Page 8 of Save Your Breath

Winger for the Tampa Bay Ospreys.

Notorious troublemaker.

And owner of my heart since we were teenagers.

Just Crazy Enough

Mia

It took a full two minutes for me to stop laughing.

I was so certain this was a joke, a way for Isabella to lighten the mood before she smacked me on the ass and said, “There she is. Now, come on — we have an album to release.”

But when I finally wiped the tears from my eyes, my stomach tight from all the contractions — she was just staring at me, waiting.

The pink-haired, Mexican vixen was dead-ass serious.

“Bells,” I said, shaking my head. “That is… insane.”

“Is it?”

She took her phone from me, reading the headline about how Aleks had found himself in trouble yet again after getting into a fight at Boomer’s in Tampa. Then, she looked at me like I should have somehow gathered the missing pieces of the puzzle from her words alone.

When I just blinked at her, she huffed, letting her hands fall against her thighs with a slap.

“Aleks is a bad boy, Mia. Austin is the golden child of Hollywood. Don’t you see? This would be a complete one-eighty. It would give you an edge.”

Something about that sparked curiosity in me, and I leaned forward. “I’m listening.”

Isabella squealed, clapping her hands together before holding them toward me in excitement. “Okay. Let me paint the picture. You and Aleks are longtime friends. You’ve already been seen together over the years — you at his games, him at your concerts, the two of you home with your family from time to time. It’s never been a thing… but what if we startedmakingit a thing?

“There have been breadcrumbs — especially this year. I could feed them to the right rumor-starter and get the Internet buzzing. As your fans love to do, they’d start overanalyzingeverything. When we went to his game in New York and he scored a hat trick and didn’t get into a single scuffle on the ice… was it because he was showing off for you, because he wants to be betterfor you?

“And when he came to that charity benefit concert we did last month, was it just because it happened to be in the same city as the NHL Awards, or was it because he was desperate to see you after winning the Stanley Cup, that he couldn’t wait to celebrate with his girlfriend?”

She widened her eyes, mouth open in a giant smile as she nodded along with her story and waited for me to come down the path with her.

“Okay… I can see the story,” I said. “There are enough instances over enough of a span of time that we could convince the public that we’ve been dating on the low for longer than anyone realized.”

“Exactly.”

“Dating a professional athlete — especially one with such a rough reputation — gives me an edge.”

“Bingo.”

“And to show he’s changing for me, that he wants to be better… it takes the narrative away from me being a crazy ex-girlfriend to being a woman worth changing for.”

“Ding, ding, ding!” Isabella waved her finger in the air.

But I just laughed, shaking my head. “He’s never going to go for this. I mean, even convincing him to play along with us dating would be a feat. But to say we’reengaged? It’s too much.”

“I disagree. Look,” she said, pointing to the article on her phone again. “He’s in boiling water with the Ospreys right now. I happen to have an inside source that says he’s walking into a very serious meeting today about his future with the team — and how it could be cut short if he doesn’t get his shit together.”

That made my stomach turn. I knew Aleks in a way perhaps no one else did, which meant I knew his little spurts of acting out came from boredom and numbing himself more than anything else. Everyone else saw him as a brute, stern-browed and severe.

I still saw him as the self-conscious boy my family took in when I was in high school.

There had always been a big part of him that believed he didn’t deserve anything good in life. When he tried hard, he pretended like he didn’t, like everything was easy to him. When he accomplished something, he acted like he didn’t care, like he didn’t need anyone’s approval and it all just happened by accident.