Chloe
The next evening, I sat next to Ava in club level seats at the Tampa Bay Ospreys arena downtown, wide-eyed and taking in the scenery of my first hockey game.
The energy was palpable.
Fans streamed in from every direction, filling the seats and adding to the noise level with every passing minute. The jumbotron shot off announcement after announcement while the DJ played loud, upbeat music for the teams to warm up to.
I looked around in awe, taking in the various groups of fans. I saw everything from couples and families with young kids to groups of rowdy men sloshing beer and screaming women with hand-painted signs for their favorite players.
The game hadn’t even started yet, and the crowd was loud as hell.
Ava stood next to where I sat, pressing up on her tiptoes to get a better look at all the action. As usual, she didn’t wear a smile, but just like she had when I brought her to practice, she lit up like I’d never seen her before.
“You really like hockey, don’t you?” I asked her.
“Mm-hmm,” she said, barely acknowledging me as she watched the players warm up. It was almost seven-thirty, and from what her father had told me, she usually went to bed around eight or eight-thirty. But tonight was a special occasion, and she didn’t look the slightest bit sleepy.
I turned my attention back to the ice to where the players were, and I didn’t realize I was chewing at the skin on my lip until Ava said something about it.
“How come you move so much when you’re sitting still?”
I blinked, then chuckled, blushing a little as I realized she’d picked up on my nervous tics. I had a habit of wringing my hands together or fussing with my hair when I was uncomfortable — had ever since I was a kid. It drove my mom and grandmother absolutely batshit, but I had yet to find a way to control it.
To be honest, I rarely realized I was doing it at all.
“Just like to fidget, I guess,” I said. “You know, kind of like the fidget slinkies we have in class?”
“Those are kinda fun.” She looked at me then. “Maybe you should carry one in your purse.”
I rolled my lips together against a laugh. “Yeah, I probably should, huh?”
“Chloe?”
I turned toward the voice coming from above and behind me, finding a stunning woman smiling at me from the next row up. She had jet black hair styled in tight curls, her honey-colored eyes glowing against her warm brown skin.
“I’m Maven,” she said, extending her hand for mine.
“Oh! Hi,” I said, standing so I could turn to face her and take her hand. Will had told me about Maven. She was one of his teammates’ fiancée and helped out with Ava from time to time.
“Glad to see you made it in okay,” she said, and then she leaned over the seats to give Ava a hug from behind and a kiss on the cheek. “Hey, you.”
“Hi,” Ava said, but she kept her eyes on the ice, as if Maven was bugging her as much as I had been with my question.
“I’m surprised you’re not down there on the ice,” she said to Ava. Then, to me, she added, “Warmups are about the only time the kids can get their dad’s attention before the game.”
She nodded toward where a player was making faces at a little boy who couldn’t have been more than three years old to illustrate her point, and I smiled.
But Ava just shrugged. “Daddy needs to focus. I’ll see him after.”
Maven shot me an amused smile, her perfectly shaped eyebrow arching a bit. “Okay, as her teacher… is she always this serious?”
“Afraid so,” I mused with a grin of my own at the little angel. “I’m working on her, though.”
“Tough to soften up someone raised by Will Perry, I suppose.” Maven assessed me for a moment. “Well, I’m just a few rows up, if you need anything,” she said, pointing to her seat. When she did, a woman with rich brown skin and straight black hair cut in a sharp bob waved at us. “That’s Livia. She’s my best friend and also the team’s dentist.”
I waved back at her, my head spinning a bit.
The team had its own dentist?
“After the game, I can walk you to the friends and family lounge. That’s where we meet up with the players,” Maven explained.
“That would be lovely. Thank you.”
“Sure thing,” she said with that dazzling smile. “Oh, and… don’t be a stranger, okay? Just the way those guys down there are a family, we’re a team, too,” she said, as if I were a wife or partner to one of the players.
I hoped my skin wasn’t as red as it felt.
One last look at Ava had her chuckling to herself, and then she retreated to her seats. I watched her for a split second with her best friend, the way they so comfortably laughed and clutched each other’s arms like they had a million inside jokes.
It made my stomach ache.
I longed for a friendship like that.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t had the opportunity to make friends. I had a few in college. I had some at the school where I worked now. But for whatever reason, I just never… fit in, I supposed. They were nice to me when I was around. If there was a work event, we could all laugh and chat. But it was surface level. It never went deep.
The closest things I had to best friends were my mom and my grandma. We talked all the time, shared inside jokes, and leaned on each other through the good and the bad. Those women had sacrificed so much for me, from their bodies, energy, and time to what little money they had. They’d even gone into debt to put me through college.
I loved them. And I loved spending time with them.
But I could never talk to them about my deepest thoughts and desires, could never be one-hundred percent honest with them. Because so many of the things I thought about, so many of the things I wanted… well, they would never understand.
When I took my seat again, I let myself get lost in the daze of watching players dash this way and that on the ice. There were dozens of pucks on both sides of the rink, and the teams were skating around in a dizzying pattern taking shots on the open net.
My eyes lost focus, the fatigue from the day and the week catching up to me. Starting up the second semester of the school year always felt harder than the first. After the holidays, kids were restless — and so was the staff. We still had months to go, but it seemed everyone was counting down to summer break.
Add in the fact that I unexpectedly took on a second job, and I felt all kinds of off-kilter.
It wasn’t a job I didn’t feel prepared to take, otherwise I would have said no. I’d nannied for plenty of my parents before and always enjoyed getting to know my students better. I also enjoyed having something to do with my time other than be alone. I liked being at home, liked my crafts and my cats and my peaceful quiet. But in the same breath, I always felt like I was itching for a change in routine.
And this was certainly a change in routine.
It was also my first time nannying for someone as high-profile as Will Perry.
I shook my head at the memory of him dropping off Ava at school this morning. He’d slid a check for five-thousand dollars into my hand when he’d walked Ava to class, and although I’d tried with all my energy not to accept it, he’d insisted.
Five grand.
That was more than I made in a month.
There was absolutely zero chance that I’d continue to let him pay me such an astronomical amount, but arguing with a six-foot-four, two-hundred-twenty-pound goalie on the day he had a game didn’t seem like a smart idea.
Besides, that money could help me pay off the student loans my matriarchy was currently buried under. It could help me pay my own bills without stress.
That was the life of a teacher that so many left out. You had to love what you did because you certainly weren’t going into this career for the money.
I blinked, my vision coming back into focus, and found myself scanning the ice for that beast of a man I was now temporarily working for. I knew from the tiny blue and white jersey Ava was wearing that he was number twenty-eight. It was also fairly easy to spot the goalies, as they stood out among the other players.
When I found him, he was standing off to the side of where all the rest of the team was shooting pucks. He hovered close to the glass, facing the rink, and he skated in place, side to side, with his gaze locked somewhere on the ice ahead of him. Then, he crouched low, dodging this way and that with lightning-quick movements and fast-snaps of his limbs in various directions like he was blocking pucks.
The back of my neck tingled with awareness as I watched him, knowing that under that cage of a mask was the scowl that he wore so easily. He was menacing, on or off the ice — and yet, after dinner last night, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a softness under that hard shell exterior.
The way he cared for his daughter, the way his chef seemed to care for him — it just seemed like there was more to him than met the eye.
And the poor man needed help.
That was more evident than anything else. He’d acted like I hung the moon rather than just helped his daughter get ready for bed. I knew he’d had a string of bad luck with finding a nanny, but had it really been that atrocious?
I marveled at his poise as he went through his warmup drills, the crowd getting louder and louder. I took my eyes off him long enough to pay attention to one of the announcements on the jumbotron, and when I looked at him again, my eyes shot wide.
He’d moved down to the ice now, onto his hands and knees, and he was stretching like he belonged on an Olympic gymnast team rather than a hockey team.
His hands were braced in front of him, holding his weight steady as he stretched his hips wide against the ice. One leg was bent, the other extended to the side, and he crouched low to the ice before rolling his hips forward and backward in a rhythm that made heat rush to my cheeks.
It should have been illegal for any man to have an ass like that.
And it should have been a felony for him to move his hips in that way, the way that made it impossible not to imagine what it would be like to be beneath him while he did it.
I tried not to stare. Really, I did. I attempted to focus on the other players, on the fans, on the bright orange fish mascot that was now making its way around the arena.
But my eyes kept snapping back to Will Perry.
He had both legs bent now, and he’d roll forward before extending his legs as straight as he could and then bending them again. After a while, he laid in a pancake stretch, his stomach and chest on the ice and his legs spread. But it wasn’t a passive stretch, it was active — his quads and hamstrings lifting him off the ice a few inches before he’d lower deeper into the stretch.
When he bent his legs and started rolling his hips again, I forced myself to look away.
Now was not the time to fantasize about my new boss — not when I was responsible for his daughter in the seat right next to mine.
Okay, in reality, I probably should never fantasize about him.
But he was a hot, professional athlete with a daughter he’d move mountains for.
I might have been celibate, but I wasn’t dead inside.
I managed to keep it in my pants through the rest of the warmup, and when the game actually started, Ava took her seat with something that almost resembled a smile.
“Let’s go, Daddy!” she screamed, and damn it if my heart didn’t melt into a puddle. This kid was so cute it hurt, and the way she loved her father… I knew he was the end all, be all in her eyes.
I was quiet most of the first period, mostly taking in the experience and trying to follow as best I could. I’d never watched a game of hockey in my life, never really watched any sport, to be honest, and I found myself taking my cues from Ava.
If she cheered, I did, too.
If she groaned and booed, so did I.
And if she growled in frustration, shaking the stuffed fish in her hands like she wanted to strangle it, I tried not to laugh and failed every time.
We got up long enough for both of us to use the restroom and get some popcorn during the first intermission. No one had scored yet. When we sat back down, I finally asked her, “So, what’s with the fish?”
I tapped the ugly thing on the tail, and Ava shoved a handful of popcorn in her mouth before shrugging.
“It’s for when we win.”
“When we win, huh? What happens then?”
“We throw the fish on the ice.”
I blinked, sure I’d misheard her, but she didn’t so much as glance my way with the statement. She was watching where they were doing some sort of game with a fan in the stands as the Zambonis smoothed the ice.
“Why?”
Ava frowned a little then. “I dunno. Daddy said it used to be real fish, but that got stinky. So now we throw fluffy fish.”
I was even more confused. Fortunately, a fan just above me leaned down and explained, “It’s an offering to the Osprey. She’s right — it did used to be real fish in the beginning. But several years ago, it shifted to toys. The team donates the stuffed animals to local shelters and kids in need.”
I offered the man a thank you before turning back to Ava with a light bulb going off.
She loved hockey, loved this team.
Maybe this was a way to get her talking more, to get her to open up a bit.
The game started up again, and I waited until a whistle blew before I leaned over to Ava. “So, what’s going on? Why did the guy in the stripes blow the whistle?”
“He’s the referee,” she said, singing the words in an almost exhausted tone. “They were offside.”
“What does that mean?”
She looked up at me then, blinking. “You don’t know what offside means?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what any of this means,” I said, leaning in and whispering like it was a secret confession just for her. “Think you could help me understand? I don’t want to look silly.”
At that, Ava’s eyes widened even more, and she nodded emphatically. “Don’t worry. Daddy had to teach me, too.”
“So now you can teach me?”
“It’s like we’re switching places!”
“It is,” I agreed with a grin, tapping her nose. “It’s a good thing we have each other, huh?”
At that, her little brows tugged inward, and she grew quiet, nodding.
But then a fight broke out on the ice, and she grabbed me by the sleeve and tugged me down to her level to explain why.
