In the Zone (Portland Storm 5)

by Catherine Gayle

  He wasn’t the only one whose family wasn’t here, though. Vladdie’s relatives were all at home in Russia, so he was going to spend his holiday with Luka and the rest of the Lukashenko family. At least the kid would be around people who spoke the same language he did.

  A few of the guys were traveling to be with their families. Mitchell “Q” Quincey, one of the other new guys on the team this year, was on his way to Manitoba so he could spend his Christmas break with his parents and siblings, and hopefully get to see his little girl. He’d gotten divorced over the summer, and his ex had been granted custody. He hadn’t seen her in months.

  And then there was Radar. He had no plans to make the trip to the Czech Republic and back in the few days we had off, but he was flying out to Philadelphia. He was good friends with a couple of guys who played for the Flyers, so they were going to hang out together for the holidays.

  Essentially, that was what Babs and Razor intended to do, too. Razor was staying behind here in Portland while the rest of his team flew back to Buffalo before dispersing for their break, and he and Babs were going to do whatever the fuck they tended to do when they were together. Probably play video games. That was all I ever saw them doing, at least.

  Babs hadn’t even bothered to come up to the owner’s box tonight. No one was up here waiting for him, and I think he was worried he might run into Katie Weber if he showed his face up here. If so, he had good reason to think that. She’d arrived in town today, and she was here with her mother and younger siblings now.

  Webs walked in to get them all, and Katie jumped to her feet, racing over to hug him. “I’ve missed you like crazy,” she said.

  “Have you?” Webs had his Dad face on. Or maybe it went further than that. He looked genuinely upset. “I thought you’d been too busy hooking up with Jesse Carmichael to remember all of us. You haven’t answered your phone in weeks.” He crossed his arms in an intimidating stance after he released her from the hug.

  “I’ve been busy. We’ve been working long days—”

  Webs scowled. “And you’ve been spending every minute you weren’t working wrapped up with him.”

  “That’s not fair, Dad.” She was angled in such a way that I couldn’t see her expression, but her tone more than made up for that. It wasn’t a whine. She was genuinely hurt by her father’s intimations.

  “I call it like I see it. And I’ve seen more than I ever wanted to all over the TV.”

  “It’s just for promotion! We’ve been doing premiers and all sorts of interviews—”

  “He doesn’t need to have his hands on your ass to promote your TV show. I thought we raised you better than that.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “And you’re behaving like someone I don’t recognize. I don’t like it. And I don’t like this Jesse Carmichael.”

  She threw up her hands in the air. “You don’t even know him!”

  “And he’d better hope I never meet him because when I do—”

  At that, Laura Weber grabbed her husband by the upper arm and dragged him out of the owner’s box, the two younger kids following behind them. Dana put her arm around Katie, saying something quietly to her, and then she and Zee walked out with Katie, following behind the rest of her family.

  That looked like it was going to be an interesting family holiday. I was definitely glad that Babs hadn’t come up to witness all that. He didn’t need that kind of distraction right now.

  As I watched the owner’s box slowly empty, it dawned on me that there wasn’t anyone here who belonged to Cole. I hadn’t heard what his plans were for the time off. And I was the one looking out for him this season. I should have already known his Christmas plans well before now. At least I had this opportunity to make up for it.

  “Colesy,” I called out when only a few stragglers remained.

  He’d been inching his way toward the door, probably trying to make his exit without anyone realizing he was alone, damn him. He turned around, his brows drawn together in question.

  “What are you doing for Christmas?”

  He shrugged, watching the last couple of people head out the door until only the two of us plus Brie and Shane remained. Then he looked over at me. “I tend to spend the holidays by myself.”

  Fuck that. Not if I had anything to say about it. “You don’t have any family here?”

  “No, and I’m not going home to see them, either.” He didn’t elaborate and looked like he had no intention of doing so even if I poked and prodded. I could respect that. I had never been very keen on sharing the details of my family life, either.

  I glanced over at Shane, long enough to see him give me a brief nod, and then I made up my mind. “Go pack up a few things and come over to my place. You’re spending Christmas with us.”

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his suit pants. “I don’t want—”

  “You’re not imposing, and I’m not letting you spend Christmas alone. Go get your stuff.” No one should be alone at Christmas. I’d spent enough of them all by my lonesome to know how awful that was. Yes, I’d been planning to do that myself until Shane had shown up, but that was beside the point.

  Colesy looked away, in the manner I’d come to realize meant he was embarrassed, but he finally nodded. “Yeah, all right. I’ll come.”

  One bird down. Now I just had to find a way to convince the other to come and stay for a few days, too.

  I almost reached for Brie’s hand, but I remembered myself and shoved it in my pocket before I made that mistake. Shane reached over and helped her to her feet, and the four of us headed out to the parking garage together.

  I wasn’t ready to give up on the possibility of taking this relationship further, especially not after talking about her with my brother earlier today. Shane really liked her after talking to her at the party, and he seemed to think she wasn’t as opposed to the idea of there being an us as I believed she was. He thought there could potentially be a future.

  And maybe he was right. She’d come to my party, and tonight she came to my game. She hadn’t told me to stuff it when I mentioned that I still wanted to come to her New Year’s Day performance. She wasn’t shutting me out, and I was making an effort to give her what she said she needed from me. Maybe I just needed to stay the course, however difficult it seemed it might be. I had never been very patient when it came to getting the things that I wanted, and I wanted Brie more than was good for me, considering I might not be able to have her in the end.

  When we got out to the garage, Colesy headed off in a different direction for his car. I led Brie and Shane to mine, holding open the passenger door for Brie to get in. After I was settled in the driver’s seat and had started the engine, I turned to her. “When we get to your place, would you be willing to pack up a bag and come with us, too? Shane and I talked about it this afternoon. We don’t want you to spend Christmas all alone with your cats.”

  She took a moment before answering, the blue of her eyes turning as dark as the midnight sky. She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly as though trying to slow her pulse. “I can’t leave my cats for that long,” she said. “There’s not anyone I’d be able to get to come and look after them over the holidays, and definitely not at the last minute like this.”

  “You could bring them, too. My house is huge. We could set up part of it for them where my dogs will leave them alone.”

  She gave me a look full of skepticism, one eyebrow arched almost comically. “You’ve never had cats, have you?” But then she laughed, and it warmed me through. “Moving them even for a few days could be traumatic for Richie, not to mention a lot of work for the three of us. Not only will we have to get the cats and wrangle them into their carriers, but we’d have to grab their litter box and supplies, cat food, toys, some things to help keep Richie calm… It’s a big undertaking.”

  “There are three of us and two of them,” Shane said from the backseat. “And we’re all a lot bigger than they are.”

&nbs
p; “They have claws,” Brie said. “And sharp teeth.”

  Shane’s shrug was visible in my rearview mirror. “Still, my money’s on us.”

  “I still have to go to practices with Devin every day but Christ—”

  “I can drive you,” I interrupted, cutting off her argument before she could pick up any steam with it. “Or he can come here. I’ve got a room downstairs that should work for you.”

  “With mirrors?” The eyebrow raise she gave me nearly cracked me up.

  “No mirrors. It’s still a good space even without them, but I can drive you to the studio if you’d prefer, so that’s not a good argument.”

  “Is this for the music video?” Shane asked from the backseat.

  “Some of it. We’re also working on a show for New Year’s Day.”

  “I wouldn’t mind watching you two, if that’s all right,” he said.

  I doubted Colesy would mind too much, either, and I sure as hell knew I liked watching her dance. “We can all come, if we wouldn’t be intruding,” I said.

  “Great. Just what we need, a huge audience. Next thing I know, you’ll be inviting the whole team over to sit in the peanut gallery and watch.”

  “That’s not a horrible idea,” I teased.

  Brie rolled her eyes. In the end, she gave in, and we wound up herding her cats, their carriers, litter boxes, cat food, dishes, brushes, toys, and a thousand other things—plus a duffel bag full of what Brie needed for herself, which seemed woefully inadequate in comparison to all of the cat supplies—down the stairs from her apartment to my car. She hadn’t been kidding about it being a big undertaking. When I take my dogs with me for a few days, I only need to grab them, their leashes, and their food. We figure the rest of it out once we get to wherever we’re going. This was an entirely different endeavor, and a hilarious one at that. It took all three of us making two trips with our arms full before Brie said we had everything they would need.

  By the time we got back to my place, Colesy was sitting in the driveway waiting for us. It was no surprise that he had beat us there. As hockey players, we spend a lot of time on the road. We’re used to packing up quickly. I pulled into the garage, opening another door so he could park inside, too, and then we all worked together to get everything in the house.

  I took Brie downstairs and showed her a few connecting rooms we could put the cats in, helping to close off doors so that they could have a safe space. She set everything up for her cats before she let them out of their carriers. Pepper was trying to help her, and Shadow and Dexter were watching a little too intently, so I herded my dogs up the stairs and out the side door so they’d leave her cats alone. When I came back downstairs, she’d already let both cats out of their carriers to explore. BC was roaming around and sniffing everything in my downstairs game room, but Richie was nowhere in sight.

  “He’s crawled inside that recliner,” Brie said, pointing toward one of the La-Z-Boy chairs near the TV. She must have noticed that I was looking for him.

  “Inside it?”

  “Yep. He shoved his body up the back. He won’t come out until he doesn’t hear voices. Even then, he might not come out for a few hours. Every time we’ve moved since I’ve had him, he’s done something like this. Change is hard for him.”

  Change was hard for most of us, but I figured it wouldn’t be very helpful to say that right now. I mean, her cat was holed up inside a chair, for God’s sake.

  “Is there anything we need to do for him?” The thought of a cat hanging out inside a recliner for several hours didn’t sound too appealing. I couldn’t imagine it was very comfortable down there, and now that I’d seen Richie at least the one time, I knew he was a huge cat. He had to be squashed in there.

  “The best thing we can do is give him some time and space to calm down,” she said.

  I nodded and started to head out of the game room. Instead of coming with me, though, she got up and took a little canister around the room, squirting something here and there.

  “Pheromone spray,” she said. “It’ll help him calm down. You and I can’t smell it, but cats can. It’s the stuff they produce and rub all over things to mark them with their scent. It’ll help him feel safe and like he belongs here.”

  The idea of Brie and her cats belonging here—in my house—hit me in a way that I hadn’t been expecting. I excused myself and headed back upstairs so I could rein my thoughts in again before I made an idiot of myself.

  Colesy and Shane had disappeared while I was downstairs with her. I didn’t know if they’d gone off together or if they were each heading to bed separately. It was none of my business, frankly, and this house was more than big enough for me to avoid finding out anything they didn’t want me to know. That thought made me think that maybe they’d intended for me to find them on the stairs yesterday. Testing the waters or whatever. Either way, I had no intention of poking my nose in to whatever was going on between them unless they came to me. Even then, there were some things about the two of them that, as a brother to one and teammate to the other, I didn’t need to know. Ever.

  Once she’d finished getting her cats settled, Brie came up to sit in the living room with me. She sat close enough to me on the sofa that I could easily touch her but she didn’t reach out to me. I figured I’d better keep my hands to myself. If we were going to move beyond friendship, whenever that might be, she was going to have to make the first move. I was pretty sure I’d already stepped over the line in asking her to come and stay here for the holidays.

  I wanted every opportunity I could get to see her, to talk to her, though. I wanted to stumble into the kitchen in the morning and find her by the coffeepot, or to spend an hour talking about anything or nothing, so long as I could hear her voice. If she hadn’t come to stay here for the holidays, seeing her here and there over these few days—and only at times that I could finagle my way into getting together with her as friends for something—it wasn’t going to be enough. I didn’t have hockey responsibilities to distract me right now and steal my time. Most of my friends and teammates were going to be spending time with their families, so there was no better chance to immerse myself in her life—and her in mine.

  “Did you have a good time at the game?” I asked.

  “More than I expected.”

  I laughed. “You didn’t think you would?”

  “I didn’t know what to expect, I guess.” Brie shrugged, drawing my eye to her shoulders.

  She’d worn a dress tonight, even though I had insisted it would be a casual affair. The league required all players and team personnel to travel to and from every game in a suit, but everyone else wore whatever they were comfortable in. I definitely didn’t mind seeing her in a dress, though. Particularly this one. It wasn’t something she’d bought when we’d gone shopping together, so I didn’t know where it had come from. It was some sort of wrap dress, tied together with a belt at her waist, in a bold print of rich purples, greens, and blues. Jewel tones, just as the saleswoman had suggested based on Brie’s coloring. That woman had definitely known what she was talking about.

  The way the dress draped around Brie’s body emphasized all of her best physical assets. It dipped into a vee over her chest, drawing my eye to her cleavage, the belt showed off the shape of her waist, and then the skirt flared out some below that. It fell to just below her knees, but with the way she was sitting, it parted a little bit, revealing a little more leg than it would if she were standing. The longer I looked, the harder it was going to be to keep my hands off her. I couldn’t look away, though. Not even if my life depended on it.

  She shifted to face me a little better, and the skirt parted a bit farther. “I watched you some, but I really spent a lot of time watching Babs and Razor—at least after Dana and Shane told me that they’d been best friends.”

  I had to laugh again at that. “They were going at each other all night. I’ve never heard Babs talk trash like that before.” It had brought out a side of him that I hoped we would see m
ore of. The kid had mad talent, but he’d really come alive out there tonight, trying to one up his buddy. Maybe after he’d spent a few more years in the league and had a few more good friends on other teams, he would have this newfound drive a bit more often.

  He was smart about it, at least. He wanted to beat Razor, but he wanted to beat the Sabres even more. That meant he wasn’t going to make a stupid mistake only to prove he was better than his buddy.

  Brie hadn’t stopped smiling while I was thinking, and I hadn’t stopped staring at her. I couldn’t seem to focus my eyes on any one thing. Every bit of her was gorgeous. This was going to be a long few days if I couldn’t convince her to move our relationship forward again.

  “Keith?” she said quietly after a moment, her voice having turned a little husky and sexy, making my mouth water.

  “Yeah?” I didn’t even care that my voice cracked on the word. She knew I hadn’t stopped wanting her.

  “I think— Can I—” Her face was all pink and flushed and so fucking beautiful, and she slid over closer to me. The movement tugged her skirt apart a little more, revealing a few more inches of her thighs, and I had to fight down a groan. But then she cupped my cheek with her hand and her lips were on mine, and all conscious thought left me.

  WAS THIS REALLY fucking happening? It hadn’t been that long since Brie had insisted we back off from the physical side of things between us. Only a few days, actually. But now her lips were pressed to mine. I’d been practically desperate to kiss her again—and so much more—and it was all I could do to keep myself from tossing her back on the sofa and forgetting all about my promise to keep my hands to myself.