The sound jabbed him right in the eardrum and he winced.
His life was so fucked right now that he couldn’t even manage to be alone so he could contemplate the dark pit of his existence while nursing a scotch and his misery. Instead, he was trapped here—with the woman who’d turned his life into a hellscape.
Things couldn’t possibly get any worse.
Chapter Two
Three Weeks Earlier…
Two floors below the frozen surface where the Ice Knights battled for victory eight months out of the year, Shelby stood alone in the hallway halfway between the locker room and the coach’s office, trying not to hyperventilate or throw up on the scuffed pumps she’d pulled from the back of her messy closet.
Her palms hadn’t been this damp since she’d checked into rehab six years ago, and it hadn’t been nerves that morning—it had been because she was still sweating out the vodka from one last monumental bender. This morning, her sobriety chip slipped easily through her fingers as she moved it like a magician doing a coin trick, sliding it from between one finger to the other as she stared at the closed door. Her future, the one she’d been working toward since she’d gotten clean, was on the other side of the unassuming gray door with the push-up bar running its width and a silver placard reading Media Room next to it.
A good part of her wanted to turn tail and run. Not to the nearest bar but to her laptop and the hockey-loving world she’d created there. The Biscuit wasn’t just an Ice Knights fan blog that had grown into the most popular hockey site in Harbor City, it was her outlet. Some people went with exercise, some started vaping, some spent all their time trying to regain everything they’d lost to the bottle. Shelby had turned to hockey, the Harbor City Ice Knights in particular. And now she was graduating to the majors, a job with the team she loved, producing web content and independent analysis as part of the team’s new social media platform that would be home to everything from podcasts to The Biscuit.
No more hustling for side gigs delivering food, making lattes, or temping in an office to pay the rent. This was everything she wanted, and she hadn’t relied on old family connections to get it—even if one of her former stepdads owned the team. Well, not that she could just call him up. It wasn’t like they’d even talked after the divorce more than ten years ago.
Now all she had to do was walk through that door.
She straightened her shoulders, let out the breath she’d been holding, and—didn’t move a single, measly inch.
Girl. Get it together. Do not fuck this up.
She put her red chip with the Roman numerals for six in the inside pocket of her purse, zipping it closed with focused deliberation. Procrastinate? Her? Oh my God, yes. So when her cell buzzed and her mom’s photo appeared on the screen, she didn’t hesitate to answer.
“Hey, Mom,” she said, ducking into the bathroom across the hall from the media room.
“You will never guess what Tina just told me,” her mom said, her loud voice making it seem as if Shelby had her on speakerphone.
Knowing this was about to be an excruciatingly detailed peek into life in the Huckleberry Hills subdivision, Shelby did a quick scan to make sure all the stalls were unoccupied so no one else would be subject to the boring antics of one of Harbor City’s most distant suburbs. Every lock on the floor-to-ceiling doors was turned to green for unoccupied.
“What did Tina tell you?” Shelby asked, not so much curious to know the answer as deeply grateful for the excuse to delay walking into the team media room.
Tina was her mom’s neighborhood walking buddy. They were out together at six in the morning power walking and gossiping about everything from who put up their Christmas decorations extra early to who had the same strange car parked in his driveway three times a week as soon as his wife left for work. Both lived for the latest gossip.
“So you know how Tina has an older sister? Well, I never realized it before, but her sister’s son, Tina’s nephew,” her mom added for unnecessary clarification, “plays hockey.”
“Isn’t that something.” Since Shelby had started The Biscuit, her mom had been sure to share every tangentially related hockey connection she came across. “Does he play minors?”
“He plays for the Ice Knights. His name is Adam Christmas or Andy Crawford or—”
“Alex Christensen?” The forward was one of the best players on the team and an integral part of their efforts to lock in their first-place spot in the playoffs.
“That’s it.” Her mom let out a little crow of triumph. “But that’s not the big news.”
No doubt this was going to be about whomever Alex was currently dating—or more correctly, several of the whomevers Alex was dating.
“His dad is David Petrov, so that means—“
Yep. Mom and Tina definitely stopped at Tina’s for Bellinis after their walk. “No, Mom, Ian Petrov’s dad is David Petrov.” The man was a hockey Hall of Famer who’d once scored eight goals in one game. He was a legend on the ice and the players who came after him still whispered his name as if the man really was a hockey god. “Ian plays on the Ice Knights, too.”
“I know—that’s what makes it so amazing.” Her mom’s exhausted, you-never-listen sigh took Shelby right back to being thirteen again. “Alex and Ian are brothers—well, half brothers, I guess—and now they get to play together on the same team. How sweet is that? You really should do a post about this. Very heartwarming.”
“That can’t be right.” Surely someone on the team would have let it slip if it were. The two were basically inseparable on and off the ice.
