Body Check: Blades Hockey

by Luis, Maria

  “Too busy watching clips again?”

  Always. You don’t get to where I’m at in the NHL by not making the most out of every hour of the day—and, for over a decade, I’ve done nothing but breathe in hockey and exhale league-crushing stats. I’m the two-time winner of the Art-Ross trophy for most points scored during the regular season, once during my short, one-year stint with the Dallas Stars and the other time with the Boston Bruins, and am also the winner of The Conn Smythe award. I’ve hoisted the Stanley Cup up in the air with the aid of my former team, the Bruins, and have made the playoffs every year that I’ve been with the Blades. “Watching clips” is my adaptation of scrolling through Facebook or Buzzfeed.

  I’m a man with tunnel vision, but sometimes that tunnel vision has got faulty wiring.

  And I’m not blind to the fact that my dedication to the sport robbed me of a balanced life outside the rink. More specifically, it robbed me of a lifetime with Holly. I don’t regret much in life, but . . . Well, let’s just say that I’ve got a first-class ticket on the Wishful Thinking train. Here’s to hoping that one day I’ll be able to look at the woman in front of me and not feel the needle of regret pricking my calloused skin.

  Hands empty, I settle for another shrug. “Nothing a little BBQ sauce can’t fix. Trust me, you can’t even see the chicken at this point.”

  Her nose wrinkles. “I’m not even going to respond to that.”

  “Disgusting, I know.”

  She rolls her eyes, and then, without waiting for me to do the whole welcome to my humble abode bit, shoulders past me and enters the condo I purchased six months ago. I’m not surprised that she knows where I moved to, considering that I know that she opted for a modern apartment overlooking the Charles River after she sold our historic Cambridge triple-decker.

  The money from the sale spontaneously appeared in my bank account a few weeks after we finalized our divorce. Along with a short email that got straight to the point: “I know the lawyers gave me the house, but it’s not right for me to keep the money from it. You purchased it. Not me. We’ll call it even.”

  Even.

  I almost snort.

  Holly and I aren’t even close to being even. Not in this lifetime.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know that?” Her flats squeak against the marble flooring as she whirls around to face me, hands balled into fists at her sides. “So much goddamned nerve.”

  I jut my chin in the direction of my abandoned dinner. “I promise the chicken isn’t protesting the smothering. It was a unanimous decision—mutually beneficial to us both.”

  Her jaw visibly tightens. “You have no idea how tempted I am to—”

  “Eat with me? There’s a lone chicken breast on the stove, begging to be dressed with ketchup, just the way you like it.” I’m fucking with her, riling her up in the way that I know throws her off course.

  She doesn’t disappoint.

  Cheeks flushing, Holly drags in a deep breath. Smooths her perfectly blown-out hair behind her ears. Sets her hands on her hips and squares off against me like some sort of Texan daredevil from the old Western days, pistol strapped to her thigh and a corset cinched around her waist.

  “You knew that I’d find out and you meddled anyway.”

  Guess we’re doing this.

  I spin on my heel and head for the kitchen. If you were to Google “open floor plan,” my condo would fit the bill. Exposed brick walls. Not a single doorway in sight when you first enter. The living room and kitchen make up some eight-hundred square feet. The floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side of the room allow for natural light and offer a gorgeous view of the harbor.

  There’s no way I’ll ever give up living on the coast. Not even for the chance to return to good ol’ landlocked Zachsville once I retire—I’ve been gone from Texas almost longer than I lived there.

  Holly’s shoes echo off the marble as she trails me.

  “Jackson, can we not do the avoidance thing for once?”

  Pulling open the top cupboard, I palm a plate and glance over my shoulder to look at the woman who stole my heart within weeks of meeting her. “We’re gonna have this conversation like civilized people,” I mutter, not missing the way her blue eyes skirt down my body.

  I hate that I can’t read her worth a damn. Though the stiff expression she’s rocking is all I need to know that she’s shut herself off from me. What else did you expect? Y’all aren’t married anymore.

  Reflexively, my grip tightens on the plate.

  “I’m not in the mood for wine,” she tells me after a minute.

  “No wine.” I pick up the tongs and slide the chicken from pan to plate. “Baked chicken for one coming up.” I spoon mashed potatoes next to the chicken, then follow up with a helping of baked beans reheated straight from a can. Welcome to the Culinary House of Carter: Yelp Rated, 1.7-stars. Setting the plate onto the kitchen island next to mine, I move to the fridge and grab the ketchup while I’m at it.

  Never let it be said that I don’t have Holly’s best interests at heart.

  “Jackson—”

  I lift my brows at her as I settle on the stool again. “Want to talk? Eat some dinner and we’ll talk.”

  “I really—”

  I don’t even hesitate to cut her off with a lifted hand. Give Holly the chance, and she’ll talk my head off for the next ten hours straight. Only now I can’t invent creative ways to shut her up. Can’t swallow her words with a hot kiss that’ll make her legs quiver and her lids fall shut as she sinks into my frame. She doesn’t belong to you anymore. Yeah, as if I could ever forget.

  “I’m takin’ a guess—you didn’t eat lunch today?”

  She squirms at that, fingers plucking fruitlessly at her pretty pink dress. “I was busy.”

  “You’re always busy.” I gesture to the stool next to mine. “What do the Italians say again? Mangia?”

  Cringing at my horrid pronunciation, she mutters, “Something like that.”

  Holly’s short and the stool is tall, and I don’t bother to hide a grin when she tries to primly hop up—and subsequently bounces right off. The hem of her dress reveals a strip of smooth skin that I stare at a little too long. Flashing me an accusatory glance, she yanks on the fabric and hauls herself up for a second try. She succeeds, just barely, hands fluttering around her dress to hide the goods away from the likes of me.

  When her blue eyes find my face, I purposely cast my gaze down to her ass. “You’re the very picture of grace, Holls.”

  Nostrils flaring, she snags the knife off my plate and the fork from hers and proceeds to cut into the dry chicken. Sans ketchup. Bless her heart.

  She pops the bite into her mouth, not an inkling of dread underlining her expression. I steel my shoulders and bide my time by taking a pull from my water bottle. Count down the seconds in my head like a ticking time bomb until she realizes she made a grave error in ignoring the peace offering that came in the form of Heinz ketchup.

  One . . .

  Two . . .

  A gurgling sound rumbles in her throat as utensils clatter to the granite. Hands lifting to her collarbone, she coughs like she’s just inhaled her very first cigarette.

  “Holy cr—”

  She barely gets the words out before erupting into a coughing fit so volatile I’m surprised the windows don’t rattle.

  Because I’m a gentleman, I uncap my water bottle and silently hand it over. Then I make a point to s-l-o-w-l-y swirl my next piece of chicken through a puddle of BBQ sauce. Her color high, she eyes me like she’s seconds away from stealing my fork and stabbing me with the tines.

  I smile, just a little. “I promise that it wasn’t my plan to avoid talking about Getting Pucked by killin’ you.”

  Droplets of water glisten on her lips when she gulps down another fistful of water. “You can be such a jerk,” she mutters.

  At one point in time, she thought my jokes and dry humor were hilarious. We clearly aren’t those same people anymore, and so
I shake off the ashes of our failed marriage from my heart and hunker down to business.

  It’s what she came here for, after all.

  Propping an elbow on the kitchen island, I angle my body to face her completely. “You’re really that pissed off that I did you a solid?”

  “Did me a solid?” She shoves the plate away and spins her stool so that we’re eye-to-eye. Or, as much as we can ever be eye-to-eye, considering I dwarf her by a foot and some change. Shaking her head, she snorts out her disbelief. “You didn’t do me a solid, Jackson. You practically blackmailed Sports 24/7 into hiring me!”

  “I wouldn’t use the word ‘blackmail.’”

  Her blond brows arch high. “No? What word would you use then? Browbeat?”

  I lean my weight into the hand on my thigh so that we are, in fact, eye-to-eye. Her nose is inches from mine when I counter, “Negotiate works.”

  This close, I can see that her pupils are dilated. Anger, not lust. Her cheeks are tinged the same hue as her pink dress.

  “Negotiate implies that you gave them a choice in the matter. But you didn’t give them that choice—either they hired me or you walked out.”

  If I’d known Holly would freak out over this, I would have kept my damn mouth shut. And this is why you can’t be friends with your exes. Nothing good ever comes of it.

  I move my hand from my thigh to my knee. Edge a smidge closer to her because I’ve never been one to avoid using my size to press my case. “They could have let me walk. They could have opted for another team, but they didn’t. Sports 24/7 wants me—”

  “God, your ego knows no bounds, does it?”

  “—and to have me, they had to have you, too.”

  4

  Holly

  Jackson is a stubborn son of a gun.

  This is the same man who, seven years back, brought the Boston Bruins to a Stanley Cup victory on a broken patella (not the same thing as paella, the delicious Spanish seafood dish). It was game seven, down to the last period, and he clinched the win with the dirtiest slapshot in NHL history that’s still shown on highlight reels years later.

  He played through the pain, never revealing the magnitude of his agony until the final buzzer sounded and he was ensconced safely in the locker room.

  Full disclosure, that damn knee cap was threatening to pull a peep show out of his skin. A sight that had me seeing triple when I fought my way to his side and took one look at him, hockey pants stripped off his muscular form and perspiration dotting his temple. He took my hand and comforted me when my legs turned into cooked spaghetti. Me, as though I was the one with a broken paella. Patella. Whatever.

  Every sports journalist loved him that spring. They nicknamed him the Badass of Hockey. The Beast of the Northeast. The one man who’d put the victory of his team above his own health.

  It’s not in his DNA to give up or step down when confronted with adversity.

  Except with us.

  I shove the errant thought away like a fly zipping annoyingly around my head.

  Fix my attention on the face that’s as familiar to me as my own. My fingers clench together in my lap. “It was a pity negotiation and you know it. But I don’t need your help. I’m good on my own. I’m succeeding on my own.” At the vehemence in my tone, his dark eyes turn flinty and unapproachable. “I don’t want your handouts, Jackson, you know that.”

  When he says nothing at all, my stupid mouth gets the best of me—as it always does—and I seek to fill the silence. “I spent so many years living on your income, on the perks of you playing for the NHL, and I was so, so clear that I didn’t want that to continue. I’m not trying to be ungrateful, or sound like a spoiled brat, but I need to stand on my own. Can’t you see that? I need to know that my success comes from my own drive and ambition, and not because of what connections you’ve made in your career.”

  Those connections may have helped me in the very beginning, but I’ve come so far since then. I would never interfere with his relationship with the Blades. Is it so wrong to expect that level of respect in return?

  Jackson lifts a hand to his face, thumb scrubbing along his lower lip.

  He’s not trying to hold back a smile right now. His expression is grave. The smile lines at the corners of his eyes almost smooth—or as smooth as they’ll ever be. Then he speaks, his voice such a low timbre that I nearly tip forward in my need to hear what he has to say.

  “You ever think that maybe me blackmailing Sports 24/7 has nothing to do with pity and everything to do with needing you on the other side of that camera?”

  My heart gives a wild, traitorous thump. Stupid, stupid organ. “I . . . Jackson, I don’t even know what to—”

  “Say?” He shakes his head, his dark hair flopping forward over his forehead. Long, blunt-tipped fingers roughly shove the thick strands back into place. “I won’t lie—I knew this gig would be good for the business. You’re big in New England, Holls, but this would do some serious legwork for your reach across the country.”

  I can sense the but coming along, and it’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him to hurry it up already. Patience, girl, have some damn patience. Unsurprisingly, patience has never been a virtue of mine.

  “But, and I’m sorry to disappoint, I didn’t throw down for you in Coach’s office because Getting Pucked would open doors for Carter Photography—not completely.” Dark eyes lift to my face, unwavering in their intensity. “I did it for me.”

  His words aren’t registering, not over the loud ringing in my ears. I swallow hard, then press my tongue against the back of my teeth as I wrack my brain for something to say—something that isn’t, “Come again?”

  In the end, my response isn’t all that much better than the one voiced in my head. Nor does it sound any less incredulous. “How in the world would me being the one behind the camera help you?”

  He shifts his large frame off the stool, and I know he’s about to pace. A troubled Jackson is a pacing Jackson. I watch as he fists his hands behind his head, then I struggle to avert my gaze when the cotton clinging to the hard muscles of his torso lifts with his upraised arms.

  My life would be so much easier if Jackson weren’t at the top of his game and probably bench-pressing weights that are double my size—he looks way too good for my peace of mind.

  Jaw ticking with an unnamed emotion, Jackson grinds out, “I need someone to run interference with what gets filmed. The network required everyone’s signature on a contract or the entire production was a bust. No matter how much I’d like to give Sports 24/7 the middle finger, the Blades need Getting Pucked. A show like this can lead to all sorts of sponsorships—a spotlight on our charities, cash in the bank for the team. I’d be an asshole to strip my guys of the opportunity because I want nothing to do with this shit.”

  Steven Fairfax’s mention about the Blades overhauling the roster flits through my head, and I can’t help but ask . . . “Are you retiring?”

  “What?”

  “Retiring,” I repeat, lowering myself off the stool so I can step near him. “Are you planning to retire after this season?”

  “Fuck no.” He narrows his eyes, brows knitting together. His raised arms fall back to his sides when he demands, “Why the hell would you even ask that?”

  “It was something the show’s producer, Steven Fairfax, said to me today—about why Sports 24/7 wants the Blades on Getting Pucked’s first season.” Needing to do something with my hands, I lock them over my chest and rock back on my heels. “They think Harrison is retiring this year, along with Weston Cain . . . and you.”

  Muscles balled tight under his T-shirt, Jackson prowls through the kitchen without sparing me a glance. “See?” he growls, and I’m not even sure he’s speaking to me at this point. “This is the shit I’m talking about. They’re vultures—analysts, journalists, Hollywood. All of them. Imagine if they saw one of the guys at the hospital or something, they’d already be marking me—any of us—as good-as-fucking-gone.”

  Sna
gging the plates off the kitchen island, he moves swiftly, aggressively, toward a trash can near the fridge and drops the dry chicken into the garbage. He sets the plates in the sink, then locks his hands on the lip of the counter, his back to me.

  Shoulders hunched.

  His sweatpants hanging low on his hips to reveal a quarter-inch of skin between his T-shirt and his waistband. That quarter-inch is tan, taut, and so incredibly tempting.

  Nope, nope. Not happening!

  Especially since my heart is warring a battle of its own: keep the space between us or rush forward and offer comfort with my arms linked around his waist and a kiss pressed to his back. Decisions, decisions, and only one is acceptable given the circumstances of our non-existent relationship.

  Retreat now.

  I take a tentative step back.

  “It’s the media, Jackson,” I say, voice huskier than it has any right to be. I clear my throat. “They’re going to say what they want to say, regardless of whether or not you participate in a reality show.”

  He leans his weight back on his heels, hands still locked on the edge of the counter. The T-shirt rides higher on his back, exposing twin dimples at the base of his spine.

  Seriously? My gaze flits to the ceiling, then returns. A peek won’t hurt, right? Not when he isn’t even looking at me? For memory’s sake, of course. Nothing more.

  “Trust me,” Jackson mutters, “I know what they’re going to say after watching this season.” He glances at me over his shoulder, his dark eyes pinning me in place. “I’m not retiring, Holls. Not yet, not until I’m ready.”

  “Then you’re all set. If you’re not planning to retire, then what secrets of yours am I keeping from the public? None. You can do this on your own. You’re a big boy, Jackson.”

  Hands falling from the counter, he faces me completely. Thick, muscular legs spread to balance his weight. Strong chest stretching the fabric of his T-shirt. That elusive strip of bare skin now gone since he’s standing upright.