Chapter Eleven #2
But the truth? The thought of her with him again nearly drove me to booking a flight and coming home early to make one last ditch effort to make her see that trying to figure this out between us is worth the risk.
It’s late afternoon when I spot a row of boutique storefronts across the street, pastel awnings glowing. I’m halfway past when something—someone—catches my eye.
Blonde hair. A soft laugh. Hand curved protectively over her stomach.
I stop cold.
She’s inside a baby store, standing by a white crib while Peyton and Vivi hover nearby. They’re laughing about something. Peyton’s gesturing wildly, Vivi pretending to measure the rails like she’s about to redecorate the entire place.
But Kendall… She's different. She is softer somehow… practically glowing.
And then I see it.
The curve. The swell of her belly beneath her shirt.
The air leaves my lungs.
Fuck, she’s pregnant. Does this mean I lost her for good? Was Tarron’s interview right? Are they really working on their relationship?
Before I can think, I’m crossing the street. I don’t even look for traffic as my duffel bounces against my leg.
The door hits the bell overhead with a clang when I shove it open.
“Kendall—”
Her head jerks up, eyes wide. It takes a second for her to register it’s me, but when she does, there’s a flicker of something—panic, maybe—before she smooths it away.
“Hey, Aleksi,” Peyton says quickly, her tone a little too bright.
“Did you just get back?” Vivi adds, but something in her eyes says she already knew I was in town.
Vivi’s grabbing onto the conversation like a lifeline when she’s usually cool and calm.
“Yeah,” I manage, still catching my breath. “My flight landed yesterday.”
Peyton nods, smiling too hard. “No time for jet lag, huh?”
Vivi shoots Kendall a look, then says, “Well, it was great to see you. Peyton and I were just going to…” she glances wildly around the store.
“Go over here,” Peyton finishes, dragging Vivi toward a shelf of picture books with the subtlety of a bulldozer.
And just like that, it’s only us.
“Hi,” Kendall says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re back.”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “You look… good.” My eyes drop instinctively to her stomach.
And before I can stop myself, the words are out:
“You’re pregnant.”
Her lips part, her hand automatically finding her belly. “Um… yeah, I am.”
The smile I manage isn’t forced—it’s just… heavy. Weighted with everything I’m trying not to say.
“Congratulations,” I tell her softly. “I know this is something you really wanted.”
She nods once. “It is.”
“Tarron’s a lucky guy.”
That’s when her eyebrows knit together, confusion flashing across her face
“Tarron?”
“You’re back together,” I say carefully. “I saw his interview, and the photo of you two at the restaurant.”
Her expression hardens. “We’re not back together. And he’s not the father.”
The air changes. “He’s not?” I ask, my pulse picking up.
She hesitates, sending a quick glance toward Vivi and Peyton who then cut eye contact as if they aren’t watching us carefully.
It has me wondering how much she told them about Nevada and the motel. But is any of that relevant now?
“No,” she says, swallowing hard. Her eyes flick back to me. “I’m three months pregnant, Aleksi.”
The words echo like they’re fighting to find gravity. The look on her face suggests that three months should mean something to me
“You’re three months pregnant,” I repeat slowly, searching her face for a clue... a hint.
My mind scrambles to do the math. And then it hits me, though my hope is too fragile to allow myself to believe that it’s possible. After all, we used protection every time. But I can’t help it, I want the baby to be mine no matter how unlikely that could be. “Three months as in—”
“Three months as in… the motel in Nevada,” she finishes quietly.
My heart stutters.
“The baby’s mine?” I ask, afraid to believe it, afraid not to.
She nods. “I hadn’t been with anyone in over a year before that. And I haven’t been with anyone since you. The baby is yours.”
For a second, the world tilts—like the whole damn planet just shifted under my feet.
Then the smile breaks across my face before I can stop it. It’s not just relief, it’s flat out joy. Stupid, overwhelming, bone-deep joy.
My duffel drops to the floor with a loud thud, and I don’t even care.
My eyes go to her belly—the small, perfect curve that’s carrying my child. Our child.
Kendall, the woman I can’t stop thinking about, is carrying my baby.
It’s the best news of my life.
I take a step closer, fighting back the sudden burn in my chest. I want to scoop her up into my arms and kiss her. Fuck, I’ve missed her so much, but the last time I saw her, she asked for space. I don’t know if my reaction to wanting to hold her would be welcomed or not.
But God, I want to.
“Can I—” I start, motioning toward her stomach.
She nods.
I reach out slowly, both hands settling on the gentle curve of her abdomen. Warm and soft, and so much more real than the social media pictures of her that I’ve been staring at for the last three months that we’ve been apart.
The moment I touch her, something inside me snaps into place.
It’s like breathing again after being held under water for far too long.
Her hands lift, sliding over mine. Her touch is hesitant but familiar, steadying me in a way nothing else ever has.
Then her fingers brush against my right hand, catching on the band of athletic tape still wrapped around my finger.
She looks down, then up at me. “You’re still wearing it?”
I glance at the ring, at her, then back again. There’s too much I want to say, but one question wins out.
“How long have you known?” I ask, and I can feel my pulse everywhere—neck, wrists, even in my throat.
She hesitates, her hands still covering mine where they rest on her stomach. “About six weeks,” she says quietly. “I took a test the night after dinner with Tarron.”
At the mention of his name, something sharp twists behind my ribs, but I stay quiet, waiting.
“I wasn’t sure at first,” she goes on, voice trembling just a little. “I took another one. And another. And by the sixth, I realized I wasn’t in denial, I was just wasting money.”
A breath of a smile tugs at the corner of my mouth despite everything. “Sounds like something you’d do.”
But the humor dies fast. Because none of it explains why I had to find out like this.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Kendall?”
Her fingers slip away from mine. She folds her arms, like she’s bracing for impact. “Because it wouldn’t have changed anything.”
“Bullshit,” I say before I can stop myself. I don’t like the fact that I cursed at her but she can’t possibly think that a baby doesn’t change everything. “You think I’d find out you were pregnant with my kid and it wouldn’t change anything?”
Her chin lifts, stubborn as hell. “You had your life in Finland. Your family. Your team. A girlfriend—”
That word stops me. “A what?”
She blinks. “The woman in your pictures. The brunette. The one you took skating and got ice cream with. The one your mom loves.”
It takes a second before I realize she’s serious, and then I rack my brain for any brunette I spent time with in Finland but I didn’t spend any time with anyone…
except for my sister who came back from France early with dyed hair.
If you ask me, she looks better as a blonde but after thirty-four years of knowing my sister, I know better than to comment on her hair.
“You mean Saara? My twin sister?”
Her mouth falls open. “Oh my God.”
I laugh, shaking my head. “There’s no one in Finland I’m seeing. You really thought I moved on that fast? Or frankly… at all?”
“I thought your sister was in France? And then you didn’t call,” she says, voice small. “You didn’t text. And after Tarron’s interview, and the photos… it just seemed like maybe it was for the best if everyone thought it was his, and you could keep living your life. I didn’t want to—”
“Saara internship finished early. And you didn’t want to what?”
She meets my eyes then, and there’s so much guilt and sadness tangled in hers that it knocks the air out of me. “Ruin things for you.”
I blink. “Ruin things for me?”
“You’d have dropped everything,” she says, her words rushing now like she’s afraid if she stops, she’ll lose her nerve. “You’d have given up the team, your career, your whole life, just to do what you thought was right. And I couldn’t let you do that. What if this doesn’t work?”
My heart’s pounding. “I’m not Tarron.”
“I know that,” she says, voice cracking.
“But the league doesn’t. The medical board doesn’t.
If they found out, it’d look like the same story all over again—doctor and player, scandal and suspension.
You’d be labeled, and I’d lose everything I’ve worked for.
I just… I can’t go through that again. And all the work you and your father put into your hockey career.
That would have all been for nothing if they benched you, or traded you… or worse.”
Her voice drops to almost a whisper. “So I needed to protect the little bit of peace I had left. For me. For the baby. I was going to find a way to tell you once I thought of a way to make sure you didn’t drop your life for us.”
The silence between us feels like it could crack the floor. I should be angry. And part of me is. Not angry that she didn’t tell me. I’m upset that she doesn’t trust me enough to tell me and let me fix this between us. I’m upset that she thought she had to go through all of this alone.
“You really thought I’d find out that the baby is mine and then I would do what Tarron did to you?” I finally ask.
She looks up, tears clinging to her lashes.
“No, I think you’d do the opposite. I think you’d pick me and the baby over everything even if it’s not what you want,” she says.
“I think you're the kind of man who would sacrifice your own happiness for responsibility and duty. But I can’t let you do that for me… for us.”
Jesus. She actually believes that.
“You didn’t even give me the chance,” I say quietly.
I exhale slowly, dragging a hand through my hair. I want to grab her. I want to kiss her. I want to tell her she’s not alone in this—not for one more second.
But she’s shaking, and I can tell she’s been holding this together with tape and stubbornness for weeks.
So instead, I do the only thing that feels right.
I put my hand back on her stomach.
The smallest smile pulls at her mouth. Then she reaches into her bag and takes out her phone. “I recorded something at my last appointment,” she says. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Yeah,” I breathe.
She hits play.
And then I hear it—the heartbeat.
For a second, the world tilts again. I’m not even aware of breathing.
That’s our baby. Our heartbeat. Beating because of one impossible night that was never supposed to happen.
I look up, and Kendall’s watching me, uncertain, like she’s waiting for me to break.
Instead, I grin. “That’s our kid,” I say softly.
She nods. “Yeah. That’s our kid.”
A laugh bursts out of me, pure and unfiltered.
I run a hand over my face, still half in shock, half dizzy with something that feels a hell of a lot like joy.
“God, I don’t even know what to do right now.
Half of me wants to go skate a lap around the city, and the other half wants to never stop touching you. ”
Her laugh is small but real. “You don’t have to do anything, Aleksi.”
I meet her eyes and smile. “Too late. I already am.”
“We still need to talk and figure this out. No interviews with the media blurting out that a little bundle is coming, okay?”
“What’s there to figure out? We’re having a baby.”
“Please Aleksi…”
“Okay. We’ll do this your way.”
“Thank you. For now, you need to get to orientation,” she says.
“Oh shit… I completely forgot what the hell I was doing the minute I saw you in the window.”
She smiles. “You need to go. We’ll talk later. I still don’t know how this happened since we used protection. You used a condom every time, right?”
“Of course I did.”
She nods and then looks down at my hands as if still trying to piece together how this happened.
“I mean, I ran out of the condoms I brought in my duffle but luckily we had the one from the vending machine.”
Her eyes shoot up to stare back at me, her face turning white as a ghost, her eyes darkening like a storm rolling in, and her jaw dropping.
“You used the condoms that have been sitting in a vending machine, in the middle of a blazing hot desert, for who knows how long? Did you even check if they were expired?”
My stomach drops. Dammit, this is my fault… isn’t it?
In my defense, it was a desperate situation.
Kendall was begging for more and she was only giving me one night.
I wasn’t thinking about anything else other than getting back inside of her.
The vending machine condoms looked like salvation at the time.
Not exactly the best combination for being concerned with reading fine print.
“I mean… probably?” I offer weakly.
She just stares, her jaw slightly dropped.
“Okay, maybe not.”
For a beat, neither of us speaks. Then she lets out a breath that sounds halfway between a laugh and a groan. “You’re unbelievable.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “And apparently fertile as hell.”
Her lips twitch like she’s fighting a smile, but she shakes her head instead. “Go. You need to get to orientation before you get fined or benched. We have enough on our plate to worry about making more waves. We’ll talk later.”
I bend to grab my duffel off the floor where I dropped it and swing it over my shoulder.
Then I walk back toward the door, still watching her over my shoulder.
I don’t want to leave. I want to find a place to take her, somewhere quiet where we can make plans but I know she’s right.
I have to go or I’ll get fined for not showing up.
As I step back out of the baby shop boutique, one thought hits me:
I’ve faced playoff pressure, broken bones, open heart surgery and brutal hits, but none of it has ever felt as terrifying—or as right—as this does.