Home Ice (Portland Storm Book 11)

by Catherine Gayle

  Sophie was the first to see me when I came through the door. She lit up like a Christmas tree, her smile as wide as I’d ever seen it when 501 wasn’t in the room. “Bergy, we won!”

  “We sure did,” I said, holding up my hand for the high five she ran over to give me.

  She and her sisters had been sitting with some of the older kids among the players’ families. It didn’t surprise me at all to find Maddie Campbell, Rachel’s oldest daughter, right in the center of them. Rachel was Jim’s assistant and the wife of one of my players, Brenden “Soupy” Campbell, who had been out with an injury nearly all season long. Maddie tended to be quiet but perceptive and incredibly thoughtful. She gravitated toward the damaged and the broken, or anyone who needed an extra dose of compassion. Not that Sophie was broken, but it warmed my heart to know that Soupy’s shy, sweet girl would have taken Sophie under her wing with all the strangers around.

  Paige gathered up the other three and brought them our way in time to hear Sophie ask, “Can Levi come on our date, too?”

  “I think Levi has other things he needs to do,” Paige answered before I had the chance.

  Izzy deflated like a balloon, and Evie’s disappointment was tangible. Zoe looked so relieved I almost laughed.

  “You don’t want him to come?” I asked the oldest girl.

  “Nope.” Zoe shook her head vigorously. “I turn stupid the second I get near him. I don’t think I said more than three words all day yesterday.”

  “Oh, you said plenty once we got home,” Paige said, laughing.

  “Well, I had to make up for all the time I couldn’t speak at all!”

  “I don’t think you need to have any fear you’ll forget how your tongue works,” Evie said, giggling. Then she took off out the door, and the rest of us followed behind her, all three of the older girls taking jabs at each other and laughing at such a high pitch that I thought I might lose my hearing if I spent too much time around them. Sophie rushed to keep up with them, once more leaving Paige and me trailing in their wake.

  “You’ve given them quite a weekend,” she said after a reasonable distance fell between us and the girls. “I don’t think they’ll stop talking about it for quite some time.”

  “I’m glad.” More than glad. I might not know these girls very well, let alone their mother, but there was something about being with them that felt right, in a way that few things in my life ever had.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re getting into with this?” Paige waved a hand in front of us, indicating the girls who seemed to be skipping across the air rather than walking. “You can still back out of taking us all to dinner, you know. I’ll find a good excuse.”

  I glanced over at her, taking in the long stretch of her neck. She had her hair all piled on top of her head today, in a sort of bun that looked at once haphazard and elegant.

  “Are you trying to get out of that kiss? Because I’m doing everything in my power to follow through with my end of the bargain.”

  “No!” She looked down at my chest instead of meeting my eyes, though, and I got the distinct sense she was fighting a blush. “No, a deal is a deal.”

  There was no denying the boost my ego got over the fact that she wasn’t telling me to go to hell. But still… “I made that deal with Sophie, not with you. And her part of it was simply to try to get you to agree.”

  “Mattias, she’s never going to be—”

  “Don’t tell me that she won’t ever be able to skate. Not you. Not her mother.” Even as the words left my mouth, I had to wonder if I meant them more for Paige in dealing with Sophie or if I was thinking of my own mother and Linnea. Either way, I meant it.

  “But the kind of balance that would require? The strength to keep herself up on those blades?” The same worried look Paige had taken on last night when I’d first talked with Sophie came back into her eyes now. “I just don’t want to see her fail so many times that she stops trying. I don’t want to see her give up.”

  “What if she doesn’t give up? What if she doesn’t stop trying?” I argued.

  “But—”

  “I can’t promise that she’ll ever be able to do it on her own, but what’s the harm in trying? Technology has advanced so much in recent years. I think I can find a way to at least get her out on the ice, and then we can see what happens. If we can devise something to help her balance at first, there’s no telling what she’ll be able to do down the line.”

  “You’re talking like you’re still going to be involved when it gets to that,” Paige said, frustration punctuating her words.

  “And you’re talking like I won’t be.”

  She stopped cold, and I had to stop, too, or I’d completely pass her by.

  “Look, Mattias,” she said, using the same tone my mother had always used when she was trying to protect Linnea as best she could. “I know you mean well. I do. And I appreciate it more than I could ever say.”

  “But?” There was no point trying to hide from it, since we both knew the but was coming.

  “But you and me? We’re adults. We can handle disappointment. We understand that you’re a good man trying to do something nice for my little girl, but you’re probably getting yourself in deeper than you initially intended. You probably didn’t realize all of the implications of what you were suggesting. Maybe you do now. I hope so, at least. But Sophie doesn’t always understand when people back away. She gets attached, and then they leave before they’re able to keep their promises, and then she gets hurt. And my girls and I are the ones left to pick up the pieces. We’re the ones who have to listen to her ask, over and over again, where Dad is and why he isn’t with us, or why her friends stopped coming to play, or why she isn’t able to move on to the next grade in school when all her friends are.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked cautiously. Although I probably didn’t really need to ask. I could tell where she was going with this. She was trying to kick me out before I got too close, before my leaving could hurt too much.

  Maybe she was right to do that. Not because I wouldn’t follow through with helping Sophie learn to play hockey but because there wasn’t a ton of job security as a coach in the NHL, and I had responsibilities to take care of in Sweden. I had to go wherever the work took me, and that might mean stepping out of Sophie’s life at some point down the line.

  Paige put her arms over her chest in a self-protective gesture. No matter how big a game she talked, I could see through it. She wasn’t just trying to protect Sophie in all this.

  “I’m saying,” she said after a protracted silence, “maybe it’s for the best if you step away after tonight. She hasn’t latched on to you too much yet. You’re still just in the maybe we can find a way to make this work phase. You haven’t yet made her any official promises that you’ll have to break eventually.”

  “Why would I have to break them?” I asked, even though I knew all the answers she would likely come up with, and then some that wouldn’t even cross Paige’s mind. But she didn’t know me very well yet. She didn’t know that I was the most determined son of a bitch she’d ever met. She didn’t know that once I set a goal for myself, there would be no stopping me. Now I needed to make her understand, or at the very least give her a hint.

  She was looking at me like trees were sprouting from my ears.

  I raised a brow. “Like you said, a deal is a deal. I told Sophie I would do whatever I could to help her out. I meant it.”

  The corners of Paige’s lips quirked up, despite her efforts to fight off the smile. “I’d let you kiss me even if you didn’t hold up your end of it,” she said. Then she bit her lower lip, and I couldn’t look anywhere else.

  “And why would you do that?”

  She shrugged. “Because it’s been too long.”

  It’d been too long for both of us, then.

  “Mom!” Zoe shouted from well ahead of us, and Paige whipped her head in that direction. “You can kiss him later. We’re hungry.” We were too far aw
ay to see it, but an eye roll was overly evident in Zoe’s tone.

  Paige pressed her eyes closed for a moment before glancing up to meet my eyes. She pinched her lips together in a thin line, and a gorgeous blush stole over her cheeks. “Sorry. We should— We should go.” Then she took off heading toward her daughters with a determined stride.

  I turned to keep up with her. Reaching out to put a hand on the small of her back, I tried not to laugh. At least not too much. “It’s fine. Don’t want to keep them waiting.”

  Once we caught up with the girls, Sophie reached for my free hand. I let her take it, my other hand settling into the curve over her mother’s hip while the older girls rolled their eyes and hurried ahead of us…giggling and snickering as they went. They kept peeking over their shoulders at us, though, nearly tripping over their own feet because they weren’t paying attention to where they were going.

  And it felt good. I only hoped Paige liked it as much as I did. Because, now that I realized how much I enjoyed spending time with her and her girls, I didn’t simply intend to follow through with my promise to Sophie; I was starting to think of ways I could make other promises, as well.

  Mattias had to be bored out of his mind. He’d brought us to the Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner. Since it was a Sunday evening and we were a party of six, we’d had to wait almost an hour before they had a table big enough to seat all of us together. The whole time we’d been waiting, my girls hadn’t been able to stop chattering.

  For that matter, they never stopped chattering, not even in their sleep, it seemed. I was used to it, but Mattias was a single man with no children. He spent his days surrounded almost exclusively by grown men, and I sincerely doubted their talk ever came close to the inanity that came out of my daughters’ mouths.

  By the time the hostess had seated us, the girls had already gushed over who was cuter among Austin Cooper, Blake Kozlow, and Axel Johansson (no need to add Levi into the mix, since everyone already knew he was the cutest of the cute); debated the likelihood that the four girls could end up married to the four cute hockey players; informed Mattias that they’d added Cooper, Kozlow, and Johansson to the brother-husband list (“It’s like sister-wives in reverse, and they’re all hockey players,” Izzy explained patiently upon seeing Mattias’s confused expression); and hatched a plan for the four of them to split up, travel to the various NHL cities around North America, and snatch the wayward brother-husbands who didn’t play in Portland. After hearing all that, I was exhausted. I could only imagine that he was rethinking his plan to take us all to dinner and trying to come up with a good excuse to get out of it.

  But he came with us, and once Sophie claimed a seat on one of the booth’s benches, he inched in beside her. The other three girls gave me giggling glances and piled into the bench opposite them, leaving me to take the final spot next to Mattias. He was so large that I had to be right up against him or else I’d be practically falling out of the booth. I did my best to calm my nerves as I slid in beside him. As if it were the most natural thing in the world he could possibly do, he put his arm around my waist, his hand resting on the curve between my waist and my hip, and drew me as close to his side as I could possibly be.

  His body heat was intoxicating, but nothing could have come close to his scent in terms of making me want to get even closer. He smelled like heaven, and it was all I could do to keep myself from burying my nose against his chest and sniffing my fill. It was a good thing the girls were here and we were very much in public, because otherwise I might be hard-pressed not to do my best to crawl up on his lap. That would be taking things way too far, way too fast, particularly since tonight was going to be it.

  Not that I’d gotten Mattias to agree to end things after this one date, but he had to see the reason behind it. His sister had Down syndrome. He understood, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

  “Balloon!” Sophie squealed, pointing toward a man making balloon animals a few tables away from us. Then she was bouncing on the bench, unable to contain her excitement. I hid a smile, hoping she would never lose her childlike enthusiasm.

  “Do you want him to make you something?” Mattias asked, chuckling.

  She was too excited to do anything more than nod, and I was impressed by her restraint in staying seated where she was. Under normal circumstances, I would expect her to crawl under the table, bumping her head and knocking into legs as she went. But with Mattias beside her, she stayed relatively in place and let him wave the balloon man over.

  The man smiled at Mattias and me before zeroing in on Sophie. “How about a crown for the little princess?” He was already in the process of filling a pink balloon with air.

  She bounced in her seat. “Can I have a dog? I want a dog.”

  Pink could lead to a meltdown. I’d never figured out why, but Sophie couldn’t stand the color. She didn’t want it anywhere near her, typically throwing a fit of epic proportions if someone gave her a pink anything. I started to tell the balloon man that maybe pink wasn’t the best color, but Mattias stopped me with a big hand enveloping mine. I shot my gaze up to meet his.

  He shook his head. “Let her tell him,” he mouthed at me. He didn’t even know what I was about to say to the man, but he must have sensed my intent.

  I bit down on my tongue. Maybe he was right. I couldn’t always do everything for her. Someday, I would have to let go. She was already eleven years old, not to mention fiercely independent. She wanted to do everything she could by herself. She wanted to be as grown-up as her older sisters. She was starting to discover her wings; I needed to let her fly, even if sometimes she might fall.

  The balloon man winked at her. “A dog it is, then.” In no time, he was twisting the pink thing into shape.

  “Not pink. No pink.” Sophie’s tone bordered on temper tantrum, and my blood pressure started to rise.

  Mattias squeezed my hand.

  “Not pink?” the balloon man repeated. In a smooth move, he shoved his half-finished project into the bag slung over his shoulder and took out a plastic bag filled with balloons of every color imaginable. “Tell me what color you want, then.”

  “Purple,” she said emphatically, surprising the heck out of me. Purple was often her second most dreaded color. But she grinned up at Mattias and plucked at her Storm jersey. “He needs to match,” she explained.

  “Good call,” Mattias said. “That’ll make him look like he belongs with us.”

  With us. The way he said it made it sound like there was an us, Mattias included.

  “Can you get me a real puppy, Bergy?” she asked, all sunshine and innocence.

  “I think you’ll have to ask your mom about that,” he replied, cleanly deflecting her question so he wouldn’t end up as either the bad guy or the hero.

  “Mom?” she asked, and her sisters chimed in with promises of how they’d be the ones to feed and water and walk and wash, all of which they’d tried leveraging against me time and again.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I said as the waiter came over to take our orders.

  The balloon man finished her dog. He stuck around until the waiter was done, so he could make her a matching purple crown even though she hadn’t asked for it. They both walked away around the same time, and Sophie was grinning from ear to ear with her crown on her head and her balloon dog tucked in beside her on the bench.

  “What’s his name?” Mattias asked, angling his head in the balloon dog’s direction.

  “Levi,” Sophie said emphatically.

  He let out a silent chuckle, one I could feel rather than hear, and I fell for him a little harder.

  The instant he parked in my driveway, all four of my girls barreled out of his SUV and rushed straight for the door.

  “Kissy-kissy time,” Evie said in a sing-song voice amid their chorus of giggles, and I let out a groan.

  Zoe took her keys out of her pocket and let them in, and then Mattias and I were alone for the first time. She slammed the door closed behind them
. Within seconds, I saw the curtains flutter. Which meant they were peeking out at us.

  “They meant to say thank you,” I said on a sigh. I turned to find him staring at me with those intense blue-gray eyes. They should have frozen me, like icicles boring into me, but there was so much heat in them I burned instead. I couldn’t look in those eyes very long or I’d melt into his floorboard. I hurried to speak again before I forgot how. “So thank you. For everything. This whole weekend…”

  My words trailed off, along with my ability to think, because he took my hand in his again, lacing our fingers together and sending jolts of electric awareness through my veins at breakneck speed.

  “I should be the one thanking you,” he said. “And your girls, too.”

  I shook my head, unable to process it. “What? Why?”

  With the pad of his thumb, he traced lazy circles on the back of my hand, raising goose bumps all up and down my arms. I shivered, but not from cold.

  “Because you showed me I could be the man my sister loves even when I’m not with her.”

  I still didn’t follow. I hadn’t known Mattias very long, but he’d repeatedly shown himself to be kind, thoughtful, and entirely too much man for me to ignore. But now it was time for me to give him that kiss and get out, before I fell too hard. Before Sophie fell too hard. Before we all got too attached. It was happening, faster than I’d been prepared for, and I was already dreading the damage control I’d have to do once he walked out of our lives. I’d let him in further than anyone since Dan and I had split up under the pressure of raising a daughter with special needs. Ever since then, I’d been cautious to keep enough of a barrier between us and the rest of the world that no one could cut us too deeply, but with Mattias I’d let down my guard.

  He cleared his throat before my thoughts were coherent, and I forced myself to meet his gaze again.