by RJ Scott
Loki held up his beer in salute. “I’ll be here when you need me. Now get your ass out there, hero, and pimp us out.”
As much as he didn’t want to leave this nice quiet space, he knew his place, and he followed Loki back out to the guests.
A huge tent spread the entire length of the back of Ryan’s house, tables beautifully set, caterers right there helping smooth the way for a lot of big donations. It was a class act, and Alex thought maybe if last year’s event had been half as classy, then they’d have made twice the money for the Dragons Foundation.
“A huge fan, Mr. Simard,” someone said as they stuck a hand right at him and moved to block him from crossing over to a simmering, scowling Gooly. Alex blinked and came to a stop, and called up that inner part of him that had patience and tact with everyone. He loved meeting fans, went out of his way to meet families, visit homes, and share the love of the game.
“Hello,” he said, and shook hands with the giant of a man with an iron grip. “Call me Alex.”
“Fire Chief Swanson,” the man said.
“Are you having fun?” Alex asked, because that wasn’t the lamest line he could think of at that time. He couldn’t help it—Gooly was still cursing in Russian and causing a small spectacle in the corner.
“I bid in the silent auction on your stick from the 2013 All-Star Game,” Chief Swanson confided, leaning in to Alex and winking. “Big money as well,” he added. “It’ll look nice up on my study wall.”
“I hope you win,” Alex said, because that was what anyone bidding would want him to say.
“Oh, I will.” Swanson winked again and laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. Not genuine. “Seems I have some competition from that filly over there,” he said, and nodded at a woman talking to Kat. Alex seemed to recall she was a surgeon at the hospital or something similar. “Anyway,” Swanson continued with a way too creepy, I’m-confiding-in-you vibe, “man-to-man, I always win.”.
Alex backed away. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said, and indicated the commotion. “Just some team things to sort.”
Swanson smacked Alex on the back, gave some kind of weird bro-hug type touch, then moved aside to let him pass.
By then the cursing had drawn a small audience. Right in the middle of it, the other Russian on the team, Semenov, was trying to calm Gooly down. Also in Russian, and also quite loudly.
“Outside,” Alex hissed to Gooly and, gripping his shirt, yanked him out of the party, followed by Semenov, through the tent, and into the cold December air. They hadn’t stopped for coats—it was pure Vermont ice hitting them—but he was Canadian, and two Russians had to be okay with the cold.
“What the hell!” he began, not asking, but with force and warning. “You got a problem, you don’t fucking curse about that shit at a charity event.”
Gooly said something under his breath, his arms crossed over his chest. Loki joined them, bundled up in a coat, followed closely by Ryan. They didn’t get right up close, and Alex didn’t know what they thought would happen.
Alex kept talking. “I get that you’re pissed, right? But if this team keeps playing like they have these last few games, playing that well, there is no way management will mess with our dynamic.” He was beginning to feel the cold as the heat of anger died away. “But don’t air this in public and make it look like we are anything but focused as a team.”
“Am team,” Gooly said, his usual ability to string complete sentences together in English obviously gone.
Semenov murmured something to Gooly, and the tension seemed to bleed from him.
Alex had one last thing to say. “I don’t know what the hell you and Vasiliev have going on, but we’ll talk about this at Saturday skate. I want you there thirty minutes early. Understand?”
Gooly nodded, the wind clearly having left his sails. Semenov took his arm and guided him back inside, Ryan following, until again it was just him and Loki.
“Okay?” Loki asked.
Alex stretched tall, the shirt he was wearing catching on his cast and not letting him extend fully. Even his clothes were conspiring against him, not to mention his arm ached like a bitch.
“Yeah.”
Unspoken was his exasperation at Gooly, at the management situation, at the fact that he was hurt and they were so close to actually making it work as a team that he could taste it. All Loki did was pat him reassuringly on the shoulder, and together they made their way back inside.
Alex spotted Jo as soon as he stepped back into the warmth of the house. It was hard not to, and how cliché was that, but she stood out. A head taller than some of the women there, she looked different to them. Slim, shapely, yes, but there was a strength in her, and she’d felt solid and real under his hands.
I owe her a real apology.
He sidestepped and avoided and exchanged pleasantries, but by the time he made it to where she’d been standing, she was gone. He gave up after the third attempt to find her, taken away from the search by this person who said they were bidding on this thing or who just wanted to shake his hand and talk about the accident. Looked like Swanson had rivals for the
Bauer Vapor stick, and he hoped it went to someone else. He wasn’t sure why, but something about Swanson made his skin crawl.
Someone tugged at his arm. “Photos please, Alex.” The young woman, Helen, was their social media guru. “This way.”
Helen walked through the crowds with all the confidence of a skater on a play, and all Alex did was follow and make sure he didn’t meet anyone’s eyes so they’d want to talk. When he did look up, he saw they were in the atrium of the gorgeous house, right in front of the huge tree.
And there was Jo, looking stunning in that beautiful copper-colored dress. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, the color of dark chocolate, and she wasn’t looking at him, but focusing on another man to her side. That other man had his hand on her, reassuringly, maybe, or could it be something more?
Alex was determined to find out, shocking himself with the intensity of his need to chase Jo. He never usually put that much work into finding out more about a woman.
She turned to face him, her cheeks a little pink, her lips slick with gloss, and her eyes narrowed. She didn’t look happy to be there, but he could work with that; he’d worked with less.
“You were the fireman who pulled me out?” he said as he realized he was being made to stand with her. She was the person who’d told him everything would be okay?
“Firefighter,” Jo murmured.
“Sorry?”
“Fire. Fighter. Not fire man,” she explained with gritted teeth, all the time trying to maintain a smile.
“Sorry, yes, I mean… Look… Jo,” he said, and kissed her cheek. She didn’t recoil. “I wanted to say—”
“Okay guys, if you can stand side by side. Jo can you turn a little…” Helen had the camera guy taking photos, and then she called a halt, and a couple of reporters stepped forward.
“What would you like to say to the firefighter who pulled you away from the car?” one reporter asked Alex directly.
“Thank you,” Alex said, and half turned to face Jo. “I thought I was in way too deep, and couldn’t see a way out.”
“You’re welcome,” Jo said, and smiled. But the smile didn’t really reach her eyes—in fact, there was a lack of any kind of emotion in her expression.
“And Jo, what did you think of the have-a-go hero?”
Jo straightened imperceptibly. “While we wouldn’t condone the action of putting yourself in danger, Mr. Simard showed a remarkable presence of mind, and as such, a father and his baby survived the accident.”
“Alex, Have you spoken to the father you pulled from the car?”
Alex hadn’t. He’d been going to, but his head was all over the fucking place. Team management were trying to organize a meetup, and he didn’t have the brain capacity to argue with them. The minute he’d had the C put on his chest he’d become the face of the franchise. He knew the family was
safe, that the father was in hospital, but he’d been warned to stay away until the reporters left off hanging around the reception area.
“I intend to, soon,” he said. Then he changed the subject. “The team have these super cute onesies for babies with tiny dragons on the front, and I have some for them.” That was a good sound bite; the marketing team would love that.
“When are you expected back…”
He lost himself in the normal questions, couldn’t quite make his way free even though Jo vanished. He hoped to hell that she hadn’t left the damn party, because not only did he owe her an apology, but he also wanted to properly thank her.
He couldn’t see her at first look, but he did find Kat, who was in charge of the auction, and cornered her by the buffet.
“What are the bids up to on the stick I put in?” he whispered into her ear, under the pretense of filling his plate with shrimp.
“I’m not telling you; this is a closed auction,” Kat said out loud, although she leaned in like she wanted to hear the rest of anything Alex might say. “Why?”
“Because whatever your surgeon friend bids, I’ll top it up so she wins, okay? Between you and me.”
She raised her eyebrows in question. “You know Gloria is about to retire and has been married for thirty years.”
Alex let out a huff of annoyance. “I’m not doing it to hit on her,” he muttered.
She laughed at him then. “Should I ask?”
“No, really, don’t.”
He left her chuckling, with an unfeasibly large amount of shrimp on his plate, and then he spotted Jo. That guy Swanson was right there with her, and Alex wasn’t sure if it was perspective, but it looked to him like Swanson was definitely aiming to intimidate. He kind of loomed, a good six inches taller than Jo, and wider, and he was tense; hell, Alex could see the tension in him from where he was standing. She was saying something to him, and just the way she held herself shouted that she was pissed. Shrimp in one hand, he used every puck-handling skill he had to weave through the party to where she was standing, slipping around Swanson like he was a scrappy D in front of the net.
Thrusting out the plate of shrimp, he knocked into Swanson, made a noise of apology, then used Swanson turning to get in and stand right next to Jo.
“I brought your food, Jo,” he explained, gesturing at the plate and watching as both she and Swanson looked down at the mass of pink and sauce on the small plate. “Oh, and sir, I think someone put in a bigger bid than you on the stick.”
Swanson looked at him steadily, then at Jo. “We can talk later,” he said to Jo, and then he winked like Alex had done him a huge favor. “I’ll go and raise my bid. Don’t want someone else getting that, do we?”
Didn’t matter that every cent he upped was a lost cause and would cost Alex more, because Alex didn’t freaking care.
“Okay?” he asked Jo, who was staring at him like he was an alien or something worse.
“What is it with men like you and Swanson getting up in my space?” she snapped, and shoved past him.
Alex watched her work her way through the crowd, and clamber over the plant pot blocking the stairs. Which had to be difficult because of a combination of killer heels and a slim-fitting dress.
With little thought, and guided by a gut feeling, he dumped the plate of shrimp on the nearest table and, trying to be as inconspicuous as six-one and two hundred pounds can be, he followed her upstairs.
He wanted to talk to her.
And also, he wasn’t anything like Swanson, the oily, arrogant ass. The accusation had hurt his pride; he didn’t like this new trend of being misjudged.
Jo needed to know he was one of the nice guys, one of the men in this world who loved women, wanted to cherish them, and all that flowery shit the other guys on the team found so hard to think about, let alone say.
Maybe he was in touch with his feminine side, or maybe he was the product of an awesome mom who’d talked that respect into him. It was probably because he had two sisters. Either way, he was sick of Kat, and now Jo, thinking he was the bad guy.
She needed to know now.
And also, he really wanted a good look at her in that dress.
See if maybe she wanted him to take it off.
Chapter 6
Jo didn’t know at what point everything happening narrowed down to a pinpoint of grief and the need to find a place to hide. It could have started when Swanson had cornered her at the party and begun talking about her biological clock, the asshole. Or it might have been before that, when Alex had looked at her in surprise and then kissed her cheek. Hell, it might even have begun at the single moment when Rose had zipped up her dress back home.
Her sister wasn’t the kind of girl to hold back. She’d turned up, bags in hand, something about an argument with Mom that she didn’t want to talk about, and Jo had just let her in.
There was no point in explaining she didn’t want to be on show, or see any of the hockey players who everyone at the firehouse appeared to idolize. Instead, she let Rose chatter on about Mom and why she was a control freak, and how she needed to get a boyfriend or something because Rose really didn’t want to work at Dad’s old company and wanted to go to college and not have to feel like Mom was going to be lonely.
Actually, it was kind of like old times. She fussed with Jo’s makeup, gave advice on which dress to wear, what heels, even what to say if she got to talk to Alex.
“Just be you. He’s a nice guy apparently; for a superstar hockey player, I mean.”
“He’s nothing special,” Jo murmured to that.
“No, guess not,” Rose said, and smiled at her mischievously. “If you’re not into tall, blond, Thor-like intensity, ferocious on-ice skill, sexy blue eyes, and money in the bank.”
“Rose—”
“I can’t help it. I’ve looked him up. He’s so gorgeous, and you saved his life—he owes you a kiss at least. Although there are an awful lot of photos of him and various eye-candy on his arm. But you know, he could be the exception to the rule and actually not be a professional sportsman who fucks anything that moves.”
Jo didn’t mention they’d already kissed. Kind of kissed, anyway. There was no point, because Rose would be all over that like a rash. So she focused in on the car thing. “I didn’t save his life. His jacket was snagged; I just helped him.”
“You dragged him from a burning car, sis.”
“I dragged him from the scene. He was the one who chalked up all the heroics for the night.”
Rose tutted. “Just go tonight, be sexy, and talk like a normal person.”
That hurt. For her sister to say that…it hurt. She’d taken after her father with his quiet ways, not her mom, the social center of the district.
“Rose—”
But Rose was still talking, something about how Jo hadn’t had a boyfriend in months, and how she really needed to think about her biological clock. That last part caught Jo’s attention.
“I’m twenty-seven,” she defended. “Not all of us need a man and a baby to complete their lives.”
Rose looked affronted, and straightened the hem of Jo’s dress with a low hum. “Dating would be a good start.”
“One day, Rose.”
And then it had gone to hell with one simple sentence.
“Hey, you remember when we were younger, and we were getting ready to go out, and Dad would stalk up and down outside the rooms and worry about this boy or that party?”
That moment there was when the grief had started; it had to be.
She hadn’t wanted to think about Dad then, and she didn’t want to now. So she turned off all the lights and settled onto a sofa that had a view of the garden. From there she could see the top of the tent at the back of the house, and to the darkness beyond, some parts of the garden lit with hundreds of white lights. She toed off her heels and relaxed back with a sigh. The only good thing about tonight was the delicious anticipation that tomorrow was an off day. She needed study time, and she c
ould crack open the books; her examinations were in January, and she was determined to ace every single one of them.
She heard him long before he actually came into the room. Not that she knew it was Alex, just that someone had followed her up the stairs and was wandering around the upper floor. Could be someone just coming up to check out the private parts of the house, but in her bones, she knew it was someone looking for her. Either Swanson, with his veiled questions about her place in the service, or Mitch, wondering where the hell his only partner at the party had disappeared to, or more likely Alex.
“You’re sitting in the dark,” Alex said from behind her.
“No shit, Sherlock,” she muttered under her breath.
“May I come in?”
“I suppose so.” She said it a little louder so he could hear. Who was she to deny someone a quiet space to sit away from all that chaos downstairs? He worked the crowd with ease, but she’d noticed the stress in his expression on a couple of occasions. Seemed like everyone wanted a piece of the Dragons’ captain. Journalists wanted to ask questions, people with cameras and phones wanted selfies, his team surrounded him with one issue or another.
Did the man ever get to just be?
He didn’t turn the light on, and she heard him stumbling into the room, walking into a table, tripping over a chair. She could imagine the headlines already: Hockey Star Breaks Leg in Dark. Just as she was reaching for the desk lamp next to her, he finally made his way to the sofa and slumped onto it. Light from the decorations outside came in through the window.
What happens now?
Did she need to make small talk? He smelled so good, of some expensive cologne, she guessed, and he was a large shape sitting on the sofa.
“I really want to say sorry.”
Ah, so he was starting their talk by addressing what had happened between them. Awkward.
“You did.”
He huffed in disbelief. “That so isn’t me. I blame the meds, the enforced house arrest, the pain…whatever. I wanted to kiss you, and normally people, girls, they want to kiss me back, and so I just went for it.”
