2. Chapter 1
Beck
Iwake up facedown on the kitchen island with a pancake stuck to my cheek, and Captain Biscuit breathing directly into my mouth.
There are worse ways to regain consciousness.
Being traded, for example.
“Jesus.” I peel my face off the cool quartz and squint at the dog. “Did we make out?”
Biscuit’s tail smacks the cabinet behind him. One ear stands upright, the other flops sideways. He’s wearing his custom blue Bears jersey, complete with the tiny captain’s C I had stitched over one furry shoulder.
He looks more professionally prepared for the day than I do.
“Don’t answer that.” I drag a hand over my face. “I’m emotionally fragile, and your breath suggests you’ve been eating ass.”
“He has been eating ass,” Declan mutters from somewhere behind me. "He’s been licking his own all morning."
I spin so fast the room tilts, catching myself on the island.
“Wow, thanks, Dec," I drawl out slowly, ignoring the sudden pounding in my head. "Nothing says brotherly love like unsolicited dog trivia and a lifetime of family lies you kept from me.”
Declan shakes his head.
He's standing there already showered, shaved and looking like a man who slept beside the woman he loves, which, after everything I've learned about what he's hidden from me all these years, makes me want to put my head in the oven.
“And good morning to you, too.” Great. Now he's got his captain voice loaded. Already. "I was trying to protect you."
“Right.” I peel the pancake from my cheek and throw it at him. “Because I’m the delicate one. Meanwhile, you resolve conflict in full hockey gear, and somehow, the world still loves you for it.”
Before Declan can respond, Diego stalks into the kitchen holding a trash bag with yellow gloves on.
He spots me and crosses the room like a man approaching a crime scene.
"Good. You're awake. Take these painkillers." He drops two pills into my palm and shoves a green smoothie at me that looks like something scooped out of a pond. "Now tell me, Beck… why is there a shot glass in a piano?"
"Because I hid it there."
I say it the way you'd answer any obvious question. Why is the sky blue? Why is water wet? Why is there a shot glass in the piano?
Diego folds his arms over his chest and pops a hip. "We don't own a piano, Beck."
The sentence takes a full three seconds to buffer. Yep. Apparently my brain is running on dial-up speed this morning.
"Run that by me again," I say slowly, "because either you just told me we don't own a piano, or the pond water is already talking to me."
"We don't own a piano," Declan confirms, in the flat tone of a man who stopped being surprised by me years ago.
"There is a piano," Diego says, with the patience of a man counting to ten in two languages, "in the east sitting room. Which I found this morning because someone—" he points a yellow-gloved finger at Biscuit, "—led me straight to it."
Biscuit's tail smacks the cabinet. He looks thrilled with himself.
"There's an east sitting room?" Declan asks.
"WE HAVE AN EAST WING?!" I ask.
We stare at each other. Two professional athletes. Two functional adults. Both of us apparently playing hide-and-seek with our own house.
"Oh, Lord have mercy." Diego presses a floppy hand to his chest. "Take the painkillers, and drink your smoothie."
I sniff it.
Cucumber. Pineapple. Mint. Possibly lawn clippings.
“What is it?”
“The consequences of your actions.”
“Does it come in bacon flavor?”
“No. Mason is in charge of cooking.”
At the stove, Mason slides a plate of chocolate chip pancakes onto the island without looking. The little chocolate chips have melted into the middle, and there's crispy bacon fanned out like a glistening sunset.
"Aw, Mase," I coo. "You made my favorite breakfast."
"They're just pancakes," Mason says, flipping another one. "Don't go all sentimental on me."
"Sure, Mase."
I push the plate away, because my stomach is currently staging a coup, and immediately Diego reaches over and doubles my bacon without a word.
And that right there is the problem with this family.
They love you in bacon and pancakes and secret pianos, but they lie to you in everything else.
"So," Declan grunts, sliding onto the stool beside me. "Should we… talk about last night? About the roster situation?"
“Nope.”
“Beck…” Declan sighs. “Colin hasn’t approved anything. You know that, right?”
“And yet, somehow, Spreadsheet Barbie announced my execution in the middle of the locker room while everyone was still sticky with champagne.”
Mason sets down another stack of pancakes.
“Darcy’s not Barbie.”
“You’re right. Barbie has hobbies.”
Darcy Madden’s face flashes through my mind anyway.
The way her gaze dragged down my wet chest last night before she remembered she wanted me unemployed.
My cock, the disloyal bastard, gives an interested twitch.
Excellent.
Nothing says healthy coping mechanism like getting hard over the woman who wants me out the goddamn door.
Declan sets his mug down. “Her report is just one recommendation.”
“Oh! Wonderful! Such good news, Declan,” I announce, raising the green smoothie like a toast. “You hear that, Mase? Mom gets the apartment, Dad gets his yoga instructor, and I get traded. The Morrisons are absolutely crushing this divorce.”
"Christ, Beck." Declan shakes his head again. "Would you chill the fuck out? Nobody has decided anything."
"Darcy Madden did. She brought her work to the celebration last night. Who brings work to a party? Sociopaths and people about to end my career, that's who."
And there she is again, right on cue in my aching skull.
Dark hair like silk, those legs, that mouth saying I don't do hockey players while her eyes said something considerably filthier.
Fuck. I hit on the woman trying to trade me.
I'm not even mad at myself. That's the concerning part.
Declan opens his mouth again, and I can see the management speech loading behind his eyes. It's the same look he's had since we were kids, the let me handle this, Beck, let me decide what to do look.
"Don't," I say, cutting him a glare. "Whatever big-brother crisis plan you're cooking up, don't. I found out about Mom and Dad on a livestream, man. In front of the whole town. So maybe this once, let me be in the room while my own life happens."
The kitchen goes very quiet. Even Diego stops rustling his garbage bag.
Lucky for me, the tablet on the wall chimes with a video call. Zoey's face fills the display, her hair piled in a messy bun, her eyes doing that red-rimmed thing they do when she's been crying and pretending she hasn't.
"Morning, Zoey," Mason says from the stove.
"Don't 'morning Zoey' me with that gentle voice, Mason Morrison.
I am living a nightmare." Our sister holds up a paint swatch.
"Mom has moved in. She has reorganized Morgan's room according to a healing color palette she read about online.
My daughter now sleeps in a room the color of anxiety and eucalyptus. "
"Sage green is very calming," Diego offers.
Zoey glares through the screen at him. “She says the yellow walls are overstimulating and wants to repaint everything sage because she read an article about it's power over the human mind.”
Declan leans toward the screen. “How long is she staying?”
“She brought six suitcases and a framed photo of us from 2009, so… Somewhere between two weeks and until I die.”
Diego gasps softly, and Biscuit chooses that moment to plant both front paws on my thigh, stretch his neck, and steal a strip of bacon off my untouched plate.
That's when I notice my phone vibrating against the island.
Dad.
Everything inside me goes strangely cold.
My eyes cut to Declan. He's deep in logistics with Zoey, asking whether Mom has spoken to a lawyer yet. Mason watches me from across the kitchen, his blue eyes narrowing slightly.
I reject the call, but the phone vibrates again almost immediately.
For one stupid second, humiliation burns through me all over again.
I found out about my father's thirty year affair while standing on the Beachside Boardwalk with five hundred strangers, my brother's voice pouring out of a PA system like a prophecy. All I could do was stand there, learning my entire childhood had footnotes everyone else got to read first.
I always knew we weren't perfect. I’m not an idiot, despite popular family opinion.
But I tried, you know?
I believed that people could screw up and still survive. That if you kept showing up, kept everyone laughing, kept the whole damn thing moving, eventually it might become the happy ending you were pretending it already was.
Which is ironic, considering my longest relationship lasted eleven weeks and ended when I forgot her birthday.
Darcy’s slow, unwilling look from last night slides through my mind again.
I don’t do hockey players.
I reject the call, but don't block the number. I'm not ready to talk to Dad, but I'm not ready to give up on what I've always believed in either.
Declan's hurt, I get that.
So am I.
But maybe there's a way through this.
I pocket the voicemail before either of my brothers can ask who it was, and the preview text burns against my thigh the whole time:
Beck, please call me. Declan's wrong, and I know out of all of my children, you will understand. Just give me a chance.
“Shit, sorry, Zo. I just got a message from Colin,” Declan says, checking his own screen then looking at Mason and me. “He's called an emergency meeting. All three of us need to be at the Bear Cave in thirty.”
I push back from the island, leaving the pancakes to go cold as Zoey's says goodbye and hangs up.
"Where are you going?" Declan asks, already suspicious. Apparently that's his default factory setting now.
"Where do you think? I'm going to get ready for the emergency meeting about my execution." I stretch, casual as a man can be with a hard-on he's been ignoring since last night. "If Darcy Madden's going to end my career, I owe it to the franchise to look hot in the termination paperwork."
"You've got bacon on your chin," Mason says, deadpan.
A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it.
Thank fuck for Mason.
"It's called garnish, Mase. Read a fashion blog."
Diego hands me a napkin as I breeze past him. "Take a shower! You smell like tequila."
I take the stairs two at a time, which is a mistake, because every step reminds me exactly what's got me moving this fast.
Her.
The woman who stood at that bar last night and didn't flinch once. The woman who looked at my entire career and decided I was the easiest thing to cut.
And my dick, the absolute simpleton between my legs, heard you're not enough and decided it was a mating call.
I lock the bathroom door. Then check it again. Mason's just stumbled across the hall and that man hears everything.
The mirror over the vanity is huge, and there I am, my hair a disaster, sun-bleached ends falling into eyes that haven't slept properly since the boardwalk. I shove my sweats down and I'm already hard enough to hurt, my cock flushed and heavy against my stomach.
"You're pathetic," I tell the guy in the mirror.
He doesn't disagree.
I wrap my hand around myself, close my eyes, and the first stroke pulls a sound out of me I didn't authorize.
Because I'm not in the bathroom anymore.
I'm back at Breakers, and Darcy Madden's looking at me with those sexy dark eyes.
Only in this version, that perfect composure shatters beneath my hands. That silky hair scrunches beneath my fingers, those trousers fall to the floor.
I keep stroking myself, thinking of her sitting on my unmade bed with her legs open, waiting for me to tell her what to do next. That's the fantasy that has me working myself faster, thumb dragging over the head.
Show me, I'd say. Let me watch.
My strokes turn faster, my fist shuffling up and down.
"Fuck…" I groan into the bathroom.
Because the truth is filthy and humiliating. And it has nothing to do with my hand. I don't want Darcy Madden in my bed half as much as I want her to look at me and change her mind.
I don't want to be traded.
I'm not done being here.
I'm not done with her.
My hips jerk into my fist as I brace one hand on the vanity, watching myself fall apart in the mirror.
She made me this crazy with one rejection. One trade bombshell.
I drag myself out of the shower twenty minutes later, dress on autopilot and head downstairs. I grab the keys to my Ford Bronco off the hook.
"No," Declan says, pulling his Bears hoodie on beside me. "We take the Rover. Three of us, one car. You're not disappearing before the meeting."
"You don't trust me?"
"No."
The thought should make me angry.
Instead, all I can think is… I don't care what happens today. All I want, is to prove her wrong.
I want to prove her wrong so goddamn bad it's making me sick in the head.
The Bear Cave looms ahead, and I realize I've got no idea what I'm about to say to her.
Only that I'm not going down without a fight.