Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Second encounter
Hey, I’m super stressed, I have an exam the day after tomorrow. I could use a half hour of distraction…
I’ll be there in forty minutes.
April
(Five weeks later)
To Anna!” Lucy called out, raising her champagne glass. “For passing her exams and landing her dream job…”
“Oh God, Anna, why are you starting with the Hawks, of all people?” Dax interrupted his girlfriend, running both hands through his hair. “You’re so smart! Why do you want to work with stupid hockey players?”
Anna laughed loudly and took a sip from her glass. “I grew up with stupid hockey players. I don’t know anything else!” she replied, defending herself. “And life as a team doctor is relaxing compared to an emergency room or trauma surgery.”
“But you’ll be on the road all the time! You deserve a quiet life.”
“But I don’t want a quiet life,” she said, irritated.
“I want action! A few surprises. A few challenges. Meeting new people.” But above all, she wanted to be part of something, to stop staring out the windows of the world, watching idly, as she had done throughout her childhood and youth.
She wanted to be in the middle of it all.
She knew that Jack and Dax had intentionally shielded her from every argument with her parents.
They still kept every problem they had from her, so as not to burden her.
They wanted to make her life easier. She had had enough!
She didn’t want a life where she was spared all the time.
She wanted a…lively life. And that was exactly what she would get with the Hawks.
She would be responsible for solving problems, not her brothers.
Dax frowned. “Action?” he echoed. “Are you sure you’re not just saying that to upset us? You do that sometimes. Make impulsive decisions to provoke us, to show that you’re an adult.”
She snorted in amusement. “Is it nice in your solar system, where everything revolves around you, Dax?”
Her brother sighed heavily. “Come on, Anna. Why do you need action? That sounds dangerous. Not to mention sexy. I don’t like it.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to fight a dragon or screw a matador! Well…maybe. Really, I just want to have new experiences!”
“But…”
“Stop whining, Dax,” Lucy said. “It’s great that…”
“Anna, it’s not too late to turn down the job,” Jack interrupted, folding his hands on the table and looking at her seriously.
“I don’t know if you realize it, but the hours are insanely stressful.
And hockey players don’t like being told what to do and what not to do.
Besides, you’re going to have to touch a lot of half-naked men, and you’re just a little too young for that.
When you turn forty or something, you could… ”
“Of course it’s too late,” Penny replied angrily, smacking her boyfriend on the arm. “It would look unprofessional if she turned down a job on such short notice.”
“Unprofessional? Like sleeping with your team’s best player?” Jack reminded her, stunned. “Which you’ve been doing for the last few months.”
The owner of the L.A. Hawks pursed her lips. “Certainly I won’t be tonight, if you keep saying such stupid things.”
Anna snorted. She was in such a good mood that not even her brothers’ Neanderthal behavior could dampen her spirits.
It made her too damn happy that they were both concerned about her well-being.
Yes, true, the concern was unfounded, silly, ridiculous, and altogether intrusive.
So knew what made Dax “Devil” Temple and Jack “Saint” West tick: The two were simply stuck in time — Anna, however, wasn’t!
Not anymore. Tomorrow she would start her new job and all her dreams would finally come true.
She and her brothers were a family again.
After ten years of hard work, she was a full-fledged doctor with her dream job.
She would earn her own money, finally start her life. Be independent.
“See what you’ve done, Anna?” Dax said, shaking his head. “Your big brother might not get laid tonight because of you. So none of this is working. If you could just listen to us and quit…”
“Dax,” Lucy hissed, looking around. “We’re in a restaurant, not the locker room. Could you at least lower your voice when you say things like get laid? I don’t want to see a single headline before the playoffs start next week! Those two have caused me enough problems.”
She gestured to Jack and Penny, who were sitting across from them.
Penny blushed while Jack put his hand on the back of her neck and stroked it soothingly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The media hype has died down.”
That was true. Anna hadn’t seen any paparazzi hanging around her door for a week.
They had probably finally given up because none of the siblings had given a more detailed statement about their family situation.
It turned out Lucas had gotten worked up for nothing — and it had been downright rude of him to ghost her after Jack’s confession.
They could have continued having sex for the last five weeks!
Sure, it would be unprofessional to keep doing dirty things with each other now that she was a team employee, but…
her life had been unnecessarily orgasm-free for the last few weeks!
Thinking about him, she lowered the champagne glass and glanced at the phone in her lap. There was still one little thing missing from her perfect new beginning: an answer from goalie Lucas Moreau.
Can we talk again before I start as assistant doctor with the Hawks on Monday?
Anna stared at her own words, which had two blue check marks signaling read. He had read the message and ignored it.
Lucas had always replied. Then again, until Jack’s press conference five weeks ago, her messages had always been of a different nature. The word talk had never appeared in them, for instance.
Sighing softly, Anna looked up. He wouldn’t reply.
He was emphatically against stupid talking.
That was his motto in life. And talk seemed to include everything from Hello, how are you?
to You should get that mole on your back checked out by a dermatologist!
He had always replied to Hello with a raised eyebrow and dismissed the latter with a sigh, even if the next time she saw him naked, the mole had been gone. Hey, maybe he owed her his life!
Anna scooped up a spoonful of ice cream and shoved it into her mouth with relish.
She wasn’t going to let a stubborn ex-lover ruin her evening.
It was perfectly fine that he had ended it.
She hadn’t expected anything else. The timing was good.
The exams and the constant stress were behind her.
She didn’t need any distraction. No more offsetting sex. She had finally achieved her goal.
Still, her palms sweat when she realized she would most likely see Lucas tomorrow, and she wished that their arrangement…had ended on a friendlier basis.
No matter. The goalie would probably just ignore her, like her message.
“What we actually wanted to say,” Jack said, raising his voice, interrupting Lucy, who had been going on at length about everything that had been necessary to reduce the scandal surrounding Penny and Jack to a minimum. “We are impressed with you, Anna.”
She grinned broadly and dipped her spoon into the ice cream again. “Really? You have a strange way of showing it! Until now, I’ve only been criticized for my decision to professionally ensure that you’re doing well.”
“Hello? I brought you flowers!” Dax defended himself. “And it’s not like we’re not proud of everything you’ve achieved, we simply wish that you had achieved it a little further away from the L.A. Hawks.”
She snorted. “Tell me, do your fellow players know how much you hate and judge them?”
“We don’t hate them, we just know them incredibly well. That’s the problem,” Jack interjected quickly. “You can respect and love horny idiots — and at the same time, judge them for their behavior.”
“Oh, yes,” Anna confirmed, nodding seriously. “Just like I do with you, right?”
Dax grinned broadly and glanced at his brother. “You should have seen that coming. It was a perfect set-up.”
Anna just laughed while the other women at the table sighed deeply. “Anna, I have the utmost respect for you for putting up with both of these idiots for over twenty years. At least Lucy and I only have to deal with one each,” Penny said softly, but loud enough so that everyone could hear.
“Yes. And then there’s the studying and all the exams,” Lucy agreed. “I don’t know how you coped with all the stress. This last year must have been hell.”
That it had been, but… Anna lowered her gaze, smiling, and her thoughts automatically wandered to Lucas’ hands on her body, to his breathing in her ear. How can you talk while you’re coming?!
As heat flooded her cheeks, she cleared her throat. “Oh, I had my…stress management strategies,” she replied lightly, quickly shoveling more ice cream into her mouth to drive away the telltale warmth in her face.
“What kind?” Lucy asked. “I could use a few tips. My job stresses me out too. Yesterday, I had to explain to Charkov what a vulva was because he didn’t know the English word.
He wanted me to draw a picture and everything.
But hey!” Her face lit up. “You’re a doctor!
I’ll just send the next player with a question like that to you! ”
“No!” simultaneously came from Jack and Dax’s mouths.
“I’d love that,” Anna said, happily ignoring her brothers. “I guess most of them could use a little medical refresher, like on STIs.”
“Fantastic! Lucy, you should videotape the whole thing for our social media channels,” Penny interjected.
The redhead’s eyes lit up and Dax buried his face in his hands, groaning. “We should never have brought the three of them together, Jack,” he said, regretfully. “Everything that happens from now on is entirely our fault.”
The only way Jack could have looked more horrified was if someone had thrown his favorite stick into a wood chipper in front of him.
Lucy and Penny took this as an opportunity to laugh loudly.
“We’ve gone a little off topic,” the PR manager admitted, grinning at Anna. “You were about to tell me about your great stress management strategies.”
Crap. Anna had hoped she had forgotten. “I’ve been, uh…jogging a lot,” she said quickly, believing it was close to the truth. She had been jogging horizontally.
Lucy grimaced. “No, that’s not for me. If I want to sweat in public, I go to the sauna.”
Thank God, that was the end of the topic, because Anna really couldn’t say any more. Not to her brothers, not to the owner of the Hawks, and certainly not to the PR consultant who was supposed to nip any scandal involving the hockey players in the bud.
Anyway, even if it came out that she’d been sleeping with their goalie regularly for six months, that wouldn’t be a scandal. The scandal would only happen when Jack and Dax killed him.
Then again, how would they ever find out? The secret was safe with her. Just as no one knew she was planning to order a second ice cream to celebrate.
No more exams, no more stress. No more need for meaningless sex.
Maybe she should just find something…real?
Now that her life was really beginning? Her brothers, at least, seemed to be doing well with something real.
Maybe with them as role models, she could grow beyond short-term happiness and find new confidence in… medium-term happiness…?
The thought alone made her uneasy. What Dax and Jack had found was rare. In her experience, the only things that lasted in the long term were doubt and negative consequences.
“Are you nervous?” Penny pulled her out of her thoughts. “Because it’s a new job? A new head doctor that you have to impress?”
“No,” she answered honestly. “I’m good at what I do. The only thing that makes me nervous is…” She narrowed her eyes and looked back and forth between her brothers. “These two bad apples here.”
“Well, I see myself more as a delectable strawberry, the queen of fruits,” Dax said, shrugging. “But Jack is definitely an apple.”
“Because I’m the forbidden fruit that gives wisdom?”
Dax grinned. “Nah. Because you fall to the ground so often that you can explain gravity. Seriously, man. You were on the ice five times in the last game.”
Anna sighed heavily. “Can you shut up for a minute and listen? I need you to pull yourselves together, okay?”
“What do you mean?” Dax asked sanctimoniously.
She gritted her teeth. “When I run into you in the hallway or treat your injuries, you have to act normal! You will not ruffle my hair, you will not call me Annabanana, and above all, you will not give the others a stupid speech about not flirting with me or touching me!”
“No way, absolutely not,” Jack said.
Dax waved his hand dismissively. “C’mon, what do you think we are?”