Filthy Goalie (The Frostbite Falls Hockey Club #1)

Chapter 1

MAPLE

What’s worse than discovering the only customer at your diner before sunrise is built like a mountain and just as warm?

When he orders black coffee and looks at your grandmother’s apple pie like it personally offended him.

I’d been pulling shots of espresso for the last hour, mostly to keep myself from thinking about the past-due notice tucked under the sugar canister.

The diner has been on this corner of Birch Street for forty-three years.

My grandmother poured the concrete in the parking lot herself the summer before my mother was born, with my uncle Pete holding the form and the dog she had at the time chewing on the trowel.

We have not, at any point in those forty-three years, missed a mortgage payment.

Until now.

Until the bank I’d known my whole life merged with a bigger bank in Chicago.

Until the new bank sent a letter I couldn’t pay.

Until I had ninety days — eighty-seven now, but who’s counting — to find fifty-eight thousand four hundred and twenty dollars or watch the only thing my grandmother left me get sold to a developer who wanted to put a parking garage where her booths still are.

I had been counting. Of course I had been counting.

The espresso machine hissed as I pulled another shot, the water hot enough to send steam curling up past my face.

The sound was white noise, familiar, the only thing that had kept me from screaming for the last hour.

The pre-dawn diner smelled like my grandmother — cinnamon from last week’s pie crust, coffee grounds, the ghost of burnt sugar from the syrup station.

My hands were cold, had been cold since November, the kind of cold that lives in your bones and doesn’t leave even when you pour hot water over your wrists.

So when the bell over the front door rang at four-fifty-eight in the morning — two minutes before I was technically open — I should have been thrilled.

Customer. Money. Tips. A regular, possibly.

Somebody to fill the empty third stool at the counter for the next four months while I figured out how to keep my grandmother’s life from becoming a parking lot.

I should have plastered on the brightest smile in Minnesota and said something like, Coffee’s hot, sit anywhere you like, sugar, the syrup’s on the second shelf.

Instead, I looked up from the espresso machine and froze.

Because the man who’d just walked into my diner was the kind of man who wasn’t supposed to exist outside of hockey magazines and Russian novels.

Six-foot-five, easy. Shoulders that filled the doorframe with about an inch to spare.

Dark hair under a black knit cap that he did not take off.

A jaw that looked like it had been chiseled by someone with a grudge.

A beard, dark, a few days past clean-shaven.

A long black coat that had seen weather — the leather was scuffed at the elbows, marked with salt stains along the hem.

Boots that left melting snow on my mat. And ice-blue eyes that swept the room exactly once and decided, with cold and impeccable disdain, that nothing in it was worth his time.

Including me.

His gaze landed on me for half a second, dropped to the menu I’d been pretending to clean for twenty minutes, and dismissed me entirely.

“Coffee,” he said. “Black.”

Not a request. Not a please. Not a good morning. Not even a question of whether I served coffee. Just coffee, black, like an order in a war room.

I should have been offended.

I was, for the record, very offended.

I was also, for reasons I refuse to examine at five in the morning before the espresso has even kicked in, going to give him the worst cup of coffee in Minnesota and watch him drink it.

“Coming right up,” I said, in my brightest possible voice, the one I use when I’m about to do something petty and want to seem innocent about it. “How do you feel about a slice of pie?”

His eyes met mine. Cold. Immovable. Slightly murderous.

“No.”

“Apple’s fresh,” I said. “Made it this morning.”

“No.”

“Are you sure? It’s award-winning.”

It wasn’t, technically, award-winning. My grandmother had once placed second at the county fair in 1996 and we framed the ribbon, and that ribbon had been hanging by the register for almost thirty years.

But this was a man who had clearly never had my grandmother’s apple pie, and he was about to have a very humbling forty-five seconds.

He stared at me like I’d asked him to commit treason.

“I’m. Sure.”

I smiled wider. The smile I reserve for tax auditors and men who look at me like I’m a problem to be tolerated.

The smile my grandmother used to call my pie smile, because no man could resist a slice of her apple pie, no matter how hard he tried, and the smile was my way of saying you don’t know me yet, sugar, but you will.

“Coffee, black, coming right up,” I said.

I poured him a cup from the pot that had been sitting on the warmer since four-thirty.

I did not warn him that it was the second pot, not the fresh one I’d just brewed.

I did not warn him that sitting coffee on a warmer for that long turns it into something that tastes like a burnt tire smells.

I slid the mug across the counter at him without a saucer, watching his face to see if he would react.

“Thank you,” he said.

It was the first thing he’d said that wasn’t a one-word order.

I noted that. I also noted that he didn’t pull a stool out from the counter — he sat directly across from me, on the third stool from the end, the one closest to the door.

The stool you choose when you want to be able to leave.

The stool that tells everyone in the room you’re not staying long.

He pulled out a phone. He did not look at me again.

I poured myself a cup of the same bad coffee and held it for the warmth. My hands had been cold since November, and the coffee mug was the closest thing I had to a space heater. I wrapped both palms around it.

I watched him from over the rim of my mug.

He had one of those wide hockey-player wedding-band-finger hands, except there was no ring.

Knuckles like the topographical map of a mountain range.

Two of them looked like they’d been broken at some point and not quite reset right.

There was a small scar at his temple, half-hidden by the line of his cap.

His coat sleeves were pushed up to his elbows.

He had a tattoo on his left forearm — a number, a date, and what looked like a name, but in cursive too small to read from across the counter.

The tattoo was the color of old ink, which meant it had been there a long time.

He took a sip of the coffee.

His face did something complicated. His jaw tightened. His eyes closed for a fraction of a second like he was bracing for impact.

“Bitter,” he said.

“I know,” I said sweetly. “It’s been on the warmer since four-thirty.”

He looked up at me. Slow. Like he was meeting me for the first time. Which, technically, he was.

The ice-blue eyes did one thing they had not done up until this moment. They focused.

It was — and I am embarrassed to write this down — like being seen by a searchlight. Like he had been looking through me before, past me, and now he was actually seeing the shape I occupied in the room.

I had to put my mug down on the counter so I wouldn’t drop it.

“You did that on purpose,” he said.

“You ordered black coffee and refused pie before five in the morning, sugar,” I said. “I’m doing my best to give you a learning experience.”

A muscle in his jaw moved. Not a smile. The thing that lives in the basement under a smile and runs the heating system.

He picked up the cup.

He drank the rest of it in three swallows. The kind of drinking that was about endurance, not taste. When he finished, he set the empty mug down on the counter very gently, like he was handling something he didn’t want to break.

“Another,” he said.

I had not been expecting that.

“Another?” I said.

“Black. Hot. Fresh, this time, if you’d be so kind.”

It was the if you’d be so kind that did me in. He delivered it like a man reading from a manual on politeness in a language he was still learning. Like the words were heavy. Like he had not used them out loud in a long time. Like he was translating something private into something public.

I poured him a fresh cup. I slid it across.

He took it.

He took out his wallet — black leather, beat-up, looked like it had been through a war — and put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. The bill was worn soft at the creases. He’d had this wallet for years.

“That’s eighteen dollars too much,” I said.

“Keep it,” he said. “I made you waste a pot.”

He went back to his phone.

I went back to pretending to clean the counter.

I had cleaned the same six-inch square of laminate, by my count, somewhere between forty and fifty times since he sat down.

The spot was no longer dirty. The spot had not been dirty when I started.

The spot was now wetter than the rest of the counter, which was actually less hygienic.

My hands moved automatically, the rag going in circles, going nowhere.

I had no idea what to do with my hands.

I was thinking about getting the pie out anyway — just leaving a slice on the counter next to him, no comment, the way you put a saucer of milk out for a feral cat — when the bell over the front door rang again, and the second person of my morning blew in on a gust of cold air.

He was small. Twentyish. Wearing a Frostbite Falls Fury jacket, the red-and-charcoal team monstrosity that made everyone in town look like they’d been drafted into something against their will. He was panicking. You could tell by the way his hat was on sideways and his breathing was too loud.