I've given you glimpses into the early chapters of every book in this series, so why change that now? It's time to do that again with DELAY OF GAME.
First off, here's what the book is about:
With her father’s health in question, Sara Thomas is focused
on reducing his anxiety. That’s no small feat considering his high-stress job,
not to mention her own distractions. Everyone knows Sara’s single; no one knows
she’s pregnant. There’s never a good time to unexpectedly get knocked up, but
now is definitely not it. Regardless, she doesn’t want anyone to
know—especially not her father—until she has a game plan in place. But when
Jonny, one of her father’s players, seeks vigilante justice on the ice, everything
gets tossed out the window.
Cam Johnson’s role as a fourth-line winger with the NHL’s Portland
Storm entails more than scoring goals. He has to ensure other teams don’t take
liberties with the Storm’s star players. The way Cam sees it, that’s the most
important aspect of his job. His teammates call him Jonny; opposing fans call
him a goon; the media calls him an enforcer. The title’s unimportant. Cam will
always fight for his team—even if he has to break the rules. He’s used to
taking penalties, but he never meant for anyone else to suffer from his choices.
When Cam’s actions cause Sara’s worst fears to be realized, he
blames himself. He’s screwed everything up; now he has to set things right.
Mutual attraction leads to lust, and suddenly Cam is taking penalties at every
turn…at least where Sara is concerned. He’s got to think on his feet or he’ll
end up with a Delay of Game.
DELAY OF GAME releases on August 21, 2014, and you can pre-order it now at iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo for only $0.99. (For Amazon Kindle readers, you'll be able to get it for the first TWO days of release at that price. Then it will go up to its regular price of $3.99.)
Okay...without further ado, here's chapter one of DELAY OF GAME. Enjoy!
SARA:
No matter how many
of those stupid sticks I peed on, they all said the same thing in the end.
Which meant two things. One, I
was royally fucked. (Oh, the irony.) And two, Daddy was going to absolutely
murder me.
Granted, he would only kill me if
he found out. Since I’d only learned just now that I was pregnant, I definitely
didn’t have a game plan yet. I didn’t know what I would do, so I supposed that
meant there was a third thing it meant, too—that I was scared out of my
freaking skull and didn’t know what to focus on first. But whatever I decided on,
I had at least a little bit of time. Daddy wasn’t the most observant person in
the world, at least when it came to anything that wasn’t hockey related. I
didn’t have to make any sort of rash decision that I might later regret, beyond
the one I’d already made and couldn’t take back.
Anyway, with this, I could take
the time to figure out what was best. If there was such a thing. I wasn’t
convinced there was.
There wasn’t time right now to
worry about it, though. My father was Scotty Thomas, a legendary coach in the
National Hockey League who was currently finishing up his second season
coaching the Portland Storm. Legendary
because he’d started coaching when he was only twenty-six, after being forced
to retire as a player early, after a slew of injuries. He’d coached his first
NHL team to the Stanley Cup Finals. They’d lost in seven games, but in the
twenty-eight years since then, he’d won the Cup four times as a head coach.
That put him in some pretty rare company, and the Storm organization hoped he
could lead them to the same end. It might not happen this year, but they were
closer than they had been in a while…and a lot of that was because of him.
Today was the final game of the
regular season, and since I was Daddy’s personal assistant—he’d officially
hired me when I’d turned eighteen so he could justify paying me a salary—I had
to get him out the door in time so we wouldn’t get stuck in traffic on our way
to the Moda Center. Personal assistant
was really just a glorified title meaning I made sure I got him where he was
supposed to be when he was supposed to be there, but the pay was pretty damn good
for an insanely easy job that I had already been doing for years, anyway.
With trembling hands, I shoved
the pee sticks and their boxes and plastic wrappings and instruction booklets
into a brown paper bag and crushed it all, then buried it in the trash can in
my bathroom. For good measure, I took that trash bag out, put a fresh one in, and
took the evidence down to the main trash can in the kitchen. No reason to leave
that stuff lying around where our housekeeper might find it and tell Daddy. I
doubted Rose would do something like that, but you just never know about people.
Better to take precautionary measures than have to sort out the consequences
later.
Oh. Haha. Yeah, that was kind of
what was going on. Except I had taken
precautionary measures. I’d been on the pill since I was sixteen, and I never
did the deed without a condom. But there was that one night a little over a
month ago, with Brad, when the condom broke. And the pill isn’t fail-safe.
Clearly.
It had been a bad date. It hadn’t
even been good sex. Definitely not worth ending up a freaking out, shaking,
preggers mess over.
I still don’t know why I’d slept
with him. I mean, he was hot, sure. And he wasn’t a hockey player, so that was
a huge bonus in his favor, at least with me. I’d spent my entire life around
hockey players, almost constantly. I didn’t want to have a relationship with
one of them beyond working for my father. I didn’t even want to have a
one-night stand with any of them. So when a guy who didn’t play hockey asked me
out, I tended to jump on it whether I was really attracted and interested or
not.
That was what had happened with
Brad. He’d hit on me at the gym. But this guy, the hot-but-boring
non-hockey-playing biomechanical engineer who couldn’t find my clitoris with a
detailed map, step-by-step instructions, and a compass? There was no chance in
hell I was ever going to go out with him again after that night. I’d known it
from the moment he’d pulled the car up in front of the Red Robin at Cascade
Station.
Who takes someone to a cheesy
chain restaurant like that for a first date? They weren’t even cheesetastic.
They were the bad kind of cheesy, like those plain-Jane slices of processed
crap they called American cheese.
But it had been so long since I’d
had sex—real sex with a hot guy who took care of himself and his body, not a late-night
date with my vibrator—that I’d gone along with him when he’d suggested we take
things back to his place.
And the condom had broken.
And now I was pregnant.
Crap. I didn’t even have his phone number anymore. I’d deleted it
from my cell almost the moment I’d gotten home. Not that I had a clue what I’d
say to him even if I did have his number. Hey,
Brad. Long time no talk. So, I know I brushed you off and all that, but guess
what? You’re my baby daddy! Congratulations!
I tried to shake all that out of
my head. Now wasn’t the time to freak. I had work to do.
“Daddy?” I called up the stairs.
No answer.
He was probably holed up in his
office watching film of the Canucks, despite the fact that his cardiologist had
told him he had to reduce his stress and get some rest when he could. This
would have been a perfect time for the whole rest-and-relaxation thing—an
afternoon off before a game. All of his players were resting right now, taking
their pre-game naps. But not Daddy.
I headed down the hall and
knocked on the open door, trying not to let myself get upset about it. That
wouldn’t do either of us any good.
He looked up. “Time already?”
“Yeah. You’d better get your suit
on so we aren’t late.”
Daddy paused the video he was
watching and got up from his desk, grabbing the cup of coffee sitting beside
him.
“Have you checked your blood
pressure today?” I asked. I didn’t like to nag, but someone had to or he’d
never do some of the things he needed to do. If it wasn’t directly related to
coaching hockey, he was generally oblivious. I’d taken over looking after him when
my mother abandoned us to run off with one of the players on Daddy’s team years
ago. I’d only been ten, but I had done a better job of looking after him in all
the intervening years than she’d ever done. By now, thirteen years later, it
was second nature to me.
“I’ll do it once we get to the
arena,” he promised.
“Your doctor says you need to
check it two or three times a day, Daddy. And you’re supposed to reduce your
stress and get more rest. And drink more water and less coffee.” I took the mug
away from him and headed back to the kitchen so I could dump its contents down
the drain.
He followed along behind me,
grumbling half-heartedly the whole way. “The playoffs start in three days. How
do you suppose I’m going to be able to do any of those things right now?”
I arched a brow at him from the
other side of the kitchen island. “Drink less coffee and replace it with water.
Then you’ll sleep more. That’ll kill a few birds.”
“And I’ll have more stress
because I won’t be as prepared as I need to be for the first round because I
was too busy sleeping.”
I sighed. “I don’t want to argue
with you about this right now, Daddy.”
“I know, Sara.” He sounded
defeated. He came around and kissed my forehead. “I’m trying to do better.”
If I’d been anyone else, he would
have been yelling at me right now. I knew that. It was just one more thing I
was trying to help him stop doing, because it was all going to add up and kill
him. He might drive me crazy sometimes, but I wasn’t ready to lose him. He was my
only family. He’d given me the only job I’d ever had. And now I was pregnant
and single and scared shitless.
I couldn’t lose him now.
I nodded and washed his coffee
cup, then grabbed a towel from the bar under the sink to dry it. “I know you
are. Go get dressed.”
While he did that, I put together
a snack for him—peanut butter on a toasted multigrain bagel, a banana, and low-fat
yogurt with a serving of chia seeds stirred in.
When he took it from me, he
scowled at the little black seeds in his yogurt. “What are you trying to kill
me with now?”
“Doc suggested them for your
cholesterol. They’re chia seeds. Full of omegas and fiber and protein—all the
good stuff you’re supposed to be eating every day.”
Doc wasn’t my father’s heart
doctor. He was Dr. Larry Mitchell, the head doctor of the Portland Storm. Doc’s
focus was mainly on keeping the players in peak physical condition, and his
background was more in sports injuries than the heart, but I figured all
doctors had to know a thing or two about heart health after all those years in
medical school. He was the only person involved with the team I’d talked to
about it. Daddy still wasn’t happy that I’d gone to Doc at all, but I needed to
know everything I could about how to help keep my father alive, and it couldn’t
hurt to have someone else aware of the situation—someone who would be around
him when I wasn’t.
Daddy lifted a brow.
“You can’t taste them, so don’t
give me a hard time about this. I already tried them to see.” I grinned so he
would know I was teasing him. “Just eat it, and let’s get out of here.”
“You spend too much time worrying
about me. Who worries about you?”
“You do,” I answered, quickly
brushing off yet another not-so-subtle hint that he wanted me to be dating
someone. Ever since the issues with his heart had cropped up, he’d been trying
to convince me to get involved with some guy or another. It felt like he was
trying to be sure I wouldn’t be alone once he was gone. My focus was on making
sure he wasn’t gone anytime soon, though. “And I get paid to worry about you,
in case you forgot,” I added.
“Can’t forget that since I sign
the checks.” He finally did what I asked without any more complaints, and then
we made our way to the arena. When we arrived, I went with him to his office
for a minute. His assistant coaches, Mattias Bergstrom and Daniel Hamm, were
already there doing whatever it was Daddy expected them to do before games.
I kissed my dad on the cheek and said,
“Remember to check your blood pressure,” and then I left him to do his thing. I
don’t think he or anyone else would ever say boo to me if I stayed down in the
coaches’ offices or headed into the locker room for a bit to say hi to the guys,
but it was habit for me to go straight up to the owner’s box and hang out with
the players’ wives and girlfriends during the games. I’d been doing that since
I was a baby, so I didn’t see any reason to change my routine now.
On my way out the door, though, I
bumped into Cam Johnson, one of my father’s players. He reached out and caught
my arms, gently steadying me. “Sorry, Sara. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Jonny was a big guy, a fighter.
He was six foot four and towered over my five foot seven frame, but his height
wasn’t the truly intimidating thing about him. The guy was 240 pounds or more
of solid muscle. The suit he was wearing only emphasized his broad shoulders
and beefy arms, and the buzz cut he always had made it easier to see the muscle
even coming down his neck. Who the hell had a muscled neck? How did he even
build muscle there?
The really pathetic thing was, I
was crazy attracted to him. Had been for a while. I didn’t want to be because
he was a hockey player, of all things, and I didn’t want to be with a hockey
player. And he was one of Daddy’s
players. And that meant he was completely and totally off limits. But every
time I was around him, I got these little tingles of awareness.
I hated those tingles. I wanted
to throw them into the pit of Mount Doom like they were the One Ring. Mainly
because I only felt them when I was around Jonny, never when I was around
anyone else. I’d hoped I might feel them with that guy Brad. Same hair. Close
to the same height. Fit, but nowhere close to as built as Jonny—but who
was?—but it was no good. No tingles. Bad sex.
And now a baby on the way.
Fuck me.
The tingles were going into
overdrive right now, since Jonny was so close to me. He had his hands on my
upper arms and I could smell his amazing cologne, and I didn’t want to move a
muscle other than to maybe lean in a little closer so I could sniff his collar,
which would be totally weird and not even remotely all right.
Jonny gave me a concerned look.
“Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”
Oh yeah. He’d asked me a
question. I totally spaced on that, thinking about neck muscles and those damn
tingles. “No, I’m fine. Sorry. I was off in another world somewhere.”
“Okay.” He dropped his grip on my
arms, and I wanted to sob. Then he took a step back from me and grinned—at
least it was as close to a grin as this guy ever showed. “You look nice
tonight. Did you do something different? A new top or something?”
“I…” What? In all the encounters
I’d ever had with Cam Johnson, that might be the most he’d ever spoken to me,
and he wanted to know if I’d worn a new shirt tonight? Where the hell had that come from? The only thing different
about me was that I had learned I was an incubator for a tiny human. “No,
nothing’s different,” I hedged. I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about that, and
definitely not this guy.
He just nodded and backed away
some more, letting his gaze travel all the way down my body and cause a
shit-ton more tingles. “Well, you look nice. Maybe it’s your shoes. Those are
really nice shoes. I’ve got to go talk to your dad now. See ya later.”
I nodded and spun on my Manolo
Blahniks, desperate to get away from him so I could make the tingles stop. Come
to think of it, I’d only worn these shoes a few times. Weird that he’d notice
something like that. I shook it off and hurried up to the owner’s box as I’d intended
to do when I’d first left Daddy’s office.
Dana Campbell—team captain Eric
Zellinger’s fiancée and his best friend Brenden Campbell’s kid sister—was the
only other person up there when I arrived, which was utterly perfect.
Dana was one of the best friends
I’d made since Daddy had come to Portland to coach, and she was the primary
reason I’d spent as much time around Jonny lately as I had. He had taught her
some self-defense techniques. They still worked out together sometimes, and she
liked having him around, so she always invited him along if we were doing
something that wasn’t just the girls. Anyway, talking to her would help me get
my mind off all the Jonny-tingles and baby daddy crap going through my head.
I plopped down in the seat right
next to hers. “Let’s talk wedding details. I need something to make me smile.”
“How about this?” Dana tucked a
curl of her long, blond hair behind her ear and leaned closer to me. “Brenden
and Rachel agreed to do a double wedding. We’re going to have it in Providence
this summer so Eric’s mom doesn’t have to fly.”
Yep, a double wedding was just
what the doctor ordered. I pulled both my legs up so I was sitting cross-legged
on my seat and settled in to dish.
CAM:
Ultimately, the result
of tonight’s game wouldn’t matter.
This was game eighty-two of the NHL’s
eighty-two game season. My team, the Storm, was playing the Vancouver Canucks.
No matter which team won this game, and no matter what happened in any of the
other thirteen games going on around the league on this final day of the
regular season, we already knew our fate and the Canucks already knew theirs.
The Storm would finish in third
place in the Pacific Division. We were going to the playoffs, our first postseason
appearance in five long years. I’d been here for four of them after spending a
few years playing for the Baby Storm—what I’d always called the Seattle Storm,
Portland’s minor league affiliate. I knew better than most how long overdue a
trip to the dance was around here.
Also regardless of tonight’s
outcome, the Canucks would finish in second place in the division. They had
gotten into the postseason more often than not in recent years, but they had
never won it all.
Those positions meant we would
face each other in the first round.
So in a few days’ time, the two
teams playing each other tonight would play again—and it would be all-out war
for about a week or two. Best of seven. Winner moves on in the toughest tournament
in all professional sports to compete for the Stanley Cup. Loser gets to call
it a summer early and go home to work on the perfect golf swing.
The only things that mattered now
were setting expectations and establishing a tone. We may not have gotten into
the playoffs in the last five years, but we had no intention of going down
easy, and they planned to make us pay for every inch of ice we wanted to take.
For both teams, tonight was all about sending a message about what was to come in
the first round.
The matchup would be interesting
from a sports network perspective—the perennial playoff contender who had never
won the big prize against the team made up of young players hungry to prove
themselves and a few aging vets hoping for another shot at the Cup before they
retired. It should make for an intriguing series from those storylines alone,
but there was a lot more at play than just that.
The season series between our two
teams had grown more and more contentious with every game. We didn’t like them;
they didn’t like us. That went back pretty much twenty years or so, well before
any of the players on the ice were in the league yet. Sometimes it seemed like
we’d loathed each other since even before the Storm came into existence. It was
a mutual, decades-old hate fest, and things had gotten progressively nastier
each time we’d faced them over the course of the current season. The fact that
we would have to play an entire seven-game series against them in just a few
days had only served to intensify that hatred, if that were even possible.
It was still a scoreless game in
the third period, and it had been filled with more than just a few hard—not to
mention dirty—hits. On both sides. There was no pretending our play hadn’t
skirted the line of legality just as much as theirs had. Anyone who tried to
argue otherwise was full of shit.
But what was happening right
before my eyes went beyond merely hitting.
I didn’t see what started it—something
in the corner behind our net, where several guys from both teams had converged,
it seemed—but I heard a bunch of angry shouting, and a scrum broke out in the
blink of an eye. Each of our five guys paired off with a Canuck. Everyone in
the building got on their feet—both benches, all the fans. No one could sit
with that kind of tension on the verge of seriously boiling over. Our
goaltender, Nicklas Ericsson, skated away from his crease and off to the corner
so he couldn’t get dragged into the fray.
That made me breathe a little
easier. Nicky had already missed quite a bit of action this season with a
concussion. And really, the last guy you ever want fighting in hockey is your
goaltender. The more distance he put between himself and all the shit going
down on the ice, the better. That was the way I looked at it, at least.
Every guy on our bench was
yelling and tapping his stick on the boards. The coaches paced behind us,
screaming at the refs to get the melee under control and cheering our boys on
just like the rest of us were.
But then the shit hit the fan.
One of the guys in visitors’ white
took Andrew Jensen down hard. Jens was our number one defenseman and my road
roommate this year. He wasn’t a fighter, but he had answered the call out there
just like any of our boys would do in a pinch. Now he was flat out on the ice
and not moving a muscle.
All the guys on the bench went
berserk when we saw Jens on his back like that. The linesmen were trying to
deal with a couple of the fights that were heading out toward center ice. One
of the refs was down on the ice with Jens, and the other was trying to help
Eddie Masters, our head trainer, get to Jens since it looked like he was in
some serious trouble. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the stretcher come out for
him, and that was something you never wanted to see. It almost always meant extremely
bad news.
With all that going on, though, no
one was doing a goddamned thing about the asswipe in white who’d just taken out
our best fucking defenseman.
“Stay on the fucking bench,”
Scotty Thomas yelled from close behind me. “No one leaves this bench or you’ll
never see another fucking minute of ice time as long as I’m the coach here.”
The assistant coaches were
shouting similar shit at us. They just wanted to be sure we all followed the
rules. Back in the day, the NHL had experienced issues with bench-clearing
brawls, so harsher punishments were instituted now for anyone who left the
team’s bench in a situation like this. Automatic suspensions and fines for the
player. Fines and possible suspensions for the coaches. Even heftier fines for
the teams.
We all knew the rules.
I knew the fucking rules.
But I also knew it was my job to
protect my teammates. I could score a goal here and there. I was a serviceable
fourth-liner and penalty killer and I could move up the lineup when they needed
me to, but I wasn’t going to kid myself. One of the main reasons the Storm kept
me on the payroll year after year was because I didn’t let fuckers like that
take out the star players on my team. Sometimes doing what was right was more
important than following the fucking rules. I knew it. The coaches knew it. The
league knew it. Everyone in the whole damn building fucking knew it.
Center Antoine Gagnon was holding
his own with a guy who had a reputation as a fighter, much like I did. Good on
the kid. Gags was a second-year guy, really young, who was still trying to
establish himself as a regular. I’d never thought of him as a fighter before,
though.
Keith Burns, our other defenseman
on the ice for this shift, had his guy pinned against the glass, and they were
both trying to catch their breath after a heavy bout. I wouldn’t be surprised
if they went another round before the linesmen got to them to break things up.
I hoped for Burnzie’s sake they didn’t. We needed him able to play, especially
if Jens was going to be out for a chunk of time.
David Weber was in a big tilt
with his guy—another heavyweight fighter for the Canucks—but Webs was a wily
veteran who’d been in more fights in his career than just about anyone else on
the team other than me. I didn’t need to worry about him.
Henrik Markusson had never even
been in more than a shoving match before, though, at least not to my knowledge.
Hank wasn’t holding up well. The guy he’d paired off with was pummeling him
with one right hook on top of another. I could only hope Hank wouldn’t get hurt
like Jens had. We couldn’t afford to lose either one of them right now with the
playoffs being right around the corner. Someday soon I needed to take Hank
aside and give him a few fighting pointers just in case he got stuck in a
situation like this again. When a line-brawl starts, you don’t always get to
pick which players are out on the ice for it.
But fighting tips would have to
wait. This was happening in the here and now. I made notes in my mind, taking
down numbers of the guys in white who would need to be dealt with when I
finally got the chance—and I would get
my fucking chance, since we were going to have a whole playoff series against
each other starting in a few days.
But then I saw it: a streak of
white, out of the corner of my eye, heading straight in Nicky’s direction. The
same fucker who’d laid Jens out was going for my goddamn goaltender.
Nicky didn’t have to fight him, at
least not according to the rules in place. He could refuse. But if this asswipe
started throwing blows, what the hell was Nicky supposed to do? He would have
to protect himself, and then he’d be fighting, and that was not something I
could let happen.
“Stay the fuck where you are. No
one leaves this fucking bench.”
I heard Scotty’s shout, and I
knew he meant for me—for all of us, really—to stay put and be good little
soldiers.
“That means you, Jonny,” Bergy bellowed
from right by my ear. “Keep your ass on the bench. Don’t you fucking put a
skate over the boards.”
Yeah, that one was definitely
directed straight at me and no one else. Bergy knew me well since he’d still
been playing when I came into the league. I actually fought him once, so he
knew exactly what I was. Hockey player. Fighter. Some people called me a goon.
I wasn’t a goon, but I couldn’t sit back and let certain things happen.
Things like this fucker making a
beeline for my goaltender.
I felt Bergy’s hands on the back
of my jersey, trying to physically restrain me and keep me on the bench.
I didn’t give a shit.
All that mattered at that moment
in time was that it was my job to protect my teammates.
So that’s
exactly what I did.
That's right! DELAY OF GAME is available now!
TAKING A SHOT, the novella initially included in the SEDUCED BY THE GAME anthology, is releasing separately on September 4, 2014.
DOUBLE MAJOR will release on September 18, 2014.
IN THE ZONE, the fifth full novel in the Portland Storm series, will release on November 20, 2014
