“Well, there’s this guy…” I start, and her face lights up with hope. I’m quick to shake my head at her. “No, not like that, Gran. He’s a pain in the ass.”
“That’s how it always starts,” she jokes, and I ignore her, flopping onto my back and lacing my fingers together on my stomach. For the five years I spent at the FBI, she was constantly urging me to go out and meet people.
But dating has never felt like it fit into my life. Not when I spent so much of it pretending to be someone else. Every time I go on a date, I find myself figuring out exactly who the other person wants to see, and giving them that. It complicates things when they fall in love with someone who doesn’t exist.
“What’s his name?” she asks, ever the busybody.
“Luca,” I say, and “Maybe it always started like that for you, but not me.”
I know Gran is thinking about her love story with my grandfather. Hating his guts, then crossing the line from loathing to loving. “I’ve barely even talked to him, but I can just tell that he has these ideas about me. I mean, he walked into my first meeting already insinuating that I shouldn’t even be there.”
She sucks in a dramatic breath, “Hesaidthat?”
“Well, no—not in so many words. But that’s what he implied.”
Gran gives me a look that says she clearly thinks I was reading too much into it.
I sigh, roll my eyes, and straighten back up, wanting to move on from the discussion. “Didn’t you get a new chess set? Let’s play a round.”
I gather the table and assemble it in front of her, setting up the board and situating myself in the chair across from her, watching as she moves her first pawn.
But from the look she’s giving me, I know she’s still thinking about our discussion—about Luca. I could tell her that she’s wrong about this one, that I just have a feeling, but that will only open up the discussion again.
So, instead, I just focus on playing, anticipating her moves and untangling her strategy so I can come out with a win—like I always do.
***
Luca McKenzie is watching me.
Not in aYou’re cute and I want you to know itkind of way, but in aI really don’t like youkind of way.
From the moment I set foot back onto Frost property, I can feel his eyes tracking me. After my meeting with the HR manager, during which she re-iterates my ridiculously high salary, I bump into Luca in the hallway. Before their training starts, I try to get to know some of the players in the lounge, and Luca appears in the back of the room, folding himself casually into an armchair—gaze never leaving me.
The only time there’s any reprieve is when he’s down on the ice practicing, and I’m the one watching him. But even then, there’s a certain presence about him that makes me feel like he might turn around and fix me with a serious stare at any moment.
When I was eleven and making my way through Italy with my dad, he met and fell in love with this Sicilian woman who ended up robbing us blind in the middle of the night. It was my first introduction to the idea of an all-consuming person. From the night that he met her untilmonthsafter she had clearly betrayed us, my father was obsessed, organizing his life around her, following her wherever she wanted to go.
It was the moment I realized a single person could come into your life like a storm, sweep through, distract you, then hang around the edges, dark clouds always looming.
And Luca McKenzie seems like he might be that kind of person. Here I am in a new city, with a new job, settling my Gran in her home, and he’s the most constant thing on my mind.
“Watch that back check!” Luca hollers, and Uncle Vic seconds it, the two of them working together to adjust the team during scrimmage.
Luca isn’t a normal team captain—that much is becoming clearer to me the more I observe things. He’s far more involved in this team than any other captain I’ve seen.
As practice goes on, I pull up a browser and Google him, scrolling through the results until I find an article titled “Everything You Need To Know About Luca McKenzie and His Frost Family Dynasty”.
For the next twenty minutes, I read about him—that he was an all-stater in high school and had his pick of D1 colleges. How he had a short career with the Rangers—during which he won Rookie of the Year and broke one of their scoring records. Then came onboard at the Frost.
Their first season was a bust, with the team fizzling out before they even hit the play-offs. Some sort of personal drama imploding with Luca, Callum Hendricks, and Sloane McKenzie—the team manager and CEO of Slap Shot, a hockey-focused online outlet.
During their second season, they struggled with effective defensive strategy, and last year they had more goals allowed in the first half of the season than the previous two years combined. More reading reveals a problem with the goalie, which seems to be remedied now.
When I click onto a video interview of Luca, I make sure to lower the volume. I doubt they can hear me all the way down on the ice, but the last thing I need is for him to know that I’m cyberstalking him.
“…this is going to be the year,”he says confidently on the screen. He’s lounging in a chair next to a late-night talk host, a confident, easy smile on his face. “Trust me, this is a good time to be a Frost fan.”
Through the rest of the interview, he charms and flirts, and the interviewer asks him all the right questions, leaning forward with her chin on her palm.
