Face-Off

He didn’t want to answer questions.

He didn’t want to pretend everything was okay.

He didn’t want to find himself stalked by cameras as he tried to go about his business.

Damn it, and damn Greg for knowing him so well. He wanted to go home.

He called his assistant to book him a flight to Vancouver and then he called Greg.

“I’ll be there Monday. Where do you practice and what time?”

2

“COME ON, IT’LL BE FUN,” Tamson insisted as Sierra Janssen hesitated on the brink of the ice rink.

“Fun for you, watching me fall on my butt in the cold. It’s seven in the morning on a Saturday, my day off. I should be sleeping in.”

“None of us are great skaters. Who cares? We get some exercise, laugh a lot and it turns out that there’s a team of firefighters and cops practicing in the next rink. Being here is much better than sitting around feeling sorry for yourself.”

But Sierra wasn’t sure that sitting around feeling sorry for herself wouldn’t, in fact, be more fun than attempting to play hockey when she hadn’t skated in years. It was cold in here and smelled like old sweat socks. Colorful pennants hung from the impossibly high rafters boasting of wins and league championships. She’d passed a glass case of trophies telling similar stories. For some reason the word league only reminded her of Michael, who had been so far out of her league she’d never had a chance. What had a successful, handsome brain surgeon wanted with a grade-two schoolteacher who, on her best days, could only be termed cute. A good day at work for Michael was bringing someone out of a coma, cutting tumors out of brains. Her idea of success was getting seven-year-olds to put up their hands before asking a question.

No wonder he’d left her for an intern. In her bitter moments she thought it would have been nice if he’d had the courtesy to dump her first and not leave her to find out he was cheating in the most humiliating way. He’d sent her the hottest email. A sexual scorcher that left her eyes bugged open, it was so unlike him. He’d even used a pet name he’d never called her before. It wasn’t until she’d read the email through a second time that she realized Jamie wasn’t a pet name. It was the actual name of another woman. Who was clearly a lot wilder in bed than she would ever be.

The woman was training to be a doctor, scorching-hot in bed, a much better match for Michael.

She gritted her teeth. Okay, so her heart was broken. Tamson was right. She had to get out and embrace life, not sit around watching it happen to other people.

She’d loved skating when she was a kid. This would be fine. A fun league for women, no stress, she’d pick up her skating skills. Learn to play hockey. She’d played field hockey in high school and she’d been pretty darn good. What could be better?

She stepped a skate gingerly onto the ice. Hung on to the boards, stepped the other skate down.

Had the ice been this slippery when she was a child? Her ankles wobbled alarmingly in her rented skates and the padding she’d borrowed from her brother made her feel like the Michelin Man. On skates.

When she wobbled her way down the ice, holding her brother’s old hockey stick, since he wouldn’t trust her with his good one, joining the other women who were warming up, she realized that even here, in this fun hockey team for women, she was outclassed.

She was the only one who had to look at her skates to stay on the ice. And what she saw was that her legs were wide apart and she couldn’t help but hold her arms out wide to stop herself from falling.

Somebody blew a whistle. “Okay, girls. Gather round.”

JARRAD STOOD AT THE EDGE of the ice and realized his old buddy hadn’t lied about the team. These guys were all over the place. Sure, some of them could skate, and the men were all fit, but there was no sense of teamwork, no idea how to sense where the puck was headed and what to do about it.

Not for the first time, he wondered what he was even doing here.

He was observing, he reminded himself, only observing. And what he observed didn’t fill him with confidence in the team. He hadn’t agreed to coach yet, maybe he’d take a pass.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said to a grizzled old Norwegian who answered to Sig and was the closest thing to a coach the team currently had.

Sig nodded. “They’re good guys, you know?”

“Sure. Probably great cops and firefighters, too.” But any fool with functioning eyesight could see that getting this ragged bunch of men into shape as a team was going to take time, not to mention hard work and coaching skills Jarrad doubted he possessed. He wasn’t sure there was enough time before the big league play-offs to get them into shape.

He stuffed his hands in his jeans and wandered. He’d spent so much of his life inside hockey rinks that he probably felt more comfortable in one than anywhere else on earth. He loved everything about the rink. The way it smelled like the inside of a fridge, the sound of skate blades scraping across ice, putting the first groove into the perfect surface right after the Zamboni finished. The guys. The team.

But there weren’t skates on his feet now. And it wasn’t him on the ice.

His sneakers were soundless as he headed down the hallway. At the next rink over he stopped to peer through the glass doors, and what he saw made him smile, genuinely smile, for the first time in months.

Without thinking, he opened the door and slipped inside.

On the ice was a group of women, ranging, he guessed from their twenties to their forties, all clad in mismatched hockey gear and helmets. This group made his firefighters seem like the hottest team in the NHL.

“You’ve got a breakaway. Sierra. Go!”

And he watched as a puck made its lazy way up the ice, at about the speed of a curling rock, and a slim young woman skated straight over to the boards and started up the rink.

She had to guess the direction of the puck, since she never took her eyes off her skates.

He moved closer. Put a foot up on a bench to watch. The breakaway got way past the cutie near the boards, and the goalie managed to stop it.

A whistle blew.

“Okay. Great work, ladies. See you all on Thursday.”

And they all headed off the rink.

Except the woman with the breakaway. None of the other women had noticed she was now clinging to the boards like a burr to a dog. He got the feeling she was scared.

He gave her a minute and when she still hadn’t budged, he stepped onto the ice.

Walked over to her.

“Hi,” he said. “You need a hand?”

When her face turned up he felt a kind of shock travel through his system. He was so used to tanned bombshells that he’d forgotten how soft and pretty a woman could look. Beneath the helmet she had big blue eyes and pale skin. Blond hair that had picked up some static from the cold and was levitating in places.

“I don’t think hockey’s for me,” she said.

He took the stick out of her hand and shot it across the ice toward the exit gate.

“Then you should probably get off the ice.”

“I’m thinking about it.”

He held out his hands, palms up. “Come on. Take my hand. I’ll get you out of here.”

She looked up at him. “What if we both fall?”

“I won’t let you fall.”