Dropping Gloves (26 page)

Every two hours throughout the day, someone new showed up to be with me. Jessica brought some work with her from Light the Lamp. While she was over, Sara called me wanting to talk about girls’ names that started with the letter C, so she could stick with the theme that was running in Jonny’s family. Julianne brought over a stack of movies and told me to pick whichever one I was in the mood for. Mia had dropped her kids off with Brie for a playdate, and she had her camera with her when she arrived.
Come on
, she’d said,
outside with you. You need some fresh air, and I want to shoot you in your garden
. No amount of arguing had been able to convince her I was better off staying cooped up in the house, and by the time we’d come back in, I
was
, admittedly, starting to feel a little better.

Just before the game started, Soupy showed up with a pair of crutches under his arms and a takeout dinner bag hanging from one hand. Mia excused herself to shower before going to pick up her kids, and Soupy brought me a disposable tray of my favorite Chinese food and some plastic ware. “Rachel informed me that since I am currently of no use to her in terms of taking care of the twins by myself and she already has to send them to daycare while she works,” he said, “I get to be on Katie-sitting duty for the game. I figured you wouldn’t mind watching with me.”

“I don’t mind. How did you know I would want General Tso’s chicken?” Not to mention the brown rice that I always got.

“Called your mom to ask.” He dutifully washed his hands and took a seat on the opposite side of the room before digging into his own meal.

A few minutes later, Mia was done showering and cleaning up, and she left promising she’d see me again tomorrow. So here we were, Soupy and I watching the Storm fall apart in the third period over the brownies he’d made me swear I wouldn’t tell Rachel about.

“Babs looks like he’s about to implode,” Soupy said as Jamie skated from the penalty box to the bench after the Flyers had taken the lead in the game.

The Storm were still killing a penalty, too, and there was only a minute and forty-three seconds left on the clock. Not much time for them to do anything in terms of tying the game and taking it to overtime, and it was a game they should have won handily based on the early play.

“He’s got a lot going on,” I said feebly. Soupy knew that perfectly well, but I guess I’d just felt the need to defend him.

“He needs to channel it. Bergy needs to send him out there and let him bang some bodies.” Apparently, Bergy agreed with Soupy even though he was all the way on the other side of the country.

It seemed that Jamie didn’t get the memo about banging bodies. Instead, he kept bumping the puck out of the zone and chasing after it, trying for a short-handed goal. After the third time he did that, the other Storm players followed him, and the goalie headed to the bench for an extra attacker. The clock kept ticking down, and Colesy was released from the penalty box. He skated straight to the bench so Luddy could go on to replace him.

Jamie and the rest of the guys put a furious flurry of shots on the Flyers’ net, but it wasn’t enough. The final horn sounded, and they left the ice with a loss in a game they should have won.

Jamie was the last guy to leave the ice. The camera zoomed in on him, making his frustration evident even through the distance.

“Do you think he’ll figure out how to get the guys on board?” I asked. Then I wished I hadn’t. Team dynamics weren’t anything Soupy needed to be talking to me about, whether Jamie had brought them up or not.

But he surprised me by answering. “I think he’s already figured it out. He just needs to believe in himself enough to really take charge of this team. I think there’s some part of him that still thinks it’s Zee’s team, but hell, even Zee knew for the last year or two that he was just filling in until Babs was ready.”

“Did he?” I’d never gotten that impression from Zee, but then again, I’d been busy in LA and hadn’t seen everything going on here as closely as I used to.

“Oh, yeah.” Soupy stretched his legs in front of him, grimacing when he moved the knee that had recently gone under the knife. “He knew. I think all the guys who really paid attention could see how they were grooming Babs to take over. Except Babs, but he’s so damned humble that he doesn’t notice those things.”

“You think he’s close to believing in himself enough?”

He narrowed his eyes at me from all the way across the room. “I think having you in his life again is helping with his confidence. In more ways than you could possibly know. He was a fucking wreck the whole time you were gone. Every time you popped up on the gossip shows, he lost his shit for a while.” Soupy leaned forward in his chair all of a sudden, resting his elbows on his knees. “There’s a way you could help him out some more, you know.”

I knew enough to be suspicious. Soupy didn’t get that kind of look in his eye unless he was being devious. “How?” I asked slowly.

“Well, you two can’t…you know…for a while.” He waved his hands in a crude gesture that left nothing to the imagination. “But you could
call
him. No radiation through the phone.”

Call
him. That was one way of putting it. “You mean phone sex?” I didn’t blush all that often these days, but right now I had to be tomato-red.

“Don’t tell Rachel I mentioned that. Or Babs, either. But sex can fix a lot of problems with a guy’s confidence.” Soupy’s phone buzzed, and he looked down at it. “Finish your brownie. Rachel’s on her way to trade out with me, and I have no intention of letting her know I’ve been eating this.”

I laughed. It felt good to laugh, not to mention surprising considering how down in the dumps I’d been leading up to my confinement. “Will she be jealous? It’s not nice to have chocolate and not share.”

“I’m sharing with you,” he said, shoving another bite of his into his mouth. “But no, she won’t be jealous. She’s got me on a diet.”

I raised a brow.

He scowled. “It seems that when you aren’t burning a ton of calories every day, skating and playing hockey and working out in the gym, you can’t eat the same way or you start packing on the pounds.” He nodded toward my paper plate with the half-eaten brownie. “I’d ask you if you were done and if I could have that, but sharing food with you is a big no-no right now. So eat it or I’m going to have nightmares about a brownie gone to waste.”

I laughed, but I finished my brownie.

Nicky did have
a minor groin pull after last night’s game, so we left him out of the day’s activities so he could get treatment. A goalie from our AHL team would be coming to fill in as backup for Bobby until Nicky was cleared to play again, but he wouldn’t arrive in Raleigh until sometime tonight. Harry’s concussion tests had all come back normal, and he was symptom-free, so he
would
be taking part in everything.

I’d filled the guys in on the plans for today after we’d boarded the plane for the flight down to North Carolina. A few of the boys weren’t exactly thrilled to have their day off taken away from them, Koz in particular, but they were just going to have to deal with it.

When we’d gotten to the hotel, I’d texted Katie to see if she was up, but she hadn’t responded. I knew she needed her rest, and she had left me some messages earlier in the night about how Soupy was over to watch the game with her, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed. I missed her. I missed seeing her smile and hearing her laugh, and I missed the softness of her hand sliding over my skin. In only a few short days, I’d gotten so accustomed to sleeping with the warmth of her body pressed against mine that I had a great deal of difficulty getting to sleep. Coop’s snoring in the other bed didn’t help, either.

Koz was late coming down for breakfast, and when he showed up, he glared at everyone who dared to look at him. This definitely wasn’t a good start to the day.

Burnzie cuffed me on the back of the head and sat down next to me. “You sure this is what you want to do?” he asked, angling his head in Koz’s direction.

I wasn’t sure at all, but I didn’t think it was a good time to back down. I nodded. “I’m sure.”

“Well, I hope you’re right.”

The bus I’d arranged for arrived at the hotel at nine thirty, and we filed out to board it.

“This is a fucked up way to spend a day off,” Koz said loudly to Levi as he walked past me. “I could still be sleeping.”

“Or you could be shoveling shit at a farm,” Levi said, snickering. “Pretty sure that’s what he would rather send you to do, and there are plenty of those around.”

Danger winked at me. “It could still be arranged.”

Koz didn’t let up with his complaints the whole way to Cipher Escape. We finally pulled up in front of a brick building hidden behind a row of trees. I was glad to get inside just so I wouldn’t have to listen to Koz’s bitching anymore.

“Right,” I said once we’d all assembled in the parking lot. “We’re going to break up into three teams of seven. I want Koz, 501, and Coop to be the team leaders.”

A few of the guys made comments under their breath after I’d named the team leaders, but they kept it to a low rumble.

“It’ll be a schoolyard pick. No choosing linemates,
D
partners, brothers, roommates, or countrymen to be on the same team, until and unless you have no other options available to you.”

“What the fuck are we even doing?” Koz demanded. “How do I know who I want to have on my team if I don’t know what the point of this whole fucking mess is?”

I shrugged. “Pick and then we’ll figure out if you made good choices or not. Coop barely even knows everyone’s names, so this puts you on more even footing.”

“And if I don’t want to do this?”

“I’m sure I can arrange for you to go shovel some shit somewhere.”

“Already found a farmer looking for cheap labor,” Danger called out, holding up his phone. “Can’t get any cheaper than free.”

After a lot of eye rolling and cursing, not to mention quite a bit of good-natured ribbing when Harry was picked last—
Gingers have no souls
, Levi had explained—we finally had our teams. I was on Koz’s team, which I’d fully expected after giving the rules for the selection process. We also had Colesy, Radek “Radar” Cernak, Harry, Bobby, and Axel “Jo-Jo” Johansson. That should make for an interesting mix for the task ahead.

We went inside, and the owners explained what would happen. Each team would be locked in identical rooms that had been filled with pictures, boxes, objects, and other sorts of clues that would require logic, problem solving, and teamwork in order for the team to escape within the one-hour time limit. The first team to finish would be rewarded with getting to select the first recipient of the thunder hat. It would go to the guy who best helped the team as a whole to win a game, and it was hideous. It looked like a thundercloud, and it boomed every time you turned your head. The last team to finish would be buying the rest of us lunch. If any team failed to escape, they’d be funding a night out for the team once we got back to Portland.

Once everyone understood the rules, we headed into our separate rooms, and the game was on.

“Bunch of fucking idiots on this team,” Koz muttered.

“You chose us,” I pointed out, shrugging when he shot a glare in my direction.

I started looking around, trying to sort out what we were working with but not trying too hard. I wanted Koz to take charge. I wanted him to pull this team together and get us all working toward the same goal.

He didn’t. He found a chair and sat down, sulking like a child.

The rest of the guys spread out, everyone opening boxes and turning objects over, trying to sort out the clues. No one was helping anyone else, though. After a couple of minutes, Colesy came over to me with a bottle in his hands that had some markings on it. “What do you suppose this is about?” he asked.

“No clue,” I said, even though I’d already discovered a notepad with similar markings on it. Those markings might lead us to deciphering a code of some sort, but I wasn’t leading this team. This wasn’t my show. I knew I might be shooting my team in the foot, but I wasn’t going to give in. I couldn’t, or my plan would backfire. Koz was going to have to bring everyone together or we would be party planning soon.

Even though I kept going through the room, checking things out, more than anything I was watching to see what Koz would do. A few of the guys took things over to him, and he brushed them off at first. But then I could see it starting to get to him. Around fifteen minutes into our hour, Jo-Jo had the bottle Colesy had brought me and was showing it to Koz, and I could practically hear the battle going on inside the kid’s head. He had figured something out, but he didn’t want to be part of the team.