Portland Storm: The First Period by Catherine Gayle

Author:Catherine Gayle [Gayle, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: Catherine Gayle
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

I WAS A fucking idiot for pulling those kids around on the sled all day yesterday. I was an even bigger idiot for not icing my ankle last night.

Now I was paying for it, and at the worst possible time—right in the middle of a game.

Every time I tried to really dig in, either to get some traction so I could gain some speed or change directions, it hurt worse than it did only a moment before. We were playing the Canucks again, the last time we would face them until the final game of the season.

It had been chippy out on the ice since the opening puck drop. Hell, even during warm ups, there’d been a lot of chirping back and forth between our teams. We didn’t really like each other, the Storm and the Canucks. The game had been full of lots of hard hits, some of them skirting the edge of being legal—and the Canucks were getting the best of us, even if the game was scoreless late in the second period. They were dominating us at face-offs, they had peppered Hunter with over thirty shots already, and every time one of us touched the puck, we knew we were going to get hit. Hard.

At the moment, I just wanted to get the hell off the ice. I’d nearly screwed the team over by passing the puck right in front of our goal crease. I’d been trying to hit Zee with it to let him take it out of the zone, but one of the Sedin twins had picked my pass off and got a point-blank shot against Hunter. When I’d spun around to try to cover my mistake, I’d twisted my ankle again. Now it hurt like a son of a bitch—easily twice as bad as it had been before that dumbass move.

Thank God Hunter had bailed me out of that one. Several of the games he’d started lately had been a struggle for him, but today he was playing lights-out hockey. Nothing was getting past him, no matter how bad we screwed up in front of him, and we’d screwed up a hell of a lot. No one quite as blatantly as me, though.

Jens gathered the puck behind our net and set up our breakout. He took it to the boards behind me on the left-wing side. I was waiting just on the other side of center ice, and he sent a hard pass my way, angling it past a Canuck with the boards. As soon as it hit my stick, I shot it deep into the zone. Half a second after the puck left my stick, Canucks defenseman Kevin Bieksa caught me with his hip and sent me sprawling to the ice.

I got up, made sure the coast was still clear for me to get off for a line change, and climbed over the boards. Jonny took my place and went to work, and I tried to will the shooting pain in my ankle away.

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