Second Round (Vancouver Vice Hockey Book 3) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Epilogue

  Introduction

  Brent Says Sell

  Soft Landing

  All That She Wants

  Welcome to Shitsville

  Property Sisters

  Meet Suite

  Melts

  Girl Talk

  Mountain Goat

  A Job Well Done

  Colourless

  Flip or Flop

  Whatta Man

  Nothing Compares

  The Future

  More in Store

  Called Out

  Torn

  Jackie of All Trades

  Meet The Children

  Sold

  New Kid in Town

  Daddy’s Girl

  Charlotte’s Web

  Stacy’s Mom

  Put A Ring On It

  Hockey Is Life

  A Whale of a Time

  Fun in the Sun

  Three Little Words

  The Dark Night

  Leo the Liar

  Never Say Never Again

  Viceland

  Two Princes

  Soul Woman

  Colour My World

  Jackie Blooms

  The Neutral Zone

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Melanie Ting

  Excerpt

  Second Round

  Vancouver Vice Hockey 3

  Melanie Ting

  Copyright © 2017 by Melanie Ting

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-0-99522433-5-4

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover by Indie Solutions.

  Developmental editing by Jodi Henley.

  Copyediting by Amy J. Duli.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  1. Brent Says Sell

  2. Soft Landing

  3. All That She Wants

  4. Welcome to Shitsville

  5. Property Sisters

  6. Meet Suite

  7. Melts

  8. Girl Talk

  9. Mountain Goat

  10. A Job Well Done

  11. Colourless

  12. Flip or Flop

  13. Whatta Man

  14. Nothing Compares

  15. The Future

  16. More in Store

  17. Called Out

  18. Torn

  19. Jackie of All Trades

  20. Meet The Children

  21. Sold

  22. New Kid in Town

  23. Daddy’s Girl

  24. Charlotte’s Web

  25. Stacy’s Mom

  26. Put A Ring On It

  27. Hockey Is Life

  28. A Whale of a Time

  29. Fun in the Sun

  30. Three Little Words

  31. The Dark Night

  32. Leo the Liar

  33. Never Say Never Again

  34. Viceland

  35. Two Princes

  36. Soul Woman

  37. Colour My World

  38. Jackie Blooms

  39. The Neutral Zone

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Melanie Ting

  Excerpt

  Introduction

  She hasn’t been on a date in over a decade…

  Jackie Wagner is better now, thanks. Her divorce is final, she’s taken up painting to relax, and best of all—her kids are doing fine. But when her ex-husband announces it’s time to sell the house, Jackie scrambles to find enough money so her kids can stay in the same neighbourhood they’ve grown up in. The problem is that her résumé is pretty dusty, and she has zero job skills other than being a wife and mother.

  Then a plum job falls in her lap—furnishing an apartment for the new coach of the Vancouver Vice. Making a nice home is one thing she’s good at, and the job has potential. Then the coach walks in. He’s confident, good-looking and, oh dear God, wearing nothing but a towel. He’s the first guy she’s been attracted to in forever.

  …and he doesn’t do relationships.

  Leo Gauthier is driven. Becoming the new head coach of the AHL Vancouver Vice is the next step in his life plan. He’s on the fast track to becoming an NHL coach, as long as he keeps winning. So he lives and breathes hockey for seventy hours a week. Everything comes second to his career except his young daughter. After a painful divorce, he prefers not to let the women in his life get too close, especially not a hot single mother.

  But beyond the physical attraction, Jackie’s vulnerability pulls at him, making him question his arm’s length policy. Can two people with such complicated pasts find a future together?

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  Prologue

  Coach Bob Pankowski scowled and shook his head. His third season with the Vancouver Vice marked the team’s worst record ever, but this hockey game was a new low. It was like a fucking car crash in slow motion, and not a thing he said was getting through. Ryan Summers skated from behind the net with the puck, looking up the ice at God only knew what. The big d-man had zero game sense. Rico Aleppo circled the red line. That winger was a freaking prima donna who wanted to pad his stats.

  “Lepper! Get back. Cover your fucking man,” the coach yelled, but Lepper didn’t hear him. Or more likely, he was ignoring him. Then Krill, the left winger from the San Antonio Rampage, drilled Summers and stole the puck. He fired it back to their streaking centreman who fired a hard slapper; Dom went down to block the shot, and the puck ricocheted off his shin pad and straight to Wolfson, the best player on the Rampage. No hesitation. The guy just shot. Fuck. The Vice goalie didn’t even move in the right direction before it was by him. Stupid fucking Bloc—the only time he concentrated was during contract negotiations. There was a low murmur of dissatisfaction in the arena, but it wasn’t like anyone expected anything else these days.

  Welcome to the Vancouver Vice, folks: the shit show of the American Hockey League. And not one damn thing he did made a difference.

  There was a numbing pain between his shoulders. Christ, now he was physically connected to this damn team. Like the mental pain of losing wasn’t enough. Pankowski rubbed the back of his neck.

  Of course Wolfson was the guy Lepper was supposed to be on top of. The coach marched down to the end of the bench where Lepper was wiping off his face with a towel.

  Pankowski grabbed the towel. “Towels are for the guys who actually sweat, Lepper. Guys who hustle back to their zone. What the fuck were you doing out there? Waiting in the neutral zone like the big fucking goal suck you are.”

  The pain in his neck intensified. Was he ever going to get through to these idiots? They’d never make it to the NHL without a two-way game. Did they not understand that one basic fact? “Wolfson was your fucking check—so you need to fucking check him! You got that, asshole?”

  Lepper ducked his head. “Yes, coach.” He muttered something else.

  The coach inhaled. “What did you say?”

  There was no answer. The player shook his head and apologized again, not even looking up.

  “Be a fucking man, you fucking pussy. You got something to say, then say it!”

  Lepper raised his eyes to meet Pankowski�
��s. “I thought we had a chance to score there. Summy had the puck, and he was going to send me.”

  “Unless you’re a fucking psychic, stay in the fucking d-zone.”

  The winger scowled. “But we can’t win games without scoring.”

  Pankowski felt a flush rising up his chest—his neck and face felt hot. Raging hot. Defence first, then offence. Why was that simple principle so hard to understand? “We can’t win games—”

  He couldn’t even finish the sentence before he began coughing. He tried to take a full breath, but failed. The pain from his neck began to embrace his whole body. It felt like a metal band tightening around his torso.

  “Uggggh.” Suddenly, his legs gave way from under him. He collapsed back against the boards. Ian Lee, the assistant coach, rushed over. He grabbed Pankowski just before he hit the floor, staggered under his weight, then laid him down behind the players’ bench. Lee took a towel and made it into a makeshift pillow.

  “Heddy, over here. Now.” The panic in Lee’s voice was clear as he yelled for the trainer, and the whole team turned and gawked. Lee stared down at him with wide eyes. That was how you knew you looked like hell, you saw it reflected in other people’s face. Worry. Fear. And sometimes something worse.

  Audrey’s face flashed into his mind. How many times had she looked at him, her beautiful face creased with concern? “You’re working too hard, Bob. It’s not good for you to spend all this time on the team.” But eventually her worry turned to something else—not hate, because hate meant passion. It was indifference. And on the day she told him she was leaving, she barely looked at him at all. Like he was something she would step over on the sidewalk, and just carry on. Fifteen years of marriage, and he was nothing more to her than a piece of used-up chewing gum. The pain in his chest intensified.

  Heddy was working on him now. He took charge. “Ian, call 911. Tell them we have a possible myocardial infarction in a male, aged sixty. Be sure to tell them which gate to enter at.”

  “I’m only fifty-seven,” he thought. But that didn’t matter.

  “Bob, can you hear me? Can you swallow?” Heddy asked him.

  The coach opened his mouth slightly in response, and Heddy put a tiny pill on his tongue. “Pass me some water.”

  Lepper was looming behind the trainer, and he passed a water bottle over.

  Heddy raised the coach’s head and squirted a little water in his mouth. “See if you can swallow that.”

  The pill went down easily. If only he could catch his breath, but the pressure in his chest continued. In fact, it was getting heavier. He closed his eyes.

  “Jesus. Did I kill the coach?” Lepper’s voice was high-pitched and terrified.

  “I’m not fucking dead yet,” Bob thought.

  An image of his two daughters came to mind. It had been too long since he had seen Claire or Lucy, but they had their own lives. They understood that the hockey season was his time to focus. The summer was when he got to hang out with his girls and now his grandson. Grady was almost two now. Time to teach him to skate. He’d always wanted to teach his own kids, but neither of his girls were interested in hockey. But Grady… he’d be different. Bob imagined slipping tiny skates onto his grandson’s feet, lacing them up, and then guiding him onto the slick ice. Watching him take that first gliding step and picking him up after his first tumble. Seeing the expression on his round face when he finally learned the truth: that skating was as close to flying as man could get on his own power.

  Then everything went black.

  1

  Brent Says Sell

  Jackie Wagner

  Black was surprisingly complicated. Apparently, it wasn’t even a colour, but the absence of colour. I squeezed some Iron Oxide Black from the tube onto my glass palette and felt guilty. One of my painting instructors had said that real artists mixed their own black. But every time I tried to make black, all I got was this really ugly brownish grey. No matter how many complementary colours I added, the paint was never sufficiently black.

  I dipped the brush into the juicy paint and ran a line across the canvas. Could anyone tell that my black came from a tube? Would a hand-mixed black be more complex and fantastic? Maybe it was like the difference between baking from scratch and using a cake mix. But I had used my share of cake mixes, too. When you remembered the night before that you had to bring birthday cupcakes for an entire grade two class, Betty Crocker was your flipping BFF.

  Maybe that was my problem as a wife—too many shortcuts instead of doing the right thing the right way. No, that was ridiculous. Brent hadn’t left over cake mixes. It must have been not doing the things he considered important. But damn it, I could never figure out what those things were. Living with Brent was like a multiple-choice exam when you had skipped the entire semester—you could only guess at the right answers.

  I shook my head, trying to physically clear those discouraging thoughts from my brain. This was why I loved painting. It was the one activity that allowed me to stop worrying.

  The tulips in front of me were beginning to droop slightly. This was the problem working with live models instead of photographs—everything changed, the objects, the lighting, the angles. But my new painting teacher, Uwe, was so dramatic. He had actually torn up one woman’s photo reference and thrown it on the floor. After a horrified silence, he told the class that if we wanted photos we should take photos, but if we wanted paintings we needed to learn to see things in real life.

  I squinted at the flowers. Maybe reality was better, because I had to really look at the shapes and dimensions instead of gridding everything out. And in the evening light in the dining room, I realized something big. The flowers weren’t only red. They had pinks, yellows, whites, and greens in them. And where the petals were almost translucent, I could see all kinds of veins and lines. Maybe Uwe was right. I mixed some new colours on my palette and tried to capture that lovely yellowish-green shade. So fresh.

  “Mommy!” Tristan squeezed his arms around my hips.

  “Darling! You’re home already?”

  With a pang of guilt, I checked my watch. Not only did it have paint on it, but it was forty minutes past the time I meant to quit. As usual, I’d completely lost track of time while I was painting.

  I brushed the bangs off my face with the back of a paint-splattered hand and looked up. Brent and Hannah were standing there, and both of them had the same look on their face—slightly disdainful. Like I was some disorganized flake who had to be tolerated. If only I were showered and perfectly dressed with the studio transformed back to a dining room, as I’d planned. I smiled apologetically, but neither my ex-husband nor my daughter smiled back. Damn.

  “Still doing your painting?” Brent asked. But he didn’t wait for an answer. Tristan dragged him away to show him something. Hannah sidled in and looked at my unfinished canvas.

  “Flowers again?” Then her tone softened. “I like the colours. Did you miss us?”

  I kissed the top of her head. “Of course. It’s so boring when you’re not here. How did your soccer game go?”

  “We lost again,” she said. “But I played good.”

  That was typical Hannah; she worried about doing her part more than winning. I began jamming all the tubes of paint back into their box.

  “Where’s Minx?” my daughter asked.

  “I think she’s sleeping on your bed.”

  At least she had been when I last saw her this morning. I admired that lazy cat’s ability to sleep eight hours straight. Since Brent left, I had not slept through the night once. But the good thing about sleeping alone was there was nobody to complain if you turned on the light to read. Hannah took off to see her beloved pet.

  I was rinsing my brushes in the kitchen sink when Brent walked in and cleared his throat.

  “Listen, Jackie, we need to talk.” The sweet tone of his voice meant that he really wanted something. When we were married it might have a been a guys’ weekend in Vegas, trading in his almost new car, or a blow
job. But now what could it be?

  Against all reason, hope bubbled up inside me. Did he want to come back? This was my secret fantasy. If my life were a movie, then Brent was the only eligible male in the cast, so naturally all my romantic thoughts were centred on him. It was two years since he packed up and left. Now we were legally divorced, and he was dating Margaret Whittaker. Reality should have sunk in by now, but I was still an optimistic idiot. Or just a regular idiot.

  I dropped the brushes into the sink. Then I smoothed out my hair and smiled. Well, I tried to smile, but my expression felt fake and awkward. That was the problem with seeing Brent. I never knew exactly how to act with him. We couldn’t go back to our loving familiarity, but I couldn’t treat him like a stranger either. There was so much left unsaid between us. We really should have had a screaming, plate-throwing fight that night he said he was leaving. That would have been more satisfying and given me some closure. Like donating a pint of blood at once, instead of releasing it drop by drop.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  He was staring at my mouth. That used to be the signal he wanted to kiss me. Holy crap, did he want to kiss me? Because I still found him attractive, damn it. His thick dark hair curling over his forehead, those soft lips, and that five o’clock shadow that he had five minutes after shaving. Maybe he’d put on weight in the past year, but it wasn’t too bad. There wasn’t one man I’d met since he left who ignited the passion I used to feel for Brent. I moistened my lips and waited.