by Elise Faber
“You done?” The soft question held just the slightest hint of amusement, except there was a bite to the humor, as though that piece of his personality hadn’t been used in a good long time.
No. She wanted to sketch his face, flip his hand over and draw the lines of his palm, but she’d submitted enough to her artist-crazy for the evening. And her hand was sore.
“Yeah,” she said, ignoring the slightly breathless quality to her voice and standing.
Sketchbook into her pack, light off and into her pocket, stiff and aching hip, ribs, and shoulder from sitting too long on the cold, hard ground. Yup. All was as it should be.
The man stood as well. His size on the ground hadn’t done his real breadth justice.
He. Was. Ginormous.
Okay, so she was petite, barely five feet three, but this man towered over her.
Yet she didn’t feel scared. Embarrassed, maybe, that she’d hijacked his hand for—she pulled out her phone and glanced at the time—an hour and a half. But definitely not scared.
And she’d focus on that at a later time. For now, she should probably make an escape before she looked even more crazy cakes.
“Sorry I messed up your sketch,” he rumbled.
She nibbled on the side of her mouth, biting back a smile. “Sorry I stole your hand for so long.”
He shrugged. “My mom’s an artist. I get it.”
Well, there went her battle with the smile. Her lips twitched and her teeth came out of hiding. If there was one thing that Sara had, it was her smile. It had been her trademark in her competition days.
Which were long over.
Her mouth flattened out, the grin slipping away. Time to go, time to forget, to move on, to rebuild. “Thanks,” she said and extended a hand.
Then winced and dropped it when her ribs cried out in protest.
“You okay?” he asked, head tilting, eyes studying her.
“Fine.” And out popped her new smile. The fake one. Careful of her aching side, she shrugged into her backpack. “I’ve got to go.” She turned, ponytail flapping through the hair to land on her opposite shoulder.
“That—” He touched her arm. “Wait. I know I know you.”
She froze. That was the second time he’d said that, and now they were getting into dangerous territory. Recognition meant . . . no. She couldn’t.
There had been a time when everyone had known her. Her face on Wheaties boxes, her smile promoting toothpaste and credit cards alike.
That wasn’t her life any longer.
“Thanks again. Bye.” She started to hurry away.
“Wait.” A hand dropped on to her shoulder, thwarting her escape, and she hissed in pain.
“Sorry,” he said, but he didn’t release her. Instead, he shifted his grip from her aching shoulder down to her elbow and when she didn’t protest, he exerted gentle pressure until Sara was facing him again. “It’s just that know I know you.”
No. This wasn’t happening.
“You’re Sara Jetty.”
Her body went tense.
Oh God. This was so happening.
“It’s me.” He touched his chest like she didn’t know he was talking about himself, and even as she was finally recognizing the color of his eyes, the familiar curve of his lips and line of his jaw, he said the worst thing ever, “Mike Stewart.”
Oh shit.
—Get your copy at books2read.com/Backhand
* * *
Boarding
Gold Hockey Book #3
Get your copy at books2read.com/Boarding
* * *
CHAPTER ONE
Mandy
* * *
“Less muggles, more magic,” Mandy murmured as she scrolled through her Harry Potter Pinterest board, trying to find the perfect themed appetizers for the movie marathon she was hosting that weekend. She knew she was unreasonably excited about having a party at her new apartment, but this was big.
As in the apartment was the biggest purchase she had ever made.
Smiling, she leaned back in her chair and continued scrolling through her phone. A hockey game was playing in the background, the volume low enough that the announcers’ voices were a muted hum. But that didn’t matter, she would hear if anything exciting happened, the crowd’s cheers would radiate through the concrete layers of the arena to where her office was situated.
Mandy always joked that her office was Harry’s equivalent of his closet bedroom—a tiny cubbyhole in the bowels of the Gold Mine, the home rink for the NHL’s newest team, the San Francisco Gold.
Her office might be small, but the physical therapy space certainly wasn’t.
A half dozen treatment tables were set up in the large room outside her door, each complete with their own built-in cabinets filled to the brim with the best supplies money could buy.
The PT suite tended to be one of the hubs—players always coming in and out, lots of activity, voices, laughter—for her team, second only to the space where they relaxed, ate, played video games, or binged the latest hit on Netflix.
But for the most part, Mandy loved all the activity. She enjoyed the players crossing through to access the weight room, or take a dip in the pool, or soak their aching muscles in the hot and cold tubs. And with the team’s doctor, masseuse, and other support therapy staff’s own small offices surrounding hers, it was hardly ever quiet.
Except now.
While the doctor and his assistant were rink side—near the team in case anyone got injured—the rest of the training staff had gone to grab a bite. She’d stayed behind this time, nibbling on a salad and taking advantage of the mental break by blissfully scrolling through wand-shaped appetizers on her phone.
After the final buzzer, the activity would ramp up again. The players each had their own post-game routines—maybe a massage or a soak in the icy, cold tub, usually some time spent on the exercise bike, slowly cooling their muscles after the strenuous sixty-minute game.
As for her?
Her phone and those magical treats would lay forgotten because she’d be running around like a chicken without its head.
Multiple players would need different treatments, and it was her job to coordinate with the masseuse and the doctor to assess injuries old and new, advise beneficial exercises and stretches, and . . .
She spent most of her time trying to pretend that Blane was just another player.
“Idiot,” she muttered as just his name conjured up all sorts of very unprofessional images into her mind.
Muscles.
The kind that made the spot just below her belly button clench with need.
Strong legs and, good gravy, but his ass.
Hockey players had the best asses.
No pancake bottoms, these men—and women—could fill out a pair of jeans. She wanted to squeeze it, to nibble it, bounce a dime—
Mandy dropped her chin to her chest, losing sight of the Sorting Hat cupcakes she’d been pondering.
Blane with his yummy ass had a unique way of distracting her.
No, it wasn’t even distraction, per se. He had always been able to get under her skin.
And that was very, very bad for her.
“Ugh,” she said, tossing her phone onto her desk and standing, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to sit still now.
Nope, she needed about forty laps in the pool and a good hard fu—
Run, her mind blurted, almost yelling at the mental voice of her inner devil. A good hard run.
Unfortunately, the cajoling tone wasn’t completely drowned out. Some sexy horizontal time with Blane would be more fun—
But the rest of the enticing words were lost as the roar of the crowd suddenly penetrated through the layers of concrete. Her stomach twisted. Mandy could tell, even before her eyes made it to the television, that it wasn’t in celebration of a goal or a good hit either.
This was fury, a collective of outrage.
She was on her feet the moment she saw the prone form lying so s
till face down on the ice.
Her gut twisted when she spotted the curving line of a numeral two on the back of the player’s jersey.
“Not him,” she said and the words were familiar, a sentiment she had whispered, had prayed a thousand times before. She needed the camera angle to shift, for her to be able to see more clearly who was hurt. “Not him.”
Then Dr. Carter was on the ice and the player moved slightly, rolling away from the camera, giving a full shot of his back and the matching twos adorning his jersey.
Fuck. Not him. Not Blane.
And that was when she saw the pool of blood.
—Get your copy at books2read.com/Boarding
Benched
Gold Hockey Book #4
Get your copy at books2read.com/Benched
* * *
CHAPTER ONE
Max
* * *
“Daaaaaad!” Brayden yelled, crashing through the door to his bedroom. “It’s time for school!”
Max opened his bleary eyes, wincing when the doorknob slammed into the wall. He’d already repaired a handle-shaped hole from that particular spot more than once. His son never moved in anything less than a sprint.
“Fuck,” he muttered, stretching his arms above his head and blinking against the sunlight streaming into his bedroom.
“Fuck is a bad word,” Brayden said, plunking onto the mattress and cuddling close to Max.
And that right there.
His baby boy burrowing into his side, bedhead on full display, bright blue eyes staring up at him made every single thing over the last seven years worth it.
“You’re right, bud,” he said. “Now, what’s this about school?” Max reached an arm for his nightstand. “My alarm hasn’t even gone off—”
Well, fuck.
It was time for school.
Okay, past time for school. As in, they were already late. But he’d set his alarm. Last night after stumbling into the house at a quarter past three—professional hockey players and flight delays upon returning from a five-game road trip did not make for a happy team—he remembered opening the clock app on his phone and setting the alarm for seven . . .
He glanced down at his phone screen.
“Fuck,” he muttered again.
Because seven P.M. was not going to get them to school on time.
Brayden opened his mouth. “That’s—”
“I know,” Max said. “Bad word. Bad Dad.” He clapped his hands together. “Okay, bud, so we’ve gotta move. You get your teeth brushed and shoes on. I’ll meet you in the kitchen with a yogurt and cereal in three minutes, yeah?”
Brayden nodded, a soldier ready for battle, then took off down the hall.
Flinching at the sound of another door crashing into another wall—Brayden’s bedroom this time—Max rolled out of bed, yanked on a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and a hat. He took thirty precious seconds to brush his teeth before shoving his feet into a pair of shoes, pounding down the stairs, and hustling through the hall to the kitchen.
Another slam indicated Brayden had moved on to brushing his teeth.
Max opened the fridge then scrambled to grab Brayden’s Minecraft lunchbox—he needed to give his nanny a raise for having made it the night before—and snagged a yogurt pouch. Two seconds to snip the top of the yogurt tube, ten more to grab a cup and fill it with Cheerios, then a few more frustrating ones as he fought with the zipper on his son’s overpriced Jurassic Park backpack before managing to stow his lunch inside.
He was breathing harder than after a shift on the ice by the time Brayden came in, shoes on, hair miraculously tamed, and smile wide.
“Anna”—their nanny—“taught me how to do my hair.”
Max’s heart clenched. With guilt for not being the one to teach his son, with anger that his ex hadn’t been there to show Brayden either, with fury that she’d bailed and left them both with a giant hole that he had no clue how to fill.
Stuck in his head, in the memories of his ex-wife, Max had taken too long to reply to Brayden’s statement.
His wide smile started to fade, the brightness in his eyes dimming.
Max hurried across the kitchen and scooped Brayden up. “It looks awesome, dude. Can you do mine like that when you get home from school?”
Brayden grinned and threw his arms around Max’s neck. “Yup.”
“Good.” Max set him down. “You breakfast. Me backpack. Us car.”
A giggle, but Brayden grabbed the makeshift breakfast and pushed through the door leading out to the garage. Max snagged the ridiculously expensive backpack—fine, he was still salty about spending over fifty bucks on a cheap-looking plastic covered bag with a zipper that rarely worked—but Brayden had loved it and his son rarely asked for anything.
Which meant that any time he did ask, Max caved like a chocoholic at a Hershey’s convention.
Luckily, he only lived about ten minutes from Brayden’s school, in a little suburb south of San Francisco, where his team, the Gold, was headquartered. They practiced and played in the city, but Max had wanted something a little quieter for his son, especially after the huge media storm that had resulted from his and Suzanne’s separation.
He thanked social media for that one.
Namely, his wife’s—ex-wife’s—uncanny ability to relay every personal, painful, juicy, and often exaggerated detail of their lives . . . as well as including plenty of flat-out falsehoods on the Twitter-verse.
Fuck, if there were a person in the world he could hate, it was Suzanne.
But he couldn’t, because she’d given him Brayden.
The rest of it, though, the lies, the scheming, the always-cry-wolf, those he could never forgive.
He started up the car, listening and chiming in at the right places as Brayden talked all things video game.
But his mind was unfortunately stuck on Suzanne and the fact that women were not to be trusted.
He snorted. Brit—the Gold’s goalie and the first female in the NHL—and Mandy—the team’s head trainer—would smack him around for that sentiment, so he silently amended it to: most women were not to be trusted.
There. Better, see?
Somehow, he didn’t think they’d see.
He parked in the school’s lot, walked Brayden in, and received the appropriate amount of scorn from the secretary for being thirty minutes late to school, then bent to hug Brayden.
“I’ll pick you up today,” he said.
Brayden smiled and hugged him tightly. Then he whispered something in his ear that hit Max harder than a two-by-four to the temple.
“If you got me a new mom, we wouldn’t be late for school.”
“Wh-what?” Max stammered.
“Please, Dad? Can you?”
And with that mind fuck of an ask, Brayden gave him one more squeeze and pushed through the door to the playground, calling, “Love you!” over his shoulder.
Then he was gone, and Max was standing in the office of his son’s school struggling to comprehend if he had actually just heard what he’d heard.
A new mom?
Fuck his life.
—Get your copy at books2read.com/Benched
Breakaway
Gold Hockey Book #5
Get your copy at books2read.com/Breakaway
* * *
CHAPTER ONE
Blue
* * *
Blue walked into Max’s backyard, his latest girl on his arm.
He’d met her at the bar last night and they’d fucked like rabbits until the sun came up. Then they’d fucked some more.
Now, he was making the requisite appearance at Max’s engagement party.
He was happy for his friends . . . for all of them.
But fuck, he was the last of the guys.
The final holdout.
The only single one.
Which wasn’t really a fair assessment because there were other guys on the team who were single or divorced, but Blue wasn’t that close to them.
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Not like he was with Brit, Stefan, Blane, and Max.
They had been his people from his rookie season, and they’d taken him under their respective wings.
And now they were all married or engaged or had cute little babies.
Yes, he got that he was younger than them, knew that he had plenty of time to sow his wild oats and still have a family.
But all Blue knew was that it was getting damned old coming home to an empty house all the time.
“There are kids here,” his date Bindi—or Bambi or Bobbi, because fuck if he could remember—said and her tone told him that she equated children with the seventh circle of hell.
“Yeah,” he said. “The guys have a lot of kids.”
Her face puckered with disgust, and suddenly Blue wasn’t remembering how good of a hand job Bindi or Bambi or Bobbi could give, but how happy Angie had been when Max had proposed on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Blue wanted that.
Not this.
“You know what?” he said, taking Bindi or Bambi or Bobbi’s hand in his and tugging her toward the front of the house, while he pulled out his cell with his other. “This will be lame. Why don’t I text you later when I’m done?”
Calling an Uber took seconds.
Untangling the octopus Bindi or Bambi or Bobbi upon the car’s arrival took longer.
Much longer.
But finally, he managed to pack her into the car and sighed with relief as it drove away.
Until he turned and saw her.
Anna.
Who always looked at him with glarey eyes and a pissy expression.
“There’s my Ice Queen,” he said, moving past her and heading back to the party. He’d congratulate the couple then go the fuck back to his empty apartment.
“Doesn’t it get old?” Anna asked, trailing after him.
“Doesn’t what get old?” he countered, snagging a beer from a nearby table.