Hard Fall

by Brenda Rothert

  “Yes!”

  She was excited as she sat on the stool in front of Lauren’s vanity and watched me work. I pinned her curls up loosely and finished the updo with a bit of hairspray. After that, I tried on each outfit I’d considered for tonight, and she tried on three of her own dresses for me.

  We went downstairs hand in hand. She was wearing a replica of the dress Anna wore in Frozen and I was wearing a little black dress that Annalise chose for me. I was a half hour late meeting Wes in the family room for the start of our date, but when I met his gaze, I saw he was smiling.

  “My girls look spectacular,” he murmured, kissing my cheek.

  “Sorry I’m so late,” I said in his ear. “She needed some girl time with me.”

  “It’s all good,” he said. “Nash is having a crawling race with Benny and Lars is picking up pizza.”

  I arched my brows in question. “A crawling race?”

  “Yeah, and knowing him, he’ll pull ahead at the finish line and trash talk Benny for being so slow.”

  Benny crawled everywhere these days. We had to keep him in his baby jumper or the playpen anytime we turned our backs for even a minute. Every day, he grew a little bigger and a little cuter, displaying his two bottom teeth when he smiled. When I combed his dark hair over to the side, he looked like a little man and all I wanted to do was snuggle with him. Now that he was crawling, though, he didn’t like to be held long.

  “There’s your giraffe!” I heard Nash say from the dining room. “I’m gonna get it, Benny! That giraffe’s gonna be mine if you don’t pick it up, my dude.”

  I cringed, laughing, just as I heard Annalise chiming in from the other room.

  “It’s not fair to race him, Uncle Nash. He’s a baby!”

  Wes kissed my forehead. “Let’s get out of here while we still can. We might want to leave Annalise in charge, though.”

  “I didn’t even think about that,” Wes said an hour later over drinks at a downtown St. Louis steak house. “Poor kid, worried she’s going to lose us just like she lost her parents.”

  “It broke my heart. I did my best to reassure her.”

  He reached across the small table and took my hand. “I’m sure you did great. You’re good at that stuff.”

  Wes was wearing dark gray dress pants and a light blue dress shirt, the shirt making his eyes look even bluer than usual. I remembered the first time we’d sat together at a nice restaurant—dinner with Ben and Lauren in New York five years ago. I’d considered him an irredeemable playboy back then, a guy who just wasn’t that deep and never would be.

  Everything was different now. I’d been forced to see the real Wes—the man beneath the facade. He was everything Lauren had always told me he was—hardworking, generous, and loyal.

  “Have we changed?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We used to be like oil and water. I thought you were…well, you know what I thought.”

  He grins. “Yeah, you were never shy about making sure I knew.”

  “Was I…wrong?”

  He laughed and squeezed my hand. “It was hard for you to even say those words, wasn’t it?”

  I smiled. “A little.”

  “You were both right and wrong. I was an asshole to you the first time we met—like I told you, I’d had too much to drink and I was used to hearing yes from women. I was a young professional athlete, and I enjoyed the hell out of all the perks. But I’ve never been a bad guy. I had some maturing to do—hell, I probably still do. I’m not letting you and the kids down, though. I’ll never do that.”

  I tucked my hair behind my ear and took a sip of my wine.

  “Do you think, if Ben and Lauren hadn’t…died…that we’d still argue every time we saw each other?”

  “Oh yeah. You’d still be calling me an overgrown frat boy at Annalise’s wedding someday.”

  “And you’d be asking me if hot flashes were melting the icicle stuck up my ass.”

  He hangs his head. “Not my finest moment, Hadley. I’m sorry I said that.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve said worse about you. We always just brought out the worst in each other.”

  Wes released my hand to take a sip of his whiskey, and he was grinning when he set the glass back down.

  “Can I tell you something I think we’ll get a good laugh out of, now that it’s way in the past?”

  “What?”

  “Remember when I was late to Ben and Lauren’s wedding, and you…disapproved of my existence?”

  “I do.” I interlocked my hands together and propped my chin up on the fist I’d made. “I owe you an apology for that.”

  He put both hands up. “No, not at all. Being late when you’re the best man is a dick move. But the truth is, I was the first one at the church that morning.”

  “How?” I furrowed my brow. “You came rolling up the parking lot ten minutes after the ceremony was supposed to start; I was waiting for you.”

  “With a warm greeting, as I recall,” he said with a wink.

  I cringed at the memory.

  “I was at the church that morning, but I had to leave because Ben forgot the rings back at our hotel. He was so pissed at himself. I’ve never seen him so upset about anything. So I went back and got them.”

  I was completely speechless as I processed this new information.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I finally asked. “I wouldn’t have called you all those names, or considered taking off one of my heels and beating you with it, if I had known.”

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t letting Ben take the fall. I’ve got broad enough shoulders to take a little browbeating from the bridesmaids.”

  I covered my face with my hands and laughed. “God, Wes, I feel awful.”

  “Don’t. I didn’t tell you to make you feel bad. I think it’s pretty funny, actually. And you were right a lot of the time when you busted my balls. That’s why it bothered me so much. I never should have brought that woman to Annalise’s first birthday party.”

  I laughed at the memory. “Oh, that’s right! What was her name?”

  He gave me a sheepish look. “No idea.”

  “You were right about me, too,” I admitted. “About me being too uptight and not having a life. And about me being nothing like Lauren.”

  Wes’s face turned down, his expression going from lighthearted to serious. “No, I was wrong about that, Hadley. You’re a lot like Lauren.”

  “I’m not, though. Lauren was sweet and funny, and she made everything look effortless. She always made people feel good when she was with them.”

  “You make me feel really good,” Wes said, his gaze loaded with meaning.

  “I think most women have that effect on you in bed,” I quipped.

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about when you fold my laundry and don’t say anything about me not doing it. When I get home from a road trip and see you left me a plate of dinner in the fridge. When everything with the team feels like shit and you’re the only one I want to talk to about it. When I overhear you telling the kids stories about when they were born, and when you take such great care of them even though you’re tired and stressed from your own job. You’re a lot like Lauren.”

  My heart pounded and my eyes stayed locked with Wes’s. I knew we were compatible in bed and we’d learned to get along, but what he’d just said to me felt like…more. And it felt good. It felt damn good. Other men had told me I was too harsh, too honest, too independent. Wes had been the first man to see the caring, nurturing woman I was deep down.

  “Thank you,” I said, looking away so he wouldn’t see the tears threatening to spill over.

  Wes smiled at his phone screen and turned it to face me. There was a picture Nash had sent of him, Lars, Benny and Annalise in the playroom. Nash was wearing a dark red wig and Lars, with a stone-faced expression, was getting his hair brushed by Annalise. She looked like she was having the time of her life.

  “Oh.” I smiled
and put a palm on my chest. “I needed this night out so much, but I still miss them.”

  “Let’s get dinner and then we can pick up stuff for ice cream sundaes and take it home.”

  “Really?”

  Wes nodded. “I’d love to spend the entire night with you at the nearest hotel, but with Annalise worried we might not make it home, I think we need to keep our time out short.”

  My shoulders relaxed with relief, because I felt the same way.

  “Excuse me, Wes Kirby?” a man said from beside our table. Wes looked over and the man continued. “I’m sorry to bother you, but my dad’s a huge Mavericks fan. He’s eighty-three years old and about to go into hospice. Could I get you to maybe write a short note to him?”

  Wes smiled and said, “Sure, no problem. I wish I had a puck I could sign for him, but I don’t have anything, even in the car.”

  “That’s okay. Just a quick note signed by you will mean a lot to him.”

  Wes took the pen and paper the man held out and started writing. It hit me once again how very wrong I’d been about this man. And then I felt a pang, because I knew this was the moment when Lauren would say that she told me so.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wes

  The final game of the season was at home against Detroit. We’d wiped the floor with them earlier in the season, but tonight we were like a Little League baseball team playing their very first hockey game. That might have been a slight exaggeration, but damn, we looked awful out there.

  Last night’s bonding dinner had been a fucking disaster. It started out okay but halfway through dinner Svetlana showed up. She’d been drunk, crying, and out of control. Konstantin tried to calm her down and get her to take a cab home, but she’d resisted, making a huge scene. Then Keegan got involved. And things devolved faster than any of us could have predicted. Even Coach had tried to defuse the situation to no avail. Keegan threw a punch, Kon hit back, and Svetlana jumped in the middle. If we’d been anywhere but Giovanna’s, the cops probably would have been called.

  Thankfully, Vicenzo let us handle it, and between a handful of us, we’d separated Kon and Keegan, put Svetlana in a cab, and calmed everyone down. Keegan stormed off after Svetlana, though. We kept Kon at the restaurant, worried about what might happen if he and Keegan ran into each other again so soon.

  The only good thing about the incident was that Coach finally understood how serious the situation was between Kon and Keegan, and had pulled me aside to tell me he would be talking to management about trading Keegan this summer. There was no way we could keep them both after what had happened, and at this point, Coach was over it. If we were honest, the whole team was, but everyone had tried to intervene without taking sides.

  The end result was a horrible end to a tragic season, trades on the horizon for the off-season, and my own status on the team up in the air as well. Coach hadn’t been happy with how I’d done as acting captain, and I couldn’t blame him. It scared me, though. I didn’t know what I’d do if I got traded. We were already talking about putting the house up for sale and buying something new, where we could all get a fresh start, but I wasn’t planning on doing it in another city. Or god forbid, another country.

  I brought it up that night in bed with Hadley. We’d made love a couple of times and she was soft and warm and sated, cuddled against me as we talked.

  “You think you could get traded?” she asked in surprise.

  “Coach is pissed about everything. The season, the vibe in the locker room, my captain skills, and of course, Kon and Keegan.”

  “Keegan’s an asshole,” she said. “Even if he’s totally in love with Svetlana, they should have handled it better. He could have asked for a trade, or they could have kept it under wraps until the season was over. And why doesn’t Kon just kick her out?”

  I shrugged in the darkness. “I honestly don’t know. I think he promised her father he’d take care of her or something like that, before he brought her to the U.S. with him.”

  “I think that promise should have been nullified once she cheated on him.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So…what would it mean if you got traded?” she asked after a moment.

  I tightened my arms around her. “I don’t know, babe. I mean, we’re already talking about selling the house, so it would be a clean break for all of us, but if that happened, I don’t know where we’d wind up.” I paused. “Which includes Canada.”

  “Canada?” She stiffened a little. “I can’t move to Canada, Wes. I mean…my boss is already freaking out about me being in St. Louis. She’ll lose her mind if I move to another country.”

  “We have to talk about it, though. We can’t just bury our heads in the sand because it’ll happen this summer if it happens.”

  “Summer’s a long way away.”

  “Six weeks, babe.”

  “Ugh.” She nestled deeper into my chest. “I don’t want to talk about that. We’ve had a stressful enough year and we’re just settling into a routine.”

  “Yeah, but the season’s over for us, which means we have to start talking about all the stressful stuff.”

  “Tonight?” she asked, tipping up her head and giving me a mischievous smile as she reached between my legs and wrapped her hand around my cock. It instantly sprang to attention and I kissed her, taking her mouth with deep, sensual pulls on her tongue until she climbed on top of me.

  “We definitely don’t have to talk anymore tonight,” I whispered against her mouth, palming her ass.

  “What should we do instead?” she teased, running her hands over her breasts as she watched my face.

  “You should let me fuck you until you can’t walk and your pussy screams for mercy.”

  She licked her lips. “Now that sounds like something I’d want to talk about.” She dipped her head to kiss me again. “If I wanted to talk.”

  “Mmhm.” I lifted her by the hips and lowered her down on my cock, pushing deep inside of her. “What were you saying?”

  “Fuuuuck.”

  The next couple of days were nice. Cleaning out my locker and saying goodbye to the guys kind of sucked, but I knew I’d see most of them during the off-season, so it was kind of a relief not to have to worry about the Mavericks for a while. The kids kept us busy, Hadley and I were all over each other at night and a well-oiled machine during the day, and it felt like this was the first time I’d been able to breathe since that horrible night in January when we’d lost Ben and Lauren.

  Hadley and I had agreed to table any serious conversations about the future until I’d had a chance to chat with my agent and find out what kind of interest there was for me in the hockey world. I was sure lots of teams would love to have me, but it had to be the right fit, both for my skills and personality, and my personal life. With Hadley and the kids in the mix, I couldn’t just go anywhere. Sometimes it happened that way, but I had enough pull in the industry to have at least a little say in where I went unless the team planned to unload me to the first taker. I didn’t think that would be the case, though. If anything, they were looking to dump Keegan as quickly and quietly as possible. My biggest hope was that when it all shook out, the core of the team would remain intact. Including me.

  “Uncle Wes, Aunt Hadley’s on the phone with the boss bitch and Benny’s crying.” Annalise marched into the kitchen with her hands on her hips.

  “You know better than to use that word,” I told her, mentally grimacing as I dried my hands. Hadley’s boss had been on a tear lately, and we’d probably used the B-word a few too many times, but I had to nip it in the bud no matter how funny it was to hear that word coming out of Annalise’s mouth.

  “Sorry.” She dipped her head and I reached down to tweak her nose.

  “It’s okay, Anna Peas. But don’t let Aunt Hadley hear you use that word—she’ll probably put you in the corner.”

  Her lips turned down. “I don’t like the corner.”

  “I know you don’t, so don’t use that word.”r />
  “Okay.”

  I took the stairs two at a time to grab Benny, who’d been napping. I’d just finished putting the lunch dishes in the dishwasher while Hadley got on a conference call with the editorial team of the magazine, and I didn’t want Benny’s crying to reach her down in Ben’s study.

  “Hey, big guy.” I lifted him and held him against my chest until he settled down. “Did you have a good nap?”

  He nestled into the hollow of my shoulder and I put him on the changing table, grabbing a diaper so I could put a fresh one on him. I’d done this a lot the last few months, so it was second nature now, and it occurred to me that I’d fallen into the role of father to these kids a lot more easily than I’d thought I would. I didn’t think about what I had to do anymore; I just did it. It was a hell of a lot simpler now that I didn’t have to rush off to work every day, though, and I hoped Hadley didn’t have to work until midnight again, like she had last night.

  Her boss had been giving her shit about everything lately, and though she tried to hide it from me, I could tell it upset her. That was why I’d told her to do her thing this afternoon and I’d take over with the kids. Tori was off today so it was just me, Annalise, and Benny.

  “When is Thor coming over?” Annalise asked me as we headed downstairs.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we can call him later.”

  “He said we could go to the park.”

  I smiled to myself, wondering if Lars really enjoyed her company or if he was just going along with it because he didn’t know how to say no. At some point, I’d have to ask him because I didn’t want him to resent me for getting him into this situation where a four-year-old demanded a lot of his time. He was young and single, so being at Annalise’s beck and call probably cramped his style big-time. Although, it was hard to tell with Lars, since he kept his private life pretty private.

  “Can I watch Doc McStuffins?” Annalise asked.

  “Sure.” I reached for the remote and turned on her favorite show just as my phone started to ring. I had Benny bouncing on my hip and I pulled it out of my pocket to see who it was.