Chapter 1
Goose
“Yo, Maddox! You wannasee my dong?” I held up a long, girthy piece of beef tenderloin.
My teammates, Jenner, Asher, and Braxton, laughed heartily, but my coach, Maddox Sterling, rubbed an annoyed hand over his face and groaned.
“What is wrong with you? There are kids around.” Blowing out a heavy breath, he looked skyward, shaking his head.
“Come on,” I teased, my cheeks hurting from how wide I was smiling. “Don’t you get it? Because it looks like a dong?”
The big bad head coach of the Indy Speed hockey team merely grunted in response. He needed to loosen up. Most days, he was strung so tight that I worried he would have a stroke.
I didn’t understand why he couldn’t take a chill pill. It’s not like he wasn’t getting laid on the regular. His beautiful wife, Bristol, traveled with the team as a reporter, so she was always by his side. Most guys would kill for that kind of easy access instead of leaving their girls waiting for them at home.
He should be walking on air. I knew I would be.
Seated on the back deck of my new house—purchased after I’d signed my most recent contract, which would keep me with the Speed for the next six years—my teammates and I were enjoying this beautiful late-summer day before training camp began. I was manning the grill while the wives and kids played in the pool.
Speaking of kids . . .
Ollie, Asher’s almost four-year-old son, ran over dripping wet and asked, “Daddy, what’s a dong?”
Braxton and Jenner snickered while Maddox shot me a glare.
Asher grabbed a towel, drying off the little guy and explaining, “It’s another word for penis.”
His words were muffled behind his hand, but I could have sworn I heard Maddox grumble, “Fuck my life.”
Ollie perked up, his blue eyes going wide. “Oh! I have a dong, too, Uncle Goose!”
“Yeah, you do!” Crouching down, I offered him my hand. “High five, little buddy!”
Pulling back his hand, he tried to give me the hardest high-five he could muster. His tiny palm smacked down on mine, and I made a big show of hissing and shaking my hand.
“Oooh. Ahhh. What’s your mom been feeding you? You’re getting too strong!”
The little boy giggled before beaming up at me. “She makes me finish all my broccoli before I can leave the table.”
“Hmm.” I furrowed my brows, pretending to be serious. “I’m gonna have to have a serious discussion with her, then. I need these hands to save pucks and can’t have you breaking them with your super-strength high-fives.”
Ollie launched himself at me, knocking me off balance and onto my butt. I chuckled at the sneak attack but quickly went on the offensive, shouting, “Tickle monster!”
My fingers dug into his sides, and his squeals rang out into the air. When he gasped for breath, begging me to stop, I decided to show him mercy.
Setting him on his feet, I booped his nose. “Don’t forget I’m still bigger than you, little man.”
Not skipping a beat, Ollie replied, “For now,” before running off to park himself at the patio table, where I had a bunch of snacks laid out.
I’d always loved kids, and my closest teammates had some great ones. I was fortunate they included me in their little family group so I could play uncle.
Maddox would say I was so good with them because I was a kid myself—and maybe in some ways I was—but I think it mainly stemmed from the fact that I grew up as an only child and was trying to make up for the loneliness that came from my early childhood.
My parents were the first of the Gusev clan to immigrate from Russia to America, so we didn’t have a big family network. When I began playing hockey and discovered it came with an instant family, I was hooked. My teammates were my brothers, and their siblings became my siblings.
The four girls made their way out of the pool, each of them carrying one of the babies.
Jenner and his wife, Evie, had an eighteen-month-old daughter, Hope, whom they’d adopted after years of struggling to create a family of their own, only to find out before she was born that they’d gotten pregnant with twin boys—Hunter and Hendrix, who were now fifteen months old. Then, there was Asher and his wife, Tessa. In addition to their son, Ollie, they also had a daughter, Bailey, who had just turned two.
