Startled, Lauren whirled to find the very reason for her misery standing there on the sidewalk, his rugged face regarding her curiously.
Her stomach flipped over and then dove straight down to her knees. Mike Beacon in a suit had always been her undoing. His tie was loosened already, showing her a glimpse of the contrast between the olive skin at his throat and the crisp white dress shirt he wore. A five o’clock shadow dusted the planes of his strong jaw, gathering in the sexy cleft of his chin.
She used to put her thumb right there beneath his full lower lip as she tugged his face closer for a kiss.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine, thanks!” she insisted, snapping out of it. She tore her gaze off of the only man she’d ever loved and looked up Flatbush for the RAV4 Uber had promised her. Every muscle in her body was tense as she waited for the goalie to just walk away.
Which he did not do.
She turned and pinned him with what the assistants in the Manhattan office termed the Lauren Glare. The laserlike effect of her stare made interns put away their phones and get back to work. It seared incompetent messengers into delivering packages in a timely fashion. It was a “powerful and terrifying weapon,” according to her coworkers.
Beacon just smiled.
What an asshole.
“Why are you still here?” she asked.
“Because you’re standing on a dark sidewalk at midnight?”
Seriously? This from a man so obviously unconcerned with her well-being? If he gave a damn, he wouldn’t have walked out on her two years ago without an explanation. He wouldn’t have tossed her heart on the street, stomped on it, and then vanished from her life. Forty-eight hours before she realized he was gone, they’d been circling real-estate listings in the newspaper together, discussing whether they needed a three-bedroom apartment, or whether two would be plenty. While naked. In bed.
Lauren didn’t remind him now, though, because she’d said it all before. For weeks she’d sobbed into his voice mail because he didn’t pick up the phone. She’d begged for an explanation, wondering what she’d done wrong.
There was really no point in going there again. “Just don’t, okay?” she demanded instead.
“Don’t what?” his husky voice asked.
Oh, for Christ’s sake. She turned to face him, her blood pressure doubling. “Don’t be nice. Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. Just stay between the pipes and guard the damn net. And leave me the hell alone.”
He swallowed, and she saw a flicker of a shadow cross his face, but it was gone before she could name the emotion. Note to self—never square off against a champion goalie. They were the masters of playing it cool when they needed to. Lauren found herself staring again, trying not to remember how easy it had been to get him to toss off the mask and really live. “Nobody gets me like you do,” he used to whisper into her ear.
It had been a lie, though. Obviously.
A quick tap on a car horn broke the weird spell that had come over her. She turned to see a RAV4 against the curb, a man’s face peering up at her that matched the profile picture of the Uber driver she’d summoned.
Thank you, baby Jesus.
Without another word Lauren got into the back seat and shut the door. She couldn’t resist a parting glance up at Beacon, though.
He stood there, hands jammed in his pockets, watching her car pull away.
TWO
AUGUST 2012
Lauren surveyed the messy Syosset office as she walked in for the first time in four weeks. She spotted a couple of forgotten Starbucks cups on the windowsill, and the copy machine’s jam light was on. Could be worse. An hour of work would put everything back to rights.
It wasn’t too high a price to pay for a long vacation on Fire Island with her high school friends. She’d needed that vacation badly. The play-offs season had ended in a third round loss to the Rangers, and everyone had been crushed as well as exhausted.
But now she was sporting bikini tan lines and a happy outlook. In four days she’d start a new semester of night classes at LIU, inching closer to her BS in business management.
Things were looking up.
She tucked her bag away in a desk drawer and set about tidying up the office. She adjusted the air conditioning from sixty-six degrees (probably her father’s doing) back up to a more reasonable sixty-nine. The old grouch was next door at the practice facility right now, so she hummed to herself as she worked.
“Nice top. Sexy,” her coworker Jill said when she arrived a half hour later. “It’s new, right?”
“Mmm?” Lauren said, not rising to the bait. The top was sexy. It was sleeveless, exposing her tanned shoulders. It was hot pink with a playful gather at the bust without actually showing cleavage. She didn’t want to start off the new season with a tongue lashing from her father.
“Have you seen him yet?” Jill asked.
“Who?” she asked, playing dumb. She and Jill had sat side by side in this office for eight years. There was nothing in Lauren’s life that Jill didn’t know, including the fact that she was nursing an eight-year long crush on a married man. But Lauren could not be prodded into discussing it. What was the point?
“Who,” Jill scoffed under her breath, and if Lauren had turned her head she surely would have seen the older woman’s eyes rolling. “Mike Beacon, that’s who. I’m surprised he’s not sitting on the end of your desk already, chatting you up.”
Once again Lauren demurred. It was true that she and Beacon were close. As the team captain, he spent more time in the front office than any other player. That meant more time with Lauren and Jill. And, sure—he and Lauren gravitated toward one another. They were almost the same age, and they’d both been part of the organization for exactly eight years. Beacon had arrived as a trade from Quebec the same month that Lauren started working for the team. The joke at the time was that they were both rookies.
The difference was that Beacon arrived in Long Island with a wife and toddler in tow, and made half a million dollars a year. While Lauren worked for her father—the team manager—because he wouldn’t pay for her to attend college.
“It’ll be good for you to figure out how the real world works,” her dad had said. “Save up some money and then get that business degree if you want it so damn bad.”
Eight years later and she was still taking two courses every fall, but none in the spring, because play-offs season often made final exams impossible.
Her whole life had been ruled by hockey, with no end in sight.
Meanwhile, after eight years, Lauren and Mike Beacon were good friends. Their jobs required having each other on speed dial, and at the top of their texting apps. It didn’t matter that the happy sound of his laughter always bounced around inside her chest, or that she had the exact shape of his smile memorized.