Chapter 5
Present Day
What the hell are you doing here, Zoe?
Chase is waiting for an answer. But the question feels much more complicated than it did a couple of hours ago.
I gulp. “I’m trained as a skating coach, and I needed a job.”
He squints at me, as if trying to decide if I’m telling the truth.
“I don’t need another coach. I’ve got all the help I need,” he says curtly. “Now excuse me.”
Before I can even respond, he steps around me in the same smooth way in which a good player can always evade his opponent. He’s halfway down the escalator before I remember to close my mouth.
Defeated, I turn around. The fourth floor has emptied almost completely. Only Darcy is visible, collapsed in her office chair, her pocketbook on her lap.
I take a deep, centering breath and head back into the office suite, jerking a thumb toward Nolan Sharp’s office. “Is he…?”
“Gone,” she says with a tired smile. “Now let’s get our drink on. I picked the most amazing place. Or at least I tried to. With the way this day is going, who can say?”
It’s hard to argue that point. “Let’s go.”
After a ten-block walk to the Meatpacking District, we approach the hippest bar I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. The name—Elixir—is carved above the front door, which opens to reveal a dark and moody interior.
The bar itself is a work of art—a long curved counter made of rich black marble with veins of gold running through it. Behind the bar, shelves of liquor are backlit so that the bottles appear to float.
“Wow,” Darcy murmurs, her pale eyes sweeping the red leather banquettes. “I was trying to be cool, but I think I overshot.”
The place is way out of my budget, and in my Legends jacket I feel underdressed. But now I’m starving. “There’s a free table,” I say, nudging her.
“On it,” Darcy says, darting toward the table.
I follow her past a smirking waiter who looks like a European model and slide into the stylish curved booth just after Darcy.
She grabs the drink menu. “You won’t be surprised to hear that the menu is pretentious. Our mixologists craft cocktails with an almost reverential attention to detail, making each drink into a sensual experience.”
“How sensual are we talking about here?” I ask, peeking over her shoulder. “If one of those cocktails could give me a back massage, I’d be into it.”
“I know, right?” Darcy says, slowly paging through the menu. “I don’t even recognize half these ingredients. What do you think Cynar is?”
I pull out my phone to ask Google. “It’s an Italian bitter liqueur made from… artichokes?”
Darcy makes a gagging sound. “Hmm. The food looks weird, too. Do you want to bail?”
I’m thinking it over when another impossibly hip waiter dressed in leather pants and a black mesh polo approaches our table. “Good evening. Which elixirs can I prepare for you tonight? The elderflower and ghost pepper mélange is particularly clarifying.”
Darcy and I exchange a worried glance while he spends several minutes describing the drink.
For some reason, Chase’s blue eyes flash through my mind. And I have to ask myself—what would he do in this scenario?
The moment the waiter stops talking, I channel my inner Chase Merritt and lay all my cards on the table.
“It’s like this—we just had a rough day.
What we really need are a couple of margaritas the size of a kiddie pool and a platter of snacks that could see us through the zombie apocalypse. How close can you get us to that?”
The waiter blinks, giving us a better view of his truly impressive command of liquid eyeliner. “I think I understand the assignment.”
“That’s what we like to hear,” Darcy says, her pale eyes lighting up. “Appreciate you!”
He turns on his heel and leaves us alone.
“Thank you for handling that. I knew you were fun.”
“I’m not. I just fake it sometimes.”
She laughs like she thinks I’m kidding. Then she puts her head in her hands. “The boss was on a tear today. I’m glad I’m not on my way to Chicago.”
“Do you ever travel with the team?”
“Oh sure. At least once a month—it’s in my contract.
We get a temp to cover my phones, and I go along to support Nolan.
He wouldn’t know how to handle himself if he didn’t have someone to bark at in person.
” She rolls her eyes. “I’m whining. He’s not all bad.
The pay is good, the benefits rock, and everyone else is nice to me. ”
“That’s good to hear, for both our sakes.”
“I really don’t want to scare you away from the Legends,” she insists. “Nolan is the worst part of the organization. He’s effective, though. That’s why he gets away with it.”
“I figured. He signs winners and keeps them in line. He’s got the salary cap under control. He’s a ruthless businessman.” These are all things I learned while researching the team. “Maybe you have to be an asshole to stay in this business for thirty-five years.”
“That’s probably true,” Darcy agrees. “Just don’t let him get in your head. I don’t.”
“How’d you get this job, anyway?”
“Ah.” She looks away, and it’s almost shifty.
“I’ve always liked hockey, so I applied for an opening in the travel department.
The head of travel is super nice, and I was really looking forward to working for her.
But everybody who gets hired by the Legends has to have a final interview with Nolan, and he poached me. ”
I bark out a laugh. “Really? From his own employee?”
She nods seriously. “He said, ‘Regan speaks so highly of you. What would it take to get you to work up here instead?’ He was such a grump that I didn’t want to say yes.
So I told him I’d only work for him if he paid for my college classes during the summer.
It was just the first thing that popped into my mind. And he immediately said yes.”
“That’s… wow.” It’s more generous than I would have expected him to be.
She grins. “It is wow. I do two classes every summer, and it isn’t cheap.
At this rate I won’t graduate until I’m thirty.
But it also taught me something about him.
” She shakes her head, like she still doesn’t quite believe it.
“He said, ‘I like that you weren’t afraid to name your demand. That’s the kind of person I want on my team. ’”
“The bloodthirsty kind?”
Darcy shrugs.
“Here we are, ladies.” Our sleek waiter reappears at my side. Even better, he’s holding two huge cocktails with salted rims. “I got the bartender to make margaritas.”
“Regular margaritas?” I ask, bracing myself to hear that they’re flavored with squid ink or bone marrow.
“As regular as they come,” he says, sliding a bowl-shaped glass onto the table in front of me. “He drew the line at making a blender drink.” He gives a slight shudder. “So this is on the rocks.”
“It’s beautiful,” Darcy says with true reverence. “I’ll treasure it always. Or at least for the next half hour.”
He does something weird with his mouth that I think is supposed to be a smile. “I’ll return momentarily with our Mediterranean platter and some truffle fries.”
We hold up our giant cocktails and touch them together before we each take a life-affirming sip. “So I guess they have some game behind that bar,” Darcy says.
“Thank goodness.” I sigh happily. And when our waiter reappears a minute later with a whole lot of mini pita breads and dips, and a large funnel of fries, I feel like I might survive this day after all.
Darcy plucks something from our collection of cute little ramekins and pops it into her mouth. “Holy cow, a deep-fried olive. I didn’t know I needed that in my life. Try this.”
She passes me the little dish, and we spend the next half hour bonding in a way that only overpriced bar food can instill in a friendship.
Everything is wonderful until Darcy says, “So I have some questions for you about Chase Merritt.”
A truffle fry stops halfway to my mouth. “What about him?” Then I realize my mistake. “And why me?”
She gives me an arch glance. “We’ll get to that in a second. But that call he took tonight? It’s from a lawyer in Minnesota.”
“Minnesota,” I echo. That’s where he grew up.
“She keeps calling,” Darcy says, her light blue eyes trained on mine. “As if it’s urgent. When I ask what she needs, she says it’s a private matter. But Chase never returned her calls.”
“Well, that’s…” Weird. Confusing. Chase never talked about his family, even when I asked him point blank. I know his mother is dead, but I don’t know anything about the rest of the Merritts.
“Thanks to you, she finally got him on the line tonight. He listened for a minute, and then he said, ‘I don’t want it. Give it to someone else.’” Darcy shrugs. “Whatever she said next made him seriously grumpy. Then he said, ‘Send it to the team headquarters. Whatever.’ And hung up on her.”
I have goose bumps now, and I don’t even know why. “And you’re telling me this because…?”
“Well…” She spreads something on a wedge of pita.
We’ve already lost track of which dip is which, and we don’t care.
“I edit the player bios every season, so I know Chase Merritt once played hockey for Coach William Walsh in Minnesota. And that’s your uncle, right?
I googled you after I learned you were joining the team. ”
Uh-oh. “Yes.”
She shrugs. “It’s a small world, so I didn’t think anything of it. But tonight, after I tricked Merritt into taking that call, he was super mad. I thought he was going to yell at me. But he just said, ‘Don’t ever send Zoe to do your dirty work. That’s low.’”
“Oh,” I say slowly.
“Yeah, I shouldn’t have poked that grumpy bear.” She gives me a faint smile. “But something about the way he said your name made it sound like you two know each other. And then I saw you confront him before he left. What’s up with that?”
Oh, hell. I don’t know what to say.
Darcy’s eyes grow large. “Wait, really? Did you and Merritt have a thing?”
“No,” I say quickly. And then I wince. “Well, briefly. He was nineteen, and I was eighteen. It was just kid stuff. We were both working at… a summer camp.”