Page 38 of Goal Line (Boston Rebels #4)
Chapter Twenty-Eight
LUKE
“ Y ou know this is goalie practice, right?” I say to Zach Reid when he picks his helmet up off the bench. I squirt more water through my mask, letting it spray my face and wash some of the sweat away, before aiming for my mouth again.
“You know someone needs to take shots at you, right?” he replies, then busies himself fastening his chin strap.
“You better be able to block a defenseman’s shots, Lover Boy,” Colt says from where he sits next to Zach, with one leg sticking straight out to accommodate his knee brace.
He’s only got another week in this huge brace before he can switch to a smaller one, but I can tell he’s over all of this.
He wants back on the ice, and is frustrated that he’s riding the bench, even though it’s only for practice.
“You realize he’s one of the highest scoring defenders in the league, right?” I say. Sometimes, I’m surprised Zach’s not a winger—he’s got the explosive energy and speed, combined with excellent fake-out skills, that have led to a surprising number of goals for him this year.
I don’t think he was a big scorer during the seasons he played for Philly, but this year in Boston, he’s upped his game.
Hockey pundits call that the “Wilcott Effect,” and they’re not wrong.
Charlie has the exceptional ability to push his players in just the right way, getting them to perform beyond what they’ve accomplished before.
Our team captain, Ronan McCabe, is one of the players always cited as an example. He had a rocky final year when he played for St. Louis and a rough transition to Boston eight years ago, but when AJ hired Charlie as the head coach six years ago, McCabe turned into an all-star player.
“Whatever,” Colt grumbles. “Just unfuck yourself, okay.”
I turn my head, my lips parted in surprise. Colt has been a really great mentor for the few months we’ve played together since I was traded, so I’m not used to this type of comment from him.
“Are you pissed about my game, or about your injury?”
“I’m pissed that of all the times something shitty like that could have happened to me, it had to be in Game 7. And I’m pissed now that I know the reason you were so distracted that night was over a girl.”
“About that...” I say. I hadn’t really been planning to tell them today, but there’s no real reason to wait—especially when part of the purpose of our marriage story was to explain my performance. “Eva’s pregnant.”
“The fuck?” Colt says.
At the same time, Zach says, “Congrats, man. And to think you were trying to convince us all that you were ‘just friends.’ Now you come back from Vegas married and expecting a kid?”
“Yeah, well, her being rushed to the hospital right before we walked out onto the ice for Game 7, and me not knowing if she and the baby were okay or not...it definitely had me distracted. And that’s on me. But it also put some things into perspective.”
“What kind of things?” Colt asks, but I can tell from his face that he’s picturing what he would have felt like if it had been Jules.
“Having to imagine a worst-case scenario made me realize that I didn’t want to wait another second to marry her.
” As I say it, I realize how true it is.
The terror I felt at the possibility of something happening to her and my inability to think about anything but her.
..even though I couldn’t admit it to myself then, that had to be a sign that I wanted forever with her.
“Is that why you got married in Vegas?” Zach asks.
“Yeah, we thought it would be easier to tell our parents about the baby if we were already married.”
“What are you, eighteen?” Colt says and huffs out a laugh. “You’re a damned adult; you don’t need your parents’ permission to get married or start a family.”
I think about the way Colt’s whole family came down from Canada for one of the games early in the playoffs.
I’m not sure what his family situation is, but Drew had said it was a big fucking deal that they were all there.
Some sort of bad blood between him and his brother that they were finally smoothing over, or something.
“True. But our families are best friends, so that’s a consideration, too. We didn’t want to do anything that was going to cause a rift.”
“Well, I think it’s great that you finally owned up to your feelings since they were so obvious to everyone else,” Zach says.
“You’ve never even met her or seen us together,” I say, caught off guard.
“Yeah, but just the way you talked about her...We all knew.”
Colt nods in agreement. “I’m never going to hear the fucking end of this from Jules.”
“Why’s that?” I ask before I squirt my face with more water.
“Because when we were all at the Neon Cactus, she and Audrey were convinced you two were together. And even when you guys said you were just friends, they concocted this whole story in their heads about how you were in love and secretly dating.”
“Guess they’re more observant than you,” I say, feeling a tad guilty because they were only half right. I’m very much in love with my wife, but it’s not mutual. She might like the orgasms I give her, but that doesn’t mean it makes the relationship real.
“You done with your water break yet?” Coach Knight calls out from the other side of the rink, where he’s standing with a clipboard, having just finished going over some things with Lennington, the goalie for Minnesota, and Kotzu, the goalie for Dallas.
“We’re just congratulating Hartmann, because apparently he’s going to be a dad,” Colt calls out, his deep voice filling the nearly empty rink .
“Asshole,” I mutter under my breath to Colt before I turn toward my goalie coach, who’s skating across the ice.
“Does Wilcott know you not only married his daughter, but you knocked her up too?”
“Keeping it classy, Knight,” Colt grumbles, and I couldn’t agree more with his assessment. Sometimes Coach Knight lacks tact. Not that I need him to blow smoke up my ass, but it’d be nice if he wasn’t so hostile half the time.
“Hey, he’s my boss too, and I just want to know if he’s about to fire one of my goalies.”
“Wilcott doesn’t make staffing decisions.” AJ’s cool tone carries down to us. Our heads all snap up to see her descending the stairs toward the bench. She’s wearing trousers and a sleeveless sweater, and the clicking of her heels punctuates each step.
She’s what my mom would call “old money,” but Alessandra Jones has fought her way to the highest echelons of professional hockey with her brains and determination, not with anyone’s help. And the world is finally taking notice.
Evan clears his throat. “Of course.”
“And you’d do well not to make suggestions that players should be afraid of being traded, when you aren’t even in the know about all the details of their lives.” AJ continues.
The hiss of laughter that escapes Colt’s mouth is too low for AJ to hear from six steps above us, but I don’t miss it. We both like Evan just fine, but he’s got a bit of a chip on his shoulder. I would, too, if my professional hockey career ended the way his did.
It’s not like AJ to put someone in their place publicly like this, so either she’s really intent on standing up for me, or there’s something else going on here that I don’t know about.
I wonder again how she figured out we were in LA and sent Morgan to help us with our story, but I don’t have the nerve to ask her.
“I was just giving him shit, AJ,” Evan says, looking up at her with a lazy smile.
“Well, don’t. Your job is to make him better, not to break him down. That’s not what we do here.”
It’s Evan’s second year in Boston, so it’s not like he doesn’t know the culture of the club, which makes me extra curious about the dynamics at play here. It makes me want to ask Tucker what the fuck is going on, because he’d be more likely to tell me than my dad would.
Dad would say something like, “Leave that up to AJ, Son.” But Tucker is just enough of a gossip that he wants you to know he knows the real story. He’d probably tell me as long as I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone else.
Except, the last time I saw my brother, he’d just stood by while Dad told AJ that my Game 7 loss was exactly why he hadn’t wanted me on the team in the first place. Maybe that’s the story I should be asking him about.
Zach steps out on the ice and nods his chin toward the net, and I follow him over there while AJ and Evan continue talking. Zach’s voice is quiet, like usual, when he says, “I have to go out of town tomorrow. Ashleigh’s uncle is moving and needs our help with some things.”
His girlfriend, Ashleigh, is from Seattle, where he met her before a game this past December. Luckily, she was moving to Boston to start grad school in January, and they’ve been inseparable since. “In Seattle?”
“Yeah. We’ll just be gone for a few days. But my weekly appointment with Chloe is while we’ll be flying, so I’m canceling it. Which means she has an open slot tomorrow.”
I pull off my mask and use my sleeve to wipe the water from my forehead and eyebrows. “Who’s Chloe?”
“My therapist. Well, technically, she’s a sports psychologist, but she’s actually a fucking miracle worker. Anyway, AJ asked me for her info, so I thought she’d mentioned her to you?”
“Ahhh, yeah, but she suggested I reach out to you for her info.”
“And yet you haven’t.” Zach raises his eyebrows.
After AJ and Drew, Zach’s now the third person to mention her to me in the past few weeks.
“Talking to someone” goes against everything I was raised on—Hartmanns talk about our feelings plenty, but only to each other.
The problem here, obviously, is that there’s no one in my family I can talk to about what was going on in my head during our last game, what I overheard my father tell AJ, or why my marriage is so complicated.
Though, I’m not sure the latter would be Chloe’s area of expertise anyway.
“Will you text me her info?”