The Hockey CEO's Rejected Wife (Winning Her Back #1)

Prologue

Ericsson passed away this morning. You’ll be needed at the stadium in half an hour.

I read it twice. Not because the meaning isn’t clear the first time, but because some part of me wants Jeff’s text to say something other than what it says, and I’ve learned to distrust that part of me on sight.

The phone screen goes dark in my hand. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass behind my desk, forty-one stories down, the city goes about its Tuesday with no idea the man who built half the skyline I’m looking at has stopped being part of it.

The coffee at my elbow has gone the temperature of the room.

I’d had Bills send it up an hour ago and forgotten it the way I forget most things that aren’t load-bearing, and now a thin skin has formed across the top of it, the way it does, and I look at that for a second instead of the text, because the text doesn’t change no matter how long I look.

A man is dead, and the half-hour clock starts the second I lift my eyes from the phone.

I’ll be there.

I send it before I’ve decided anything, which is unlike me.

I decide things. It’s the one talent I’ve never doubted, the ability to look at a situation stripped of whatever everyone wants it to be and see only what’s left when the wanting is gone.

Richard Ericsson is gone. His daughter is at The Res.

And the thing I’ve waited eleven years to own is now, by every clause Jeff drafted and every signature already dry on the paper in my safe, finally mine.

I should feel something cleaner about that. There’s no time to examine what I feel instead.

“Bills.”

He’s in the doorway before the second syllable, because that’s what I pay him for.

Thirty-something, Harvard, a tie knotted so exactly it looks load-bearing itself, a man who loves hockey almost as much as he loves money, which is the only reason he and I have lasted three years without either of us putting a chair through the glass.

“Cancel everything,” I tell him, already pushing back from the desk. “Today, tomorrow. Rearrange whatever needs rearranging and don’t ask me to approve it. Just make it disappear.”

“All of it?” His thumbs are already moving over his tablet.

“All of it.”

He doesn’t ask why. That’s the other reason he’s lasted three years. He’s typing before I’ve reached the door, and I leave the cup where it sits with its cold skin intact, because a cup of coffee I’ve already let go cold isn’t worth one more second of my attention.

Colton is in the executive lounge, in the corner chair he always takes, the one with the angle on both the elevator bank and the window.

There’s a paperback folded back on his knee and a paper cup of something steaming beside him, and when the elevator opens earlier than any version of my schedule should allow, his eyebrows climb toward his hairline.

I’m not due anywhere for hours. He knows my calendar better than I know it myself.

But the surprise lasts about as long as it takes him to fold the corner of his page and stand, and by the time the express car has dropped us to the street and I’ve crossed the lobby’s cold marble to the curb, the back door of the limousine stands open and waiting and Colton is holding it without a word.

I send him the location as I slide across the leather.

A pin on a map, nothing else, no message attached.

I don’t explain, and he doesn’t ask, which is worth more to me than half the men I employ who explain everything and understand nothing.

He drops into the driver’s seat, glances at the screen as the link loads itself into the car’s GPS, and pulls us into traffic with the smoothness of a man who has spent a decade learning exactly how much pressure my patience will bear.

Ten minutes. The Res sits ten minutes from the tower when the lights cooperate, and today, of all days, they cooperate. Green after green slides past the tinted glass.

It isn’t enough. I’d have liked the drive longer, which is its own unfamiliar thought, because I’ve spent my whole life trying to shrink every drive, every gap between wanting a thing and holding it, down to as close to nothing as money can buy.

But for these ten minutes I sit in the back of a car worth more than the house I grew up in, watching the city I bought my way into blur past, and I think about a man I respected and never told, and a deal I made for reasons I’d have sworn were simple right up until they stopped being.

They stopped being simple six months ago. I haven’t told anyone that. I’ve barely told myself.

The car slows. The driver’s voice comes quiet over his shoulder, we’re here, sir, and I lift my eyes, and the simplicity ends for good.

The press has the steps of The Res already, because a man like Richard Ericsson doesn’t die quietly and the vultures had the scent before the body cooled.

There must be thirty of them banked across the lower steps in a loose dark crescent, cameras up, breath fogging in the cold, and the second the limousine noses to the curb they turn as one, the way a school of fish turns, and the noise of it reaches me through inches of glass and engineered quiet before Colton has even cut the engine.

I know what they see when the door opens.

I’ve read the profiles, the ones that call me broodingly handsome in one breath and legendarily ruthless in the next, as though the two came as a matched set sold together.

The financial pages have a favorite line about me, that I’ve never once walked away from a thing I wanted and never once kept a thing past the moment I stopped wanting it.

They mean it as a warning to whoever has to sit across a table from me next.

They aren’t wrong to. I built that reputation the way other men build wine cellars, deliberately, bottle by bottle, year by year, because a name that frightens people closes deals that charm never could.

I’ve hollowed out three companies that trusted me and let the photographs of the wreckage do my negotiating ever since.

So when the door opens and they start shouting, the hunger in it has nothing to do with the dead man. It’s me they want. The cold one. The one the gossip pages swear has no soft place anywhere in him.

They’ve simply never watched me look at her.

I don’t look at them. I’ve trained myself out of it the way I’ve trained myself never to look at a tell across a table. Looking gives them something, and I am not in the business of giving things away for free.

I look at her instead.

She’s at the top of the steps, set a little apart from the cluster of staff and lawyers in their dark coats, and she’s turning toward the car the same way the reporters turned, except there’s nothing predatory in it.

She’s pale. Even through tinted glass and across thirty feet of stone I can see the pallor, the swollen eyes, the chin held at an angle I recognize because I’ve worn it myself in rooms where I couldn’t afford to look as young or as frightened as I was.

It’s the angle of a person doing a passable impression of tough.

Someone who isn’t tough at all, who knows it, and who is betting everything on no one else in the crowd working it out.

I’ve met her exactly once. Our wedding day. Six months ago, in a judge’s chambers that smelled of furniture polish and old paper, with her dying father parked in a wheelchair by the window and Jeff standing witness and a vow I made because it came bundled with a hockey team.

I don’t know her. That’s the stone I’ve been carrying since the contracts closed.

I married a woman who is a stranger to me, told myself it didn’t matter, and then spent half a year thinking about her at the wrong hours of the day.

That, more than the dead man, more than the cameras, is the thing I still haven’t decided what to do about.

Colton opens my door, and the noise comes in like weather through a broken window.

“Mr. Flint! Mr. Flint, are you the new owner of the Waymakers?”

“What happens to the team now that Ericsson’s gone?”

“Mr. Flint, is it true you’ve been negotiating for control for over a year?”

I move through them the way I’d move through weather.

Not rudely. Rudeness is a form of engagement, and I don’t engage.

I simply walk, my coat catching the wind off the river, and the crowd parts the way crowds part for men who’ve stopped expecting to be stopped, microphones swinging after me like compass needles, and I climb the cold steps with my eyes on the one person up there who isn’t shouting anything at all.

She sees me coming. I watch the exact moment her composure decides it has held as long as it’s going to.

Then she’s moving, fast, down two steps and a third, and she hits me with the whole slight weight of her, and my arms close around her because there is nothing else on earth they could have done, and a woman I’ve traded perhaps two hundred words with in my life cries into the front of my coat as though I’m the last solid thing left in a world that came apart this morning.

The breath goes out of me on a sudden inward catch, and I can’t call it back.

Thirty cameras firing like a hailstorm, and not one of them will ever guess what just happened on these steps, that the most photographed coldness in the city felt something buckle low in his chest because a girl ran to him without first checking whether he’d open his arms to catch her.

She didn’t doubt it for an instant. That’s the part my body answered before my discipline could so much as raise its hand to vote.

She came to me certain of being caught, and no one has been certain of me, of anything soft in me, in longer than I can stand to count.