2. CHAPTER ONE
Edinburgh — Scotland
2018
“That’s it, Ciara, good,” Omar called from the sidelines as I landed a double with ease. “Try for three.”
I didn’t want to try for three. But one of the stipulations for being at this training camp was that what Omar asked for, he got.
My skates zipped across the ice as I regained momentum and envisioned the triple axel in my mind.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t me in my mind’s eye performing the stunt. No. It was my little sister in all of her redhaired glory as she flew through the air and landed smoothly, much to the amazement of everyone in the Olympic stadium.
Mine, however, was not quite as elegant.
My turns were fine—but that was never the problem. It was the landing that always got me.
The ice rose up to meet me, cold and hard as I crashed into it as the air whooshed out of my body.
“So, that is not how you do it,” Omar’s thick Russian accent filled my ears. “I am surprised you and your sister are not of the same caliber when it comes to skating. Nor, it seems, are you even on the same level as you were at the Olympics.”
Gritting my teeth, I sat up and brushed the frost off of my leggings. People had been comparing me to Brynn for ten years, so it didn’t even hurt my feelings anymore.
Comparing me to Brynn was ridiculous and stupid in the first place.
She’d been on the ice since she could walk—a natural is what every figure skating teacher we’d ever had gushed about.
But I’d put enough blood, sweat, and tears into the sport that I knew that I was on par with her, if only I could get out of my own fucking head.
Getting up again, I began to skate, oblivious to Omar’s barked commands.
My eyes drifted shut, blocking out everything. Omar, the figure skaters waiting their turn on the ice, the other athletes that always seemed to hang around for the figure skater’s practice time—all of it.
Then I began to count.
It was a silly habit that I’d had from the first day that I stepped onto the ice in Minnesota born out of my silly obsession for a movie from the 80s that I hadn’t watched since the day of the accident.
The first three months of my time in the states had been spent hiding in the unfamiliar bedroom that they’d put together for me. Then Maxim and Alexei had had enough of my rotting away and put me to work at the skating rink they owned.
It was there that I first saw Brynn skate and how the grief over losing her own mother in the accident seemed to melt away from her skinny shoulders.
After that I spent more time watching her skate than anything else, the dads asked if I wanted to try and I jumped at the chance.
And I was terrible at it.
It was like the ice that my mother had loved so much growing up was rejecting me completely. I was stuck in a class with beginner babies and a teacher who didn’t want to teach me but had no other choice because the dads owned the rink.
It was so awful that I nearly quit until I remembered my favorite movie. It hadn’t survived the accident, going down in the car with the moms and I’d never watched it again. But I figured if Lexie could do it without her vision, then I could do it with my eyes closed.
Skate, one, skate, two, skate, three, I counted it off in my head as I turned in time not to hit the rounded wall of the rink.
The counting helped to center me more than anything, but I always started every morning warm up by ticking off the number of strides it took me to get from one end of the rink to the other, both length and width.
I’d done it so much at the rink that the dads owned in Minnesota that I could probably do my entire complicated Olympics routine with my eyes closed.
The training camp ice rink was considerably larger, so the counting wasn’t of as much import, but it soothed my frazzled nerves from the failed triple.
“Try again, Ciara,” Omar called again, his voice driving a stake into the Zen that I’d managed to gather over the past minute.
With a sigh, I followed his direction and picked up momentum.
Breathe, keep it tight,I could hear Alexei’s voice. Most of the time people fail the triple because they look at it like it’s their white whale. If you go into something with that attitude, how can you ever expect to achieve greatness?
I then remembered what I told Brynn, mimicking the words that she’d told me her mother used to say to her to calm her nerves.
Confident fly, nervous feet sink.
It was posted up all around the old house we all lived in and it had been what had given Brynn the courage to attempt a triple for the world to see.
I just needed enough confidence to try it again in front of a bunch of other athletes.
No big deal, right?
Flipping around, I lifted up off of my skates and into the air.
One, two, three,I counted and popped out, landing for just a breath on a single skate before wobbling and careening to the side.
“Shit,” I cursed loud enough for everyone in the arena to hear me, my tailbone smarting as I rolled onto my butt on the ice.
Omar seemed to concur. “Not bad. Not good either, but better than that awful first try.”
“Come on, Omar, she’s ten minutes over her time,” Felicite, one of the other figure skaters, whined in her posh British accent.
“No need to sweat,” I said, waving a hand over my head. “I’ll get off your ice just as soon as I put my ass bones back together.”
There was a rumble of laughter from the rest of the onlookers, the loudest from a redheaded man who was propped up on one of the low half walls.
I noticed him every time I’d come to skate for the past week. I wasn’t sure what he did on the ice, but he was a bit too bulky to be a figure or speed skater. That left curling as all of the hockey players at the training camp were in a different rink entirely.
Rolling to my knees, I got to my feet with some difficulty. My tailbone felt tender, but my hip was definitely going to be a mottled mess by the end of the night.
Skating to the exit, I took the skate guards that Omar was holding up and slipped them onto the blades of my skates.
“There,” I said, giving Felicite a cheeky wave. “You may now enter for your ice time, your highness.”
The woman’s pale features flushed pink all the way to the roots of her white-blonde hair.
Felicite tilted her pointed nose up into the air. “I don’t know why you’re giving me attitude. You were the one who went over time.”
“Because I was still working with her, Felicite, don’t forget that this is my workshop and my ice,” Omar warned, his stony features becoming even rockier as he rounded on the other woman.
Felicite’s mouth opened and closed with shock, clearly not used to being checked by, well, anyone.
“Now get your ass on the ice and warm up. You still need to perfect your twos.”
There was a twittering of giggles from the other skaters who were hanging around. They’d clumped into groups last month as soon as we arrived, forming cliques that I had no desire to be a part of.
I only had one friend in Scotland and she was currently barreling headfirst in my direction.
“God, what a cunt,” Maeve snickered as she looped an arm through mine and handed me my duffel. “Don’t you listen to her, she’s got a stick so far up her arse I’m surprised she doesn’t taste wood.”
Maeve had been one of the other skaters on Team Ireland at the Olympics this year and had glued herself to my side as soon as we all introduced ourselves the week before the opening ceremony.
She was the loudest on the team, her curly brown hair often taking on a life of its own as she argued with anyone who would listen—more often than not whoever was doing her hair and trying to tame the wildness of it.
Green eyes flicked over to me, questioning my continued silence to her chattering, but I was too busy staring at my phone which I’d just pulled from my bag.
The screen had immediately lit up with a message from Alexei, one of the people I was trying my best to avoid at the moment.
ALEXEI: Ciara, you can’t ignore us forever. Please talk to us. I was waiting to say this in person but I’m sorry for yelling at you in the hospital… I was very scared and lashed out.
“How could you let this happen, Ciara, you were supposed to be looking out for her! How could you let her go hang out with other figure skaters without you?” The memory of Alexei’s voice ghosted through my mind.
I dropped my phone back into the bag as if it had burned me.
“Those people still trying to talk to you?” Maeve asked, wheeling around so she could get a better look at my face.
Her freckled nose wrinkled. “You should just ignore them. They don’t deserve you.”
“They’re my family.” I shook my head, feeling a little annoyed with the shorter woman in front of me for talking badly about the people I cared most for in the world.
Even if I’d lost them at the moment.
I hadn’t stuck around long in the hospital after Brynn had been hit by that car in Norway. I couldn’t fathom sitting there and looking at the anger in Alexei’s eyes or the confusion in Brynn’s from losing the memory of the greatest moment in her life.
It was all my fault. Had I not left Brynn with that damn hockey player she would have been safe and happy.
But I’d wanted to push her out of her comfort zone and my instincts had told me to trust the suave Alec Nashtos. One of the biggest mistakes of my life.
If I ever saw that man again I was going to set him on fire.
Maeve, oblivious to the anger boiling just underneath the surface of my skin, scoffed. “Are they though? Family doesn’t hurt you like this. They should be ashamed of themselves. If you were to come back to Ireland with me at the end of this you wouldn’t have to deal with them anymore.”
That was enough from her.
“Maeve—” I snapped, wheeling around to give her a piece of my mind. She may have been my friend, but that did not mean she knew me. Not really.
She knew nothing of my time in Ireland before the moms came to get me. She knew nothing of waking up in the hospital to a new, grieving family that—despite being the reason they’d lost their loved ones—accepted me completely and showed me what a family should be like.
“Ladies,” a deep voice cut off the verbal lashing I was about to give her and we turned to find one of the other athletes approaching us.
“Connor!” Maeve trilled, her attention leaving me so completely that it nearly made me dizzy with whiplash.
She’d spent the past month obsessed with the burly Scottish curler, but had always been too afraid to actually talk to him.
Connor was six-foot-four and loomed even over me as he came to join us with the rest of the curlers in tow. If Brynn had been here she would have leaned over with a giggle and called him a real beefcake.
“Am I interrupting something?” Connor asked, dark eyes moving from Maeve to me and back to Maeve again. Apparently, Maeve had been doing something right, because Connor’s full attention was on the omega figure skater.
Maeve’s freckled cheeks flushed a bright red and she shook her head, shooting me a strange look. “No, we were just talking about our practice, right Ceer?”
I didn’t like when she used the nickname my family called me, but I barely heard it as my eyes met a pair of green ones over Connor’s left shoulder.
That same curler who’d laughed the loudest earlier was now hovering just behind his teammate, his red-gold beard twitching with a smile as our gazes met.
He was certainly handsome. Gold freckles splashed across his sharp nose before disappearing entirely in his neatly trimmed facial hair. The hair on his head, which was a shade lighter and more red than his beard, floated in wild waves around his face like a lion’s mane.
He was a hair shorter than the mountain that was Connor, but wider in the shoulders as he shot me a half-smile that made something flutter deep in my stomach.
I hadn’t felt attracted to someone since before leaving Norway. It had been like Brynn’s accident had numbed me for everything but skating. But now those deadened nerve endings seemed to be lighting right back up as the curler and I locked gazes, oblivious to Connor’s friendly rumble and Maeve’s nervous squeak.
“We’d love to come out tonight.” Maeve looked as if she was about to vibrate right out of her skin as she spoke.
“We?” I asked, looking away from the intense eyes still locked on to my face and over at my friend. “Where are we going?”
Maeve looped her arm back through mine and yanked me down so that she could whisper into my ear. “To the pub, Ceer, weren’t you paying attention?”
I frowned and whispered back to her: “I don’t want to go to the pub.”
“Please,” Maeve begged, giving my arm a shake. “I’ll never make another peep about your family again.”
I really just wanted to go back to the hotel, curl up into a ball, and watch one of my musicals. It had been my routine since arriving in Scotland after the Olympics.
Hairspraywas definitely calling my name, but Maeve’s pleading look and the promise of not talking about my family anymore was too good a carrot to pass up.
“For one drink,” I finally gave in, but Maeve was barely listening.
“We’re in!” she said, already turning back to a grinning Connor.
One drink would be fine, and then I would let Link Larkin and Tracy Turnblad put me right to sleep afterward.
My plan to leave early lasted all of an hour.
Pints at the pub quickly turned into the entire group that was made up of speed skaters, figure skaters, and led by the curlers, heading for the club.
Lights flashed red, purple, and blue as I watched the dancers writhe together on the dance floor in their skimpy clubbing outfits.
Normally, I’d be right in there with them. There was nothing I loved more than the pulse of music and the slide of skin as the electricity of it made everyone feel alive.
But I couldn’t find it in myself tonight, so instead I sat at the bar watching as Maeve and Connor danced close enough to start a house fire and sipped on a poorly mixed lemon drop.
In the few hours since practice had ended, I’d gotten two more texts from my family. One from a still confused Brynn asking what she’d done to make me leave and one from Aurelia telling me she misses me and to make sure I was eating regularly.
Each one made me feel guiltier than the last and I very nearly called Brynn to apologize and explain everything to her, but then I remembered the dads’ decision to let her get her memory back on her own.
It had been the last thing we’d argued about at the Olympic village as we packed to go our separate ways and I wasn’t about to make them even more disappointed in me than they already were.
“Is that as disgusting as it looks?” a deep voice with a thick Scottish burr asked over the thump of the music.
Glancing up, I found the same redheaded curler from earlier sliding onto the stool next to me.
He’d swapped out his sweats and t-shirt from practice for a black button down and I couldn’t help but notice the flex of his arms as he lifted a hand to get the bartender’s attention.
He was built like a truck, and if I had been the me before the Olympics I would have immediately turned on my signature Ciara Callaghan charm.
Instead I frowned at my drink and shook my head. “No? Why?”
A huff of laughter rumbled out of him. “Because every time you take a drink you make a face.”
“I do not,” I told him primly, taking another sip of my drink for good measure. “See?”
The man lifted his pointer and brushed it in between my eyebrows, smoothing out the furrow that I hadn’t realized had formed. “Really?”
I was torn between leaning into the man’s touch and jerking away, eventually picking the latter.
“Can I help you with something or do you make a habit of bothering women drinking alone?” I asked getting ready to stand and tell Maeve I was going to head out for the night.
The man didn’t seem put off by the sharpness in my voice, in fact, it seemed to energize him.
“Leith Dougall.” He pointed at himself and then at me. “Ciara Callaghan.”
“Is this some weird ‘me Tarzan, you Jane’ pick-up line?” I asked, pushing down the sudden bubble of laughter in my chest. I didn’t need to give him any more ammunition for his misguided flirting attempts.
Even if he was cute, I wasn’t going to allow myself to touch thanks to my self-imposed penance. But it seemed my visitor was a stubborn one.
“If it works, then it works,” he said, shrugging as his grin widened even more.
“Well, it doesn’t.”
It felt good to see my comment wipe the self-satisfied smirk off of his face. I shot him a sharp, toothy smile before slipping off of the stool and disappearing into the crowd.
I was halfway through the club when I felt his presence behind me and one glance over my shoulder confirmed that I was being pursued by the bulky curler.
It should have irritated me. I’d verbally castrated men for less, but instead an odd thrill shot through me at the thought of being chased.
Every one of my words had been sharp, and quite frankly, mean, but that didn’t seem to put Leith Dougall off. No, instead he was on my tail and it sent an excited shiver down my spine.
Stepping out into the crisp night air, people swirled around us, but at this moment I wasn’t sure if they actually existed or not or if the man behind me and I had stepped into our own little dimension.
Then I got my first true taste of his scent.
Crisp and sweet, the man smelled of fresh granny smith apples. It was mouth-watering to say the least and I very nearly pressed my nose to his neck upon turning to face him.
He was an alpha—like me—but that did little to cool the sudden wave of desire washing through me.
“What do you want?” I asked, swallowing down hard to keep myself from seeking out that apple scent even more.
Green eyes met mine and I sucked in a shocked breath at the lust I saw reflected in them.
“I think you know what I want,” he murmured, his words practically a mush in my ears.
Squaring my shoulders, I tossed my hair and tilted my chin defiantly up at him. “I don’t think you can handle me.”
The corner of Leith’s mouth pulled up into a dry smirk. “I think you’re going to be very surprised at how much I can handle, wee one.”
I blinked with surprise. It had been ages since anyone had dared to call me small. I towered over everyone in my family except the dads and most of the figure skaters could fit in my pocket.
But next to Leith Dougall, I must have looked positively tiny.
Later, as my back was slammed up against the wall of my hotel room and Leith’s lips danced over my pulse, I realized I was going to be breaking a lot of my rules tonight.
I’d decided early on that romance wasn’t in the cards for me. Sex, yes, but anything past that was a hard no.
After seeing what a bad marriage had done to my Mam and Aurelia, but also how the end of the dads’ good marriages had shredded them into bits… I was firmly on the side of never falling in love.
So I kept my rules simple.
No relationships past sex, no bringing them back into my space, and definitely avoid sleeping with someone you are going to have to see often.
But as Leith’s fingers slid down the zipper of my red dress, all the rules that I’d practically tattooed on the inside of my brain started to get blurry.
My dress hit the floor and the pale bra and panties I was wearing soon followed it. My skin tingled as his green eyes burned a path down my body appreciatively and then I watched as he aggressively unbuttoned his shirt, nearly popping buttons off in his haste.
His hands went to the button of his trousers and he paused, glancing up at me.
“Do we need condoms?” Leith asked. “I haven’t had sex in a year and I’m clean.”
Somewhere deep in my mind where my logical, clear-minded self had been shoved, little alarm bells were going off at that.
“Not if you don’t want. I’m on birth control.” The best that was on offer, actually. My doctor described it as the Lexus of birth control. A joke, but it always came to mind whenever situations like this came up.
Leith, whose skin had become flushed from our near dead-sprinted hustle up the stairwell of the hotel, examined my face carefully before he nodded and the sound of his trousers dropping filled the room.
“You good for the first round here?” he asked, his palm sliding behind my ass and left thigh before hitching it around his waist.
My body shuddered with anticipation at his mention of there being more than one round, and instead of answering, I reached in between our hips to press the thick head of his cock at my soaked entrance.
Leith didn’t need further instructions and soon he was pressing inside, the girth of his cock a shock to my system at first.
It had only been a few months since I’d last had sex, but the beta I’d spent the night with in Norway had nothing on the massive Scotsman currently trying to fit what felt like a bat in my pussy rather than a cock.
“Oh, wait a second,” I gasped, my nails digging into the top of his shoulders as we both hissed with pain.
“Sorry,” Leith apologized sheepishly, his hips stilling completely.
Then, much to my surprise, the man lifted me away from the wall and started to rub comforting circles up and down my back until the pain ebbed and I was left with only the feeling of complete fullness.
Normally, I would have bitten the face off of any man who tried to patronize me by treating me like a baby. I wasn’t some omega who needed to be soothed and it grated on my skin when men tried to do it to me.
But for some reason the massive hands on my back didn’t make my hackles rise. It was the complete opposite in fact.
Something about the contact sent little shockwaves of pleasure right to my clit and soon I found my hips starting to roll against him, urging him on despite the last echoes of pain as I adjusted to his width.
Leith’s mouth found mine and I was lost in it as he lifted my body up against the wall again, the cool surface making gooseflesh rise on my arms and legs. He used the flat surface to leverage me and he began to slowly start to thrust.
I could feel the slowly swelling edge of his knot each time he bottomed out inside of me and it made me moan each time.
I wonder what that feels like inside, I thought hazily as I looped my arms around his neck and held on for dear life.
The thought was naughty—even for me—most alphas refused to knot or lock each other. It was almost taboo and some disagreed whether or not it could physically even be done.
I’d never considered it much, preferring the company of betas. Betas didn’t crave bonds and commitment the way omegas and alphas did, which made them easier to deal with.
But now as his knot edged just inside of my cunt, I was more than curious.
Breaking away from his hungry lips, I looked down at him, taking in his flushed features and blown pupils. “Have you ever knotted another alpha?”
Leith’s hips jerked roughly and we both moaned.
“No, I haven’t,” he rumbled, but judging by the swell of his cock inside of me I knew how he felt about it. “But I wouldn’t do it unless we worked up to it. I can feel your lock right now and I’m worried it would snap my cock clean off if I tried.”
It had been a while since someone had mentioned my lock. Beta men usually loved the twisting muscles that were supposed to clench and keep an omega’s cock deep inside of me.
“Do you like the way it feels?” I clenched down experimentally, relishing the open-mouth shudder that it pulled from the massive alpha inside of me.
“Probably more than I should,” he admitted through a ragged gasp, his weight pressing me hard into the wall as his hips slammed forward. “I don’t think I’m going to last long.”
He said something in Gaelic, a curse I was pretty sure, before his lips bore down on mine again and our tongues danced together.
Wedging a hand in between us, I pressed down hard on my swollen clit, determined to come at the same time as him.
Everything was a white-hot blank after that. My insides clenched hard as I came and I could vaguely hear his shout and feel the spread of warmth inside of me as he followed suit.
Then I was lying on the hotel bed on my back, Leith on top of me and our chests pressed together. I could hear the hurried beat of his heart that nearly matched my own and the rise and fall of his body as he sucked in ragged gulps of air.
Despite every rule in my book, I still couldn’t help but run my fingers through his red hair.
A rattling purr of pleasure left the alpha as he pressed lazy kisses to my neck.
“Give me a couple of minutes and I can go again,” he told me, his breath on my ear making me shudder with delight.
I should have told him to go at that moment. Had I known what my future would hold, I would have saved us both the heartache.
But instead, I just leaned in close and whispered, “If you can get it up again I’ll let you take me from behind.”
Even as I spoke, I felt him start to stiffen inside of me and he lifted his head up to grin at me.
“You sure know how to sweet talk a man, don’t you, mo ròs?”
This time I was a rose and the nickname sent a warm flush through me. Then he was flipping me over and sliding inside of me again and we were once again lost to each other.