for time.
“Sure you do. You can play, can’t you? So practice your coaching skills on us. We’re not paying you, so we can’t complain.”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty busy.”
“No, you’re not. You’re sitting around feeling sorry for yourself.”
He could argue the point, but Greg wouldn’t be fooled.
“I need to think about it.”
“Come home, do a good thing. Get your life back.”
“I can’t.”
“Think about it.”
“I’m heading out into traffic,” he lied. “Gotta go.” And he flipped shut the phone. Then he got slowly into the car, let the hum of the engine and the air-conditioning system—which constantly adjusted itself to his preferred temperature—soothe him.
As if he’d go home to his rain-soaked town and coach a bunch of amateurs. Home. He wasn’t sure if it was the images of Fred or the call from Greg, but suddenly he felt a twinge of homesickness. Which was weird. He used to go back a lot when his dad was alive, but Art McBride had died a couple of years back from a sudden heart attack. Shortly after that, his mom had moved to Vancouver Island. A nurse, she’d taken a demanding hospital position, which all the family understood was her way of dealing with the grief and loneliness.
Vancouver in February was cold, rainy and dreary, he reminded himself as the sun beat against his expensive shades and the engine purred obediently beneath him.
He headed out the coast road to his Malibu home. He’d grab a swim, call up a nice woman and go get some dinner. Enjoy the riches life had so generously given him. So he couldn’t play hockey anymore. Big deal. He’d figure out something to do with the time hanging heavy on his hands.
Sam, his younger sister by three years, was busy with her law practice. Even though she bugged him all the time to leave L.A. and move back home, she had a full life. It wasn’t as if she needed him.
And Taylor, the youngest McBride, was too busy trying to take the McBride spot in the NHL to have much time for his older, washed-up brother.
Be great to see them, though. Maybe he’d fly up for a quick weekend. See the family and a few old friends. Maybe when the weather was better.
But as his house came into view, he realized that his old buddy, Greg, wasn’t the only one who wondered how he was doing now that his ex-wife was engaged to a new victim.
Paparazzi clogged the gated entrance to his home like rats packing a sewer.
He swore under his breath. Didn’t stop to think. He swung the car around in a tight U and sped away from his own house cursing aloud.
A couple of miles down the road, he pulled over. Even in the perfectly controlled air-conditioning he was sweating. He knew from experience that for the few days he and his ex and her new guy were the love triangle du jour, he’d get no peace.
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
