CHECK MY HEART
by
Christi Barth
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
CHECK MY HEART
First edition. July 17, 2017.
Copyright © 2017 Christi Barth.
ISBN: 978-1386524960
Written by Christi Barth.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
CHECK MY HEART is dedicated to Eliza Knight and Lea Nolan, who shared a crazy night with me at Mardi Gras World – and were brave enough to eat alligator balls!
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Naked Men Series
CHECK MY HEART is dedicated to Eliza Knight and Lea Nolan, who shared a crazy night with me at Mardi Gras World – and were brave enough to eat alligator balls!
Ten Months Ago
Kurt Lundquist paused in the doorway of the hospital room. It always took a minute to steel himself before going in to visit Jasper. As the big brother, it was his job to be brave and cheerful and bring the dirty jokes, stupid comics and violent video games to the sad fourteen-year-old. Bringing stuff was no problem. His contract with the Cajun Rage hockey team brought him buckets of cash. All of it worthless, as far as he was concerned, because it couldn’t buy a cure for Jasper.
Bringing a good attitude? That was about as easy as checking one of those twats from the New York Spartans and skating away without blood all over your jersey. Because Kurt stood a solid six—four, bench-pressed four hundred and twenty pounds, could sprint the length of the ice without raising his heart rate—but he couldn’t fight that fucker cancer.
A gurney coming straight at him sent Kurt ducking into the room before he was ready. Shit. He might be as tough as they come, but he felt the wetness in the corners of his eyes. Hopefully Jasper wouldn’t notice.
Hell, the kid didn’t even look up. His bald head was bent over the tray table, crumpled-up paper scattered across the covers. “What’d you bring me, bro?”
“How’d you know it was me? Your Spidey sense?” Kurt teased. He swiped the back of his hand across his eyes.
“Dude, I’m over Spider-Man. I told you that sticky mucus coming out of his palms is just gross. I like Thor now.”
“Why? You like his girlie cape?”
Still scribbling, Jasper said, “He’s invincible to Earth stuff. I figure he can’t catch any of our diseases. That’s a cool superpower.”
Jesus, the kid broke his heart. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
“So, what’d you bring me? Candy? Chili cheese fries? Swedish meatballs?”
“No. You know you’d just puke all that stuff up in about seven seconds. I brought you something better.” Kurt dug in the plastic bag from the Halloween store and pulled out a wig. It was the same brown as the Lundquist brothers’ hair, but a long, pirate version with a couple of dreads and some beads braided into a front piece.
Jasper finally looked up. Surprise flashed across his too-thin, too-pale face, followed by the same delight he wore every Christmas morning. “That’s badass.” He tried to put it on, but his IV tubing got tangled in the long hair. Kurt gently centered it on his head. Then he tweaked his little brother’s nose, just like everything was normal.
It wasn’t.
It hadn’t been since Jasper broke his leg playing hockey last season and the doctors discovered the bone was riddled with cancer. Two surgeries, one amputation, three rounds of chemo later and the only thing left was to try to make him smile as much as possible before time ran out.
“Did you meet your new nurse today? The one who’ll help you out when you go home?” That was easier to say than to call her a hospice nurse. Someone who’d ease him through to the end.
“Yeah. She’s hot.”
Kurt barked out a laugh. “I’m guessing she’s about a decade too old for you.”
“You’re old, and I still have fun with you.”
“Thanks, squirt.” The kid was right back at it, paper to pen. “Hey, I can’t stay too long. Practice starts in an hour. How about you talk to me? What are you working on so hard?”
“My bucket list.”
“Your what?”
“Oh, right. I mean, your bucket list. For the Cup.”
None of that made sense. “Jasper, what’s this all about? I’m not dying. Not for a very long time.”
“No, but I am.”
The cold fist of reality slammed into Kurt’s gut. “Who told you that?” Because there’d been a family powwow with the doctors, and the majority decision had been to keep that news from his brother. They all thought Jasper was too fragile to handle it. Kurt didn’t agree. The kid was strong enough to handle anything. But he’d never go against their wishes.
“I figured it out. I’m going home. Nobody will say when the next round of chemo starts. Nobody says I’m in remission. That hot nurse, Lisette, is for my hospice care.”
“Jasper—”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Not now. I can’t control that I’m dying, but I can control what happens after I do. I want you to win the Cup.”
Kurt fisted his hands below the bed rail, where Jasper wouldn’t see. “You know it’s not up to me. The whole team would have to win it, after taking down essentially thirty-two other teams. Hockey doesn’t give you the Cup because you ask nicely. You have to earn it through sweat and blood and killer moves on the ice.”
“The Rajuns made it to the conference finals last season. That makes this next season the one where you win it all. For me.”
Throat thick with all the emotion he wouldn’t let out, Kurt said, “Jasper, I swear I’ll try my hardest. There are no guarantees in hockey, though.”
“You’ll do it, bro. I know you will. And when you do, you’ll get your day with the Cup.” He pulled on the beaded piece of hair. “Bet you’ll score a ton of chicks with the Cup.”
“I do all right as is, Jasper.”
“Okay, then, I’d finally score. I’m desperate. I couldn’t get to first base with Lisa, two doors down. And she’s bald from chemo. I mean, I rock the bald look, but chicks? Not so much.” For a minute, he sounded like a normal, opinionated teenager. Then he must’ve walked back through what he said, because he frowned. “I mean, if I was still around, I’d use it to score with chicks. But I won’t be. So I’m making a list, a bucket list, of everything I want you to do with it.”
He’d hold it together. For now. Then skate hard enough in practice to make his legs ache and his lungs burn. And then, he’d go home and drink from the same bottle of single malt Scotch he’d cracked open the night they got Jasper’s diagnosis.
“What’ve you got so far?”
Jasper tossed a crumpled paper over his shoulder, hitting the IV bag. “Stupid stuff. Eat Trix out of it.”
“Only the best cereal in the world. That’s not stupid.”
Jasper pawed through the slips of paper. “Take it to my high school. Let my whole hockey team take a picture with it.”
“You want me to let your stinky-ass friends get their fingerprints all over my shining, silver Cup?”
“Yeah. I do.” Jasper’s light blue eyes, identical to his own, stared him down.
“What else? Take it to the beach in Biloxi and use it as an ice bucket?”
“It’d be cool if you could take it to the college I want to—wanted to go to.”
Kurt ignored the slip of the tongue. “You got one picked out already? Someplace with a killer hockey program?”
“No.”
“Let’s start there.” He moved the list aside—pretty fucking much the saddest piece of paper he’d ever touched—and started a new one. “The University of Wisconsin’s great. They’ve got a couple of nice lakes to hang out on.”
“Their mascot’s a badger. I wanna be something more fierce. Like the Cajun Rage’s angry crawfish.”
“I’ve heard of choosing a school for partying, or for pretty girls, but never by the mascot.” He lifted the heavy history textbooks the kid actually read for fun from the nightstand. Grabbed the tablet beneath and opened the browser. “I think UC Santa Cruz has a banana slug. Is that gross enough for you?”
Jasper dissolved into giggles. There. He’d done his job for the day. Made the kid laugh and forget—if only for a second—that they were planning for a future he wouldn’t get to have.
And Kurt didn’t want to think about what kind of a future he’d have without Jasper in it.
Chapter One
Present Day
Kurt wanted to stick his head in a swimming pool and just start swallowing. It’d maybe make a dent in his thirst. He’d done his usual session on the ice for two hours, then put in a solid hour in the weight room. The weight room with the broken air conditioning. In August. In New Orleans. But what kind of a pussy would he be to skip a workout on account of a little extra sweat?
Still, he’d ripped his shirt off halfway through the doorway to catch the breeze. Because of course the AC worked in the hallway. Where basically nobody needed it. Or maybe he was just in a shitty mood.
That happened a lot. Nah, to be fair, it was pretty much a constant state ever since Jasper’s death. He tried to hide it around his teammates now. They didn’t need him pulling them down. Not on a regular day, and sure as hell not during the playoffs and now that they’d won the whole damn thing and had the massive Cup sitting in their front office.
But on the inside? Kurt felt like a snarly dragon, curled up but waiting to spew fire at the next person who walked by.
“Uh, Kurt? You got a minute?”
Aw, hell. Talk about a way to get smoke puffing from his inner dragon. And man, he needed to stop obsessively reading Jasper’s comic books. No professional hockey player should have an inner dragon, for fuck’s sake.
Kurt looked at the guy with the too-big glasses and shapeless sport coat hanging off his too-skinny frame. Central Casting would hire Edwin Motz in a heartbeat to play a tech geek in a movie. And he used to be. The socially awkward, stat-spilling Keeper of the Cup had made a metric shit-ton of money in Internet start-ups before getting bored and retiring at basically Kurt’s thirty-two years.
He waved his shirt in the air. Got a perverse pleasure in watching the guy wrinkle his nose as the stink from it wafted by. “I’m half naked here, Ed. Can it wait?”
“It’s, um, about your day with the Cup.”
No kidding. Ed sent emails pretty much every hour trying to pin down when and where his precious Cup would be going with each player. “Didn’t we settle that? I told you I’m throwing a party at Mardi Gras World. Don’t worry, it’s not going on a plane. Or down the side of a mountain. No need to up the insurance rider.”
“I was hoping for more specifics. An itinerary, to be precise.”
“There isn’t one. There’s an unformed plan for a big-ass party. I have people calling me all the time about it. DJs and caterers and tarot-card readers. I can’t keep any of them straight. It’s a giant pain in my ass.”
“Sorry. But I will need details for the Cup.”
Ed treated this thing better than rich women did their stupid, yappy purse dogs. “Because the Cup needs to pencil in a massage? The thing’s mine for the day. Every person on the team’s got the same deal. Twenty-four hours straight of doing whatever I want with it, wherever I want. That’s all you need to know.”
“But—”
Jesus H., Ed was working on his last nerve with a buzz saw. “You want an itinerary? Take a single sheet of paper. Write in really big letters Kurt Lundquist’s Party. There. Done.” He turned, fast, to get away from the annoying Ed. The annoying Ed who was only doing his job and didn’t deserve to get his head taken off by Kurt.
Fuck.
And then Kurt finished his half spin right into a person. Well, breasts. He definitely noticed the breasts right off the bat. Along with the faint scent of something fresh, like grapefruits and flowers mixed together, from the cloud of dark hair that tumbled across his skin.
Instinctively, he grabbed at her shoulders to keep her upright. That pressed the soft curves against him even more. Bare, silky arms slid beneath his palms. Then their eyes connected. When he realized who belonged to the maple-sugar eyes, Kurt felt an almost discernible click of recognition. “Lisette?”
“Hi,” she said a little breathlessly. Her voice was low and sexy, like what you’d hear across the sheets at four a.m. after a couple of rounds of balls-to-the-wall sex. Lisette’s voice alone had brought him to half wood more than once. And that was without factoring in her pouty red lips that fucking begged to be tasted. Or the breasts he was pretty damn sure would fit perfectly in his hands.
Kurt figured it was time to let go of her before she noticed his ever-harder interest against her hip. As his hands skidded off her elbows, he said, “Christ, I’m getting you all sweaty.”
“Not yet. Maybe after dinner and a couple of hurricanes, though...” She laughed. But combined with the sideways shake of her head, the line came off as a little self-deprecating. Weird. With her looks, Kurt had no doubt she could crook her finger and have any man snap to attention.
God knew he sure had every damn time Lisette simply walked into a room.
Not that it’d ever mattered.
With a nod, he said, “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too.” Raising her hand, she almost touched his chest, then just hovered close enough that the heat coming off her palm steamed against his skin. “Quite a bit more of you than I’ve seen before. Not that I’m complaining.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Not a damn bit, actually. Not with the way her eyes were sealed to his chest tighter than lips sucking on a crawfish head. Still, Kurt yanked his tee on over his head. Technically, they were in a workplace. Yeah, it was the hallway between the gym and the locker room where he had every right to stumble around in little more than sweat. But as a visitor to the Cajun Rage facility, Lisette deserved a certain amount of respect. “I just finished a workout.”
“But it’s the off-season, isn’t it? I thought now that you had the Cup in hand, you’d be spending your days binge-watching TV, eating ice cream sandwiches.”
Almost a year later, she still remembered his soft spot—aka addiction—to ice cream sandwiches. It felt weirdly good to know he’d drilled his way into her memories. “We don’t get to keep the Cup. It’s gotta be earned every year. Sure, I take a couple of weeks to veg, but never entirely stop training. And as soon as I got back, I hit it hard.”
Mostly because that was the life he knew, the life he’d chosen. A little because he couldn’t decide what he’d rather do. Some because he hoped if he trained hard enough, wore himself out, he’d finally sleep the night through. Something Kurt hadn’t managed in ten months and four days.
“Where did you go?”
Kurt’s attention broke out of his pathetic navel-gazing and back to the hot brunette. “For what?”
“On vacation. You know, the whole iconic Kurt Lundquist, you’ve just won the Cup—what are you going to do now?”
“Uh, Moab.”
Her tiny, adorable nose crinkled. Which was even more adorable. “In Utah? In the summer?”
“Yeah.” Kurt hadn’t been ready to be comfortable. He couldn’t reconcile getting drunk in Cancun banging beach bunnies with finally having the time to grieve the loss of his brother. So he’d pushed himself to the physical extreme. “I hiked around the desert. Checked out the canyons.”
“Isn’t that how the guy in that
movie ended up getting stuck and cutting off his own hand?”
Kurt shook both of his out, then grabbed hers and squeezed. “Still attached.”
“Good.”
Then they just looked at each other. Like they were in some stupid chick flick. Kurt knew why he was doing it. He wanted to drink her in. The last time he saw Lisette, well, he figured it’d be the last time. And they hadn’t even said goodbye. They’d been too busy saying a final goodbye to Jasper, over his gravesite.
Seeing her now, with a smile on her beautiful face, was a present he’d never expected. Would he take advantage of it? Hell, yeah. He’d stare as long and as hard as he could get away with. Which was saying a lot, since back on the playground, Kurt had been the champion at staring contests for all of elementary school.
But why was she staring right back at him? They’d never flirted before. There were so many don’t touch and she’s forbidden alarms going off in his head that Kurt couldn’t completely tell if she really was flirting now. If it’d been anyone but Lisette, he’d have said she definitely was. And he’d have locked in a date and restocked his condom supply as fast as possible.
Her tongue flicked out to lick those full lips. “I guess I should say congratulations.”
“For what?”
Lisette tilted her head to the side. The motion sent the tips of her hair cascading over one breast. Her silky white top just made it all that much easier to notice the way the dark ends curled around the nicely sized mound, exactly like Kurt wanted to with his hand. “For winning the championship, silly.”
“Nah. I didn’t do it by myself.” He shook off the praise automatically as he finally released her hands. It was his stock answer, provided by their PR department and well-practiced at this point. “There are nineteen other guys on the team who skated their butts off alongside me.”
“I know.” Color rose in her cheeks, like they’d been brushed with cotton candy. “I watched.”
“The playoffs? You did?” Talk about a surprise. At this time last year, Lisette hadn’t known the difference between the center line and the goal line. Made it crystal clear a time or too that she hadn’t cared, either. Which was fine. Hockey wasn’t everyone’s thing. But it meant her revelation caught Kurt off guard.
Check My Heart Page 1
