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  Game Over

  Hockey Boyz Book 2

  Angela Stevens

  Copyright © 2020 by Angela Stevens

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For Sarah, Lisa, Matt

  Contents

  1. CHARLIE

  2. Mia

  3. Charlie

  4. Mia

  5. Charlie

  6. Mia

  7. Charlie

  8. Mia

  9. Charlie

  10. Mia

  11. Charlie

  12. Mia

  13. Charlie

  14. Mia

  15. Charlie

  16. Mia

  17. Charlie

  18. Mia

  19. Charlie

  20. Mia

  Also by Angela Stevens

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  CHARLIE

  “Can’t fucking believe it!” I lifted the cup above my head and handed it over to José Estrada. “This is yours.” I thumped the goalie on the back and grinned from ear to ear.

  José kissed the silver and then drank from it. Spluttering from the rush of beer down his throat, he winked at me. “It’s ours, Charlie. The whole team. Including Stamford.”

  Next to him, Kai Stamford shrugged. “I wasn’t even there.”

  Kai had been suspended from the team at the start of the playoffs after he’d gotten into a fight with our asshole ex-right winger, Mickey Compton. Kai was lucky he was still on the team, but Coach Peterson was keen to keep our promising center by moving hell on earth to make that happen. ‘Extenuating circumstances,’ Peterson claimed to the board and, thank the hockey gods, the board saw it that way, too. Mickey did his bit, too, by proving he really was a fucking idiot with a grudge, and left the evidence of his stupidity in plain sight.

  I emptied another bottle of beer into the trophy and slid it across the bench to Kai. “Drink up, Stamford. José is right. You got us into the playoffs, so this victory is as much yours as it is ours.”

  Reluctantly, Kai put the huge cup to his mouth and drank. It wasn’t hard to understand how he was feeling. After fighting our way to the finals together, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being excluded from the last stretch, Jeez, that had to hurt like a bitch. Like all of us, Kai lived and breathed hockey with a passion.

  Actually, that was an understatement for me. It was literally, and figuratively, what got my heart pumping. If I wasn’t playing, I was practicing, and after that I was watching and studying it. Hell, I even dreamed about it every single night. 24:7, 365 days a year—hockey was life. For every waking moment of my life since I had my first skate-out as a mite at age four. Even if I had a wet dream, it somehow involved a hockey element. Hockey and me, me and hockey—we were shipped, Hock-lie? Char-key? Hmm, that could do with some work, but you catch my drift.

  I. Was. Nothing. Without. Hockey.

  Just an empty shell with no reason to wake up in the mornings. In fact, I was dreading the summer, because it would feel odd not having to cram in three matches a week. Still, I did have a training schedule, and some boot camps lined up to keep my legs moving, and prime my fitness and skills for next year.

  Kai passed the cup on to another team member. I looked at the faces of my peers around me. The team was like a brotherhood, the bond between us, superglue tight.

  “Roll on, October, when we get to do it all again!” I yelled, taking another slurp of beer from the dregs of the bottle.

  “I’ll drink to that.” José clunked his bottle against mine and Kai’s. “And next year, there will be no stopping The Three Musketeers!”

  “More like Charlie’s fucking Angels!” Cavanagh whooped after his little joke, and I groaned. I had a feeling that little quip would become our new nickname.

  The door opened, and Coach Peterson appeared. His eyes scanned the room before they fell on me.

  “Hey, coach, you want a beer?”

  “Jeez, Hamilton. I’ll pretend I can’t see the underage drinking going on in here. All right, you lot, take your celebration elsewhere, and try not to give yourselves alcohol poisoning, I need every one of you on the team next fall.”

  The players gathered up their gear and filed out of the locker room, high-fiving the coach as they went by. I tossed my empty bottle in the trash. Still pumped over our win, I turned to my friends. “Are we hitting the party?”

  José was already on his feet, hauling his huge goalie bag over his shoulder. “You bet. I’ll meet you there. I want to take a shower and drop this stuff off first.”

  As I gathered up my gear, Coach Peterson appeared by my side. “A word, Hamilton, before you go.” And without saying anything else, he disappeared into his office.

  Kai nudged me. “I reckon he’s going to give you first line next season.”

  I couldn’t keep the stupid grin off my face. Over the past year, I’d pretty much tried out each line, working my way up through pure graft. I was the first to arrive at practice and the last to leave. The gym might as well have had my bed in it as I practically spent every spare moment there. During the playoffs, I’d flipped between second and first lines, but the last three games that coveted position had been all mine.

  “I’ll catch up with you guys. Wish me luck!”

  “You deserve it, man.” José threw his arm around me and thumped my back.

  “Hey, don’t jinx it. Peterson might just want me to take out the trash.” But in my heart, I knew all my hard work had paid off.

  It took all my self-control to walk with composure to the coach’s office. If I got this, it would open doors. The scouts would be coming to watch me. Huh, I might even get picked for the draft, and my college days could be over. Fuck yeah, I’d be on board with that. No more math, no more countless boring hours listening to tedious lectures, and no more fucking homework assignments. A chuckle slipped out. Okay, well, perhaps that wouldn’t be any different—technically, I had them, but most of them sat unfinished on my desk.

  As much as I loved being at college and living and breathing hockey, the same couldn’t be said about schoolwork. Christ, I’d never been the academic type. Not that I was dumb, it’s just that shit never fired me up like the ice does. Besides, my dyslexia made all that studying twice as tiring and difficult.

  This was a good day, I convinced myself, as I rapped on Peterson’s open door.

  “Come in, Hamilton, take a seat.”

  I had to give it to the guy, he kept a good poker face. Coach Peterson wasn’t letting anything slip as he bent his head back down and looked at the pile of papers on his desk. He continued studying them as I made myself comfortable on the vinyl-covered chair.

  Finally, he looked up, then leaned back in his chair and tossed his pen to the desk. “What the fuck happened, Charlie?”

  Coach was known for his dry humor, but he wasn’t fooling me. I could see he was almost as excited as I was, he was just better at keeping his shit together. “Natural ability, I guess.” Shit, that sounded cocky, didn’t it? Hell, fuck that! I didn’t care if it did. This was the best day of my life and…

  “What a waste.” Peterson sighed loudly, and shook his head.

  Huh?

  “You know what? If it wasn’t for this, I’d have considered promoting you to first line.”

  I slapped my hand on my thigh. “Yes!” But when I glanced up at coach, his face showed the opposite. Huh?

  Peterson leaned forward and extracted a piece of paper from a file and slid it across
the desk to me. There were three red circles scribbled on the surface, highlighting the text underneath. My heart dropped into my stomach as I picked up my grade sheet.

  “You do know you had to pass all your classes, right?”

  I ran my fingers through my hair as the three Fs loomed into focus. “Shit, I thought I’d done enough to scrape a D.”

  “How the fuck did you reckon a ‘D’? You skipped half your math classes, that’s an instant fail, Hamilton.”

  “Um, class was right after practice, and, um, sometimes, I was late finishing…”

  “All freshmen math classes are straight after practice, Charlie. José and Kai managed to make them on time, and so did every other freshman on the team. Christ, you even had to pass the building on your way home!”

  “Yeah, but I put in extra time on drills, that has to count for something, right?”

  He just glared at me and then looked at the paper again. “And you only handed in one piece of homework for Spanish—for the whole semester! And that was the fucking syllabus quiz.”

  Guilty as charged. “But in my defense, that was the only paper in English.”

  The look he gave me could have turned milk sour. “Don’t get smart with me, Hamilton. The time to have been fucking smart was before you failed your finals. What about the English Lit class? For fuck’s sake, all you had to do was read three books and write a report. Even a grade schooler can do that.”

  I felt my cheeks heat and clamped my mouth shut. No one at school knew about my dyslexia. It was something I’d fought with my mom over before I’d started college. She wanted me to declare it, so I could have special provisions made for me, but I was tired of the stigma that carried. Since my diagnosis at nine, that shit had sat over me like a fucking cartoon rain cloud. I was over being lumped in with the ‘special’ kids at school, having a freaking aid following me around the corridors, someone checking my homework, having to take tests and quizzes separately from my classmates so I could have someone read me the damn questions. Yeah, I’d had enough of that shit to last me a lifetime. The last thing I wanted to do was haul that baggage with me to college.

  My mood plummeted as Peterson tore me off a strip, but somewhere deep inside I still clung to the hope he was going to promote me. Teachers always did shit like this. He’d give me the fucking-pull-your-socks-up lecture and then reward me for what really mattered. And what mattered here was that I was the best D on this fucking team, and I had worked my ass off all year to make sure of that.

  Coach handed me another piece of paper with a schedule on it. As I stared at it, the print danced around and I had to focus on each letter to make the whole thing stay still. Stress, and probably the beer I just downed, wasn’t making reading it any easier.

  “What’s this?”

  “I had to work my butt off to stop them from throwing you out of the program. You are signed up for summer classes. Don’t fuck it up, and you can retake your exams in a month.”

  I took the paper and groaned. “But coach, I have boot camp and…”

  “You have nothing, Hamilton. Not until you pass those damn classes. No practice, no skill drills, and certainly no boot camp.”

  “But…”

  “What don’t you understand? There will be no fucking hockey. Period. Let me put it in terms you can understand. It’s game over, Charlie—unless by some miracle, you pass your classes.”

  That last part hit home, and my jaw dropped open. “I’m off the team?”

  Peterson got up and went to his filing cabinet. “Finally, it penetrates that stubborn brain of yours. Yes, you are off the team. And, no, I can’t overrule the college board. My hands are tied, Hamilton. There are rules, and even star defensemen have to obey them. Pass your retakes, or you’ll be packing your bags.”

  Two

  Mia

  “Oh, my God, Mia!” shrieked Nora right in my ear for the fifteenth time. “We won!”

  “Our team won,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant.” She sighed heavily and rested her head against my shoulder. “Your brother was amazing, wasn’t he?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes, José was brilliant.” My heart swelled in my chest. His other faults aside, José was an amazing goal tender.

  “Charlie was fantastic, too, don’t you think?”

  God in heaven, yes, he was. My eyes had been glued to our star defenseman throughout the entire game. The way he skated so effortlessly, and his physicality! Twice he made open-ice hits and left the opposition sprawling in the snow. For a moment, I was lost in the memory of him taking off his helmet at the end of the game, shaking back his too-long hair, the sweat flying from his forehead. Seriously, it was like something out of a sports’ drink commercial, and I swear he looked straight at me in the crowd and winked.

  Angie scraped her hair back into a ponytail and pulled me out of my little fantasy bubble. “How do I look? Do I pass the Nora hotness test?”

  Nora leaped up off the bed, and pulled the hair tie back out of Angie’s hair. “Now you do. Jeez, Angie, why do you always tie back that mane of yours? It’s gorgeous when it’s loose.”

  “She’s right.”

  Angie was so darned sweet, if not a tad clueless. She saw herself as some sort of plain-Jane, nerdy type. I blame her ex for that; the moron did a number on her confidence. Still, she was with Kai now, and that guy worshipped the ground she walked on.

  “But in her defense, Nora, she already has Kai wrapped around her little finger, so let her tie it back, then perhaps she won’t hog all the attention, and we might get a look from those other yummy hockey boys.”

  Angie blushed. “I do not have Kai wrapped around my finger.”

  I put my arm around her. Yeah, Angie was most definitely clueless. Not only did she have the highly desirable Kai Stamford totally ensnared, half the team salivated after her whenever she turned up on his arm.

  “So, is there one yummy hockey player in particular that you want to catch the eye of?” Nora grinned inanely at me, her eyes sparkling with mischief.

  Of course, there was. But it didn’t matter how much I dressed up or how I wore my hair, Charlie Hamilton was not going to look my way. At least not if my overbearing brother was in the room to see him.

  I slumped down on the end of Nora’s bed. “What’s the point? He won’t do anything about it because of José.”

  Swinging around to face me, Angie frowned. “Who won’t? Oh, Mia, do you have a crush on someone on the team?”

  Angie received matching eye rolls from both me and Nora for that one. Clueless.

  “Oh, honey, you really do live under a rock, don’t you?” Nora stretched up on tiptoes to put her arm around our tall red-headed friend. “Poor Mia is besotted with Charlie.”

  “Not besotted. I just happen to think he is very attractive, and he has a super cute personality.” And a freaking epic physique that I would die to get a look at underneath all those clothes. The guy was just infectious to be with, and his smile was the real deal. When he flashed that grin, his whole face lit up. And those eyes… God, don’t get me started on those eyes! Stormy gray, with a hint of teal when the light was just right.

  Cupping her hand around her mouth, Nora stage-whispered to Angie, “Like I said, absolutely B-sotted.”

  “Seriously, Nora, you are the only obsessed one here. Tell me, does José still make your panties wet every time he ignores you?”

  Nora’s face fell, and she dodged into the bathroom. “I’ll just pee, then we should go.”

  Okay, I was being a bitch, and poor Nora didn’t deserve it. My brother was a complete idiot for not noticing her. But to be honest, she was better off without him. As much as I loved my twin, the guy was a complete man-whore. Nora deserved so much better.

  Angie bit her lip as she watched Nora disappear into the bathroom. “Poor Nora, she has it so bad. Couldn’t you put a word in with your brother?”

  “Honestly, I have tried to warn her off him, but she is too far go
ne. It pains me to say it, but as far as women go, José is a complete ass. She should be glad he never looks her way, Angie, because my brother will just chew her up and spit her out, just like he does with every other woman.”

  There was a pause as Angie contemplated my words. “We should find her someone else! To take her mind off of him.”

  “Yeah, we should.”

  “So, you like Charlie Hamilton? Does he like you?”

  I patted the bed beside me and she sat down. “We kissed once.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, that night he walked me home after the party. You know, the same night you met Kai.”

  “But he didn’t ask you out?”

  I got up and smoothed down my dress in the mirror. It was my go-to, team-win outfit. A red dress that fell mid-thigh and hugged my curves. The color was fantastic against the olive tones in my skin and it complemented my chestnut hair perfectly. I loved that dress, and not just because I got to wear it when we won, but because this was the dress I was wearing the night Charlie kissed me, and I happened to know it turned him on.

  “Charlie will never ask me out.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t talked to him much, but I have definitely seen him looking at you from across the room.”

  “Yup, and that is all he is ever going to do, because my brother is Charlie’s friend.”

  “So?”

  “So, there is some bro-code thing going on. Charlie told me after he kissed me.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. We broke away from the most fantastic kiss of my life, and he said, ‘Fuck’; then he apologized and made me swear not to tell anyone what he’d done. After that, he assured me it would never happen again, because he respected my brother, and that he had made a huge mistake.”