Chapter 3
LOGAN
How’s Maggie doing?
We just smoked some crack off a
hooker’s ass, and now we’re chilling
before the fights start.
WTF Waverly!
Chill out, Logan. She came with me
to feed Buttercup and Gretzky.
I gave her a bath, we watched
Bluey, and I put her to bed.
Basically, a typical Saturday night.
I’ll save the crack for her
eighteenth birthday.
Waves, you know you snort
blow off a hooker’s ass and
smoke crack out of a pipe, right?
Why are my brothers such assholes?
I’ll leave the snorting and
blowing to you and Rafe.
No blowing. No snorting.
We’ll be home tomorrow.
Thanks for taking care of her for me.
—Text from Logan to Waverly
“Awife, huh? You gonna marry me, Olive?” The freckles on Olivia’s nose crinkle again with my use of the old nickname.
Guess she’s still not a fan, which for some fucked up reason, makes me want to use it more.
She’s beautiful, no matter how you look at it.
Always has been. But when she’s fired up, watch out.
I’m not sure there’s a word that does justice to the way this woman looks when she’s pissed off.
Those typically pale-green eyes glow with indignation.
Like she knows she’s better than everyone in the room.
And the thing is, she is better.
Better than everyone in the room.
Hell, she’s better than everyone in the damn casino.
I knew it the very first time I laid eyes on her, standing in front of our public speaking class, freshman year of college. The professor forced us up to the front of the lecture hall one at a time and had each of us give a five-minute speech on how we spent our summer.
I could have summed mine up in one word.
My favorite word—hockey.
Okay, I guess really I needed three words—hockey in Canada.
Somehow, I managed to bullshit my way through the five minutes with a shit ton of umms and likes. But I got through it. Thankfully, it had been a good fucking summer.
Rafe and I both stayed with the family who’d been arranged for us to spend the previous season living with.
I can’t imagine billet families get paid much to take us asshole players in, but they do it, and ours was great.
Rafe’s parents had died before we left for Canada, and neither of us wanted to go home.
So like typical asshole teenagers who didn’t give a shit how anyone else was coping and whether or not we’d been needed, we stayed away long enough to only have two weeks home before we left for Boston University and our new world.
Seriously though, who the fuck wants to get up in front of a class full of strangers and tell them about what a disappointment you were to the grandfather who raised you?
Not me. And that’s exactly what I was.
A disappointment. Especially that summer.
He’d been the trainer for the Harrington family all my life.
He loved two things, horses and me. My mom was probably part of that love at some point, but she left me with him when I was three and never looked back.
She dumped us both, and neither of us ever forgave her for it.
The last thing Pops wanted me to do was go after my dreams of playing hockey.
He wanted me home. With him. At Triple Crown Ranch, training the next generation of racehorses for their wealthy owners.
He didn’t understand that I wanted to be the wealthy owner, not the trainer, and hockey was how I was going to make it happen.
I loved the sport. Who wouldn’t? Skate fast, score goals, and beat the hell out of the other team whenever you feel like it.
Hockey was a great escape for a terminally angry teenager.
But it gave me so much more than I ever thought it could.
Taught me more. Like respect for myself and my teammates.
Hard work. Dedication. The game gave me everything.
Only, unlike Olivia St. James, I didn’t own every room I walked into.
My confidence on the ice didn’t translate off the ice too. Not back then.
I sat in that class on the first day of college in awe as she spoke.
She talked about her family. How their hockey team had just won the Cup that year and how they celebrated together afterward on some island.
But she wasn’t bragging. No doubt she could have.
We learned quickly she wasn’t just a St. James but a Kingston too.
She talked about this massive family, full of aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings, like they were the greatest thing in the world.
She talked about having to sign up for breakfast on a chalkboard the day before so the cooks would have a head count.
And how her cousins kept trying to erase names off the board after everyone went to bed just to be dicks. And when she said dicks, mine got hard.
Olivia never looked my way that day. She never looked anyone’s way.
Not as the year went on either. Especially the athletes.
Her roommate spent most of the first year banging Rafe, so I spent plenty of time watching the little ice queen.
A habit that didn’t stop after Rafe got caught fucking around on the roommate.
“I said you’d need to find a wife, not that I’d volunteer as tribute, Adler.” Her clear disgust has a smile tugging at my mouth.
“Tribute, huh? You’d rather take your chances with the Capital?” I ask, flipping a gray chip through my fingers.
Her dark hair spills over her shoulders as she tilts her head, shock flashing in her green eyes momentarily before she’s able to mask it. “Impressive. I didn’t expect you to have read The Hunger Games.”
“I didn’t. I watched the movies.” Yup. That does it. Her chin raises, and she might actually roll those pretty eyes before Serena whispers something in her ear.
I did read the books.
All of them.
Not gonna tell her that though.
When the elementary school told Pops they thought I was dyslexic, he did everything he could to help me figure out what worked for me and my brain.
I basically had to train myself to read a whole different way than what the teacher was saying, and it was fucking hard.
But Pops never gave up, and every night, we’d read something together.
He’d read one page, and I’d read the next.
Some nights, it took me so long to get through that single page, that was all I managed.
But by the time I hit middle school, we were reading Harry Potter and eventually, The Hunger Games.
Some days life feels like those fucking books.
Fighting for survival.
To protect my family. My peace. Our future.
The idea of finding a wife makes me feel like I’m going to break out in shingles the way Dooley did last season when he couldn’t shake his shitty streak. Nasty. Who wants a wife? I’ve already got one person who relies on me. One person I can’t let down. No way I want another.
Olivia turns back to me and sips her martini, her observant eyes narrowing. “I’m right, you know.”
“About what?” Who needs blackjack? I could go back and forth with this prickly woman all night and get the same damn high.
“You needing a wife. That’s your answer. You already have a stable income. What you don’t have is a stable job or home life.” She swirls that damn olive pic around her glass as I grind my teeth.
I rub the same damn chip I’ve been flipping for the last five minutes. “I have a stable job and a stable home life.”
“You have a job. A good one. But it requires you to travel 50 percent of what is typically a nine-month season. Your team travels somewhere around fifty-thousand miles a year, Adler. And you don’t have a baby momma at home to take care of your baby.
That doesn’t look good in court. Not to mention our region has a maternal custody average of 70 percent.
A court won’t consider your schedule stable and controlled. Who watches your baby?”
I want to be angry, but the despair growing in my stomach is taking up too much of my energy for me to focus any of it on her attitude. “She has a name. It’s Magnolia. My sister watches her for me most of the time. My family pitches in when they need to. And I have a nanny who comes to the house.”
“Logan . . .” The pity in her eyes is what does it.
My despair flips to anger, and Olivia straightens her spine, refusing to back down.
“Don’t shoot the messenger. You asked my opinion, and I’m giving it to you.
Trust me, I’m not saying you should go out and fall in love.
I’m saying you do what you need to do to keep your daughter.
It sucks that it’s like this, but it is.
People think married with kids equals settled.
They think it means you’ll be more present and more fucking capable.
” Olivia’s jaw clenches, and she throws back the rest of her martini.
“Those people are assholes, but they have all the control.”
Uhh . . . “We still talking about me, Olive?”
Pretty sure we’re not.
Olivia waves the cocktail waitress down and asks for another.
“You sure, Liv?” Serena asks her with a slick smile, like she’s excited about the idea of her cousin getting drunk.
“You had a hell of a head start on me. I’m just catching up.
” She swivels on her seat and stacks a few chips as the dealer waits for our bets, and when she catches me staring, she just shrugs.
“Who knows, maybe you’ll get a judge who doesn’t care about any of that stuff. There’s a first time for everything.”
“Sounds like you know about this from firsthand knowledge.” But what the hell could she know?
She blows a lock of glossy hair the color of burnt sugar away from her face, frustration rolling off her in waves. “Yeah well, I thought the glass ceiling no longer existed. Apparently, I was wrong.”