Scoring the Single Mom's Heart (The St. Louis Blaze Hockey #2)

Chapter 1

CARTER

It was the buzzer I'd been hearing in my head since I was seven years old, the one that meant the game was over and somebody had won — except this time it was real, and it was us, and for one full second I just stood there on the ice with my stick raised and my brain refusing to process what my body already knew.

The noise from the stands hit a second later, eighteen thousand voices screaming at once, deafening, and the whole building dissolved into pandemonium — the ice and the stands both, one continuous wall of sound rolling down over the glass.

Then the bench emptied, and the world turned into noise and bodies, all of us piling on top of our goalie in a heap of pads and gloves and somebody's helmet skittering away across the ice, nobody able to hear a single word anyone else was screaming and nobody caring.

Somewhere in the middle of it I caught sight of Cole Hartley down on one knee on the ice, phone up, filming the stands — the section where his two kids were losing their minds next to their grandmother. Getting their faces. Keeping the night forever.

By the time we made it off the ice and down the tunnel, the celebration had already started without us — and the locker room was pure chaos. Pop. A champagne cork shot across the room and disappeared into the racket — and there was so much of it.

Twenty grown men screaming at the top of their lungs, sticks banging against the lockers, someone's speaker blasting something nobody could actually identify over the chaos, skates still half-on clattering against tile as guys tackled each other into the wall.

Champagne sprayed in every direction at once, arcing over shoulder pads and soaking through jerseys nobody had bothered to take off.

By the time a wave of it hit my face it was already warm, which didn't matter, because nothing about right now needed to be perfect.

It needed to be loud. It needed to be every single one of us shouting ourselves hoarse in a room that smelled like sweat and cheap bubbly, with not one single person in here trying to be quiet about any of it.

"MICHAELS." Ty Hendricks — our rookie, twenty-two and playing his first full season — had me by the back of the neck, shaking me like a dog with a toy, his face still streaked with the black under-eye grease that had melted halfway down his cheek during the third period.

Rookie energy, even after a year in the league — he hit every win like it was his first one. "You feel that?

You feel that, man? And the signature Michaels Flip in the third period — took it backhand, faked the shot, flipped it forehand to the top corner before their goalie even moved. Gets them every single time! I don't know how they still don't see it coming!"

I felt it. Every minute of that third period was still sitting somewhere behind my ribs, a low hum that hadn't figured out it was allowed to stop.

"Yeah, Ty. I feel it."

When Ty said the Flip, I thought of Mark Ewing — the best coach a kid could have — and I grinned, because you couldn’t think about Mark without grinning. The whole story of how I got here had his fingerprints all over it.

Then somebody dumped a full bottle of champagne over my head and the moment, appropriately, ended.

Across the room, Liam O'Connell had Anne up on his shoulders like she weighed nothing, the two of them lit up because they just got a second chance at love.

Liam was our captain in everything but name — the guy who'd led this team through two trades' worth of roster turnover and a season nobody picked us to win, and the reason half of us still believed in something bigger than our own stat lines.

Anne had her hands fisted in the air, screaming along with the crowd noise still rattling through the walls, looking nothing like the composed physical therapist who'd put Liam's shoulder back together a couple months ago and ended up putting the rest of him back together in the process.

She'd lost a shoe somewhere in the chaos and didn't seem to have noticed.

Near them, Cole Hartley had tucked his phone away by now and was just standing in the middle of it, soaked and grinning, watching the room the way you watch something you want to remember.

Cole was Liam's partner on the blue line, steady and unflashy and exactly the guy you wanted next to you in a tight third period — and the one of us who carried the most and said the least about it.

He'd lost his wife a couple of years back, Claire, and he'd raised their two kids since with his mother-in-law's help and a kind of quiet, unshowy grit that I'd never once heard him ask anyone to notice.

Tonight, for one night, he wasn't a widower or a tired dad juggling school pickups and a road schedule. He was just a guy who'd won the Stanley Cup, with his family in the building to see it.

I grabbed Liam in a headlock that turned into a hug that turned into both of us yelling something incoherent into each other's shoulder pads — no words that made sense, just two guys who'd fought through the same impossible season finally letting it out.

Then Anne was being lowered down just so she could throw both arms around my neck too, and Cole got pulled into it right after, and for a solid minute it was just the four of us, soaked in champagne, screaming about a trophy.

And then Cole broke off, because his kids had made it down to the room — somebody in a Blaze polo walking them in through the door, Maggie a step behind with a hand on each little shoulder — and Ben — seven and small for it — just ran at him full tilt across the wet tile and slammed into his chest, and Cole caught him and swung him clean up off the floor anyway, too happy to care that the kid was getting too big for it, and buried his face in that neck while Emma — eleven, more contained, at the age where she felt things hard and showed them carefully — pressed into his side and held on with her face against his ribs.

Whatever he said to them, I didn't hear it. I just saw a man who usually said nothing hold onto his two kids like they were the actual trophy, and I had to look away, because some things aren't yours to watch.

Across the room, Jess — Anne’s best friend, and the woman I’d spent an entire season failing to keep my eyes off of — was doing the same thing.

I caught flashes of her between bodies, throwing her arms around Anne and spinning her in a circle, ambushing one of the equipment guys with a hug he clearly hadn't been expecting, laughing with her whole body at something Ty said.

She had that look people only got maybe a handful of times in their lives, like the night was too big to hold still inside of.

Then she saw me.

She didn't walk. She ran — actually ran, weaving through the crowd, and I barely had time to brace before she hit me at full speed and I had to catch her or we were both going down.

"You did it," she said, both arms locked around my neck, her face pressed into my shoulder. "Carter, you actually did it. I am so proud of you I could cry. I think I might actually cry."

"Don't cry. I just got this jersey clean."

"Don't be careful." She pulled back just far enough to look at me, eyes bright, grinning so wide it had to hurt. "Stanley Cup champion. I can't believe I get to say I know you."

"Get to keep saying it, too, if you play your cards right." I picked her up off the ground entirely, spun her once just because I could, and set her back down laughing.

"Bold talk for a man who smells like a locker room."

I let it all wash over me and grinned like an idiot, because for once there was nothing underneath the grin at all — no deflection, no cards held back, just a guy who’d won the Stanley Cup and got to stand here soaked in it.

Across the noise I found Jess Calloway — Anne’s closest friend for years, which made her practically family by association, the way these things worked in a group that had been through as much together as we had.

She ran the labor and delivery unit at one of the biggest hospitals in Chicago, and tonight she wasn’t the composed nurse-leader who read a room before she walked into it.

She was just happy, loud and unguarded and grinning, her whole face lit up like she’d never get tired of being in a room like this.

She was, put simply, beautiful — a great smile and a warmth that pulled me in the first time Anne introduced us. I found out later she was older than me by a few years, and it didn’t slow me down for a second.

From the day I met her I’d spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about her — and about her son, Justin. There was chemistry there I couldn’t explain. She had a kind of composure I didn’t know how to fake — more settled, more self-assured — and that only made me want her more.

"CARTER!" Justin had spotted me over Jess's shoulder and abandoned Finn — Liam and Anne's boy, the same age as Justin and inseparable from him whenever the team's families ended up in the same room — mid-chase, barreling toward me with the kind of full-body sprint only a kid that age could manage.

"Did you see it? The game? Did you SEE it? "

"I was there for the whole thing, bud. Best one of the night." I caught him under the arms and swung him up onto my shoulders before he could ask twice, his small hands immediately fisting in my hair, quick and unselfconscious, like this was already just a thing we did.

"Finn's dad let him touch the Cup already," Justin announced, a little breathless, a little smug, like proximity to greatness ran in some kind of currency only first-graders understood.

"I'm gonna tell my whole class you're my—" He stopped, the word catching somewhere it usually didn't, and barreled straight past it without seeming to notice the gap he'd left. "—my favorite. You're my favorite!"

"Damn right I am," I said, and swung him a little higher just to hear him shriek, already moving on to the next loud, ridiculous thing the night had to offer.

Jess's eyes flicked up to mine over her son's head for half a second — there and gone, nothing either of us had time to chase tonight — before she laughed at something Finn was yelling and turned to scoop him up too.

I set Justin down, and he immediately took off again to rejoin Finn — and Cole's Ben, who'd wriggled down out of his dad's arms and found the other two the way kids find each other, so that within about thirty seconds there was a three-boy pileup near the blue line and Maggie was calmly making sure none of them brained themselves on the ice.

Jess grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me again, hard, grinning the whole time like she couldn't help it.

"Go shower, Stanley Cup champion. You smell like a frat house."

"You love it."

"I tolerate it. Go — and hurry up, because Liam's parents are taking the boys and I am not spending tonight watching you celebrate from across the room."

I kissed her once more because I could, and headed for the tunnel to find a shower.

And the tunnel was where it caught up with me.

Quieter back there, the roar dropping to a muffled thing behind me, the first place all night I could hear myself think. And the second I could, there he was.

Somewhere underneath the chaos, underneath Ty's hands still gripping the back of my neck like he might never let go, there was a version of me standing very still in the middle of all of it, just trying to hold onto the shape of the moment before it blurred into everything else.

Twelve years of beer-league rinks and junior call-ups and two trades that had felt, at the time, like the universe quietly telling me I wasn't good enough to stay anywhere — and all of it had started with a man named Mark Ewing.

Mark was my club hockey coach in Ames, Iowa. He'd spotted me at a public skate when I was fourteen — scraggly kid, too small for my age, no equipment of my own — and decided, for reasons I still didn't fully understand, that I was worth his time.

He'd sourced skates and pads through hand-me-downs and favors from every sporting goods store in a thirty-mile radius. He'd drilled me on edges and positioning and the backhand-to-forehand move he called "the Flip" that I still used in the NHL, in tight quarters near the net, almost every game.

He'd pushed me academically when I would have happily coasted, gotten me a hockey association scholarship, and written the recommendation letter that helped get me into Boston College, where I played varsity and helped win the ECAC championship my junior year.

He and his wife Barbara had tried to become my foster parents officially — had started the paperwork, done the home study, done everything right — but the licensing process moved slower than the calendar, and I aged out of the system before it could go through.

I'd spent more time in their kitchen than anywhere else in my childhood, but it was never official, and then I was eighteen and gone to Boston and the window closed.

Mark had called me this morning, before the game. Go get it, Carter. I'll be watching. He always called before big games. He had for twelve years.

All of it had led here — to this exact floor, this exact noise, this exact trophy sitting in the middle of the room like something out of a dream I'd stopped letting myself have. I made a mental note to call Mark back the second I could hear myself think.

I dug my phone out of my bag with a hand that wasn’t quite steady, and standing there alone in the tunnel in my soaked gear, a brand-new Stanley Cup champion, I called Mark Ewing back before I even hit the showers.

He picked up on the first ring. He’d been waiting.

“Carter,” he said, and I could hear that his voice was wrecked too. “You did it, son.”

“We did it,” I said. “You did it. All of it. It started with you.”

I don’t remember everything we said. But I remember standing there, dripping and grinning and not bothering to wipe my face, already counting the minutes until I could get back out there to Jess — and understanding, maybe for the first time, that I finally had a life full of people worth hurrying back to.