2. Mads
TWO
Mads
Ten stared right at me with a look of recognition and even a hint of a smile.
He was gorgeous—there was no getting away from that.
From his chiseled cheekbones to his green eyes, he was a step away from pretty.
My reaction to him was visceral. He was exactly the kind of man I liked to spend time looking at.
Tennant Rowe. On one hand, star center and a team player with excellent hockey sense, and on the other, gorgeous, sexy, and fodder for a million fan fantasies.
I need to focus on the hockey. I have nine years on him, and he’s a family friend. I decided to repeat that until I’d settled down the appreciation that had filtered into my thoughts. So, I focused on the hockey.
Even at eleven or twelve, whatever he’d been when we’d last met, it had been obvious that Tennant had the Rowe hockey genes—the potential to be better than his brothers, even.
Not that Brady or Jamie had ever let him be better.
Brotherly love had not extended to letting Ten get goals on them, or hell, even get the extra potato at dinner.
Their competitiveness would have stifled a lesser kid, but not Ten—he’d thrived on it.
“What do you know about Tennant Rowe?” Head Coach Mike Benning had asked me before the trade. “You played with Brady, right?”
I’d almost felt like my opinion mattered right then, as if my having prior knowledge of Ten’s brother Brady meant that when I spoke, Coach would actually listen.
Not that he didn’t listen, don’t get me wrong—he was a good guy underneath the stern-faced iciness.
He was just really focused on the forwards.
It was one of the things the team was fucking up, not that I was saying that out loud just yet.
I had camp to get through yet, finding a core of D-men I could shape.
Then I’d be saying exactly what I thought to Coach Benning, and he could like it or not.
It would be too late to get rid of me then.
So yeah, he was right. I’d played with Brady in Juniors, part of the D-pair with him, and we’d been good.
More than good. He’d ended up first pick to Boston, and made it to captain so damn quick it had taken even me by surprise.
Then again, he’d always been a pushy bastard who’d gone after what he wanted.
Me? My rise hadn’t been so fast, but I’d stood out at the Buffalo Sabres, done my part in getting us to the Stanley Cup finals.
Only my career was over, and Brady’s star was still shining. Go figure.
“You can’t judge Tennant by his brother,” I’d said, and I’d meant it.
Brady was a defenseman; big and ugly in the corners, with a spark that made him the best. Yeah, he was captain, yeah, he had some two-way skills, but he was no kind of forward like Ten, who had all the best top six attributes, like speed and puck smarts.
Ten was still staring, and I guessed that meant I was staring back.
I sketched a small wave, and he copied me, then one of the reporters asked him something and he was distracted away from me.
That was okay; wasn’t like we had anything to say except that small acknowledgment of familiarity.
I’d checked him out on Google when Coach had asked me, seen the standard NHL photos.
One, in particular, had caught my eye. Ten in Dallas colors, stick behind his neck, smiling, his lips in a pout, eyes bright.
He’d sure grown up all kinds of sexy, but given the number of photos of him and various female models, he was the wrong kind of sexy for me.
Anyway, let’s face it, Brady would kill me if I went anywhere near his brother.
After all, he’d walked in on the threesome thing in Montreal and been faced with me, a busty brunette, and this built-like-a-brick-outhouse guy, both of whom had been…
Well, yeah, Brady had sworn he needed eye bleach, since then his opinion of me had placed me firmly in the region of whore.
Pretty accurate for the most part, at least until game five of round three, when I’d had an argument with the boards that had taken me out of a playoff game and then out of professional hockey altogether. Nothing like having your body let you down to stop your whoring ways.
I pulled myself out of thinking about Ten and his brothers when Coach Benning skated up to me.
“And?” he asked under his breath.
“And what?”
“The kid look good to you?”
“Who?”
“Tennant Rowe,” he said with a hint of impatience, like I was stupid.
I could wax lyrical about the lithe body in the obviously brand-new Railers hoodie, or the way his green eyes sparkled in the bright rink lights.
Hell, I could even talk about how broad his back had seemed pressed up against the glass before he turned.
But that wasn’t what Coach was after; he wanted some instant insight into talent.
I had so much I wanted to say at that point.
Something along the lines of the Railers being lucky to have someone with his stats, that the kid was a man now, who had the potential to lead the team into a good year.
Maybe even playoffs. I was desperate to say that Coach shouldn’t fuck it up.
I didn’t say a word. My shrug was the way I’d started talking to the man who couldn’t tell a good player from a bad one.
Benning muttered something that sounded distinctly like it included the words “asshole” and “fuck.” I was used to that now. We had what the team liked to call an interesting relationship. I called it a fucked-up mess, but I knew it wasn’t all him.
A flurry of cursing and laughter, and the ten rookies I had with me that day were out on the ice.
I looked at them objectively as they stretched and skated lazy circles to warm up.
We had six spots on the team, four of which were already filled by some of the best D-men I’d seen in a long time.
Which left spots for two out of the ten who were there for training.
I already had my eye on Travis MacAllister.
He’d spent last year on the minor team that fed the Railers, shown promise, been called up a couple of times but not dressed for the game.
Mac, as he was known, was so close to making the team proper, and he knew it, cocky son of a bitch.
I liked that in a defenseman—confidence in his abilities, that he could push anyone into the boards and walk away smiling.
I put him with this new kid—bright eyed, ruling-the-world kind of confidence radiating from every pore.
He was a six-five Swede with a goofy, big-toothed smile, and appeared inoffensive at first look, but Arvid “Arvy” Ulfsson was anything but harmless.
He had potential behind that smile and spent a lot of time at the net, scrappy and relentless.
His weakness was his desperate need to get in on the attack, and he needed to settle his position with his mark before he got all fancy and tried to take shots at the net.
The rest were a mix of guys who shone and some who didn’t. All of them deserved a place on the minor team, but whether they’d stand up well as part of the Railers was another matter.
I partnered Arvy and Mac in the three-on-two, switched them out, concentrated really hard on the edge work, on the checks they followed through, on the ones they didn’t… or as hard as I could when Ten was sitting and watching.
I wonder what Ten thinks? Is he taking mental notes like me? He’d grown up practicing against his brothers, both NHL stars in their own right. Was he watching this scrimmage and thinking that the defense could be better? Was he judging Arvy and Mac? Is he judging me? Why do I care?
By the end of the practice, I’d mentally crossed five of the guys off the list. Telling them that they weren’t being offered contracts was hard, but they had to learn, right?
The NHL was the shining target, the Stanley Cup, the original six, a hundred years of history.
Not everyone was guaranteed a seat at the table their first year out.
One of them, a hulking bulk of a guy, seemed to want to say something, but I stood my ground, like only the best kind of enforcer could, and he subsided with a rueful grin.
I couldn’t blame any of the guys for their disappointment—enforcers were pushy and ultra-confident by trade, and you couldn’t expect them to switch it off as soon as practice ended.
By the end of session one, I had five left, and the uneasy feeling that Ten was staring at my every move.
I excused it as being because I was familiar to him, a family friend, someone he used to shoot against as a teenager on the odd occasions I would stay at the Rowe house and we’d play pick up hockey.
When I casually skated a loop to bring myself up against the goalie coach, I glanced up at the seats where Ten and the rest had been sitting, but there was only empty space.
They’d left, and for a second I was disappointed.
I’d kind of hoped to have a chat with him afterward. What about, I didn’t know.
The last thing you did was ask Tennant Rowe how his brothers were, or make a comment about the most recent Brady/Jamie success.
Not that he wasn’t proud, I was sure—they were a close family, and one I had envied as an only kid with an absent mother, but still…
Ten had spent a long time making his own name.