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I blinked.
Notcurled.
Blond curls straightened out; their wildness contained. Bright blue eyes. Curves for days clad in business casual.
Except for her feet. Those were in slippers.
Fuzzy pink penguins.
Her head was down, as though she was studying the adorable faces on them.
“Do you hear me?” the man, older, a bit portly, and definitely domineering, asked.
Billie Rose—Billie Rose!—nodded meekly.
I felt anger begin to boil deep in my belly. I hadn’t talked to the woman in a month, but the Billie Rose I knew didn’t meekly nod and stare at her feet while someone lectured her.
Shedid the lecturing.
Shedid the ball busting.
She—
“Joel, you gorgeous bastard! How the fuck are you?”
Billie Rose—Billie Rose!—looked up.
Straight from her feet…right to where I was spying.
Ten
Billie Rose
Ijerked, saw that—to my horror—Joel was standing just ten feet away, well within earshot, expression guilty as he turned to greet a teammate.
A face I didn’t recognize, which was a rarity.
I knew pretty much everyone in River’s Bend.
But the Rush’s roster changed regularly—players going up to the NHL, down to the ECHL, being traded to another team—and sometimes I was a few days behind pairing a face with a name.
Worse—and this was another rarity—I’d forgotten they had practice this evening.
The first of the season, and it was a good thing. It meant that the town was getting back to normal.
Cleanup was commencing. Rebuilding would begin soon.
I knew the team coming back was important.
A sign of their solidarity because they wouldn’t be making as much money as they could somewhere else, where there was a town full of people to buy tickets and attend games and pay for food and beer. River’s Bend was scattered in the wind.
I would make sure my people had a place to get back to, would find that safety and security of River’s Bend again.
But it would take time.
And I knew that because of that, the Rush coffers wouldn’t be as well off as when the entire town seemed to gather at their home games, cheering on the team.
We’d finally made peace with each other—the town, the team, the players, the population—and the peace and camaraderie we’d created…had gone up in flames.
