Nice? No, but neither was he. Well, mostly. Lady Luck didn’t just have an impact on how he acted on the ice, but how he acted off of it, too. Again, unexpected.
Obviously, something was going on, a reason why he couldn’t stop thinking about her and why seeing her in the stands wasn’t about winning games anymore. One thing he’d learned in locker rooms was that a player didn’t fuck with what worked. He and Fallon worked. Did that really need to be defined? Not tonight. But as he smoothed his palm across the silk of her hair spread across her back, he knew it already had, even if he couldn’t form the words in his head yet.
Chapter Twenty-One
Zach didn’t want to move. Even with the sun coming in through Fallon’s bedroom windows like a laser beam, he just wanted to stay in bed with her and ignore the rest of the world. Lucy, though, had other plans. When her number flashed across his phone’s screen for the third time in the past thirty minutes, that was all the confirmation he needed that she wasn’t going to stop until she talked to him. He loved the woman, but damn, could she be a pain in the ass sometimes.
He swiped his thumb across the screen. “Good morning to you, too.”
“About time you answered.”
“What’s up?” he asked, keeping his voice low so he wouldn’t wake up Fallon, who was dead to the world beside him.
“It’s your parents.”
That news hit him like a stick to the face, and he sat straight up in bed, completely awake. “What now?”
Lucy let out a heavy sigh. “I had a media source reach out to tell me that they’ve sold their story to one of the gossip rags. It’s going to be out today, four-page spread plus a video interview that’ll be streaming.”
This was what they’d meant when they’d hit him up during the road trip. No doubt they’d wanted him to be a part of the interview, probably would have been a bigger moneymaker, then. That it was airing all of their misdeeds and his stupidity in trusting them wouldn’t have mattered to them when there was cold hard cash on the line.
“Sometimes you have to get creative.” He swallowed back the bile that phrase brought up.
“What?” Lucy asked.
“That’s what my mom said to me a few weeks ago when they hit me up for cash.” He lay back against the pillows, closing his eyes and trying to imagine any outcome that wasn’t a total shitstorm. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Tell your side of the story,” Lucy said. “My understanding is that they’re spinning it so that you were the cruel son who turned away from them even after everything they did and the sacrifices they made to get you to where you are today.”
He would have laughed if his entire chest hadn’t been kicked in. Just when he thought they couldn’t sink any lower. “Assholes.”
“Pretty much. So I can set something up today with the Harbor City Post. You’ll get to share your side of things.”
Oh yeah. That sounded like a great idea, almost as good as scoring on his own net. Even picturing the outcome from that made his gut twist and his hands turn clammy. “You mean shove my biggest personal failing out onto center ice so the whole world can see what a trusting fool I was?”
“You’re supposed to be able to trust your parents.”
“Yeah, well, we know how well that worked out for me.” Frustration and fury swirled together like an angry hurricane inside him, and the need to strike out, to tell the world to just fuck off had him ready to yell. Then Fallon’s cool hand came to rest on his chest. He had no idea when she’d woken up or how much she’d heard. Even though she knew the story already, having to revisit it in front of her and see the pity in her eyes was like shoving a salt lick into his open wound. He let out a harsh breath. “I’m not doing any interviews, Lucy.”
“Zach, if you’ll just listen to reason you’ll see—”
“No, Lucy,” he interrupted. “I’m not doing it. My public humiliation isn’t for sale.”
His parents had already bartered it away, and no amount of spin was going to change that. The best he could hope for was that they’d realize this was their last opportunity to milk him dry and that it would all blow over. With the way the Ice Knights were playing now, he wasn’t worried about losing his spot on the roster, but his rep as a leader within the team would take a huge hit if he admitted what an idiot he’d been. Why trust someone with such obvious bad judgment?
Lucy let out a sigh that all but screamed, This is the wrong call. “Okay, I’ll see how we can spin ‘no comment’ to make you look like less of a jerk.”
Yeah, being seen as the most-hated man in Harbor City hadn’t bothered him before—at least, not that he’d ever shown—why would it now? “Thanks for the heads-up, though. I appreciate it.”
After hanging up with Lucy, he laid his phone down carefully on the nightstand because all he wanted to do was throw it across the room. That, however, wasn’t going to do anything but possibly put a hole in Fallon’s drywall. Her arm snaked across his chest, and she snuggled closer, her warm, naked body fitting perfectly against his. He dropped his arm so it curved around her back as if that were the way he’d been doing it forever.
“You okay?” she asked, her breath soft against his shoulder.
“Fine.” Always. No matter what. He refused to give in to the dread pooling in his gut. “I can take the lumps.”
She planted a hand on his chest and pushed upward so she was staring down at him, a righteous fury hardening her features. “But you shouldn’t have to. Your parents are lying.”
“Nothing new there.” In fact, it was all too familiar.