Hard Fall (St. Louis Mavericks 1)

“Oh.” I smiled and put a palm on my chest. “I needed this night out so much, but I still miss them.”

“Let’s get dinner and then we can pick up stuff for ice cream sundaes and take it home.”

“Really?”

Wes nodded. “I’d love to spend the entire night with you at the nearest hotel, but with Annalise worried we might not make it home, I think we need to keep our time out short.”

My shoulders relaxed with relief, because I felt the same way.

“Excuse me, Wes Kirby?” a man said from beside our table. Wes looked over and the man continued. “I’m sorry to bother you, but my dad’s a huge Mavericks fan. He’s eighty-three years old and about to go into hospice. Could I get you to maybe write a short note to him?”

Wes smiled and said, “Sure, no problem. I wish I had a puck I could sign for him, but I don’t have anything, even in the car.”

“That’s okay. Just a quick note signed by you will mean a lot to him.”

Wes took the pen and paper the man held out and started writing. It hit me once again how very wrong I’d been about this man. And then I felt a pang, because I knew this was the moment when Lauren would say that she told me so.

Chapter Nineteen

Wes

The final game of the season was at home against Detroit. We’d wiped the floor with them earlier in the season, but tonight we were like a Little League baseball team playing their very first hockey game. That might have been a slight exaggeration, but damn, we looked awful out there.

Last night’s bonding dinner had been a fucking disaster. It started out okay but halfway through dinner Svetlana showed up. She’d been drunk, crying, and out of control. Konstantin tried to calm her down and get her to take a cab home, but she’d resisted, making a huge scene. Then Keegan got involved. And things devolved faster than any of us could have predicted. Even Coach had tried to defuse the situation to no avail. Keegan threw a punch, Kon hit back, and Svetlana jumped in the middle. If we’d been anywhere but Giovanna’s, the cops probably would have been called.

Thankfully, Vicenzo let us handle it, and between a handful of us, we’d separated Kon and Keegan, put Svetlana in a cab, and calmed everyone down. Keegan stormed off after Svetlana, though. We kept Kon at the restaurant, worried about what might happen if he and Keegan ran into each other again so soon.

The only good thing about the incident was that Coach finally understood how serious the situation was between Kon and Keegan, and had pulled me aside to tell me he would be talking to management about trading Keegan this summer. There was no way we could keep them both after what had happened, and at this point, Coach was over it. If we were honest, the whole team was, but everyone had tried to intervene without taking sides.

The end result was a horrible end to a tragic season, trades on the horizon for the off-season, and my own status on the team up in the air as well. Coach hadn’t been happy with how I’d done as acting captain, and I couldn’t blame him. It scared me, though. I didn’t know what I’d do if I got traded. We were already talking about putting the house up for sale and buying something new, where we could all get a fresh start, but I wasn’t planning on doing it in another city. Or god forbid, another country.

I brought it up that night in bed with Hadley. We’d made love a couple of times and she was soft and warm and sated, cuddled against me as we talked.

“You think you could get traded?” she asked in surprise.

“Coach is pissed about everything. The season, the vibe in the locker room, my captain skills, and of course, Kon and Keegan.”

“Keegan’s an asshole,” she said. “Even if he’s totally in love with Svetlana, they should have handled it better. He could have asked for a trade, or they could have kept it under wraps until the season was over. And why doesn’t Kon just kick her out?”

I shrugged in the darkness. “I honestly don’t know. I think he promised her father he’d take care of her or something like that, before he brought her to the U.S. with him.”

“I think that promise should have been nullified once she cheated on him.”

“Agreed.”

“So…what would it mean if you got traded?” she asked after a moment.

I tightened my arms around her. “I don’t know, babe. I mean, we’re already talking about selling the house, so it would be a clean break for all of us, but if that happened, I don’t know where we’d wind up.” I paused. “Which includes Canada.”