The Hockey Captain’s Betrayal (Miami Sports Wives Revenge Club #2)

CHAPTER ONE

Trophies everywhere, and every single one of them polished by her own two hands.

Seventeen years of it. Seventeen years of steaming wrinkles out of tuxedos before galas, memorizing which sponsor's wife was allergic to shellfish, sending monogrammed onesies to rookies' newborns, smiling through playoff losses like her jaw had been wired that way at the factory.

Martina Weddington could recite her husband's entire career highlight reel from memory, and lately, apparently, she did—in her sleep, out loud, much to Paul's annoyance.

Tonight she was playing paramedic. Paul had aggravated the hip again, the old injury that flared every March like a moody houseguest, always right around when reporters started asking whether this was finally the year the captain retired.

He'd texted from the practice facility—staying late for treatment, forgot my pills, don't wait up—so Martina had gotten in the car at eleven at night with a bottle of anti-inflammatories and a foil-wrapped sandwich, because God forbid the captain of the Miami Breakers go to bed hungry.

The arena was dark except for the exit signs, a church after the sermon, once everyone's gone home except the people stuck cleaning up.

Martina let herself in through the family corridor, flashing the laminated pass she'd carried since Paul's rookie season, back when she still believed rookie season was the hard part.

She heard Cassidy before she saw her. That light, delighted laugh she did whenever she'd landed Paul a good headline, or found the right caterer, or basically just breathed near a camera.

Martina smiled. She thought, they must be going over the contract announcement.

Then she heard the other sound.

It took her brain a solid three seconds to process it, the way you might stare at a word in a language you don't speak and wait for it to resolve into English. It resolved alright. All at once. Ugly, and unmistakable, and not a single thing to do with contract announcements.

She opened the door anyway. Some small, traitorous, hopeful part of her needed to be wrong.

Sadly, she was not wrong.

Paul had Cassidy up against the treatment table, Cassidy still wearing the silk blouse Martina had helped her pick out for the foundation gala two weeks ago.

Martina remembered complimenting the color, telling her it brought out her eyes.

Paul's captain's jersey lay crumpled on the floor beside Cassidy's discarded heels, the number nineteen—his number, her age when they'd met, a coincidence he used to call fate at every anniversary dinner—staring straight up at the ceiling.

Neither of them heard the door. For one long, obscene moment, Martina stood there and watched her marriage end in real time, in high definition, and, funnily enough, a room she'd personally chosen the paint color for.

Cassidy's eyes found her over Paul's shoulder, and everything stopped.

Paul turned. He didn’t look ashamed. He looked inconvenienced, the way he looked when a reporter asked a question he hadn't prepped for.

"Martina." He said it like a correction, like she'd wandered onto the wrong practice ice. He was already moving toward her, naked, furious, dick still hard, hands up like she was the one who needed managing. "Don't make a scene."

Cassidy grabbed for the nearest thing to cover herself, which happened to be Martina's own foundation jacket, hanging on the hook where Martina herself had hung it a hundred times before board meetings.

That was the detail that did it. Not the affair or the blouse, not the number nineteen staring at the ceiling like a judgmental little eye. The damn jacket.

Something in Martina's chest went very quiet and very cold, and then something else entirely took over.

She didn't remember crossing the room. She remembered the ceremonial hockey stick mounted by the door (a relic from Paul's rookie year, autographed, insured, sacred), and she remembered the sound it made against the glass of his framed captaincy photo, which was extremely satisfying, and then against the display cabinet holding his first professional helmet, which was even more satisfying, right up until the alarm started screaming through the whole building like she'd personally set off a five-alarm fire.

Martina ran.

Paul came after her wearing nothing but his trousers, bellowing that she was destroying everything he'd built, while Cassidy trailed behind demanding he stop her before she gets to the lobby, as if Martina were a shoplifter and not the woman who'd spent seventeen years making sure his shirts were pressed for exactly this kind of press conference.

She made it to the underground garage with her heart trying to exit through her ribs. She had the car door half shut when Paul's hand caught it, holding it open with the strength of a professional athlete who did not, in this moment, seem to register his own strength.

"The announcement is in two weeks," he said, breathing hard, sweat and betrayal and cologne all mixed together. "Neither of us can afford a scandal right now."

Martina looked at him, at the man whose sponsors she'd charmed, whose mother's birthday she never forgot, whose captaincy she'd basically stage-managed for a decade and a half, and put the car in reverse anyway, forcing him to let go or lose the arm.

He let go.

She drove until the arena lights disappeared in the mirror, pulled over beneath an overpass, and threw up neatly onto the shoulder of the road, which felt, honestly, like the most dignified thing that had happened to her all night.

Her phone lit up. Paul. Cassidy. Paul again.

She turned it off. She wasn’t going to play this game.

In the dark of the car, she noticed the blood on her palm—a shard from the display cabinet, she realized, though she didn't remember it cutting her. She stared at the thin red line for a long time.

Paul had chased her through half the arena. He had grabbed her car door hard enough to leave finger marks.

He had said a great many things in the last ten minutes.

None of them had been I'm sorry.