Hard Checked (Ice Kings #4) - Stacey Lynn Page 0,3

wouldn’t listen to me in all these years I’ve tried explaining. I want my baby. Ours. One I carry in my body and birth into the world. Now, we know with certainty that will never happen. I understand there are options. I’ve crossed those off. Please.

It’s over.

Let me find my peace adjusting to the latest news. Perhaps this way, we’ll both eventually get what we want but there’s no hope of it—

The paper crumples in my fist. I pull my arm back and fling it, unsatisfied it only bounces off the kitchen island before dropping to the floor. A scream tears from my throat and I look for something more substantial to throw. Something that will shatter like she’s just done to me.

“Fucking bullshit. All of this is such bullshit.”

The final flames of my marriage ending are going up right in front of me. I pull out the papers she had dropped off like she had it timed to do as soon as I got back home and read them.

Every minute that passes burns the hole she’s creating brighter and bigger.

Twenty minutes later, I am pissed.

A few thousand dollars a month until she lands on her feet and finds a job to support herself along with the rest of her clothes and personal items in her closet and our house. She’ll arrange for movers to come pack her things. That’s all she’s asked for.

No money for a down payment for her own home.

No Bruiser.

No insisting we sell the beach house on Sanibel Island where we’ve lived for thirty days every summer to relax before training camp. And she gets half.

There’s no half of nothing.

After all she’s been through. After all the dreams she put on hold for me, insisting it was worth it. After all the years she spent crying in my arms, hurting because she couldn’t carry our own child… and she’s asking for fucking pennies.

It’s almost more insulting than demanding everything. She walks away with my name and the salary of what my father makes teaching and she doesn’t want a damn thing else from me except for my signature.

And fuck this.

Fuck it all.

Chapter Two

Gigi

My grandpa always said when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. When life handed me lemons, I stomped them into a pulp and bought myself a one-way ticket to Turkey where I spent a year and a half traveling Eastern Europe before spending another six months traversing through Western Europe, ending in Scotland before the weariness of traveling finally started getting to me.

My heart started missing my dad and home.

Despite my homesickness that took root, it still took a phone call from my aunt Pamela to tell me my dad was in the hospital with chest pains to finally get me back on the plane and on American soil. The moment I hit town, I headed to his bar to drop off my luggage in the apartment above it to clean up before heading to see him. I figured with what Pamela said, he’d be home and resting.

Imagine my surprise when I walked into the bar to grab the key for upstairs, and there he was.

All hefty, full stomach and thick head of graying hair and second chin, booming his standard and well-known laugh with a bunch of male customers.

I’d leaped over the bar, not caring about the drinks I probably spilled in my wake, and slammed my much more petite arms around him in a hug.

Since that day barely over a year ago, I’ve come to know the guys that were there that night. Most of them are team members of the Carolina Ice Kings, North Carolina’s professional hockey team.

At one point, Dad pulled me aside and said the guys found his bar a year earlier, sauntering in after a loss at home with some of their wives and girlfriends. There’d barely been a body in his bar because most young people liked to head into Charlotte to the cooler clubs. Apparently, these guys liked the quiet so much they kept coming back. He told me I was never to tell anyone they came in. They liked it here, they tipped well and didn’t cause problems, and he liked their company.

I know this because Dad introduced me to most of them that night in between the sassy shots he took at my colored hair, the mermaid tattoo I’d picked up in Germany, and the tiny nose piercing I got in the French Riviera.

There was one among them who stood out. He came in