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M arcus
Marcus was always more at home on the ice than at parties. On the ice, everything made sense—the flow of the game, defensive positioning, scoring chances. At parties, people moved unpredictably, conversations jumped around, and the unspoken social rules changed without warning.
He parked his Volvo hybrid (chosen for its safety ratings and understated design) on the street outside Kane's sprawling waterfront home. The captain's place had become the team's unofficial gathering spot—partly because of his natural leadership, partly because his girlfriend Allison treated the team like her own personal fan club.
Marcus checked his watch. Eight-fifteen. Fifteen minutes after the stated start time but still early enough that the gathering wouldn't be packed. The sweet spot for picking up information without getting trapped in too many conversations.
He grabbed the six-pack of craft beer from his passenger seat—a locker room tradition he'd learned to follow, though he'd stick to water. Alcohol messed with recovery, and they had a brutal stretch of games ahead.
As he approached the front door, he ran through defensive zone clearances in his head—a routine that settled his nerves before social situations. Four years with the Chill, and he still needed these mental prep drills.
Before he could knock, the door swung open. Kane stood there with his trademark crooked grin, dressed casually in jeans and a Chill hoodie.
"Spreadsheets arrives! Right on time." Kane clapped him on the shoulder. "Though I'm still not convinced you don't actually live in the practice facility."
"Not enough hot water pressure," Marcus replied. "And the beds are terrible."
Kane laughed, taking the beer. "There it is. Come on in, most of the guys are here. Stephanie is holding court by the fire pit."
Marcus followed Kane through the house, automatically clocking who was where. Kane’s wife Allison and Jax’s wife Lauren chatted in the corner, laughing over filled margarita glasses. Chenny and Mateo huddled in a corner, phones out, probably arguing about Instagram stats. Rookies clustered near the food like fourth-liners waiting for ice time. Coach Vicky hadn't shown yet—she usually made quick appearances at these things, just enough to show support without making the guys feel watched.
And then he spotted Stephanie on the back deck, talking with a few women he’d seen around after the games. She'd changed from her work clothes into dark jeans and a cream-colored sweater that softened her usual game-face look. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, catching the golden light from the fire pit.
Something tightened in Marcus's chest—a reaction he'd been getting more and more whenever Stephanie walked into a room.
"Beer?" Kane offered, breaking into his thoughts.
"Water's fine."
Kane nodded, unsurprised. "Kitchen's stocked. And Spreadsheets?" His captain's voice took on the serious tone reserved for third period pep talks. "We're counting on you tonight. When we talk about this ownership thing, the guys need straight facts, not corporate bullshit."
Marcus nodded, understanding the responsibility. "Got it all here," he tapped his temple. "The good, bad, and ugly."
"Good man." Kane moved away to greet newly arriving teammates.
In the kitchen, Marcus grabbed some water and took a moment to watch the gathering through the window. These people were more than teammates and colleagues—they'd become something he'd never expected when he'd been traded to New Haven four years ago: a tribe. Even with his numbers obsession and quiet nature, they'd made room for him, nicknamed him "Spreadsheets" with the same rough affection they gave all their brothers on the ice.
It had been unexpected. And weirdly important.
His phone buzzed with a text from his sister. Mum saw the news about the team. Everything okay?
Marcus typed quickly. Still figuring it out. Will call tomorrow.
Three dots appeared immediately. Don't overthink it. And please tell me you're actually at Kane's party and not breaking down game film alone in your apartment.
His sister Amara always cut straight to the point. And she knew his habits too well.
At the party. Will call tomorrow.
Proud of you, brother.
Marcus slipped his phone back into his pocket, hit with a sudden pang for Toronto, where he'd grown up. His father, a mathematics professor at the University of Toronto, had given him both the love of numbers and hockey—two passions that shouldn't fit together but somehow shaped everything he was.
"There you are."
He turned to find Stephanie in the doorway, two empty glasses in hand. The sight of her—relaxed, cheeks flushed from the heat of the fire pit—caught him off guard.
"Kane said you were hiding in here." She approached the counter, setting down the glasses. "Strategic retreat or scouting mission?"
"Grabbing water," he replied, holding up his bottle. "And getting my head straight."
She nodded, understanding in her eyes. "It's a lot to take in. The team's worried."
"Darby & Darby's last three teams saw major changes within a year."
"Always looking on the bright side." She reached past him for the wine bottle, her arm brushing his. The brief contact hit him like an unexpected hip check. "But this is why we need our alliance. Your brutal honesty, my damage control."
"Is that what you call it?"
A smile tugged at her lips as she poured wine into both glasses. "Among other things." She offered him one of the glasses. "Just this once, Spreadsheets. For team solidarity."
Marcus hesitated. He rarely drank during season, but sharing a drink meant something. He accepted the glass.
"To unlikely alliances," she said, raising her glass.
"To beating the odds," he countered, clinking his glass against hers.
Their eyes met over the rims, and for a moment, something shifted between them. She took a sip, her eyes never leaving his, and he noticed things he usually tried to ignore—the exact shade of amber in her eyes, the way her hair fell across her shoulder, the small scar near her left eyebrow he'd never spotted before.
His mind flashed back to their first major showdown eleven months ago in the media room after a tough loss to Pittsburgh. She'd torn into him for telling a reporter that the defensive coverage had "all the right positioning but guys just didn't execute." She'd been fierce, eyes flashing with that same amber fire they held now, but for entirely different reasons.
"Stephanie!" Dmitri's voice boomed from the doorway, breaking the moment. "Kane says team meeting in five minutes. We need PR wizard and numbers man both."
Stephanie broke eye contact, her professional mask sliding back into place. "We'll be right there."
As Dmitri left, she turned back to Marcus. "Ready to face the firing squad?"
"They're not the enemy."
"No," she agreed, her expression softening. "They're family. An annoying, overprotective, occasionally infuriating family."
The word hit home. Family. Not how Marcus typically thought about work relationships, but dead-on accurate in this case.
"Then let's not keep them waiting," he said.
As they moved toward the deck, Stephanie hesitated, then touched his arm briefly. The casual contact sent heat shooting through his sleeve.
"Just so we're clear on strategy—let me smooth out the edges of your analysis. These guys need hope along with facts."
In the past, he might have argued that false hope was worse than the truth. Instead, he nodded. "I can work with that."
Her smile was genuine this time. "We might actually make a good team."
That feeling in his chest came back, stronger this time. As they walked together toward the fire pit, Marcus remembered last month's charity event when he'd overheard Stephanie defending his approach to a skeptical board member: "Yes, he's intense about the numbers, but there's always hockey sense behind them. Marcus sees plays developing that nobody else catches." She'd never said anything like that to his face.
Maybe this alliance had been building longer than either of them realized.
***
S TEPHANIE
Stephanie had built her career on reading people. Body language, microexpressions, tone shifts—these were her analytics, her data points for navigating the chaos of professional sports. Yet Marcus consistently defied easy categorization.
Like now, as he sat across the fire pit, calmly explaining to the team what he knew about Darby & Darby's history. His posture was straight as a skate blade (as always), his delivery steady (as always), but something was different. He was making eye contact with individual players. Pausing to let information sink in. Even—most shocking of all—occasionally tossing to her for the "human element" context.
Behind them, music thumped through Kane's ridiculous sound system. In the kitchen, Liam and a couple rookies were doing vodka shots, howling after each one. Dmitri's booming laugh cut through everything as he arm-wrestled Ethan on the coffee table, a crowd of teammates cheering them on with beer bottles raised.
Somehow, the team meeting continued despite the party raging around them.
"Bottom line," Marcus concluded, setting aside his barely touched wine, "roster changes are likely, but not guaranteed. Their previous teams show a pattern of keeping core talent while replacing about 30% of support staff."
The team exchanged glances, digesting this. Jax crushed an empty beer can against his forehead and tossed it into an already overflowing recycling bin. His wife Lauren rolled her eyes.
"What Marcus means is that they'd be idiots to break up what's working.” Stephanie stepped in seamlessly. “You guys are having a great season. But some changes come with any ownership shift."
"What about coach?" Ethan asked, as Chenny poured tequila into his empty cup. The kid had fought hard to earn his spot under Coach Vicky's system.
Marcus looked to Stephanie, a silent handoff that surprised her with its smoothness.
"Coach Vicky has one of the best records in the league since taking over," she replied, raising her voice to be heard over Mateo's terrible karaoke attempt in the background. "Her position is locked through this season at minimum. Beyond that..."
"Beyond that, we play our asses off and make them look stupid if they even think about replacing her," Kane interjected, captain mode fully engaged despite the beer pong trophy sitting next to him from his earlier victory.
A chorus of "fuck yeah" and clinking bottles passed through the team.
"What about you two?" Chenny asked, looking between Marcus and Stephanie while petting his dog Charlie, who somehow remained calm despite the party chaos. "Word is Darby's big on analytics. Where does that leave PR?"
The question hung in the air. Stephanie felt twelve pairs of eyes shift to her, including Marcus's steady gaze. For a moment, her PR mask slipped. These weren't just players she managed or colleagues she sparred with. Over three seasons, they'd become her people—surrogate brothers who texted her at midnight when media crises erupted, who remembered her birthday with increasingly ridiculous gifts (including a life-size cardboard cutout of herself that still occasionally appeared in unexpected places around the facility), who trusted her to protect them from the worst of public scrutiny.
"PR isn't going anywhere," she said firmly, voice cutting through a nearby beer pong argument. "But the approach might change. Marcus and I are developing a strategy that keeps the human element while bringing in his number magic."
She glanced at Marcus, half-expecting him to contradict her optimistic spin. Instead, he nodded.
"Stephanie and I have established an alliance to ensure both sides are covered," he said, nearly getting drowned out as Dmitri cranked the music volume for his favorite song.
"Spreadsheets and Media Witch joining forces?" Dmitri yelled over his shoulder. "This I must see."
"Ten bucks says they kill each other before the season is over," Jax offered, sloshing beer as he gestured dramatically.
"Twenty says there's something else entirely happening between those two," Kane countered with a knowing grin that made Stephanie's cheeks heat unexpectedly.
"Focus, children," she said sharply, channeling Coach Vicky's tone. "The point is, we're all in this together. No one gets left behind."
The conversation gradually dissolved as Liam announced a round of shots for everyone except "Spreadsheets, who's probably calculating the liver damage." The team scattered—some to the kitchen for drinks, others to the impromptu dance floor where Rookie Ethan was attempting to teach Chenny some Russian dance move, still others to the beer pong table where a heated tournament continued.
Stephanie drifted to the edge of the deck, her professional vigilance temporarily exhausted.
The deck offered a stunning view of the harbor, lights reflecting on the dark water. She leaned against the railing, letting the cool evening air clear her head while the bass thumped behind her and periodic roars erupted from what sounded like Mateo challenging Jax to a pushup contest.
This wasn't how she'd envisioned her career unfolding. At thirty-two, she should have been in New York or Los Angeles by now, running PR for a major franchise or sports corporation. That had been the plan—until Preston Reed had derailed everything.
She rubbed her arms against a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. Three years later, and that asshole’s name still triggered that same cold knot in her stomach. The man who'd promised to mentor her, then tried to destroy her career when she'd refused his advances. The man whose analytics obsession had given her a deep distrust of data-driven approaches to anything human.
The man whose friends still held influence marketing departments all along the East Coast.
"You're cold."
Stephanie startled at Marcus's voice beside her. Before she could respond, he was offering his jacket—a charcoal blazer that he'd somehow kept immaculate despite Dmitri's earlier attempt to spill beer on everyone.
"I'm fine," she started to protest, but he draped it over her shoulders anyway. The weight of it was unexpectedly comforting, the lingering cedar scent oddly intimate.
"Thanks," she amended, pulling it closer.
"It's dropped about twelve degrees since sunset," he said, as if he needed to justify the gesture.
They stood in silence for a moment, watching the harbor lights while behind them the party reached new levels of hockey player chaos—someone had started a chant, and the stomping threatened to collapse Kane's deck.
She recalled the last time they'd been this close outside work—three months ago at the team Christmas party, when they'd accidentally found themselves under mistletoe. The awkward moment had passed with nothing more than knowing looks from teammates, but she'd thought about that near-miss more often than she cared to admit.
"You did well in there," she finally said. "With the team."
"You too."
"We make a surprisingly effective duo."
Marcus's expression remained neutral, but she caught a slight shift in his stance—a relaxation that most people would miss.
"The question is whether we can keep it up with Darby & Darby," he said. "Their approach will hit your communication style hard."
"And boost yours."
He tilted his head, considering. "Not exactly. I include the human factors. Their models strip all that away."
Stephanie turned to face him fully, surprised. "You're telling me you don't agree with a pure numbers approach?"
"Numbers without context are useless. Data needs interpretation." His eyes met hers directly. "That's something I've figured out from our disagreements."
The admission caught her completely off guard. Marcus acknowledging he'd learned something from their battles? The world really was turning upside down.
"Well," she managed, "I suppose I've picked up a few things too. Like maybe not all stats are bullshit."
"Does this mean you'll stop calling my player development tracking 'robot evaluations'?"
"Let's not get crazy," she replied with a small smile. "But I might consider them alongside my human intelligence."
The corner of his mouth twitched in what might have been the beginning of a smile. On anyone else, it would have been nothing. On Marcus's usually impassive face, it was practically a declaration.
"Progress," he said simply.
A strange ease fell between them, so different from their usual tense standoffs that Stephanie relaxed despite the chaos—both at the party and in their professional futures.
From inside came the crash of something expensive, followed by Kane's shout of "You're buying a new one, Dmitri!" and raucous laughter.
"Can I ask you something?" she ventured after a moment.
He nodded.
"Why hockey? With your mathematical brain, you could have done anything—finance, tech, academia. Why choose a career that's so physical, so unpredictable?"
Something shifted in his expression—a subtle opening that she'd never seen before.
"My father taught mathematics at the University of Toronto," he said, his voice quieter than usual. "Hockey was everything to our family. Not just a sport—a way of life."
Marcus looked out over the water. "He took me to Maple Leafs games whenever he could. We broke down plays together—he showed me the geometry in the game, the patterns behind what looked like chaos to everyone else."
Stephanie remained silent, sensing the rare glimpse behind his walls.
"I was a quiet kid, more comfortable with numbers than people. Hockey gave me a language, a way to connect." His fingers tapped lightly on the railing. "When my father died during my first year at university, the rink became home. A place where his lessons still made sense."
The revelation landed softly between them. Stephanie had known the basic facts of his background—Canadian, mathematics degree, drafted in the second round—but nothing of the emotional weight behind it.
"He would have been proud," she said quietly. "Of what you've built here."
Marcus nodded once, his profile outlined against the harbor lights. "What about you? Crisis management to sports PR isn't the usual path."
The question was fair, given what he'd shared, but Stephanie felt her walls instinctively rising. Her road to New Haven included chapters she rarely discussed. The night when Reed had cornered her in his office, one hand on her waist, the other blocking the door. The months of sabotage after she'd reported him. The "coincidental" leak of her personnel file to other teams when she'd tried to leave.
"I've always been good at managing chaos," she said, gesturing to the party behind them where Jax was now attempting to juggle beer bottles. "Sports just has more interesting chaos than corporate America."
His eyes found hers, assessing. "That's not the whole story."
"No," she admitted. "But it's all I'm sharing tonight."
To her relief, he nodded, accepting the boundary without pushing. Another surprise from a man she'd pegged as relentlessly analytical at any cost. She remembered six months ago when he'd cornered her for forty minutes breaking down why her media strategy for Jax's minor conduct violation was "statistically flawed." He'd been right, as much as she hated to admit it, but his approach then had lacked this newfound awareness.
"Another time," he said.
"Maybe."
From inside came the sound of glass breaking followed by cheers—hockey players celebrated destruction as much as creation. Stephanie straightened, suddenly aware of how long they'd been away from the party.
"We should head back," she said, beginning to slip off his jacket.
"Keep it," he said. "It's only getting colder."
Ever the practical one. But the gesture felt like something more than practicality.
As they turned to rejoin the team, Stephanie's phone buzzed with a text. She pulled it from her pocket, expecting a work message.
Instead, her blood ran cold at the name on the screen.
Preston Reed: Heard about your new owners. Old friends of mine. Mentioned you're causing trouble again. Some advice: don't fight the analytics revolution. You lost that battle in Boston, remember?
She stared at the message, her carefully built composure cracking. Preston Reed. After all this time. And connected to Darby & Darby?
"Stephanie?"
Marcus's voice seemed distant despite his proximity. She quickly locked her phone screen, forcing her expression to neutrality.
"Just work," she lied, hating the tremor in her voice. "Nothing that can't wait until morning."
His eyes narrowed slightly—he'd caught the shift in her demeanor. For a terrifying moment, she thought he might push the issue. Instead, he simply nodded, though his gaze remained sharp.
"Shall we?" he said, gesturing toward the door where Dmitri was now attempting to balance a beer bottle on his forehead while teammates recorded on their phones.
Stephanie moved forward on autopilot, her mind racing. If Preston Reed had connections to Darby & Darby, her position was far more precarious than she'd realized. And if he was watching her again...
She squared her shoulders, pulling Marcus's jacket tighter around her. She'd survived Reed's attempts to destroy her once. She'd built a new life, a new reputation, a new family here in New Haven.
She wouldn't lose it all again.
Not without one hell of a fight.