Pucking My Best Friend’s Dad (Silver Fox Hockey #1)

1. Prologue – Kieran

Prologue – Kieran

The gala has been going for two hours when I take the elevator up.

This is earlier than is professionally appropriate.

The Bellamy's Tremont ballroom still has most of its crowd, and the league expects a showing from the Barons through the end of the program, which runs until ten.

I have been here since six-thirty. I have done the program.

I have done the receiving line and the table remarks and the forty-minute stretch at the bar where Declan introduces me to the people he needs me to meet.

I have done all of it correctly, and now I am in an elevator at nine-twelve on a Wednesday night in October, in a suit that cost more than my first car, carrying the tiredness that comes from three hours of being exactly who other people need you to be.

The seventeenth floor is quiet. Cream carpet, wall sconces, the silence of a hotel corridor at the end of an evening.

Suite 1714 is the same as all well-appointed rooms at the Bellamy.

I have slept in this suite, or one that's identical to it, four or five times since the Barons started using the Bellamy for league events.

I know the layout without having to look for it.

The entry foyer, the sitting area, the credenza with the comp bottle the front desk leaves when they recognize the name on the reservation.

I unpack the bag on the luggage rack so I can take a shower.

I come out of the bathroom in a towel and there is a woman standing in my suite.

She is in the doorway, just inside it, one heel still clearing the threshold, shoulder against the frame.

The door behind her is giving slowly on its hinges, the way heavy doors do when nobody's pushed them hard enough to catch the latch.

She is in a green dress, the kind that cost someone a great deal of money and is earning it tonight, and she has the look of someone who has been making very fast decisions in a situation that went sideways.

I reach back for the second towel without moving anything else.

Seven years of widowerhood have taught me a number of things.

One of them is what to do with my face when something unexpected happens in a room.

I know how to be still. I have trained for it: twenty-four years in a sport that had opinions about showing anything, four years of head coaching, and seven years in a city that stopped me at restaurants for eighteen months after the funeral to tell me how sorry they were. I know still.

She is also still. That's the first thing I notice, she's not flinching, not bolting. She is doing the same read I am, and doing it well, and the only tell is that one heel in the doorway that hasn't fully committed to coming in.

I tell her she can stay if she needs a minute. I tell her there's water on the credenza and bourbon if she wants something stronger. Then I go back to the bedroom and pull on the sweatpants and the long-sleeved tee, and I sit in the dark for a moment before I go back out.

She is in the chair with the bourbon. She has, in the time I was in the bedroom, closed my door from outside and come back in and taken the far chair and crossed her legs and taken off her shoes, and she is holding the glass in both hands the way you hold something you need to steady you.

I take the chair across from her, not the couch beside her, and pour myself two fingers from the bottle, and we sit in the quiet for long enough that it stops being uncomfortable.

Her name is Greer and she is twenty-six.

She came tonight as her best friend’s plus-one, and she has been running from an ex who committed the irredeemable cruelty of leaving and taking the dog.

She asks good questions. She is smarter than most of the room I left downstairs, which is a room full of people who run professional sports franchises, so that is not a small thing.

The bourbon is almost gone and the lamps are low.

Somewhere in the building an ice machine drops a new load, which is a sound I have woken to in hotel rooms for twenty-six years and stopped hearing a long time ago, except tonight I hear it.

There is a moment, some time later, when the conversation has run itself out and the quiet comes back, and we are both clear on what this is. I have not been unclear about it since approximately fifteen minutes after she sat down.

She stands up.

She crosses the room. Three steps, and she is in front of me with her knees touching the inside of mine, and she says: Tell me to stop and I will.

I look up at her. The lamp behind her is doing something with the green of the dress, and I cannot locate a single argument worth making.

I put my hands on her and I do not say stop.

What I notice, in the first minutes, is how long it has been since I have let myself want anything.

Not the wanting in the abstract — the wanting that lives in the chest the way cold lives in a bad joint, dull and always present.

That has not been absent in seven years.

What has been absent is letting it move.

Greer has her hands in my hair and her mouth at my jaw and I am, for the first time in a long time, not stopping myself.

She is warm and sharp and more careful than she is letting on. I am somewhere I thought I was done with going. My hands remember things I thought they had forgotten.

I lay her down and take my time, and she does not tell me to hurry.

The lamp stays on. Seven years of a quiet house, and I want to see her; the reality of her, the way she looks at me when I am above her, like I am something she was not expecting to find.

Her spine arching off the suite's expensive sheets.

The small sound she makes when I push into her, slowly, the way her fingers close on my forearm and hold.

Tomorrow is not a thing I am allowing myself o think about tonight.

What I am allowing is this — the way she fits under my hands, the way she laughs once, low, at something I say that I did not mean to be funny, the way she eventually stops being careful and just lets herself be here.

The lamp goes off somewhere in the middle of the night.

The last taxi on Tremont passes. We do not sleep for a long time.

* * *

I wake just before five to a room that is dark and very quiet.

The space beside me in the bed is empty. The sheets are still warm.

I lie there for a moment without moving. The ceiling in suite 1714 is the same one from all the league dinners for the past five years. I have looked up at it many times.

The green dress is gone. Her shoes are gone. From the sitting room, the credenza, the bourbon bottle capped and set back in its place.

She has been careful about leaving.

I sit up. The clock says four-fifty in the morning. I am forty-seven years old. I have just spent the night with the most interesting woman I have met in a very long time, and she is gone, and the only thing I know about her is her first name.

I sit at the edge of the bed in the dark for longer than I need to.

Tremont Street is starting up five floors below; a delivery truck, a taxi, the sound of a city that doesn't sleep for long.

The careful, reasonable man who has answered the right-thing-to-do question for seven years has a number of thoughts about tonight, and they are probably correct.

But right now, at four-fifty in the morning, I’m not interested in them.

Right now, I would just like to know her last name.