“I could never hate you, Ivan.”
His eyes bore into me with such fevered intensity that I’m afraid I’ll catch fire. “We’ll see about that.” He puts the car into reverse and backs out of the parking space. “I’ll tell you everything after we check into a hotel.”
We wind up at an upscale chain hotel near but not on the strip. Ivan tries to convince me to rent a room for myself, because I’m probably going to want it after I hear whatever it is he’s about to tell me, but I refuse. He doesn’t get away with telling me how I’m supposed to react.
Once in our room, which is exactly as nice and nondescript as you’d expect for this type of hotel, I sit on the bed and prop myself up against the headboard with a stack of pillows. “Start talking.”
Ivan sprawls into the rolling chair next to the desk and scrubs his face with his hands. “Fuck, I’m not sure where to start.”
“At the beginning?” I suggest gently.
“’A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’” he intones.
“Oh, no. Don’t try to turn this into a joke now.”
He sighs. “You’re right. It’s not funny. So I’ll make a long story short. Three years ago, back when I was playing in the majors, I got pretty badly injured in a game. I had to have surgery to repair my ACL, but I had a lot of other shit too—broken ribs, bruised hip, dislocated shoulder. The only treatment for the pain that gave me enough relief to let me get back into shape so I could play was opioids—oxycodone worked best. I’m pretty sure you can guess where this is going.”
I’m not guessing. “You got addicted.”
Nodding, he smiles grimly. “Right Not exactly a new story. Happens to a lot of professional athletes. Hell, Brett Favre practically made a franchise out of kicking opioid addiction.”
“Mmhm,” I agree. “So I’m not seeing why this makes you such a terrible person.”
“Because I didn’t kick the addiction. I pretended I was off the meds when I started playing again, but I wasn’t. It’s just that I was buying the pills illegally instead of getting a prescription from the team physician.”
“They didn’t test you to make sure you were drug-free?”
“Nope.” His shrug is edged with bitterness. “I’m not sure they really wanted to know. I was playing again, which meant they weren’t paying me for doing nothing, so I don’t think they had any particular interest in catching me. But that doesn’t make it their fault. I made a choice, I knew what I was doing and, honestly, given the same choice again, I’d do the same thing. I wasn’t ready to give up hockey and work a desk job before I even turned thirty. And the only way I could play was to keep the pain at a level I could tolerate, and that meant taking oxy.
“The truth is, I’d still be taking oxy—with a side of equally illegally obtained dextroamphetamine, which I added to my regimen about a year after I got injured because I needed the energy boost to play—if I hadn’t been caught up in a drug bust last spring. The only reason I’m not in jail is that the arresting officer recognized me and decided not to charge me. But my team’s management found out what I’d been up to, and I’m just damn lucky I didn’t get booted all the way to the curb. Instead, they agreed that if they could find a team to take me, they’d trade me if I went to drug rehab. The franchise that owns the Coyotes was willing to take a chance on me because if I get back to my major-league form, they can move me up to the San Francisco team at a dirt-cheap salary. The night Lucas brought you home was my first day out of the rehab facility. They let me go a few days early. They said was nothing more they could do for me, because no matter how long I was clean, I’d probably always still crave the relief the drug gave me.”
Just like that, the snatches of conversation I overheard between him and his brother make sense. Lucas was worried that Ivan left before he was ready. My heart breaks a little for both of them. Opioid addiction is a dangerous, scary thing.
Okay, I can understand why he’s ashamed of this, but it seems to me like the kind of thing that could happen to anyone. Needing pain medication doesn’t seem to me like a capital crime. “And all of this makes you not a decent, honest guy because…?”
He leans forward and glares at me, his eyes so fierce and icy-hot that I flinch back. “Because it means I’ll do anything to get what I want. I will lie. I will cheat. I will break the damn law. And the rehab counselors were right. I did wake up every day craving oxy. Every day until the morning after Shoshoni. And you know what I woke up craving that day?”
Standing up, he crosses the space between us before I can even register that he’s moving and, suddenly, he had one knee on the bed beside me, our faces inches apart. “You, Sylvia. I woke up craving you. That morning and every damn one since. And you do not want to know how many lies I’d consider telling or how many laws I’d have no regrets about breaking to find a way to keep you in my life. Because I don’t know what the hell it’s going to be worth when you leave it.”
And then he kisses me, and it’s wild and hungry and so sweetly tender that my eyes start leaking. But I’m not crying because I want him to stop.
I’m crying because I want him never to stop.
He doesn’t.
We forget the condoms.
I forget to care.
Fourteen
Ivan
Sylvia lies halfway on top of me, her eyes soft with exhaustion and sexual satisfaction.
I made love to her with every ounce of skill and dedication I possess. Not because I thought it would change anything, but because I couldn’t love her any other way. Especially when it could be the last time.
I didn’t ask for her permission, God help me, and after the shit I dumped on her, she might’ve said no if I’d given her time to think about it. But from the way she’s looking at me right now, I don’t think so.
Not that this solves any our problems.
“So,” she says, her voice thick with contentment, “what laws are we going to break to be together? Because I’m thinking the laws of physics are probably non-negotiable.”
Cupping her cheek, I stroke her jaw with my thumb. “After everything I just told you, are you sure you want to find a way? Because as I just proved, I’m a totally selfish bastard.”
She rouses enough to snort with indignation. “If that was a demonstration of how selfish you are, the world should have more selfish bastards in it. I came four times! But that’s not the point.” Catching my hand in hers, she brings it to her lips and kisses the center of my palm. “I’m just as selfish. I love you too, and I don’t want to give you up, either. So we’re going to find a solution. Because there has to be one.”
I hear the rest after she says “I love you,” but it only registers dimly. No three words have ever thrilled or terrified me more. “You love me?” I echo stupidly.
Laughter bubbles in her throat. “Duh. I think I’ve loved you from the second you agreed to take me to Target to go clothes shopping. Do you know how rare that makes you? You’re practically a unicorn. It just took a while for my brain to get the message.”
Well, I have to kiss her, don’t I?
When we come up for air, I say, “The night we spent in Provo, I thought about pulling most of the money I saved when I was in the majors out of mutual funds and finding some way to invest it in your invention business without letting you know it was coming from me.” She starts to sputter, and I press my fingers to her lips. “I realized right away that would never work, but…what if I did that? I could turn about half a million dollars liquid in a few days, and you could start working on getting your patents and prototypes right away. You wouldn’t need to go back on the road.”
“Half a million just like that? Wow.” With a regretful sigh, she shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. First of all, it would make you kind of my boss, and while as you know, I’m very turned on by you taking control in bed, I would very much not like that in other parts of our life. And second, I think it might cause some real problems between us if I
were to lose your money, especially that big a chunk of it. An investor expects to get a return on his investment. I don’t want you throwing away your nest egg on my business. You might need that money someday.”
I’m a little disappointed, but I get where she’s coming from. Especially on the part where I’d be her boss. But there is a way I can endow her with my worldly goods that won’t make me an investor in her company or her boss.
It’s ridiculous, of course. Foolish. Possibly insane. But what the hell?
“We’re in Vegas,” I point out.
She blinks at me. “And…?”
“We could get married. Tonight.”
Her expression cycles through half a dozen emotions, from incredulity to denial to hope. “How would that help?”
“Well,” I say, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, “for starters, my money would be yours. I wouldn’t be your boss or your investor; I’d just be the man who loves you and wants to support you as best he can.”
“I don’t know. That just seems like a sneaky way to get around my previous objections.”
I shrug. “I told you I was a selfish bastard. But here’s the thing—if we’re married, we have an extra incentive to figure out how to make it work. Maybe we don’t put half a million into your inventions. Maybe we put half that. I won’t go broke if we don’t get that investment back. And maybe you keep your trucking business, but you don’t have to be on the road as much as you do now. Somehow, we’ll figure it out—as equal partners. What do you say?”
Fifteen
Reader, I married him.
Epilogue
Sylvia
Eight months later
It shouldn’t have worked. We shouldn’t have worked.
But somehow, we do.
Not that it’s been easy.
I let Ivan put a small amount of his savings into patenting and prototyping one of my inventions. The rest of the cost of finding a manufacturer and completing the licensing agreement came out of my savings. The product will hit the market in a year. No, I’m not going to say what it is or what it does. Maybe it’ll make us rich and maybe it won’t, but it doesn’t matter.
We’re rich where it really counts.
Much to my sorrow, my semi was never recovered, although the FBI did apprehend and break up the ring of thieves a couple of weeks after they stole my truck. Lucas told me they got caught because the women tried to pull the same trick on a male driver that they’d pulled on me and got caught coming out of the men’s showers.
I replaced my rig so I could keep driving. Ivan’s on the road with his team—now the San Francisco Sea Lions, since he got bumped up to the majors less than a month after he started playing with the Coyotes—half the weeks of the six-month season, and I quickly figured out I could take jobs that end at or near places where he’s playing. Most of the time, it means we’re only apart for two or three days at a stretch.
Hockey is still kind of a mystery to me. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy watching Ivan play and the game is very fast and exciting, but that’s kind of the problem. Most of the time, I have no idea where the puck is or what’s going on, except that my darling husband is flying around on the ice at what seems like superhuman speeds and sometimes getting slammed into walls. But he always comes off the ice with a grin on his face, so I know he’s having fun, and if he’s having fun, then I can accept the risks he takes that make me wince.
Of course, since Ivan is with a San-Francisco-based team now, I’ve had to move. Lucy, Romy, and I agreed to let the apartment in East L.A. go. It wasn’t an easy decision, because for price, it was a nice place and a great location. But Romy’s airline has been trying to get her to relocate to Dallas for a year now, and as much as she loves L.A., most of her family is in Texas. And Lucy and her fiancé, Owen, are having their wedding on the Costa Maya in December, so she was going to need out of the lease in a few months anyway.
Speaking of weddings… I glance in the mirror and catch my mother’s eye. She’s standing behind me, tears shining in her eyes as she takes in my appearance: ivory-colored wedding gown with a fitted bodice, dotted with pearls and trimmed with lace; blond hair, which I’ve allowed to grow out since the summer, intricately French-braided with roses and baby’s breath; and her sapphire earrings dangling from my earlobes.
Yeah, that’s right. I’m marrying him again.
Because if you thought my family or his were going to let us get away with a quickie Vegas wedding, you haven’t encountered the lobbying power that’s either the Figueres or the Carlson family alone. And put together? You’d have a better chance of escaping death and taxes.
Music swells from the outer room.
“That our cue,” Mom says to the women assembled in the room—my bridesmaids, Romy and Lucy, and Lucas’s wife, Megan, who’s acting as matron of honor.
We’re holding the service at the Chapel of Our Lady in the San Francisco Presidio. My father is waiting for us as we queue up at the back of the church. He holds out his elbow. I place my hand in the crook the way we’ve practiced.
“You’re not giving me away, you know,” I whisper as we watch the processional of mother of the bride, mother of the groom, and bridesmaids walk down the aisle.
He gives me a gentle smile. “Of course not. You may be my daughter, but you’ve always belonged to yourself. It just took your mother and me thirty years to figure out that you knew what you were doing and who you wanted to be all along.”
I’m so surprised by this admission that, when the music change that signals our entrance begins, I almost miss it.
The chapel isn’t big, and it’s not full. Between my side of the family and his and a few of his current and former teammates, there are about forty people in the room. They rise to their feet as my dad escorts me to the altar.
Ivan watches us advance, the look on his face plain for anyone to see. Clad in a black tux that hugs his muscular frame like a second skin, he somehow manages to look both feral and urbane at the same time.
And he’s mine. Mine, mine, all mine.
Lucas, the best man, stands beside his brother, wearing a particularly sappy grin, as if he knew this was coming all along and is expecting to be congratulated on his foresight.
And sitting obediently on the floor between Ivan and Lucas is our ring-bearer, the pit bull we adopted from the animal shelter after we moved to San Francisco. I’d been thinking about getting a dog to keep me company on the road, and Ivan liked the idea. In my opinion, she’s a pretty thing—mostly gray with white patches on her nose and paws and the sweetest chocolate brown—but some people find her intimidating anyway. More fool them. She looks tough, but she’s about as likely to bite someone as I am. Which is why we christened her Semi-Tough.
Where are the rings, you ask? In a small mesh baggy attached to her bedazzled-for-the-occasion collar.
The officiant—a slim, chic woman in her forties we picked from a website because she promised not do anything remotely religious in the ceremony—thanks my father for his blessing, and he gives it, places my hands into Ivan’s, and takes his seat.
Ivan and I look into each other’s eyes, and everything and everyone else fades into the background.
I love you, he mouths, although he hardly needs to say it.
I love you, too, I mouth back.
He leans close and whispers so the audience can’t overhear us. “So you’re going to marry me again?”
“A thousand times,” I respond.
Semi-Tough yips.
The audience laughs.
Everything is perfect.
Damn, I’m lucky.
The End
Afterword
I hope you enjoyed reading Semi-Tough Luck.
For the rest of 2021 and 2022, I’ll be focusing on writing historical romances, but I have written and published a few other contemporary romances that you might like.
Holeshot is a novel set in the same world as Semi-Tough Luck and stars Sylvia’s roommate, Lucy,
a journalist who’s assigned to cover the meteoric rise of motocross rider, Owen Lenart. Let’s just say that sparks fly.
Can’t Take the Heat was originally written as the first in a series set in Las Vegas. I never wrote any more titles in that series because after my son died in 2014, I found I wasn’t able to tackle the second story, in which the heroine is widowed. Can’t Take the Heat features a firefighter/EMT heroine who is struck on the head during a rescue and gets temporal amnesia, forgetting that she broke up with her hotel magnate boyfriend three years earlier.
—Best, Jackie
SemiTough Luck: A Motocrossed Romance Page 8
