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Chapter One
Five Years Ago…
What kind of asshole would dump his fiancée via FaceTime minutes before their wedding ceremony was about to begin?
That wasn’t the kind of question Astrid O’Malley had ever thought to ask herself—especially not when her best friend was fastening the eighty-two million buttons going up the back of Astrid’s wedding dress, which hadn’t been worn since her mom walked down the aisle.
She hadn’t considered it when she’d lifted her mimosa glass and blinked back tears—never trust waterproof mascara against the power of bridal tears—when her dad ended his pre-ceremony toast by telling her that her mom was with her in spirit and would be so proud of the woman she’d become.
It hadn’t even been a flicker of an idea when Tig Jones’s face had popped up on her phone screen as an incoming FaceTime call. Instead of an uneasy feeling of oh-fuck taking her stomach down to her toes, she’d dipped into the attached bathroom of the New Orleans’ First Methodist’s Sunday School classroom, where the bridal party was doing last-minute makeup touchups. Holding her million-mile veil (going by what her dad had told her growing up and the pictures she’d seen, restraint had never been her mom’s style), she’d popped in her earbuds as she stood in front of the child-size sink and aimed her phone camera at the mirror that only captured her from the boobs down before hitting join call.
She set her glass down on the counter, accidentally on purpose leaning forward to give Tig a better view of how good her boobs looked in this dress, and asked, “If you can’t see my face, that doesn’t count as really seeing me, right?”
Hockey players were a superstitious bunch—something that had definitely rubbed off on Astrid, since she’d practically grown up rink-side as her dad moved from job to job, culminating with his current stint as the Cajun Rage’s head coach. There was no reason to jinx her and Tig’s marriage before it began by ignoring the old wives’ tale that it was bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the big event.
When Tig didn’t answer, she crossed her fingers to ward off any curses and looked down at her screen.
She could only see her soon-to-be husband from the waist up, but it was enough to knock her knees out. Astrid went down hard, her ass landing on the very short (and thankfully close-lidded) kiddie toilet.
Instead of the tux he’d picked out for their wedding, Tig was wearing a blue T-shirt with a Harbor City Ice Knights hockey logo on it and a baseball cap pulled down low on his face. Her brain was trying to work out why the Cajun Rage’s star goalie would be wearing the team’s arch nemesis’s merch when she realized he was sitting in front of a window overlooking the New Orleans’ airport tarmac. Realization sucked the air out of her lungs like a souped-up Shop-Vac.
He wasn’t coming.
“Astrid, babe, I wish the deal the Ice Knights offered me to play for them hadn’t been so good, but it is. I had to take it,” Tig said as a single, perfectly timed tear slid down his cheek. “The catch is I have to leave today. Right now. They want me between the pipes for tomorrow’s game. My flight boards in half an hour.”
There were a million thoughts she should have been having at that moment, but her brain was stuck on buffering, and the only thing that got through was the realization that unlike Tig, Astrid was not a pretty crier.
The tip of her nose turned red enough that she could have taken Rudolph’s job. Her face went blotchy and stayed that way for at least half an hour. And she could never, ever stop her nose from running, which was exactly what she wanted when that one sad song from the stupid toys-come-alive movie came over the grocery store speakers when she was PMSing hard enough to deplete the world’s strategic chocolate reserves.
Tig, on the other hand, looked like someone who had squeezed a few drops of Visine into his eyes and then added a soft glow filter to the video call.
“I’m so sorry. I never meant for this to happen.” He wiped the single tear away with the back of his hand and aimed a shaky smile at the camera. “You know I love you.”
The words came through muffled, as if they’d had to go through a couple of feet of stuffing, which seemed to be wrapped so tight around her that it was impossible for her to feel or say anything. She’d never really gotten the meaning behind the phrase “frozen like a deer in the headlights” before, but now she did—and if she was that doe on the highway facing down a Mack truck, she’d have been roadkill for sure.
It was fucking ridiculous.
Here she was, wearing her dead mother’s wedding gown and doing her best stump-on-a-log impression, while several hundred people—including the entire roster, front office, and coaching staff of the Cajun Rage hockey team—waited in the church for the first strains of “Here Comes the Bride.”
She should be reading Tig the riot act. She should be plotting a revenge so epic folk songs would be written about it. She should be raging or crying or flipping the fuck out. Instead, she was frozen in the moment.
Only Tig Jones could do this to her.
Only Tig Jones had ever been able to do this to her.
“I never meant to mess things up,” he said, his voice shaking just the slightest bit. “You have to believe me.”
How often had she heard that from Tig since they first started dating?
A million times at least.
“You’re not saying anything, and you always have something to say,” Tig said, sinking lower into his seat at the Delta Sky Lounge and shoving his baseball cap farther down as if that would help the guy who was supposed to be the Cajun Rage’s goalie for the rest of his career go unrecognized. “Please,” he pleaded, “say something.”
For what may have been—probably was—the first time in her life, she couldn’t. “Astrid,” Tig said, jostling the phone in his hand as he got up so all she saw for a second was a plane on the tarmac before he pointed the camera back at himself as he started pacing. “I just—”
There were more words; Astrid knew there were because she could see Tig’s mouth moving, but she didn’t hear a single solitary syllable because something inside her cracked. Everything that had been muted and moving at the speed of a sloth stuck in molasses broke free and came rushing at her—the bone-deep hurt, the raw anger, the icy certainty that everything (including her) had changed forever. It all slammed against her chest and knocked the shock right out of her.
“Shut up, Tig,” she said, relieved to find her voice, even if it had that scratchy tightness that usually preceded a whole lot of tears from frustration.
