12. CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Up!” Maxim Peterson’s voice cracked over the ice as the puck slid down the center line and we were off after it.
I pushed one of the wingers out of the way as the centers vied for the little black disc. I couldn’t quite place his name, but I was pretty sure his nickname was Breaker.
The kid went down easy enough and I heard one of the coaches shout his name, confirming that I was correct.
I’d been with the Seattle Stallions for a month now. It was a crazy thing to come onto a team that was just coming off of a championship win. They all buzzed with the kind of energy that gave me a contact high.
Every practice—even though we weren’t technically even in the preseason yet—was packed full of drills that left my legs throbbing at the end of each day.
A whistle pierced the air, stopping everyone in their tracks.
“Come on in!” Alexei barked from where he stood with his brother and the rest of the assistant coaches.
When I’d first met with them, I’d been curious about the twin coaches that had taken over the hockey world from seemingly out of nowhere. They’d spent the better part of a decade in a tiny town in Minnesota at a rundown ice rink, after all.
But I also knew that ice was in their blood. From their figure skating coach parents, to the nearly professional college hockey career. They’d even coached a bit over fifteen years ago before abruptly stopping after the deaths of their wives in a car accident.
Most of what I could find on the internet about them was surface level and earlier articles barely mentioned their three daughters. It wasn’t until Brynn Peterson had gone public with the two alphas that were currently skating toward our coach and Aurelia Peterson had mated into a billionaire pack that they appeared in the media at all.
Ciara Callaghan was the most elusive of the three sisters. Of course, her exploits as a late bloomer figure skater were available at the click of a button. Other than that she didn’t have any social media and rarely stepped out at public events with her family.
It made me feel like an absolute scuzzball to even try and look any deeper.
…But at the same time she kept running away from me.
The first time I’d seen her in the hallway after coming to Seattle her eyes had widened like she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing… and then she turned and ran headlong in the opposite direction.
Nash, who had been right behind me, told me not to take it to heart and that Ciara was… complicated.
As if I hadn’t already gotten that much after she’d completely rocked my world that night in Scotland and then disappeared.
It felt like every single night she danced behind my eyelids and her scent lingered on my tongue.
A scent match.
I didn’t think it could happen with another alpha, and yet here I was thinking about her while my coaches were talking.
“Park, are you even listening to me?” Cookie, the defense coach shouted from his place next to Maxim. “Get the cotton out from between your ears, you’re in the middle of practice!”
The other players who were standing closest scooted away from me, probably afraid of incurring the coach’s wrath.
“Sorry, Coach,” my apology was immediate. I’d learned early on that arguing with a coach just got you and the rest of your team a bunch of drills that were sure to make you vomit up half a kidney.
Cookie looked like he wanted to tear into me a bit more, probably to show me—the new guy—that he meant business. I didn’t mind it. People yelling at me never made me feel anything other than bored.
My mother’s side of the family were some of the loudest group of humans I’d ever met, so Cookie had nothing on them.
Cookie, seeming to find no fault with my demeanor, finally huffed a sigh. “Fine, make sure you don’t zone out again.”
There was a rumbling of snickers from the men around me that I ignored, giving him a resolute nod.
I managed to get through the rest of practice without getting my head bit off, though I was completely drenched in sweat by the time we finally made our way off of the ice.
“Don’t take it to heart, Wiz,” Nash said as he skated to catch up to me. His alpha counterpart, Dutch, quickly flanked my other side.
“Yeah, Cookie’s like that with everyone. He’ll warm up eventually and be a total sweetheart to you.”
“It didn’t really bother me,” I told them as we put our skate guards on. My back ached and I was really looking forward to taking the hottest shower I could stand once we got back into the locker rooms.
Dutch snorted and shook his head with disbelief. “Doesn’t seem like anything gets you riled up, huh? Keep it up and we’re going to rename you inner peace or some shit like that.”
I gave him a gentle shove with my elbow. I liked Dutch. Out of all of the guys on the team he seemed to operate on the same wavelength as I did.
“Says the man who apologized to the barista when she was the one who dropped his coffee this morning,” Nash teased, peering around me at his packmate.
The burly alpha glared at him and reached behind my back to give the man a shove.
We got up and headed to the locker rooms, Nash throwing an arm over my shoulders as we walked.
The inside was already filled with steam thanks to all of the showers being on full blast and I set to work peeling myself out of my pads.
It was the best feeling in the world to take them off at the end of a particularly rough practice and I rubbed at my red, sweaty skin and I gathered my shower stuff.
I was the last in, and as always, I had to use the janky stall at the end of the long row. Upon my arrival, the guys told me there was a hierarchy to the showers—probably their way of hazing the new guys.
Josh Corning was in the same boat as me and he gave me a resolute nod as he soaped off.
The stall wasn’t horrible by any means, but it was a tad smaller than the rest and the tiles never seemed to warm up no matter how hot you set the water. Then there was the pressure. While the rest of the guys were putting their showers in the jet setting and letting it pound away at their stiff muscles, the shower head in my stall had only one setting: trickling rain shower.
Turning the knob as hot as I could get it, I showered off quickly, letting the boiling water ease the stiffness in my neck and shoulders.
By the time I stepped out, the guys were already back in the main part of the locker room joking around as they dressed in their regular clothes.
The mention of Ciara’s name amongst the rumbling talk immediately made me perk up and focus in on one of the guys—who I was pretty sure was named Richter.
“I saw Callaghan this morning, I swear she’s the hottest woman in this entire damn place,” the man was saying as he combed his hair in the little mirror magnetized to his locker door.
“Oi, Rich, I thought you weren’t supposed to talk about her anymore,” said the guy standing at the locker next to him. “Didn’t the coaches tell you off last time?”
“Yeah, I swear this guy has been rejected more times than I can count and yet he still keeps coming back for more,” another guy shouted and the locker room erupted into a mass of rumbling laughter.
“Successful people reject rejection,” Richter said, putting on a lofty accent that made the guys around him burst into another fit of chuckles. “One of these days she’s going to say yes. She rode the quake once and she’ll do it again.”
“All right, Tolstoy, shut the fuck up before you get yourself in trouble,” his locker neighbor said, giving the man a playful shove.
Something about the way he was talking about her grated against my skin and I tilted my chin up, ready to tell the asshole off. But I never got the chance because Nash was passing me by with a towel still wrapped around his waist.
Nash crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the other man. “Hey, what part of leaving my sister alone did you not get, Richter? I like you, but even this is starting to get weird and creepy.”
Dutch hovered just behind me and when I turned to look at him he just shook his head as if to tell me to let Nash do what he was going to do.
“Is that stepsister or sister-in-law, Nash?” one of the other guys asked jokingly, probably trying to lighten up the situation.
The laughter was much more muted now as Nash continued to stare Richter down.
“Nash, man, you know I don’t mean it like that.” Richter put his hands up in front of him in surrender.
The tendon in Nash’s jaw ticked with irritation. “Then how did you mean it? When someone tells you no, then I highly advise taking it at face value.”
“Or what?” Richter asked, abandoning his contrite attitude entirely.
“Or Ciara will tear your balls off. I don’t need to defend her, she’s perfectly capable of doing it herself.”
There was a beat of thick silence as the two alphas glared at one another.
“Is there a problem?” Casper, the team captain, asked as he was the last to step out of the showers.
In the few weeks I’d been playing for the Stallions, it had become evident that the broad-shouldered alpha was the peacekeeper of the team.
As if on cue, Dutch passed me and put a hand on his packmate’s shoulder, a silent request to just let it go.
Nash’s jaw finally unclenched and he shook his head. “No. No problem here.”
The two alphas left Richter alone and made their way to the other end of the locker room where their lockers were.
Richter muttered something under his breath, his eyes finding mine.
“You got something to say, newbie?” he barked.
I wanted to put my fist in his face, or at least tell him off, but Casper’s dark eyes were locked on to me and I couldn’t risk getting in trouble while I was still on probation.
So instead, I just rolled my eyes and went to join Dutch and Nash.
“Do I sound like that guy?” I asked as I tugged my sweatshirt over my head. “When I talk about her?”
They had been kind enough to invite me out with the older players, and five beers in, I’d confessed all of my feelings for the gorgeous alpha whose scent felt like mine.
Dutch eyed me from where he was trimming his dark gold beard. “No. You sound more pathetically obsessed than he does, but not in a bad way.”
Nash smiled for the first time since leaving the shower.
“‘She’s just so pretty and I want her to step on me,’ sounds familiar?” he said, pitching his voice much higher than what mine actually was as he mimicked the drunk words that had tumbled out of my mouth last week.
“Shut up,” I grumbled, my face warming.
The two alphas shared twin chuckles.
Nash’s grin widened like he had a secret. “Well, kid, you’re in luck today. Don’t say we don’t ever do anything for you.”
I frowned, confused. “What do you mean?”
Dutch’s beard twitched. “Just finish getting ready.”
I sped through the rest of my grooming and both Dutch and Nash were waiting for me once I finished.
We made our way through the locker room, waving bye to the guys who were still hanging around.
“Ciara is picking up a set of keys from us today,” Dutch explained as he opened the door to the locker room and we found the woman in question leaning against the wall with a bored expression as Richter talked at her.
At the sound of the doors opening, Ciara’s blinked, her eyes focusing on Dutch and Nash and then finally at me.
The same panicked expression she always got when she looked at me filled her face and I could almost read her thoughts screaming at her to run away.
Richter took one look at us and turned and hurried down the hallway, leaving the four of us alone.
“You didn’t actually need me to go to Thea’s old place to pick something up for her, did you?” Ciara growled, her head whipping over so that she could glare at Nash.
“Come on, Ceer, you should have known it was a trap.” Nash grinned and reached out to ruffle her hair, earning himself a slap. “You’ve got to talk to him at some point.”
“I much prefer tucking my tail and running,” Ciara mumbled, her eyes sliding over to me. For a moment I was afraid that I’d find disdain in their honeyed brown depths.
But instead I found the same thing I saw when we were in Scotland: attraction.
“That is so unlike you, our brave little sister,” Dutch teased.
Ciara’s lips pursed into a deep frown. “I’m tattling to Brynn. Good luck getting any sex tonight.”
The two alphas blanched as if they hadn’t considered that to be a possibility when they were scheming.
“Ceer—” Nash started but Ciara cut him off.
“Don’t ‘Ceer’ me, Nashtos. Now off with you. Apparently, I have to have a conversation that I wasn’t ready to have,” Ciara said, shooing them away.
They left, looking a little bit deflated. Ciara crossed her arms over her chest and shot me a look that was completely guarded, the earlier desire in her eyes gone completely.
“You wanted to talk, so talk.”
My mouth dried completely because Ciara wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been ready for this conversation.
How was I supposed to verbalize even a miniscule percentage of what I was thinking and feeling? How was I supposed to tell someone who clearly wasn’t looking for a relationship that we were scent matches?
So, instead of all of that, I offered her what I hoped was a friendly smile.
“How about we grab some coffee?”