by Sarina Bowen
That was almost exactly the moment that the Stanley Cup finals would be played. But there was no way of knowing which day, though, as the league didn’t schedule each new set of games until the participants were decided.
Her own graduation ceremony would occur during the play-offs, too. If the Bruisers kept winning, she might have to inform Nate that she would miss a couple of days of team travel to don a cap and gown.
Nate wouldn’t make her miss her own graduation. He wasn’t an ogre. “Just don’t take your shiny degree and defect to the competition,” he’d said more than once.
She wouldn’t, though. In the first place, she’d used the corporate tuition-matching program to cut the cost of her education in half. If she quit she’d owe that money back. But more importantly, she didn’t want to leave either Nate or his company. Even if getting a new job with more responsibility elsewhere would be a thrill, Nate paid her really well to run his C-suite. And she wanted the stability of her seniority there when she became a single mother.
Nate’s company was one of the few in Manhattan to offer on-site day care, too. The first thing she planned to do after getting a positive pregnancy test was to register on the waiting list for a spot. Unlike so many other working women, she’d be able to swing by the nursery and breastfeed her baby. Given all that she’d read on the mommy forums she’d begun trolling, that luxury was worth its weight in gold.
Maybe Nate didn’t know it, but Lauren was about to become the most loyal employee who ever lived. She nibbled on her roll and checked the private jet’s flight plans for Beijing again.
And tried really hard to forget about Mike Beacon’s smile.
SIXTEEN
TAMPA, FLORIDA
MAY 2016
Two days later, the team did only a short practice in Tampa, to keep the guys rested before game two. But Beacon spent some extra time with Silas and the goaltending coach, practicing drills and reviewing strategy.
Silas looked good, too. No matter what Coach fired at him he stayed cool, deflecting puck after puck with a Zen-like concentration.
“You were killing it out there,” Beacon said as they got dressed after showering. They were the last two in the locker room. Their teammates were already watching tape in the conference room. “You feel good?”
“Sure. But I always feel good in practice. I don’t blow it until later,” the kid grumbled. He was probably thinking back to his last time in the net—in February. Mike had gotten a touch of food poisoning and Silas was called in last minute. The game had been a total disaster.
“Hey,” Mike said, squeezing the kid’s shoulder. “Don’t talk yourself down. It’s not like you to get all mopey. You’re a better team player than that. I heard you were doing great in Hartford this spring, too.” Though it was unlikely the kid would mind the net at any point during the play-offs, unless Mike got hurt.
Silas grit his teeth. “Did pretty good in Hartford. But my expectations were pretty low, so I wasn’t a basket case, you know? I didn’t used to be that guy who cracks under pressure. But now that I know how it feels to be that guy, I don’t know how to shake it off.”
“You go back to basics,” Beacon said. “You remind yourself there’s never been a goalie with a hundred percent save average. Never. That’s what I tell myself every time someone scores on me.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. Because if I stand there and worry about it, I’m not doing my job for the team. My job isn’t to feel bad about what just happened. My job is to make the next save. And I can’t do that if I’m beating myself up.”
Silas made a grunt of acknowledgement. Beacon thumped the kid on the back and left the lockers, ducking into the conference room where the rest of his team was watching video from their first game in Tampa. They’d lost 2–1, but they weren’t disheartened. Not yet. They’d fought hard, and their opponent had gotten lucky with both unlikely bounces of the puck and with the ref’s calls.
Tampa was crackable. Everyone knew it.
“Look,” Coach Worthington said as he pressed Pause on the footage. He pointed at the screen. “That’s a little sloppy right there. It’s the same story we’ve been looking at all morning. This team has had terrific success the last couple of years, and everyone expects great things from them. But they look stressed out and it shows in their skating.”
He turned, and his gaze took in every man in the room. “We can do this. It isn’t about skills anymore. And it isn’t about the stats. We’ve got those already, and we’re pretty healthy, too. The team who wins this series will be the team who believes it can. It’s going to be about heart, and about faith. I have mine.” He put a hand to his chest. “Right here. So I need you to show me yours tonight. Bring it with you from this room, and carry it with you onto the ice.”
Mike lifted his gaze to the frozen players on the screen—to Tampa’s center lunging for the puck. Coach was right. These guys were hungry, but their hunger had a wild-eyed desperation to it. They feared coming close to the Cup yet another year, and then failing in the clutch.
He could work with that.
“Beacon,” Coach said. “Something on your mind?”
“Yeah.” He must have been smiling. “I think you’re right, Coach. They’re feeling the strain. We can use it. They’re gonna fight dirty, though. Be ready for that, guys.”
“Yeah.” O’Doul nodded from across the table. “So I think we try to keep our noses clean for the first period tonight. Neither Crikey or I will throw down, even if we’re baited early. I think it’ll make ’em crazy if we hold off a bit. Let these guys simmer.”
A chuckle moved through the room, and several players nodded.
“I like it,” Coach said. “Cooler heads prevail, and all that. We’re back on our home ice after this one, too. The tide is about to turn in our favor. I can feel it. And now I want you boys rested. Go upstairs and take a nap, okay? Turn your phones off. No caffeine. We’ll see you at five thirty for yoga.” He stood up, and the meeting was adjourned.
He headed outdoors instead of upstairs. Most guys would order room service and then try to sleep. But he was too keyed up, so he went out to the poolside tiki bar and ordered a grilled chicken sandwich. He ate it watching sports highlights on TV—including video of himself making a couple of saves.
“What do you think?” the kid tending bar asked, topping up Mike’s ice water glass.
“Coulda gone worse,” he said.
The kid grinned. “I’m rooting for you guys.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Grew up in Jersey.”
“Well, thanks.” Though it was probably a ruse meant to improve his tip.
“Don’t mention it.”
When he was done, Mike left the kid a generous tip, no matter who the kid was rooting for. He still wasn’t sleepy, but the rows of aqua-blue lounge chairs beckoned to him. Carrying his water glass with him, he bypassed all the ones facing the pool in favor of a row in the distance. That spot looked more private, so he headed over, hoping to find it relatively empty.
It was, except for one stunning woman in a bikini and sunglasses, a laptop open on her belly. His heart tripped over its own feet.
Lauren.
Wordlessly, Mike kicked off his shoes and sat down on the deck chair. Then he shucked off his shirt and lay back, closing his eyes. “Nice office you got here,” he said.
“I know, right?” Her eyes remained focused on the screen. “Some business trips are easier than others. Sometimes you get a deck chair, and sometimes you’re in the Middle East, wearing a potato sack and covering your hair.”
“Seriously?”
“Sure. In Riyadh our hotel had a women’s only floor, which was pretty trippy.”
“Where else have you been with Nate?” He stretched out as the sun began to warm his chest, and he hoped she’d keep talking. Sunshine and Lauren’s voice—
two things he didn’t have enough of.
“Shanghai. Tokyo. Singapore. Taiwan. Turns out conference rooms look the same everywhere.”
“That’s all you see?”
“No—we always have at least a day of sightseeing. Nate’s fun. I’ve been to the Great Wall of China. Another time he booked us a sushi-eating tour of Tokyo. I’ve never been so full in my life.”
He chuckled, his eyes closed against the sun’s rays. He hoped Lauren had had a lot of fun on Nate’s dime, and a big, exciting life these past two years. He ached just to hear how much he’d missed.
I haven’t trusted anyone since, she’d said the other night. It killed him to know he’d done that to her.
“Aren’t you supposed to be upstairs resting?” she asked.
“I’m resting. Look at me rest.” He held perfectly still. But then he opened one eye to see if she was looking.
Nope.
Figures.
“Hey, Lo?” he asked. “You need me to rub any sunscreen on your back?” He didn’t mind sounding like a lovesick teenager if she’d keep talking to him.
“Thanks but no thanks.”
“Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
She rolled her eyes in his direction. “Go nap, Michael. Your team needs you to be perky.”
“I’m perky already.”
She let out a little snort. “Right. Then can you watch my stuff for a second so that I can buy an iced tea?”
“I’ll get it for you.” He sat up.
She popped out of her chair first, though, and grabbed a wallet out of her shoulder bag. “Be right back.”
Her long, bare legs sashayed away, and he groaned to himself. Her hair swung back and forth as she moved, giving him glimpses of smooth shoulders. If he went upstairs to nap right now, the image of Lauren’s perfect backside would probably torture him.
He heard a small thud and looked down. Lauren’s shoulder bag had tipped over, the contents threatening to spill onto the pavement. He nudged a sunglasses case and a pen back into the bag. Just as he was righting her bag, a prescription pill bottle rolled into view. He read the name of the drug off the label before he could think better of it. Clomifene. What the heck was that?
Right there in the Florida sunshine, a chill crept over him. It wasn’t long ago that he’d lived in a home overflowing with pharmacy bottles. After Shelly’s death, he’d filled a small shopping bag with them, dropping off the last of them at the pharmacy for disposal. In fact, Mike and the pharmacist in his Long Island town were on a first-name basis by the time Shelly died.
What the hell was Clomifene for?
Easy, he cautioned himself. It could be nothing.
When Lauren reappeared at the other end of the pool a minute later, he scrutinized her again. But this time he wasn’t ogling her very appealing body. He was looking for signs of trouble.
“What?” she said with a frown when she reached her chair.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. He put his head back and closed his eyes again.
Lauren settled herself beside him. Before long he heard the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard.
He turned the name of the drug over in his mind, trying to decide what it could be. Lauren hadn’t taken any medication when they were together. He tried to think of something a healthy woman might take, and came up dry.
Maybe it’s an antidepressant, his guilty mind offered up.
Now he was never falling asleep.
He slipped his Katt Phone out of his pocket and searched the name of the drug. It came up right away. And the Wikipedia description was both a huge relief and completely confusing.
Clomifene is one of the most widely prescribed fertility drugs in the world.
His chin snapped toward Lauren. And his gaze zapped right to her very flat, very beautiful belly. “Lauren?”
“Yeah?”
He opened his mouth and then shut it again. It was really none of his goddamn business. None at all. It didn’t matter if he was burning up with surprise and curiosity.
“Oh my God, what?” she asked, staring at him. Then her phone rang. She snapped her laptop shut and reached into her bag where it lay on the ground, yanking out her own Katt Phone. “Nate? I’m by the pool.” There was a silence, and Mike fought against his interest to study the pill bottle again. It was probably visible.
No. He wasn’t going to look.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. “It’s hard to concentrate out here, anyway.” She gave him a sideways glance. “See you in five.”
“Sorry,” he said when she hung up. “I know you’re busy.”
“Go take a rest, Mike.” She flung her things into the bag without looking at him. Then she pulled a sleeveless knit dress over her head, and his traitorous eyes followed its path down her sleek body. “See you at the rink tonight.”
Then she was gone, leaving him sitting there, Googling the heck out of a fertility drug and trying to decide what it might mean.
SEVENTEEN
Six hours later, Beacon had only one thing on his mind: a black, six-ounce rubber disc. You don’t get twelve years as a starting NHL goalie unless you can concentrate when it counts.
It was the middle of a hard-fought second period and the score was still zip-zip. Brooklyn was skating hard against Tampa, defending their zone and taking shots, too. They just hadn’t quite gotten lucky enough to score.
Tampa was frustrated, too. Beacon could tell they were working harder than they’d expected to. Their star forward was Danny Skews—a wiry dude with an angry snarl. Beacon had never liked the guy. Tonight his face was even redder than usual. Beacon thought he looked ready to crack under the weight of his own frustration.
That’s cool, he told himself. A rattled offensive player was easier to read. Their opponents got a hold of the puck, and play moved down the ice toward Beacon. He stayed loose, watching the whole zone at once. That was his job—to see every possible outcome of the play, and to be ready to backstop everyone else’s errors. Skews passed to his wing, who passed it back.
Then something beautiful happened. O’Doul got into Skews’s blind spot, and none of the Tampa players gave their man the heads-up. It shouldn’t have worked, but O’Doul leaned in at just the right split second and blocked the next pass, getting his stick on the puck just long enough to redirect it back to Trevi.
Skews got stripped while twenty thousand people watched.
The guy’s response was to trip O’Doul, who went down grinning. And then it got even better, because Skews got called for the trip. That’s when his composure snapped. “Fuck you!” he screamed at the ref, while O’Doul openly laughed.
“C’mon.” The ref pointed toward the sin bin.
“That was a clean check,” Skews argued.
“Really? You want to fight it? We can make it four minutes,” the ref offered.
“Fuck you,” Skews spat again. “Bunch of little fucking faggots, all of you.” He turned toward the penalty box.
“Classy,” Trevi muttered as he skated past.
Beacon had only been a bystander to this little drama up until now, but the gay slur instantly doubled his blood pressure. “Hey!” Beacon called after the ref. “You can’t let him say that shit! How many kids do you think just heard that? Bet the network got it on camera.”
The ref frowned, his eyes following Skews to the box, where the red-faced player was still cursing under his breath. Beacon saw the official think it through, his gaze snapping toward the television cameras. He turned and skated toward the scorekeepers’ bench. When he got there, he leaned in to confer with the official, and the linesmen skated over to join them.
Beacon fidgeted in front of his net, watching the confused faces of his teammates. Although the delay was probably only ten or fifteen seconds and counting, it was unusual in hockey.
A moment lat
er, Beacon was stunned to hear the announcer call for Skews’s ejection from the game. “Unsportsmanlike conduct,” the ref had called. But instead of a bench minor, the guy was thrown the hell out.
There was a roar inside the stadium, as well as inside Beacon’s head. Holy shit. Holy shit, he repeated to himself. Players had been ejected from play-offs games before, but it was rare, and Beacon couldn’t think of an instance that did not involve egregious bodily harm to another player. Beacon was willing to lay odds that this would be the first time in NHL history that a player was ejected for hate speech. And in a play-offs game!
Holy shit. Their opponents were going to lose their ever-loving minds.
While the crowd continued to shout and stamp their feet—some in favor of this development, but many against—the refs called for a face-off. All his teammates were rested from their unexpected timeout, but their faces looked tense as the puck dropped.
Tampa won the puck, and play transferred quickly to Beacon’s end of the ice. His attention snapped back to the game. “Trevi’s open!” he barked at O’Doul, who couldn’t see the field as clearly as he could. “Man on!” he shouted at Castro a moment later. His whole world was reduced to the scrape of blades against ice and the slapping scramble of sticks and bodies.
His boys cleared the puck before things got too crazy. They iced it, though, so both teams went scrambling toward the other end of the rink. And it was on like Donkey Kong for the rest of a very sweaty period. Ultimately, the loss of their star center cost Tampa, though. And it was Beringer who put one in the net for Brooklyn before the buzzer rang. They all clomped down the chute into the visitors’ dressing room for the second intermission, awash in adrenaline.
“Well boys, that was interesting,” Coach said, snapping his gum. “You better lock this one up now. That’ll really make ’em squirm. And you need to show that whole goddamn arena you can clobber them with this weird-ass opportunity you just created.”
“We didn’t create it,” Beacon spoke up. “Skews did with his punk-ass mouth.”
“Excellent point, sir.” Coach put a hand to his chest. “My mistake. But your game better follow through. Capitalize on this disruption. Don’t let ’em get their shit together before you get your shots off.”
