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Fitz narrowed his eyes. “And for once, given how cameras are usually magnetized to your ass, your good deed was not recorded. Rather, the only part that went viral was you playing fisticuffs with an opposing player.”
Fisticuffs. Dex almost laughed at the old-fashioned language, but the look on Fitz’s face dampened the bubbling threat of humor.
“But the girl? She’ll testify for me.” Damn, she had to.
The boss made a face. “Have you forgotten that Hughes is her boyfriend? I wouldn’t rely on that for your defense. No, we need something else. In the months before your court date, we need to rehab your reputation. Again.”
“Another fake it till we make it vanish sitch?”
Fitz’s hand white-knuckled around his coffee cup. He really did not like being reminded of that.
“No going back to that well. This time, we’ll have to make you look purer than the driven snow. Sophie has some ideas.”
He pressed a button on his office phone and murmured a summons for Sophie, head of PR at the Rebels. Poor Soph was unfortunately well used to coming up with strategies to make Dex look like a choirboy, or maybe not so unfortunately. Job security for her, right?
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“You’d better hope it does. Because a conviction will put you on waivers, boot you off this team, and then it’s bye bye hockey.”
In a daze, Dex stepped out of Fitz’s office and tried to catch his breath.
Bye bye hockey?
That couldn’t happen. Hockey was the only thing in the world that mattered to him, the one thing he could rely on. If he couldn’t play hockey, he was nothing.
“Hey, Dexter! How did it go?”
He met the green-gold gaze of Tara Fitzpatrick, former fiancée, current hair stylist, and his closest friend in Chicago. Like a lost mutt, he’d been wandering the halls of the Rebels compound and arrived at her “salon,” where she cut the hair of the players and staff. She was currently brushing away some stray strands, which looked like the lustrous locks of chatty D-man Theo Kershaw. The guy spent more time on his hair than on his sticks.
A happy gurgle called his attention to the other person in the room. One-year-old Esme, Tara and Fitz’s daughter, was clamoring for attention from her stroller.
Sorry, Esme, the Big Bad Boss of Attention Hogging is here for your throne.
“You busy, T?” he asked Tara.
“I’ve got twenty minutes until my next appointment. Have a seat.”
With an unceremonious plop into the comfortable leather chair, he took a good look at himself in the mirror, then swiveled to face his friend because he was sick to his back teeth of that loser.
“I might be going down.”
Tara raised an eyebrow. “Going… down?”
“Prison or the AHL.” It was debatable which was worse. “Your husband thinks I’ve really screwed the pooch on this one.”
She winced.
“Shit, he told you already?” Which meant Fitz wasn’t trying to mess with Dex out of some twisted desire to exact revenge for dating Tara—which the man had set up, mind you—but instead was a thousand percent worried Dex might be in major trouble here.
“He mentioned that the lawyers were concerned,” Tara said. “Some of your other shenanigans were more acceptable in a ‘boys will be boys’ kind of way. No one got hurt except the prudes and their sensibilities. But a physical injury against another player off the ice was always going to be trouble.”
Dex put his head in his hands. This was not good.
Tara squeezed his shoulder. “But we can fix this! Here, hold Esme, that’ll cheer you up.”
Within a few mind-numbing seconds he had the infant in his arms. Those gorgeous green eyes, a carbon-copy of her mom’s, with her dad’s wavy black hair was a dynamite combination. Tara was right. He did feel slightly cheered, even if the kid was named after one of those Twilight vampire chicks. A little forethought, people.
“Your daddy doesn’t like me, Esme. He’s still mad because I got there first. In another universe, I would be your pop.”
