Across the Line (In The Zone) (19 page)

Smiling, she walked over to lean against him. She placed a kiss between his shoulder blades. “It
is
a big deal because, you know what? I love you too.”

He turned to face her, incredulous. “You love me?” When she nodded, he asked, “When did you know? Have you been keeping it a secret? That’s not good, you know. Everybody says you shouldn’t keep secrets from each other.”

“I only realized about ten minutes ago.”

He blinked, thought back. “During...? Oh.
Ohhh.
” A broad grin dawned on his face and he chuckled. “I’m
that
good. My lovemaking was so inspired, it made you realize you’re in love with me.”

Laughing, she put her hands on his chest and shoved him, but he quickly pulled her close and kissed her. Desire flared again. He loved her. She’d lost her restaurant and almost all of her worldly possessions, but she had Calder, the most generous, intense, funny, sexy man she’d ever met.

Chapter Thirty-Two

They ate a late lunch. Calder had to catch the five p.m. back to San Diego. Since he couldn’t stick around to help, he tried to find out what Becca was going to do next. She looked annoyed at his questions, but he needed to know she’d be all right. He told her he would extend the stay on the lakeside cottage for as long as she wanted, but she wouldn’t let him. She got downright mad.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I can find an apartment in two weeks. I’m not twelve, Calder. I have everything under control.”

He backed off then. If there was anything worse than a crying Becca, it was an angry one. As he stuffed his one change of clothes back into his small bag, he struggled with the idea of calling in “sick” to the game, but as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t. If it were midseason, he probably could have. His role on the team would have been set long ago, but preseason was different. The lines were still fluid. If a guy had a good camp, he could find himself playing more minutes or even on one of the special power play or penalty kill teams.

For the first time in his life, he resented the demands of his job. Becca needed him, damn it. She sure as hell couldn’t rely on her family for help. Bastards, all of them. She had Savannah and Oliver, but they were practically kids. What could they do? She needed to find a place to live, deal with her insurance company and her employees, who now needed to find other jobs, and all he could do was kiss her goodbye and—

“Holy shit!” He froze in the middle of zipping his bag shut. He was an idiot. He was such a fucking idiot.

Becca hurried into the bedroom. “What? What’s wrong?”

He turned to her with a grin that got wider by the minute. “Nothing’s wrong. I just realized the answer to all our problems.”

“That’s great, I think.” She looked uncertain but not for long.

“You need to move to San Diego.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

He grabbed her arms and squeezed. “I mean it. I want you to move in and live with me.” He pulled out his phone and got on the internet. “I’m going to see if I can get you a ticket. We can send for your car later.”

“You want me to go to California with you
tonight?
”

“Come on, Becks. We’ve been together for almost three months. You’ve got to be as sick of the commuting as I am.”

“You’re crazy. No. I need time to think about it.”

He felt the eager smile melt off his face.

“God, don’t look at me like that.” She left the room. He followed her.

“Look at you how? Like you just stomped on my heart?”

“I just said I had to think about it. I think that’s a normal reaction when someone suggests you move across the country.”

He stopped. She was right, goddamn it.

“Okay. Maybe I was hasty. I probably should have taken you out to a nice restaurant, told you how much I care about you and that I want to spend as much time with you as possible and
then
asked you if you would move in with me. But unlike you, I don’t always think things through.”

She gasped. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means some things in life you shouldn’t think about. Some things you should just do because it feels right.”

“I agree. If you’d said, let’s make out, or let’s go out for ice cream or something, I’d have said yes. But moving to California? Come on. As a hockey player,
you
may be used to picking up and moving to another city at the drop of a hat, but I’m not. Before I move away from the only home I’ve ever known, I have to weigh the good and the bad and make sure I’m not making a mistake.”

Okay, now he was mad.

“First of all, it’s not a
mistake
to move in with me. I’m not that hard to live with. I put the toilet seat down and the cap on the fucking toothpaste. I don’t freak out at the sight of a tampon box in the bathroom. I live in a nice house with plenty of room and a kitchen that you said yourself was all-star.”

She opened her mouth, but he was on a roll.

“And pardon me, but unless I’m losing my mind, we said we loved each other—” he looked at his watch, “—oh, a couple of hours ago.”

“That’s true, but—”

He held up a hand. “Second, you said you had to weigh the good against the bad. What bad? I don’t see any bad. I see you and me finally able to see each other without having to spend five hours on a plane. I see you reopening your café in California where people will go fucking nuts over it. I see you getting away from here so that your jerk parents don’t drop in on you and make you feel like shit whenever they want.”

She gasped. “How did you...?” Then she nodded. “Your mom.”

“My mom
and
my dad told me. Something I’m grateful for since my girlfriend didn’t see fit to include me in the loop.”

“Calder...”

He grabbed the rest of his clothes and stuffed them in his bag. “I mean, it’s not embarrassing at all to look like you don’t know what’s going on in your girlfriend’s life.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry. I probably should have told you, but it wasn’t that big a deal.”

He stopped and exhaled. Damn it. She’d just lost virtually everything she owned in a fire not forty-eight hours ago, and here he was bawling her out for a petty misdemeanor.

“I’m sorry, damn it.” He pulled her into his arms a little roughly and pushed his face into her neck. “I don’t care that it wasn’t a big deal to you,” he said, his words somewhat muffled. “I love you. I want to know what you do when you’re not with me. The big deals, the little deals, all of it. Especially when we’re apart. It makes me...it makes the distance disappear for a little while.” He exhaled. “And if that makes me sound like a fucking pussy, so be it.”

Her arms came around and she hugged him. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about my mom and dad’s visit. I...I just...I don’t want you to think I’m weak.”

“Are you serious?”

She leaned back to frown at him and he let her go. “Of course I’m serious.”

“Becks, you’re one of the strongest, most capable people I know. In fact, when I got on the plane to come here yesterday, I felt kind of stupid because you would have handled it all, and I was right. I mean, what was the point, really? All I did was...”

“Take me to a hideaway in the forest.”

He scoffed.

“Where you made love to me in the sunshine.”

At the sweet memory, a smile threatened to crumble the wall of anger he’d built.

“And made me forget that I’d lost everything, just for a while.”

Aw, fuck. It was impossible to be mad when she said shit like that.

Chapter Thirty-Three

When Calder got home from the airport around eleven, he went straight to bed. There had been a fussy baby, not only on board, but next to him, so he’d spent five hours in that hell of being supremely irritated but having to appear as if he didn’t mind. Earphones didn’t work because the mother was constantly shifting around, jiggling the infant, getting out a seemingly never-ending parade of cereal, drinks, toys, books, teething rings. It would have been a nightmare, but nightmares required one to be asleep.

When he woke, he was emotionally and physically exhausted, not to mention jet-lagged. Was it better to show up to the optional morning skate, moving like he was a seventy-year-old hockey alumnus, or blow it off and come to the game rested and raring to go? He decided on the latter. While he might get some brownie points for being there, he didn’t want the coaches to be discussing lines for tonight’s game and remembering him sluggish and uninspired. If he didn’t want to become a grocery stick on the bench, doing nothing more than dividing the forwards from the defense, then he had to take every opportunity and show them what he could do, especially since Hart had joined the team.

He ate a good breakfast, did a mini workout to get the blood flowing and had a light lunch before taking a game-day nap. When he arrived at the Mesa Arena three hours before game time, about a dozen people asked him how Becca was doing. He gave everyone an update. One of the guys confirmed how insurance companies could drag their feet when it came to paying out on a claim.

“Is she going to rebuild there?” Tim asked. “Because from what you’ve said about her food, she could probably be pretty successful here in San Diego.”

Calder nodded. “I think so too.” He didn’t say anything about asking her to move in.

“I think she’d do pretty well where I live in La Jolla,” Locke said. “Plenty of ladies watching their weight, wanting something light and healthy that they don’t have to cook themselves. There’s an open-air mall there she might want to check out.”

Later in the dressing room, Calder got a text from her.

I’m staying up to watch the game just because I can.
The three-hour time difference usually made it difficult for her to watch his games live.
Knock ’em dead.
No mercy.

He chuckled.
I’m gonna score for you.
Just watch.

He was putting his phone away when Robert Plazinic, one of the assistant coaches he’d been doing some extra work with, came over to his stall. “Hey, Griff, I wanted to give you a heads-up. Marchand talked about the lines today after the morning skate. I told him you’ve improved on your cross-ice passing lately. He said, ‘He’s improved enough to not show up this morning?’”

Typical Marchand. Calder chuckled.

Plazinic shrugged. “I told him good enough so that I think he should give you a few shifts with Holly and Hart tonight since Gibbs did something to his hamstring.”

“Is he okay?”

“Give him a few days. He’ll be good as new.”

“So what did Marchand say?”

“He said he’d think about it.”

Calder shook his hand. “Thanks, man. I owe you.”

“Hey, it’s all you. The consistency I’ve been seeing is all he’s looking for. He wants to know he can count on you, night after night. So go out there and show him what you can do.”

So after the on-ice warm-up, Calder mentally put Becca aside for the next few hours and turned his thoughts inward. He
did
have to be consistent. He refused to be one of those players whose performance swung like a pendulum, depending on whatever drama was going on in his life. Everyone had drama once in a while, but professionals focused and they executed no matter what was going on off the ice.

They were playing the Seattle Cascade tonight. Hart’s old team. Earlier, Hart had pointed out things only an insider would know. He told them what set certain players off. This guy hated getting elbowed prior to a face-off. That guy was touchy about his speed. He suggested they crowd the crease as much as possible after the whistle because Womark, the Cascade’s starting goalie, did not like players invading his territory. Sometimes it pissed him off so much, he would start to defend erratically. This was one advantage about getting a “new” player—he almost always had inside information to share about his former teammates. In Hart’s case, the information was spot-on accurate.

Then, despite the heads-up Plazinic had given him, Calder was surprised to find out he was starting. After a moment or two of shock, a sense of purpose filled him. Fuck. He’d rarely been a top-six player and certainly never a starter on the first line. Some unknown energy reserve kicked in. He felt pumped, ready to show the coach, and Becca, he belonged here.

His first shift was solid. Thirty seconds in, they almost scored with a nice tic-tac-toe play. Tim got the puck and passed it to Calder who passed it to Hart, who would have scored if the puck had been just one inch to the left. Instead, it banked off the goal and they couldn’t get the rebound.

When he got back to the bench he was frustrated, but not, he realized, because Hart had barked at him during the play. Oddly, Hart’s direction hadn’t fazed him like it had last time. For some reason, he’d taken it in stride, and almost scored in the process. God, he hoped he could keep that up for the rest of the game.

His next shift, the Barracudas scored. This time, Calder got the puck, zipped it across the ice to Tim. Hart was already in front of the net, uncomfortably close to the goalie, of course, by the time Tim sent it to him. Hart aimed and shot, and just like last time, it banked off the pipes, but in the scramble Calder snapped up the rebound and popped it right over Womark’s skate.

The home crowd erupted in cheers as the horn blew and the red light flashed.

Beaming, Hart slapped an arm around Calder’s shoulders. “Nice rebound.”

They bumped helmets. Tim skidded to a stop to join the huddle moments before the defensemen joined them. Afterward, they skated to the bench for the congratulatory drive-by. It was fucking awesome. The music blared. The crowd was still on their feet and they replayed the goal on the video monitors.

On the way to the dressing room during the first intermission, Plazinic punched him in the arm and gave him a thumbs-up. They were leading, 1–0. The Fox Sports West guy flagged him for a quick interview and as he answered a couple of questions, Calder felt like he was ten feet tall.

“They’re rattled,” Hart said a few minutes later in the dressing room. “Good job, guys. Let’s keep it up in the second.”

Calder checked his phone and grinned when he saw he had six text messages from Becca, all of them in one form or another praising the hell out of him. She was proud of him. His woman was proud of him. That made him feel
twenty
feet tall.

Second period opening face-off, Hart squared up against David Riggs, a big hulk of a man. Motherfucker could skate and he hit hard. Riggs and Hart mouthed off to each other, but Calder couldn’t hear what they’d said. Clearly bothered, Hart lost the face-off. Later, the two of them had a little shoving match after Hart tried to score and got too close to the goalie. Again, words were exchanged, but Calder was too far away to catch them.

The next face-off, Riggs stood next to Calder as they waited for one of their teammates to shovel the puck back after it had been dropped.

Riggs pushed Calder sideways with his hip. “You wanna suck my dick, like your gay fucking brother?” He spoke in a voice pitched so that only Calder would hear him.

Calder had been so intent on watching for the puck, it took him a moment to register what Riggs had said.

“
What did you say?
”

“I asked if you were a dirty, ass-fucking faggot, like your brother—”

Riggs didn’t get a chance to finish. Calder’s bare fist was already making contact with his face. Calder had gone from irritated to rabid in about .005 seconds. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even think. He just reacted from his gut. Before he knew it, his gloves and stick were on the ice and he was pummeling Riggs wherever he could. His face. His jaw. His mouth. His neck. He was also warning the stupid Neanderthal that if he ever fucking bad-mouthed his brother again, he’d shove a hockey stick up his ass so hard, his head would come off.

Riggs, taken by surprise, took the first two punches hard, but then reflexes and experience kicked in. Their helmets got knocked off, the play stopped and they slipped and slid around, each with a fistful of the other’s jersey, trying to land a punch and avoid getting hit at the same time. Riggs was three inches taller than Calder and a good ten pounds heavier.

But Calder had rage on his side.

In a flash of pain, he felt his lower lip split as his head jerked back. Warm blood flowed into his mouth. He wondered, as the officials finally stepped in to separate them, if he’d lost any teeth. He was afraid to spit out the blood because if he had, they might get lost on the ice. Sometimes, if they weren’t shattered, the team dentist could reattach them.

Riggs went into the box for a five-minute fighting penalty. Calder got five also but because he was bleeding, instead of going to the box, he went to the treatment room. The damage was minimal. He needed a few stitches but hadn’t lost any teeth. When he returned for the rest of the second period, Hart glanced at him questioningly.

“I’ll tell you later,” he said. Determined to finish the game as strongly as he’d begun, Calder shoved aside the entire incident. He had to be in the present and show the coach he belonged on the first line.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t scored while he was getting patched up, but the fight had ignited his teammates. The play got more intense. The energy in the arena crackled. Neither team got any goals in the second period, but the Barracudas had some close calls.

In the dressing room during the second period, Calder talked to no one. He didn’t check his phone, like he had during the last intermission. He stayed hot and focused. He visualized himself passing tape to tape, digging the puck out against the boards, scoring, scoring, scoring. By the time he burst onto the ice for the last period of the game, he was vibrating with purpose. And he knew, could feel he was in the zone.

For the next twenty minutes, he was not only in the zone, he fucking owned it. And the best part was his line mates had caught fire too. Right off the first face-off, Hart skipped the puck to Calder, and Calder one-timed it right over Womark’s shoulder. Eleven seconds in. Boom.

Three minutes later, they almost did it again, but the goalie seemed to have woken up, and caught the puck handily. Too bad he couldn’t block to save his life after that. He allowed three more goals before the Cascade brought in the backup goalie, but by then it was too late. The Barracudas shut them the fuck out, 5–0, and with two goals and two assists, Calder had actually outscored his brother.