Cross-Checked (Boston Rebels #3)

Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

AJ

I take a moment in the empty locker room to practice walking around with Abby. I’ve got plenty of experience holding babies, but not while walking around a crowded hockey game in three-inch heels. Once I feel more steady on my feet, I walk out into the empty hallway, taking it slowly. The last thing I need is to insist he trust me with his child, and then have some sort of mishap.

The noise from the arena isn’t that bad right now during warmups, but once they take the ice for the beginning of the game and the arena is full of screaming fans, music, and the announcers, it’ll be a different story. I feel like Abby needs those little baby noise-canceling earmuffs. Then again, she probably won’t be at another game, and it’s unlikely this one experience could damage her ears.

Plus, I think babies tend to sleep best with noise, and he did say that it was her bedtime. With any luck, she’ll sleep through this whole thing.

“Something you’re wanting to tell us, Miss?” Ralph, the nighttime security guard for this floor, jokes as he sees me walking toward the elevator with a baby.

“Did you miss my whole maternity leave?” I wink at him. With my high-profile role in this organization and my no-nonsense attitude toward my job and my team, no one is going to expect to see me walking around a game with a baby strapped to me tonight.

Little do they know that, once upon a time, I wanted nothing more than to be a mother. I’d have left everything behind, scrapped my entire career, if it had been possible. But it wasn’t. And that’s when I learned that my husband, the same man who’d initially been attracted to my drive and ambition, basically only saw me as a vessel for his future children, which I was unable to have. It was all downhill from there.

“Whose baby you steal?” Ralph asks.

“McCabe’s.”

Ralph eyes me like he’s about to ask why McCabe’s baby is at work with him, but most players’ kids come to at least the beginning of home games with their wives or nannies, or both, before going home to bed. Instead, he just nods and extends his key card to the electronic pad on the wall to call the private elevator for me.

“You have a nice night, Miss.”

For the first three seasons I was here, I constantly asked Ralph to call me AJ instead of Miss. But eventually it stopped feeling like he was calling me out for being, at the time, the only woman in management, and I accepted that because my position in this organization is higher than his, addressing me with a title was just how he was raised. “You too, Ralph.”

He continues down the hallway as I stand waiting for the elevator, and when I step into it, I’m surprised to find Lauren standing there. Her mouth drops open as she takes me in.

“You have a baby. At a hockey game.”

I chuckle at her perplexed expression. “This is Abby.”

“McCabe’s daughter?” she asks, leaning in to get a closer look.

“Yep.”

“Is this a kidnapping? Do I need to stage an intervention here?” She’s teasing me rather than asking the question I know she’s really wondering: what circumstances could possibly result in him handing over his child to his boss, a woman he so clearly hates?

“His nanny didn’t show up tonight. Former nanny, I guess. Sounds like she’s been pretty unreliable.”

“Ahh,” Lauren says, nodding knowingly. “Yeah, he had Tammy watch her this week during practices.”

“Tammy, your old nanny?”

“Yeah,” Lauren says with a little laugh, because she retired from being a preschool teacher, only to wind up as a nanny for Audrey and Drew’s son for a few years, and then for Lauren’s twins until they were old enough for preschool. “Now that she’s officially retired, she had some time to help out this week while his nanny went to Nantucket.”

“Sounds like maybe she didn’t come back,” I say as we ride the elevator up.

“Hey, speaking of McCabe, did you ever speak to him about the fighting in the crowd like Frank asked you to?”

“Shit, no. I was supposed to talk to him before tonight, since this is our first game back on home ice.” I’m relieved that Lauren mentioned this before I see Frank in a couple of minutes.

Maybe he’ll be so distracted by the baby that he’ll forget to ask me about it. He was born to be a grandfather, but unfortunately for him, none of his boys are ready to settle down and give him grandkids—a fact he reminds them of far too often. In the meantime, he loves spending time with the players’ kids and will probably already know who Abby is the second he sees her asleep on me.

“Well,” she says as the elevator stops and we step out on the club level. “Let’s see if he says anything.”

“You’re headed there now, too?”

“Yeah, he asked me to stop by before the game.”

“That’s weird.”

“Maybe I’m getting fired?” Lauren says with a shrug, and I laugh, because we both know there’s no way she’s getting fired. If anything, he probably wants to give her more responsibility. If there’s one thing Frank Hartmann excels at, it’s the business-side of hockey—knowing what people are capable of, and making sure they’re in a position to be successful. But he wouldn’t do anything without telling me first, which makes me think he’s just trying to get her comfortable with the idea of taking on a bigger role, so that she’ll be ready when an opportunity arises.

I ignore the looks shot my way as we walk through the private floor that’s only accessible to people with box seating or season tickets in the club level below the boxes. Most people around here know who I am, even if I don’t know them, and I’m sure they’re all equally shocked to see the GM of the Boston Rebels walking around a game with a baby on her.

For a split second, I wish Abby was my baby, because I’d love to be the one to normalize women in sports bringing their babies to work. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

E ven though my back is killing me from carrying Abby on me for the first period, I head down the steps toward the Flynn’s sixth row seats as the team skates out onto the ice for the second period. Lauren said they had an empty seat tonight, and if McCabe spends one more second of this game looking up at the stands for Abby, I’m going to fucking throttle him. He’s playing okay, but he’s distracted, and I want one hundred percent of his focus to be on the ice.

“Here, we left you the aisle seat,” Lauren says, gesturing to the seat next to her as I reach their row.

“Thanks.” I say hello to Lauren’s fiancé Jameson, his sisters Jules and Audrey, and Audrey’s son Graham before I sink into the cushions, thankful the seats on this club level are padded. Abby’s been great tonight, as long as I’ve been moving. The constant din of noise hasn’t bothered her at all, and she’s slept most of the first period, only startling awake if there’s a sudden loud sound—or if I stop moving.

But I didn’t think about what it would feel like to have twenty pounds strapped to my chest for this long, while standing in heels. My lower back aches, and my shoulders and upper back are sore as hell, too. And we’re only a third of the way through the game. She’ll probably stay asleep if I keep patting her back like this.

I watch the players circle the ice before skating to the bench, and McCabe comes in last—probably because his eyes are cast up to the stands, and when they land on me, sitting there with Abby, they widen before the corner of his lips turn up in a half-smile. It should be illegal for a guy to have eyes that green or black lashes that long, not to mention a legendary scowl that turns into a grin that fucking melts women’s hearts.

Not mine, though. Definitely. Not. Mine.

The entire crowd makes a collective “oooo” sound, and that’s when Lauren’s elbow meets mine, and I glance up at the Jumbotron. McCabe’s stupidly handsome face is plastered there, head tilted back and his huge green eye staring up. Next to him, in big white block letters, it says, “Who’s McCabe looking at?”

I glance down at Abby before the camera can pan to me, because even though I know it will anyway, I don’t need to see myself enlarged up there as well. Hopefully, all they’ll focus on is his baby, not me.

“All clear,” Lauren whispers a few seconds later, and when I glance up, the video on the screen is showing the players lining up for the first face off of the second period.

“How long was I up there for?”

“Just a few seconds. Saved by the start of the period.”

Shit. I probably should have stayed in the owner’s box. Because now I see what McCabe was talking about in the locker room—his GM watching his kid during a game is likely not something that would ever have happened if I was a male.

There’s no doubt it was the right call, the necessary move in the moment. But I can’t help wondering how the public will perceive it, or how my colleagues will view it when it comes time for the final votes for GM of the Year to be cast.