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“Your quest.”

“My . . .” Nolan blinked once. “My quest?”

“Into Freddie’s identity.” Eli slid past him, dragging his entire left side against Nolan’s—a very purposeful move given the hallway was wide enough to fit a Cadillac with room to spare. “I have an idea how to find him.”

“Do you?”

“Mm-hmm.” Eli’s fingertips grazed the skin of Nolan’s wrist. With another of those all-knowing smiles, he said, “You coming with me?”

So much yes.

chapter

eight

In hockey circles, Cody Evans wasn’t as well-known as his former-Trailblazers-team-captain husband, but he was nonetheless recognizable to true fans in the same way any player’s significant other was. Unlike Roman Kinsey, though, Cody didn’t scowl at interruptions or walk around with a constant glower.

Eli had met Cody several times—in fact, he’d attended Cody and Roman’s annual Trailblazers potluck last year—and he figured if anyone could help Nolan find Freddie and Annie, it was a librarian.

“Can’t say I remember any players named Freddie,” Cody said from behind the counter at the Fletcher Free Library on College Street. He frowned as he thought and pushed his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. “And I’ve known all the Trailblazers since their first season. Some better than others, obviously, but a Freddie doesn’t ring a bell.”

“How about an Annie?” Nolan asked, one hip propped against the counter. “One who was married to a player.”

“Or a girlfriend,” Eli added, because he’d read Freddie’s letters, and while Annie had very clearly been his girlfriend, their marital status was unclear.

“Or a girlfriend,” Nolan allowed.

Cody shook his head. “Off the top of my head, I don’t remember anyone named Annie. You said the letters are addressed to Annie from Freddie?”

Nolan nodded. “That’s right.”

“You do realize that those could be nicknames they had for each other, right?”

“In which case, we’re fucked,” Nolan said. “Yeah, we know. But I can’t not try to look for them. I’d hate for these letters to end up in someone’s recycling bin or back in the storage room. That’s just . . . sad.”

“So I was thinking,” Eli jumped in, “of doing a search for the name Freddie in old newspaper articles. I tried to do it at home, but older articles are behind a paywall, and I’m too cheap to pay for it.”

Nolan chuckled, and his gaze was affectionate when he said, “I would’ve paid for it.”

Eli shrugged. “But here we get free access. Right, Cody? Don’t you have newspaper archives on microfilm?”

“Microfilm,” Cody repeated with a chuckle. “Sure, we have microfilm, but only for old articles that haven’t yet been digitized. What you’re looking for is only fifteen years old, and those have been digitized. You can access them via the library’s newspaper database on those computers over there. You just need to log in with your library card number.”

“Well, that’s a letdown,” Eli said, and he was only half kidding. “I was looking forward to playing around with microfilm, if only for the novelty.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

He and Nolan snagged a couple of side-by-side computers. Eli logged Nolan in first, but when he tried to do the same on his computer, it gave him an error message: You are logged in on another terminal.

Damn. He’d been hoping they could tag-team their search to save time.

Nolan gripped the underside of Eli’s chair and rolled him closer. Much closer. Their shoulders bumped. Their knees bumped.

“Guess we’ll have to use mine,” Nolan murmured with a sly smile that had Eli wishing he’d invited him over to test out his couch instead.

The library. The fuck had he been thinking? They could be naked right now.

He’d been thinking that he didn’t want to move too fast. He’d been thinking that he wanted more than a romp in the hay—or on an oversized couch, as it were.