by RJ Scott
“I need to make a statement,” she said. The cop listened, made notes, and called for her to be formally interviewed so they could ascertain how much the information mattered.
Probably not at all.
No one had died. The only person injured enough to need the hospital was Cody, they were lucky the bomb had gone off after the arena had emptied of all but the stragglers. All but the staff and team and a few die-hard fans.
Only on the way back home did she realize two things. The first was that she could have lost Alex tonight, and a future without that man was impossible to imagine. And secondly, without thought, she was going to Alex’s place, because she needed to be where he would go when he was finished at the hospital.
He woke her up from where she’d fallen asleep curled up on the sofa wrapped up in one of his Dragons jackets. When he’d given her a key a few days before, it hadn’t been a big thing, but now seeing her in his home, he realized giving the key had meant as much to him as giving her a ring.
It meant she was part of his life.
The TV was still on, still running the news that someone had planted a bomb at Sweetings Arena, and that Cody James, right wing for the Dragons hockey team was still under observation in the hospital. Alex was still in uniform; he looked exhausted and wrecked. He kicked off sneakers that were clearly too big for him.
“Hey,” he murmured, and kissed her, then gathered her in to him and held her tight. “I didn’t know where you were,” he said. “If I’d lost you…”
She didn’t need to say a word. She just held him hard and pressed kisses to his neck and face. He clearly hadn’t showered since the game, that hockey player funk not even enough for her to let him go.
“I need a shower.”
“Later. How is Cody?” she asked between kisses.
“His wrist is fractured, but his leg will be okay.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Stay here; I’ll be back.” She trailed him into the shower, but he waved her away, asking for coffee, or anything, and that he just needed a moment.
She knew what that was like, that single precious minute where you attempted to get your thoughts straight.
“Sorry.” He apologized like he expected her to be pissed. She pressed a kiss to the end of his nose.
“Get in the shower,” she said with a smile. “I’ll see to the coffee.”
After the shower, Alex, in loose sweats and a Dragons T-shirt, relaxed back on the sofa and pulled her with him, so she sprawled over his chest. She braced herself, but he tutted and knocked at her arms.
“Stop doing that,” he murmured. “I want you lying on me.”
“But—”
“No buts.”
She huffed, and relaxed her hold until he was taking her weight. She’d always been the tall one, the broad one, the girl who was too much of a tomboy to be a serious artist, or too big to be the cute one. But Alex didn’t care; he loved her just the way she was.
“Breaking news…” the TV announcer intoned in that excitable way they sometimes did. “An arrest has been made in connection with the bombing tonight of the Sweetings Arena.” Jo looked at the screen, and what she saw made her scramble up and away from Alex.
“That’s him,” she said, and pointed at the screen. “The man I saw when we went skating.”
The announcer added more. “In a standoff with the police, Miles Crawford claimed he was responsible for several fires and explosions that have been plaguing the city, including that of the New Year Ferris wheel incident. There is no news as to why he carried out these attacks, and no evidence of a connection with organized terrorism. We will keep you up to date here on…”
Jo hunched in on herself. Everything was linked; one man had destroyed so much. What about the fire at the cinema? And the car accident that had been caused by the same explosive device?
“Why?” she asked, but she wasn’t really asking for a response. Alex took her hand and tugged her closer, and she willingly went with him, curling a hand into his long blond hair.
“Let’s go to bed.”
They didn’t make it to the bedroom. When the overload of emotion hit Jo, all she could do was cling to Alex, and he wasn’t going to let her go.
“You could have died,” Jo murmured, cradling his face.
“Stay with me,” Alex said.
“I am,” she said, and kissed him, taking her time to memorize every moment as she tasted him, and deepened the kisses, and moved to dig her fingers in his hair.
“No,” Alex said, serious and focused, breaking the kiss and holding her at a distance. “Marry me. Stay with me. Forever.”
Her answer was a kiss, and a smile, and then a whispered yes.
He groaned into the word, kissed her, pressed her against the wall, and then with a noise of frustration he put his hands on her ass and lifted her, walking back toward the bed and pulling her with him onto the mattress. She sprawled over him, and that time she didn’t move.
“I love you, captain.”
“I love you, probie.”
They kissed, and he moved her so that she could feel the length of him, fat and hard against her clit. The eroticism of that, grinding down on him, plus the emotion of the night—probably including one big proposal—had her coming with his name on her lips and their hands grasped.
So much emotion.
And so much love.
It was her cell that woke her, and Jo extricated herself from Alex’s hold to look at the display. It couldn’t be her mom; she’d called and reassured her mom and her sister that she was okay. She connected the call when she saw Mitch’s name come up on the screen.
“He got passed over for a professional career in hockey,” Mitch said without any context.
Next to her Alex stirred, and rubbed his eyes sleepily.
“Who did?”
“Not only that, he’s related to the dad and kid in that car accident. He’s the kid’s fucking uncle.”
“Mitch… Wait… The accident.”
“The guy who set the bomb at the arena is the same one who blew up his brother-in-law’s car and set the bomb at the Ferris wheel. You want to know why? So he could gauge first responder reaction times ready for the big job, the arena. He was assessing burn times and radius destruction. Fuck, you should see this wall in his house—it’s full of pictures and schedules. There’s images of the hockey guys with families at the New Year fair…he was planning to kill kids.”
“But—”
“I’m looking at it now. He wanted to attack a hockey team. That was the endgame of this whole fucking thing. If the bomb had gone off when it was supposed to, if it had been in a dry room and not the hydrotherapy room, hundreds would have died. Jesus, Jo.”
“Mitch—”
“I’ve got to go. I wanted to let you know, the cops have him and he’s crying like a fucking baby.”
Jo looked at the dead phone.
“What is it?” Alex was up on his elbows peering at the same screen.
“He wanted to kill you all.”
“Who?” Alex was only half awake, blinking at her.
“The guy who set the bomb. It was his end game to hurt the Dragons because he was passed over for a hockey team.”
“What the hell?”
“It doesn’t make sense, but the bomb at the arena, if it had been in a dry room, it was set to hurt a lot more people.”
Alex held her tight and cursed under his breath.
Jo shivered at how close it had been to killing so many people. And how close she’d come to losing Alex.
She cuddled into him.
“You want to go check the news?” Alex murmured.
He opened his iPad and scrolled to news one-handed. The picture of the suspected perpetrator of the Sweetings Arena bomb was front and center. He looked familiar, and with a wrench Jo realized it definitely was the maintenance guy from the afternoon of their skate-date. Had he been carrying the bomb then? How had he even got through any kind of security
? She buried her face against Alex’s chest.
“I don’t want to see it,” she whispered.
“Are you okay?”
Jo didn’t want to move; she wanted to stay where she was. Alex squeezed her when she gave a silent shake of her head. “There’s no sense in this world sometimes, Jo.”
He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, and for a short while the world and all its horrors were put aside.
Epilogue
“That’s five games in six nights,” Alex said, dropping the paperwork back on the desk.
He knew it was the only solution; didn’t mean he had to like it. Sweetings Arena had been out of commission for five weeks, and while the league had helped all they could, games had been lost. The proposal was that the five missing games that couldn’t be reorganized or played on third-party ice would be added at the end of the normal season, before playoffs.
“Is it doable?”
Alex thought about his team. They’d moved from arena to arena, always playing away, and it didn’t matter that Vaz had carried the wing when they’d lost Cody for the remainder of the season. The only bright side about the explosion was that Cody’s story had been lost in the mess of speculation and reporting about the chances for the team.
Not that it had disappeared altogether, but in the grand scheme of things it had been put to one side for later consideration. Alex would deal with it over the summer.
Their chances of a place in the playoffs were dwindling. They’d need to win four of the five final games to keep a wildcard place. Statistically, they were fucked.
Worse than that, emotionally they were destroyed. Every player was exhausted and out of sorts for one thing or another, and Alex had almost shut them all in the same damn room again after practice to knock their heads together. Vaz and Gooly were back to being Russian ice men, Rafferty was picking at Loki and Ryan, and they in turn were forgetting they were the core of the team. They didn’t have a backup goalie of any worth, and Drago would be exhausted with back-to-back games.
Not to mention that there were trade rumors around Ryan, and with the approaching trade deadline, Alex was just done with it all. Being captain fucking sucked balls.
The only bright spot in his life was Jo. She settled him. She was strong and certain, and he knew he’d made the right decision asking her to marry him. They’d talked about getting away in the summer break and eloping, but Alex wanted everything for her, and would agree to anything she wanted.
“What’s happening with Ryan?”
Coach did that eye-twitch thing; the one that Alex knew meant something was being planned.
Alex sat back in his chair. “You’re fucking joking,” he snapped. “The GM is trading Ryan? No.”
Coach held up a hand. “Alex—”
“No.” Alex stood up. “We pull up a wing from the Colts.” Their minor league team had some real talent there. “You leave Ryan here, and I will guarantee you that we’ll get a place in the playoffs.”
Now Coach stood. “You can’t promise that.”
Alex thumbed to a contact on his phone. “Get the team in here now.”
The door opened and twenty or so men, all still in uniform, squeezed into the office. There wasn’t enough room to breathe, let alone discuss anything important. But that wasn’t what Alex wanted to do. The time for discussion was long gone.
“We will make the playoffs,” he announced, and looked at Ryan, at Loki, Gooly…the entire team, one at a time. “This team will get us there. Anyone who disagrees or who isn’t willing to give two hundred percent to this can leave this room now.”
A few people shuffled, but only to look at the others. No one actually left.
“Team,” Alex said, softly.
“Team,” Ryan and Loki said at the same time.
Gooly looked at Vaz, and even though it was a glare, they both said, at the same time, “Team.”
The rest of them repeated the word, some quietly and then with greater enthusiasm.
“We’re going back on the ice,” Alex said. “And we’re going to fucking skate. Get out there.”
The players left, and the last person out, Ryan, shut the door. It was just Alex and Coach in the room.
“Leave Ryan alone,” Alex said. “He’s one of the strongest parts of this team, and you know that. Don’t let the management try to mend something that isn’t broken and, fuck, get a backbone and stop them messing with the Dragons so I don’t have to pick up the mess.”
“You can’t talk to me like that—”
“My team,” Alex snapped.
He wasn’t asking, he was telling. For what it was worth, he was captain, and his voice had to be heard in the organization for it to work.
Coach looked down at the papers on his desk, the proposal for the extra games, and notes scribbled on a pad with Ryan’s name at the top. He tore off the notes and pushed the sheet through the shredder. Then he stood and offered Alex his hand.
“Management won’t like it, but I’ve got your back.”
And then he added one word.
“Team.”
* * * * *
Jo settled into her seat.
The hockey press had labeled the Dragons making it to the playoffs a miracle, but she’d never doubted Alex or the men he called his team. The Dragons had scraped in with a wild card spot by one point, and tonight was their first game in the playoffs. They didn’t have home ice advantage, they were stuck on the west coast for games one and two, and they were up against the team that was expected to win the Stanley Cup, but somehow, that was okay.
Alex was captain to a team that had been through hell and made it out the other side.
“You okay?” Kat asked, and nudged her side.
“Excited,” Jo answered, tapping her fingers on her knee. The lights glinted on the ring on her finger; it was an understated twist of gold with one central diamond.
“Did you tell Alex you passed your exams?”
“I sent him a text. I don’t know if he’ll have gotten it. I didn’t want to interrupt all the things they had to do, but I wanted to tell him.”
The lights dimmed, the noise deafening as the Dragons skated out in lazy circles. The fanfare that followed was for the home team, a sea of jade and black rising from their seats as the home team entered the arena.
She wasn’t watching that team; she had her eyes firmly on number 25, the same 25 who was right in front of her at the glass. He made a hand-gesture for phone, then a thumbs up, and finally he blew her a kiss.
She threw him a kiss back, then sat back down next to Kat as he skated away. Ryan slowed down by the glass, blew a similar kiss to Kat.
The Dragons could win tonight, however unlikely it was given the skating and goal scoring from the other team.
They could lose.
Either way, Jo watched the man she loved line up for the national anthem, and she smiled so hard it hurt.
The heart of the team, the captain, looked confident, exchanging fist bumps with Loki, and then he was in final position for the face-off.
* * * * *
Alex looked left and right, checking everyone’s position, then nodded that he was ready. With Jo watching in the stands, a team that wanted to win, and an indescribable feeling of pride, he and his team were ready for this game.
He’d been ready for it his entire life.
THE END
Read Nikita ‘Gooly’ Gulin’s story in The Legacy, coming July
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Table of Contents
The Heart
All Rights Reserved
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Ch
apter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
