Chapter 15
The photo shoot was excruciatingly awful, and Jo spent most of it half hidden behind Alex, who seemed at home under the bright lights of interrogation and cameras.
“Tell us what you were thinking when you rushed into the inferno, Simba,” one guy called out from the throng. The owner of the voice was rocking a Dragons jersey, and waved a video camera in a wild arc that on two separate occasions had nearly connected with the brand new Toyota parked next to them. The lights in the dealership were bright, and Jo had a headache. It was supposed to be photos only, Mitch and her in uniform, and Alex in his Dragons shirt; she hadn’t been expecting questions. Then again, she had it easy. Mitch, who looked just as awkward next to her, would respond with the tried and trusted answer that they had just been doing their jobs. Which they had.
“It wasn’t an inferno, and I wasn’t thinking at all,” Alex answered. Mikey tugged on his jeans, and he lifted the boy into his arms, his jersey pulling tight across his back. Jo could look at Alex’s back all day, and the way SIMARD stretched across muscles that she had personally inspected that morning.
Shirt Guy was persistent.
“Did you know the car could have exploded at any second?”
Alex stepped away, then, stood right in front of the Pearson family, and Mikey buried his face in Alex’s neck. Poor kid really didn’t need to hear that shit.
“This isn’t a press conference, guys,” Alex said, deceptively calm. “You have two minutes to get photos, so I suggest you make the most of it.”
Some of the reporters were cool with that. A couple scowled, but Alex didn’t look like he was offering any chance for discussion.
Then everyone emptied out of the dealership, and it was just staff and their small group. Jo could sense Alex’s tension relaxing a little.
The owner of the dealership was shaking Alex’s hand, and Mikey still clung to him like a monkey. What would it be like to see Alex holding their child like that?
And where did that thought come from?
The last thing in her head was a need to get pregnant, start a family, settle down.
Abby sidled up next to Jo, Izzy asleep in her arms. “He’s a good man,” she whispered. “Not only because he saved my baby and husband, but I know he had something to do with getting us this car.”
Jo didn’t know for sure, but she had caught subtle nods between Alex and the owner of the dealership.
“Also, he looks so damn sexy in that jersey. Shame it hangs down over his ass—I bet that is one fine ass.”
Jo let out a snort of laughter, then because she was damn proud of Alex, she leaned in. “He has a gorgeous ass.”
Mitch groaned, muttered something about objectification, and announced he was done there and that he was heading back home. Alex shook his hand, which turned into a bro-hug. The way Mitch stood, he pulled at Alex’s jersey, lifting it a little at the back, apologizing but winking over Alex’s shoulder at Abby and Jo.
The two women looked at each other and shared a few seconds in which ogling a man’s ass was the most perfect moment of the day.
“How long have you been dating him?” Abby asked, shifting Izzy a little so she was resting on Abby’s shoulder.
Jo’s first instinct was to deny it; then it hit her. Why did she feel like she had to deny anything? “Not long,” she said, and immediately felt liberated, like just admitting he was her boyfriend was the first step to a lot more.
Abby’s expression, after the initial smile, turned serious and made Jo pause.
“When you next have a quiet moment with him,” Abby began, “Will you do something for me? Hug him really hard, and thank him for what he did for us at the hospital.”
“You can thank him,” Jo said immediately. “He’ll go all stupid and red, but he’ll be okay with it.”
“Not for this one, not here. He clearly doesn’t want anyone to know, but all our medical bills were cleared, and I’m convinced it was him. He wouldn’t want me to say a thing, but truly, he has been our guardian angel.”
Something inside Jo shifted. Love bloomed inside her chest. He hadn’t mentioned anything to her, no one knew what he’d done for this family, and he wasn’t looking for praise. He’d picked up a small boy who didn’t want to hear about how his dad and sister had been caught in a blazing fire. He just wanted to protect everybody.
Who looked out for Alexandre Simard?
“Ready, girls?” Derek asked, and he and Alex, with Mikey still clinging to him, crossed over to them.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked Jo, and she realized she must look like she’d been blindsided by something heavy. Deliberately, she stepped up to him and kissed him, laughing as Mikey made yuck sounds.
“I’m good. I love you, Mr. Simard,” she murmured. He smiled at her and kissed her quickly.
“I love you too. Ready for our shared skate-date?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
When Alex explained that he’d promised Mikey a skate at the Sweetings Arena on an off day, she hadn’t expected to be part of the plan, but Alex had added that it was the promised, infamous skate-date and she couldn’t say no. Maybe if she was lucky, Abby would be a brilliant skater, and Jo could stay at the side and hold the baby.
No such luck. Izzy needed feeding, and that wasn’t exactly the kind of thing Jo could do. She did get Abby settled in a small room with sofas so that she would have privacy, but couldn’t escape the inevitable much longer. With a fond look at baby Izzy feeding from her mom, she had to leave. As she left Abby, a maintenance guy walked into the corridor, and he nodded in passing. Seemed like the huge arena never slept; she’d already been stopped when a concessions guy had wanted to talk to Alex.
Everyone knew Alex. He was the face of the team that had the arena filled every game day.
“Just to warn you, there’s someone in there,” she said to the engineer, and thumbed toward the lounge. “She’ll be done soon.”
“Thanks.” He lifted a tool box. “Hydrotherapy,” he said, touched his cap, winked, and carried on down the corridor marked with arrows to rooms for skates, sticks and hydrotherapy. Behind the arena was a maze of corridors and rooms, but when she stepped out into the arena itself, where smooth ice waited, it was like a different world. The place was cavernous, seats stretching way back to the rafters. The building had been new when the expansion team was created, built especially for the Dragons, and at center ice, the logo in scarlet and black was imposing.
The scent there was fresh, the size of the place overwhelming, and her senses were on overload.
Skates were waiting for her, as was an impatient Alex. He was buzzed with the whole thing, and Derek and Mikey were already out on the ice. Mikey looked like a cute little pro, Derek a little unsteady but holding his own.
“I will fall over,” Jo said.
“I won’t let you,” Alex replied.
“I’m too big. If you catch me, I’ll hurt you; it’s a long way to fall.”
Alex held her hand and led her across the rubber to the ice. He stepped out onto it, no wobble, confidently standing like any self-respecting NHL skater would be. Then he looked at her and his face softened. “I will always catch you,” he said. “And you’re a slip of a thing—you can’t hurt me.”
“I’m five ten.”
He pushed forward a little and cradled her face. “You’re the perfect height for me. Now stop making excuses, and let’s skate.”
“Seriously, I don’t like this,” she said, her natural exuberance for trying new things overwhelmed by her need to avoid pain. “I should go home and study.”
“Ten minutes,” Alex murmured, and with a strong tug, he had her stepping out onto the ice. She clung to him like Mikey had, arms around his neck, her body flush to his.
“You can’t get this close to me,” he whispered in her ear. “We have company, and I can’t kiss you how I want to.”
As if to underscore that, a male voice shouted from behind them, “Jeez, get a room, guys.”
Jo looked back over her shoulder. Ryan and Kat were there. Kat looked way more confident on her skates than Jo did. Then again, her brother was a hockey player, as was her boyfriend, and she’d grown up around hockey.
“Thanks for coming,” Alex said, and high-fived Ryan.
Ryan grinned. “When a little guy says I’m his favorite, even better than Captain Simard, then I need to be here.”
“Ass,” Alex said without heat. “Go find him.”
Ryan skated out onto the ice, smooth and strong, coming to a halt near Mikey, throwing up some ice, Kat following more sedately.
Jo wanted to watch, but Alex had other ideas. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said, and began to skate backward. She yelped—she couldn’t help it—but then she forced herself to relax. She’d run into burning buildings; she could handle ice. Right?
After the third or fourth circuit in which Alex had to tell her a hundred times not to look at her skates, she finally relaxed enough that he did a fancy twist thing so he was skating next to her, still holding her hand, still supporting her. She wobbled a little, but he was a solid presence, and she even relaxed to the point where she was enjoying herself. And then he let go, and she didn’t panic. Push, slide, stay close to the boards, and hell, she was skating. Ryan joined them, skating in a sharp circle and halting quickly at Alex’s side.
“Mikey wants to be a D—let’s explain checking.”
Seemed like Ryan was enjoying this way too much. They reached the space in the boards where she’d come on, and she slid, or stumbled, to a stop, holding the side.
“I’ll watch you show Mikey how to do checking,” she announced like she knew what she was talking about. Alex kissed her on the tip of her nose, then skated backward away from her, winking before swerving, digging his skate and flying up the ice to the far goal. There was some complicated explanation, and then Alex began to skate steadily up to her end, looking all kinds of sexy, and making a dramatic fall to the ice as little Mikey pushed him from behind.
They did it again, only that time Mikey rolled right onto Alex, laughing like a loon, and Jo heard something that sounded like finishing a check.
Finally, all three headed back to Jo, plus Kat and Derek from where they’d been skating and talking. Abby sauntered out, Izzy sleeping again, resting on her shoulder and chest, and they watched Mikey with Ryan out on the ice.
It was the most fun she’d had in a long time.
Three days later she was back at Sweetings Arena, and it was a very different place on game night. The crowd was at capacity, the game against the Predators in their yellow was intense, and all Jo could think was why hadn’t she watched a live hockey game before?
Everything was fast, abrupt switches and changes, noise, excitement, chants, and there was a good group of yellow in among the Dragons’ red and black. Alex was back, the crowd was excited for what that meant. They had their first line back, or so Dennison explained at her side. First line was Alex, and on the left of him was Loki, the other side a tall Russian called Dmitriy or something like that; it was difficult to hear.
She was one of eight firefighters from their firehouse who had taken up the guaranteed empty seats for them, and she was in a world of color and noise. Since Alex had been introduced back onto the ice, the screaming and chanting hadn’t died, and it was vast.
She focused in on Alex, number 25, from the warmup when he tapped on the glass surrounding the rink with his stick and blew her a kiss, much to her chagrin when her fellow firefighters thought that was everything from cool to amazing to dead freaking funny.
The teams were in the third period, only two minutes left on the clock, and the Dragons were 3–2 in front. That was good, and by that point she was actually able to track the puck, after spending the first two periods wondering what the hell was going on.
“So why don’t they just keep chucking the puck as far from their end as possible?” she asked an incredibly helpful Dennison, in between screaming.
“I can’t believe you date a player!” he shouted in her ear.
She winced at that. It was true; if they were hoping for this to go any further, she really needed to learn this stuff. After all, Alex had spent a couple of hours helping her study for her exams. Well, an hour of studying, then an hour of making out on his couch.
“So why is it?” she asked.
“Icing just puts the puck at that end—last thing we need is a faceoff in front of Drago.”
True. Not that she really got it, but she did get the concept of Drago, who was the guy in the net for the Dragons, not letting the puck in.
One minute, and the crowd were all standing. The goalie for the Predators had waddled off to where the yellow players were all sitting, and the team had an extra player on the ice. She wanted to ask why, but the way Dennison was booing, it probably meant something bad.
Loki had the puck. He was number 41, she knew that, and she knew Ryan was 17 and tried to stop the other team’s guys from getting near Drago, number 30, in the net.
Ryan passed to Loki, who did some complicated dance on the ice, twisting out of the way of a big hulking guy in yellow like he was some kind of figure skater or something. He put the speed on then, skated up the ice, splitting two more yellow guys apart, but there was no way he was getting the puck any further, as everyone appeared to descend on him.
So he passed, shooting it hard toward Alex, right to his stick, it seemed, even though Alex was behind him and Loki couldn’t have seen his captain. Alex gathered the puck to him, and without hesitation he smashed it at the empty net, going to his knee with the force of the shot. From her angle, it looked like it was wide, then it bounced, seemed to have a life of its own, slamming into the back of the empty net. The arena erupted, and with ten seconds left there wasn’t much of a chance for the other team to fight back.
When the horn sounded, there was a win, and jeez, she’d never heard a noise like it, the crowd going wild, and it carried her with it, and she was on her feet.
That was her man, and he’d closed this game down.
The arena began to empty. Over two-thirds of the stands had cleared, and Dennison finally led the rest of the firefighters out after she said she was waiting for Alex. She had instructions of where to go in her pocket with her pass. But she knew it would be a while before she could head down to outside the locker room, and part of her just wanted to soak this up. Seemed she wasn’t the only one staying. Groups of people chatted in the aisles, the sea of red leaving trickling down to very few.
She checked her watch, and restless, she walked up the steps and stopped at the next level. From there you could still see the ice. Curious, she climbed even higher and felt a rush of dizziness as she realized that these nosebleed seats were way above the ice. From here she thought maybe you’d need to watch the action on the massive jumbotron. Still, you’d be in the crowds screaming for the Dragons. She sat in another seat, watching people below clearing rubbish from the aisles and then moving away. Everything happened at speed in this place; every part of it fascinated her.
She felt it before she saw anything. A rumble, a vibration that rocked her chair, and then the arena, right by where she’d been sitting, erupted and split. A plume of fire and debris shot up and out, entire rows of chairs vanished like they were being sucked into a hole, then there was an eerie silence.
And the screaming started.