“YOU’RE REALLY NOT mad at me?” I asked Riley, hating how timid and insecure the simple question made me sound. But the truth was, I felt pretty timid and insecure right now. And in my mind, my husband had every reason to be upset, maybe even more reasons than I’d managed to come up with on my own.
The truth was, I always expected Riley and everyone else to be upset with me in some manner or another. Having that sort of outlook on life was second nature to me, as natural as breathing. Maybe it wasn’t healthy, but it was me. I didn’t know any other way of going about my life.
We were curled up in bed, Riley’s strong arms holding me close to him, our skin still naked, flushed, and slightly sweaty following what Riley called a quickie. It’d turned out to be something we’d both needed after the events of the night.
Riley had barricaded Max and Lola downstairs for a bit, blocking the stairwell with two baby gates, one above the other, to keep them from banging down the door so we could have some time alone.
Our solitude wouldn’t last much longer—Max’s whining was loud enough to wake the neighbors if he kept going for any length of time—but this setup did at least allow us some time for intimacy without Max interfering and trying to protect me from Riley. Or so that was what Riley claimed Max might do. He seemed to think that his dog believed he was responsible for taking care of me, for protecting me as well as anyone I tried to protect in return.
Hence the reason Max had been so desperate to get back inside earlier; he’d thought Kiara and I needed him to guard us, even from my own husband’s anger, if it came to that.
I wasn’t so sure about this explanation, but I was willing to concede that I might not be the best judge of the dogs’ actions, considering my innate fear of them. And Riley had known these two dogs an awful lot longer than I had. So maybe he was right. Maybe Max really did think he needed to protect me.
Nevertheless, that very same fear was what had led to the whole fuss in the first place. I might have done a decent job of confronting my fears head on lately, but I hadn’t done anything about ridding myself of them once and for all. If such a thing were even possible. They were still holed up inside me, just waiting for the right trigger to set them free.
Apparently, one of those triggers involved witnessing a small child in danger of being attacked by a dog. Reasonable enough, considering my past, but maybe a bit unreasonable when considering the dogs in question.
I had to find a way to get past that.
I had to find a way to quash the anxious energy that welled up inside me whenever I was around these dogs. Admittedly, my nerves weren’t as bad as they had been at first. But they were still more than enough to be problematic.
Except…well, the truth was that any dog could attack, given the right provocation, couldn’t it? Wasn’t that what they were always saying on TV and in the news? Dogs were animals, and they were ruled by their animal instincts. Forgetting that fact wasn’t something I could afford to do.
Riley kissed me again and then rubbed his strong hands over my shoulders. “You’re tense. I don’t like it when you’re tense. What’s got you all worked up now?”
I tried to shrug his concerns away. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” He kissed the bridge of my nose, then the space between my eyebrows. “Are you still scared?”
Of more things than I could ever afford to tell him.
I shook my head and curled in toward him, burying my face against his pecs so he couldn’t analyze my expression. “I’m not scared with you,” I said.
And it was mostly true.
Mostly. But not all true. Because today had been one more perfect example of why he should keep Max and Lola and get rid of me.
No, I wasn’t scared when I was with Riley. I was only scared all the times when we weren’t together, and he might wake up and realize how much better off he’d be without me in his life.
He tensed under my touch. That probably wasn’t enough of an answer for him, but it was the only answer I was willing to give voice to. The more I said, the more likely it would be for him to send me on my way.
Riley’s teammates and their families had gone home after the game ended—the Storm had won in overtime—leaving just the two of us and the dogs.
Max and Lola seemed to be virtually unaffected by the events of the day, with the only difference being that Max had been glued closer to my side than ever before, until we’d come upstairs and left the dogs down below. Max’s protectiveness was oddly reassuring, if somewhat disconcerting. It was as though he sensed my fear and, not knowing what my specific fear might be, he wanted to guard me from any dangers lurking around the corner.
If only he realized he was the danger, at least in my warped view of the world. Could he protect me from himself?
I doubted it.
In his efforts to shield me, he might trigger another panic attack that had me passing out, if not something worse.
Don’t ask me what would constitute worse in this circumstance. I didn’t particularly care to come up with that answer.
Before I had mentally braced myself, Riley crawled out of the bed and went downstairs to remove the baby gates so the dogs could come up. Max was first to bound into the bedroom, giving me a happy bark before jumping onto the bed to curl up by my side, practically smothering me. Lola tried to claim Riley’s spot, so he had to push and shove her out of the way so he could be next to me.
Breathe, Mackenzie. I had to remember to keep breathing.
Because this was my life now. This man and these dogs and Riley’s friends and teammates and their wives and girlfriends and children.
Whatever I’d had before was gone. This was it for me now.
I could make this work.
I had to.
EVEN THOUGH RILEY wasn’t yet out on the road with the team, he still had to spend a lot of time away from home. There were hours’ worth of treatments and various therapies to go to every day, plus he had to spend time in the gym working out in all the ways he was approved to work out, not to mention countless checkups with the team doctors to ascertain how the rehab for his ankle injury was progressing.
He was gone more than he was home. That meant I had a lot of time on my own to fill.
I spent some of that time with Grady, walking the dogs and learning to give them commands and have them take me seriously. A couple of times, we went to a large-breed dog park nearby, where we were able to take Max and Lola off their leashes and allow them to run free and to chase the balls and Frisbees we tossed for them.
They made a few canine friends that way, whose owners were also out with their dogs at the same time: a gorgeous golden retriever named Dusty, a shepherd mix called Spot despite his lack of spots, and an elderly Labrador named Honey, who was as sweet as pie.
I was as shocked as anyone that I thought a dog was sweet, but there you have it. Maybe they were starting to grow on me. And I didn’t even faint when any of them came over to sniff my hand and say hello. Progress!
Grady taught me to throw a Frisbee, which Max was only too happy to chase for as long as I was willing to throw it. Lola preferred to just run around chasing some of the other dogs at the park, expending all of her youthful energy in short bursts.
Every now and then, Max and Lola would start to wrestle with each other. I thought they were fighting, at first, and I wanted Grady to go and break them apart.
He just laughed and shook his head. “They’re just playing,” he pointed out. “Those are their play growls. Didn’t it sound different when Max was trying to bust down the door to save you from Riley? It had to have.”
I could only blink in response.
Had the growls sounded different?
I honestly couldn’t be sure. I’d been so caught up in trying to remember to breathe and to cover that child in every manner possible that the specific tone of Max’s growls hadn’t broken through the barrier of my panic.
I made a mental note to pay closer attention to Max’s and Lola’s sounds, so that I could learn to interpret what they meant.
Then Grady shocked me by getting in the middle of the pile, wrestling with the dogs as if he were one of them. All three of them came away covered in grass and dirt and twigs but looking happy and tired—the good kind of tired that came from having fun, not the bad kind of tired that came from doing everything in your power to convince someone to love you. I knew all about the second sort of exhaustion since I’d spent the majority of my life trying to do exactly that; I was only now coming to appreciate the first.
But my time with Max, Lola, and Grady wasn’t the only thing keeping me busy. A couple of times, Anne and some of the other WAGs invited me to go out with them, trying to make me feel welcome as part of the group even though I felt more out of place than I could explain.
We went to see the newest romantic comedy in the movie theaters and gorged ourselves on popcorn, which most of them vowed to burn off later at the gym. That only made me wonder if I should be going to the gym, too, but then I reminded myself that chasing after Max and Lola was some serious exercise in and of itself.
We had a dinner and shopping day, but I refused to buy anything else even though they pushed me into trying on about half a store’s worth of clothes. Katie Babcock tried really hard to convince me to buy a silk sheath dress in a baby-soft pink that they’d all oohed and aahed over when I had it on, but one look at the price tag nearly made my heart stop beating. There was no chance I would spend that much of Riley’s money on a dress I would never have the opportunity to wear.
When we were leaving that store to head into the next one, she told us to go on ahead of her and she’d catch up in a minute. I was attempting to fend off Sara Johnson’s attempts to get me into a dress that wasn’t much larger than a postage stamp and was practically see-through to boot when Katie rejoined us with a shopping bag in her hand.
She thrust it my way. “Here. I bought it for you since you wouldn’t get it for yourself.”
I blinked at her in confusion. “Bought what?”
“The pink dress, silly. You looked amazeballs in it. There’s no good reason for you not to have it. Besides, I bet RJ’ll wet himself when he sees you in it. That’s how good it looks on you, all right?”
“But I can’t—”
“You can, and you will, and you are,” Brie Burns said. She took the bag from Katie and shoved it into my hands, closing my fingers around the handle. “She already bought it.”
“And I ripped the tags off, too, so you can’t take it back,” Katie added, looking proud of herself. “You’re just going to have to keep it.”
“You should wear it to the Light the Lamp ball next month,” Jessica Ericsson said.
A ball? They wanted me to go to a ball?
I didn’t know who they thought I was, but I knew one thing: I wasn’t now and never would be Cinderella. That wasn’t how my life worked. As far as I could tell, that wasn’t how anyone’s life worked.
It was strictly a fairy tale and nothing more.
But I decided to stop arguing for now. Later that week, I could get on the bus and bring the dress back, and beg them to do a return even though the tag had been removed. I could maybe get them to do an exchange or store credit, which I could then use on some clearance items if I had to. Or maybe on a gift for Katie, so I could essentially give the money back to her.
Whatever I did, I’d have to figure it out later because, at the moment, they were dragging me into another store. Not only that but Katie’s mother had arrived, looking like a woman hell-bent on something—and she was staring straight at me.
This couldn’t be good. I didn’t have the first inkling what it might mean, but I wasn’t overly keen to find out.
EVEN THOUGH I’D experienced it before, I was still surprised at how quickly I could lose muscle tone from not being allowed to work out like I normally did. I could practically feel the power slipping from my thighs, the gradual diminishing of my muscle mass, the speed I relied on slowly leaching out through my pores. Yeah, that was probably an exaggeration, but not by a huge amount. No matter how much work I could do, I still couldn’t replicate the experience of being on the ice and using my muscles in the myriad ways they had grown accustomed to being used in the years I’d been playing hockey.
Every day in the gym with the trainers was a new shock to my system, despite the fact that I’d done all of these exercises and more for years. But rehab was a new experience for me, and I didn’t like it.
Things that used to be as easy as snapping my fingers were now almost torture. I’d always known Soupy was a badass for coming back from so many injuries over the time I’d known him, but my respect for him was growing by leaps and bounds now that I was going through it myself.
Every evening when I went home to Mackenzie, all I wanted to do was soak in a tub full of Epsom salts to soothe all my tired, aching muscles. Which was exactly what I did. Doctor’s orders, even.
At least Mackenzie let me haul her into the tub with me on a semi-regular basis. So I supposed it wasn’t all bad. Just mostly bad.
She had a way of making things better, though, just through her presence. A sweet smile and a soft kiss, and I was putty in her hands, all my aches and pains melting away beneath her touch.
Weeks went by and the playoffs were growing ever closer, but my healing only progressed at what felt like a glacial pace. Other guys from the team came on and off the injured reserve list with an assortment of major and minor injuries, changing the dynamic of our little group, but what I had begun to call the core three remained in place.
The good news was that, even with so many bodies out of the lineup, the rest of the team was getting shit done on the ice. During the time I hadn’t been allowed to play, the Storm had moved into the top spot in our division, second only to the Blackhawks in the Western Conference and ahead of every team in the Eastern Conference. Not only that but we were within striking distance of overtaking Chicago in the standings before the regular season ended, which was exactly the position we wanted. Finishing first overall would give us home-ice advantage throughout the playoffs.
It made me itch to get back on the ice, to lace up my skates and wrap my fingers around my stick. I dedicated myself to doing the only thing I could do in a situation like this: I put my nose to the grindstone and made sure I did every last fucking thing the doctors and trainers told me to do.
They wanted me to ice for exactly twenty minutes every two hours? I set an alarm on my phone to remind me, even waking up in the middle of the night to follow the plan, and used a timer to monitor how long my ankle was on ice. I suggested to Mackenzie that maybe I should sleep in the guest bed for a while so I wouldn’t wake her every time I got up, but she nixed that idea, even going down to the kitchen herself to get the ice pack for me.
They wanted me to elevate for an hour and then do stretches, light massage, and some time with the TENS unit they’d sent home with me? Done.
What about gradually increasing stretches with resistance bands and slowly taking on more weight-bearing types of exercise? Got it.
I’d do whatever it took to ensure I could make my return to the ice with enough time left in the regular season to get back up to game speed before the playoffs started.
Somehow through my rehabilitation, Mackenzie and I had started to work together as a team.
We still didn’t know one another terribly well, but we were settling into our lives as a married couple. I wasn’t even sure how it had happened, but within a few short weeks, she had become as much a part of my therapy and healing as my doctors and trainers were.
This was another first for me, because Amanda had never wanted anything to do with my career other than the money that came with it. She’d gone to my games only begrudgingly, and she’d never done much to get involved with the other WAGs, whether for socializing or fund raising or even just commiseration.
But Mackenzie couldn’t be more different in that regard.
Almost every day, when I returned home from my physical therapy session, she had some new story to tell me about what she’d done with Katie Babcock and Dani Williams, or what new segment Anne had cooked up for Eye of the Storm, or how she and Grady and the dogs had been dragged away from the dog park for a play-date by Brie Burns and their dogs at Burnzie’s big mansion on the Willamette River.
It was no great surprise to me that Max and Lola had led the charge into the river for an afternoon swim, despite the cold, and then Burnzie’s dogs had all followed suit. Which, of course, led to Garrett Burns, Brie’s not-yet-two-year-old son, giggling like only a toddler can giggle for the next hour while the adults tried to get the dogs out of the river, followed by giving them baths to remove the smell of fish guts, since a couple of them had apparently gone fishing, and then dried them all off.
Anne’s camera crews had managed to capture all of that on film, which would undoubtedly make for a good segment on her show.
Eye of the Storm had already made Max and Lola famous with their swimming lessons at Doggy Paddles. I’d had to start up an Instagram account just for the pair of them and their antics because they’d become so well-known all around the world, not just in Portland.
An afternoon dip in the river would only serve to make them more popular than ever.
After all that Mackenzie had been involved with lately, she seemed to be settling in to her new life here as my wife, maybe even better than either of us could have dreamed.
Yeah, we were still having minor squabbles over how to sort the laundry and other shit like that, but those things would eventually work themselves out. I was pretty sure we both understood that those things didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. But then again, my socks belonged in the bin with all my athletic gear, not in the bin with her sexy, lacy bras and whatnot.
But still, those kinds of arguments were only minor bumps in the road.
That was why I was flabbergasted one afternoon in early March, just as I was finally being allowed to lace up my skates again—if only for non-contact drills and practices—when Mackenzie sat down next to me on the couch and said, “I got a job today.”
“You got a what?” I asked, certain I’d misheard her.
Because why would she need a job? I made more than enough to provide for her, and I thought I’d made it clear that she could spend whatever she wanted or needed.
The truth was that Mackenzie spent a hell of a lot less than Amanda ever had. So much less that I’d taken to buying her little presents all the time because I wanted her to have nice things.
One day, I’d come home with a thin gold chain bearing a garnet pendant, since that was her birthstone.
Another time, I’d stopped at a high-end pet supply store and bought her a backpack she could take out on walks with Max and Lola, complete with nooks and crannies for water and snacks for all three of them, plus a waterproof pouch for her cell phone. Here in Portland, it could be sunny and clear one minute and raining the next, so it was better to be prepared. Besides, Lola was especially good at finding puddles to splash around in, if not streams or rivers to dive into.
Just yesterday, I’d stopped by a local florist’s shop and picked out a single long-stemmed pink rose because I’d wanted to see her smile. It’d definitely done the trick. And it had earned me one hell of a lay.
The gift that had made her light up more than any other, though, was an e-reader and a gift card so she could fill it up with books.
She was so easy to please. Maybe too easy to please. Was she just putting on a show for me so that I’d think she was happy with me?
I thought we were doing a good job of this, making a solid effort at turning this marriage into something that would last, but maybe it was just in my imagination.
Maybe I just wanted it to work out so badly that I had convinced myself it was, even though she was miserable. And she could definitely be miserable. Her fear of my dogs might be more than she could overcome, but she was just suffering through living with them—and me—because she didn’t think she had any other options. Maybe she wasn’t fighting me harder on the laundry and the toothpaste and the dishwasher because she was scared of what would happen if she was disagreeable.
But that wasn’t going to work for me. Because I didn’t want any other options. Not for either of us. I wanted this to last.
Regardless, surely she didn’t think I expected her to get a job. Did she? We’d never talked about it, but then again, we didn’t talk about a lot of things. Not yet.
We had been gradually getting to know one another, but maybe we’d been spending more time focused on the physical aspects of our relationship than on anything deeper.
Yeah, it had to work physically, but sex wasn’t everything. Even I knew that.
Mackenzie getting a job wasn’t anything I’d anticipated, but maybe if I’d attempted to get to know her better before now, I would have seen it coming.
“A job,” she repeated, sounding entirely serious and not like she was trying to pull a fast one on me. And there was a hint of excitement in her tone, too.
“You know you don’t need to work, right? I thought I made it clear when we got married. I can support you. I make more than enough—”
“It’s not that,” she cut in. “It’s not about money, I promise. I just need to feel like I’m doing something. Something more than just shopping for clothes with the other girls and going out for lunch and trying not to be scared of your dogs or whatever. Besides, it’s not exactly a job, per se. They’re not paying me. I’m just going to volunteer, at least for now. Maybe someday, if they have a position open up, I can apply. And I’ll already have a leg up on the competition because I’ll have been there for a while as a volunteer.” She gave me a hopeful, hesitant look. “Anne said that a lot of the other guys’ wives and girlfriends do volunteer work for different charities, so I thought it would be okay.”
For a moment, I could only stare in wonder. “It is okay. Whatever you want to do. I’m just surprised.”
“Surprised in a good way or surprised in a bad way? You’re not going to faint on me, are you? Because I can’t lug you up the stairs to bed, and I don’t know if Max and Lola would help without you telling them what to do.”
I had to chuckle at that. At least she was comfortable enough with me to crack jokes, even if I wasn’t keeping up with her decision-making process. “So where did you get this volunteer job?” I asked, trying to keep my tone casual, which was a more difficult task than it should have been.
The thing was, I didn’t have a problem with Mackenzie working. Far from it. I didn’t want her to feel as if she had to work, but that was as far as I’d go on that score.
A lot of the other WAGs worked in any number of fields, even though most of them didn’t need to from a financial standpoint because of how much money my teammates and I made playing in the NHL.
For most of those women, it came down to needing a job for their own happiness in life, which was a pretty awesome reason for having a job if you asked me. Their careers gave them a drive and a direction, something of their own that they could be proud of. I could understand that entirely since I’d worked so hard to make something of myself after growing up in my disaster of a family.
And maybe that was what Mackenzie wanted, too.
Be that as it may, my confusion at present centered around the fact that Amanda had never wanted to work even so much as a single day in her life.
She’d never helped with the various charities the other WAGs organized and volunteered for.
She hadn’t bothered to get any sort of education beyond a high school diploma because she wouldn’t need it as my wife.
Hell, she’d never even wanted to lift a finger around the house, insisting on hiring a housekeeper to come in and clean the place twice a week. She’d claimed she couldn’t handle all the dog hair. Admittedly, Max and Lola did shed a lot, but it wasn’t that bad. It was because of her unwillingness to deal with my dogs that we’d eventually hired Grady to walk them every day.
I supposed I was just used to her laziness, and maybe some part of me had expected Mackenzie to be equally lazy and ungrateful, regardless of the fact that she’d shown herself to be virtually Amanda’s opposite in every way that mattered.
Poor excuse on my part, but that was the truth, at least as far as I could see it.
“It’s through the Portland Public Schools,” Mackenzie said, “with their libraries. When Laura Weber started talking to me and found out what I was interested in, she talked to a few of the other girls. And then Dani Williams introduced me to a friend of—”
“Do me a favor and steer clear of Dani, all right?” I cut in. That girl was nothing but trouble, as far as I could see it. She was my teammate’s wife, not to mention the team captain’s sister-in-law and the daughter of one of our coaches, but she was still trouble with a capital T, as far as I was concerned.
“But she has a friend who’s a teacher,” Mackenzie said in a breathless rush, essentially brushing off my argument. Which might very well be for the best. Mackenzie deserved to be allowed to decide for herself who she liked and who she didn’t. “Bea Castillo,” she continued. “She teaches special education at one of the local elementary schools, and Bea’s the one who told me about the need for volunteers in the libraries. I’m going to go to some of the schools in the area a few days a week and read books to the kids when their teachers take them to the library.”
“Oh,” I said, sounding stupid, even to myself. So Mackenzie’s plan had nothing to do with Dani in the end. In fact, it sounded like something that would be a great way for her to get out of the house and into the community, doing something that excited her. She was always reading, so it seemed perfect for her, actually.
“You’re all right with that?” Mackenzie asked, and now she sounded unsure of herself.
I was a jackass of epic proportions for making her question herself for wanting to do something good in the community. “Of course I’m all right with it,” I said. “In fact, I can maybe do something to help you out with it.”
“Yeah?” She sounded dubious. “Like what?”
“Like come with you once or twice, hang out with the kids? I can talk to Jim Sutter and see if we can get some foam hockey sticks or maybe some signed pucks to give out as prizes or something.”
“You’d want to do that?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t anything I’d ever thought about doing before, but if it meant spending more time with Mackenzie and less time worrying about my damned ankle, I was on board. “Why not?” I replied.
Her smile made me feel like a fucking god. I only hoped it would always be this easy to make her happy.
What was the saying? Happy wife, happy life? Well, my life was looking pretty damn good these days.