Besting the Blueliner: A Grumpy Hero Hockey Romance (The Playmakers Series Hockey Romances Book 8) Read online

  Besting the Blueliner

  Book 8 in The Playmakers Series™

  G.K. Brady

  Trefoil Publishing

  For Betsey Jane

  Contents

  1. Fortress of Solitude

  2. I Raise Your Pistol by a Rifle

  3. Chivalry Is Alive and Crabby

  4. Olive Branches Come in all Shapes

  5. Earth, Water, and King Arthur’s Court

  6. Rain, Rain, Go Away

  7. Shelter Me

  8. Just a Jock

  9. Get a Clue

  10. Rhythm of the Rain

  11. Trade Secrets

  12. Of Dukes and Pigeonholes

  13. Natural and Unnatural Disasters

  14. The Law of Averages

  15. Jeremiah and Me

  16. The Bumpy Road Home

  17. Aussie Bites

  18. Terra Firma

  19. Walking the Line

  20. Pass Me That Cup

  21. That’s a Swagger

  22. I’ll Have Two

  23. Underestimating the Overrated

  24. Truth and Other Dangers

  25. Plan B

  26. Daddy’s Little Girl

  27. Kissing Makes Everything Better

  28. Undercurrents

  29. Truth or Dare

  30. Dead Wood Is More than a City

  31. Home Is Where Your Heart Is

  32. Chirps and Crosschecks

  33. Underwear Optional; Love Is Not

  34. The Life of a Commodity

  35. Same Page, Different Books

  36. Blood Is Thicker than Coffee

  37. Alliances

  38. She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also By

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Fortress of Solitude

  Cam Blue raised the ax above his head and brought it down with a solid, satisfying thwack! Two perfectly hewn pieces of wood clattered as they hit the ground, giving his dulled heart a lift. He loved that sound because it reinforced the notion he was doing something that defined survival. Not that he needed to worry about survival in the sixty-degree balmy calm of a Colorado late spring day, or that any threats to life and limb loomed. The three-thousand-plus-square-foot custom log home behind him—that sat on a hundred acres and took in the jaw-dropping breadth of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the south all the way to the Mosquito Range up north—was far from a flimsy lean-to that would crumple in the face of a Colorado mountain storm.

  After a long season playing in the NHL had just come to a fruitful and victorious end, Cam was exhausted. Bruised and battered. Stanley Cup-partied out. Yeah, it had been one hell of a ride, like nothing he’d ever imagined in his twenty-seven years on the planet. He’d spent the last seventeen of those years chasing the silver trophy, and reality had outstripped fantasy. But much as he loved his Blizzard teammates, as much as they were his family after the trade that had brought him to Denver only months ago, he was ready for the off-season escape from all of humanity. Solitude was his preferred state of being, and few places were more remote than the mountaintop retreat he’d bought soon after his arrival. An extravagance for sure, but he hadn’t indulged in many, and the purchase compensated for the trade he hadn’t wanted in the first place. Buying his parents their Florida vacation home didn’t count because it was theirs, not his. Though he’d made that fact abundantly clear over and over again, they still looked at it as his, or at the very least as part of the family trust. Well, someday they’d get it. Repaying them for the immeasurable sacrifices they’d made over the years to support his dream had been such a kick it had been almost selfish on his part.

  Florida and its oppressive, sticky climate might have been their nirvana, but his was right here, in the cool Colorado air, where the only noise was the occasional screech of a red-tailed hawk or the haunting evening cries of a distant coyote pack.

  He paused and eyed the billowing gray clouds rushing over the peaks in the distance. As they had done the last three days since he’d arrived, the mountains were brewing up a thunderstorm that would crash around him and crack the sky with blazing bolts of lightning before dropping rain or hail an hour from now. Give or take an hour. He hadn’t spent enough time in these mountains yet to predict the exact arrival of Mother Nature’s fury—not like some of the locals, like Jack Webster, his friendly neighbor to the south.

  Cam’s gaze strayed north to a hill covered in aspen trees flourishing their newly unfurled spring-green leaves, and an irrepressible growl rose in his throat. He reminded himself—again—that his neighbor to the north wasn’t worth the energy Cam wasted on him. The guy was a total dickhead. Then again, letting the dickhead get under his skin might send Cam’s wood-splitting into overdrive, and he’d be done in a fraction of the time he’d allotted.

  He let out a long-suffering sigh. “Well, Grace, how about I finish up here and you and me go inside and grab a cold one?”

  His German Shepherd mix answered with three enthusiastic thumps of her tail against the patch of dirt where she lay.

  “Thought you’d like that idea.”

  He’d named his dog Grace, after Grace Kelly, because she carried herself with the coolness of the late Princess of Monaco despite the dog’s dubious breeding. As for the movie star herself, though she’d been dead some four decades, she was still the ideal embodiment of everything he loved about women but found so elusive in the inelegant twenty-somethings who crossed his path on the regular. Except Britta. She was the exception … which had to be the reason why he’d been sucked under her spell till he’d nearly drowned. Everything else about her had been all wrong, and in his search for why he’d been so blind, he’d come up with the only explanation that made sense. Okay, so he’d been younger and stupider too, which might have contributed to his total lack of foresight but was a hell of a lot more difficult to accept.

  He gave himself a mental slap upside the head. Why was he purposely inviting bad juju into his thoughts? Like his damn neighbor, Britta could spike his blood pressure in a heartbeat, and not in a good way. No, the days when she could spike it in a good way were so far in his rearview mirror they’d become specks he couldn’t make out anymore. And that was how he planned to keep it, even if she was trying her damnedest to change his mind.

  Women!

  Gripping his ax, he chuckled aloud. Now he’d really whip through the job at hand. He spared Grace another glance. “The perfect female, sitting regally, admiring everything I do. Why can’t I find a human version of you?”

  He raised the ax, poised to swing it, when a soft cry reached his ears. What kind of animal made that noise? Maybe it wasn’t an animal at all. Shading his eyes, he looked heavenward again, searching for a circling eagle or a red-tailed hawk. Or maybe he’d imagined it.

  Grace’s swift rise up on all fours, however, told him the noise had been real. The dog’s ears were strained to the north, and her short-furred body was taut as a bowstring. Lowering his ax, he listened for several beats but heard no other sound except the ruffling of the high prairie grasses.

  Though his dog’s posture hadn’t changed, he raised the ax again and brought it down, splitting the wood. Grace shot him a look as though admonishing him. Shaking his head, he picked up the pieces of split wood and chucked them into a pile with the others when the cry came again, sound
ing like “Help!” being carried on the wind.

  Nah, couldn’t be. No one else was around. He hadn’t spotted signs of life since he’d arrived.

  “Help, pleeeease!”

  The plea was faint but unmistakable, shooting chills through his limbs, lifting the hairs on the back of his neck. Grace leapt forward, racing off to the right, then stopped to send him an urgent look over her back.

  “Wait up,” he instructed the dog. He leaned his ax against his splitting stump and loped toward his Polaris ATV, his ears pricked for more cries that didn’t come. Urgency took him. What if he was too late? He grabbed his rifle from where he’d propped it against a hand-hewn post on the wraparound porch. The firearm was an unfamiliar, awkward weight in his hand, but he didn’t dare leave it behind.

  A man who’s not prepared for whatever lies out there better not head out in the first place.

  Terra White shoved at the good-for-nothing side-by-side all-purpose utility vehicle that had overturned and pinned her when she’d misjudged the slope of the hill—okay, mountain—she’d been trying to traverse. Who knew the machine was so squirrely?

  “Goddamn it!”

  Her dad was going to kill her … if he found out that she’d overturned his new toy. He hadn’t even ridden it himself yet, barely giving in to her incessant badgering about delivering the vehicle to their mountain cabin without—gasp!—a male escort. Sure, her real motive had been to have the place to herself for a week—a luxury she’d never been able to indulge in before, thanks to her overprotective former-Marine father and her brother cut from the same bolt. Somehow they were convinced her twenty-six-year-old self had no clue how to survive in their comfortable mountain cabin for a night. Yeah, she’d watched those forensics shows where the bad guys ambushed honest citizens in their remote vacation homes, but honestly, how often did that happen? She knew how to use a gun, and she’d been confident—okay, cocky—when she’d set out to prove them wrong.

  And now here she was proving them right instead.

  Yeah, Dad was definitely going to kill her—if she didn’t die of thirst or from a mountain lion attack or a rattlesnake bite first. Or worse, she could be pulled apart by a pack of coyotes. Ever since being bitten by a wolf-looking dog when she was six, she’d been deathly afraid of anything canine. Scavenging coyotes had to be the worst way to go.

  “Here lies Terra Marie White, badass backwoodswoman and would-be adventuress, who died before she ever lived.” She groaned out her frustration. “What a sucky, boring way to go. At least I could have bought it skydiving or climbing El Capitan instead of dying on our mountain property in late spring.” Not that late spring was a picnic in the mountains. No, it could be dangerous, and as she eyed the lowering gray heavens, she recognized her chances of dying from a lightning strike were far superior to going parched. At least it would be quick.

  Oh goody!

  Then again, if she did survive and didn’t tell Dad, and if she hadn’t scratched the pristine matte-tan paint job on the RZR, she’d be golden. Now all she had to do was heave the stupid thing off her pelvis or wriggle out between it and the rock practically impaling the small of her back. Crying for help was ridiculously wasteful, though she hadn’t been able to resist the feeble attempts. No wandering wranglers would be up this way yet looking for stray calves, and though she’d never actually encountered a cowboy up this way—hell, she never encountered anyone up this way unless they’d been invited to the cabin—he’d be the only humanoid in these parts. It was the land’s remoteness that had called her dad to buy it and that lured her back time and again, but the quiet she loved so much was about to be her undoing.

  Even if she could dig out the phone lodged in her back pocket, there was no cell service to call for help. Did she have a GPS homing beacon thingie? No idea. So much for being a badass backwoodswoman. Unlike her brother, River, she wasn’t tech savvy, and while he was always fiddling with her stuff, she doubted very much he’d installed something like that for her. Mostly, he made her electronics not work just to mess with her, the prankster side of him even less endearing under the circumstances.

  She lay back and pulled in a deep, steadying breath. “You can do this, Terra!” she hollered at the encroaching, ominous gray ceiling. “Help me, Mom?” she entreated the heavens where her mom had resided these last sixteen years.

  “Ugh! Don’t be such a wuss. Just take a little nap, rest up, and get your Hercules on.” If she could somehow squirm out of her jeans …

  She tested her pelvis again, but nothing budged. In fact, she was pretty sure the whole area was going numb, and she quelled her rising panic. What if she made it out but was paralyzed from the waist down? No three children, no more swimming, no … Oh God! No sex! Not that she’d had much of that in her short time on planet Earth—thanks to the aforementioned menfolk in her life—but what she’d had she’d liked, and she’d been optimistic more was in her future on a steady basis.

  At least three more times to get those three kids. Why three kids? Because her mother had always wanted three, but she had developed pre-eclampsia with Terra and had been warned that another baby could kill her. When Terra had been old enough to ask her mom for a baby brother or sister, her mom had been brutally no-nonsense while still maintaining a solid quirkiness. An odd combination for a former flower child, in Terra’s opinion.

  While she’d been alive, Terra’s mom had doled out the majority of the affection she and River had enjoyed, their dad maintaining that cool, aloof man air. But when their mom died, something had flipped in her father, and affection she wasn’t used to had flowed her way. He’d always been protective of his little girl but more so after their mother was killed in a skiing accident.

  Terra’s father, however, had crafted another excuse for discouraging her more daring side.

  “Men don’t want tomboys.”

  “Then why can’t I just be a tomboy without a man?” she’d posed rather logically, or so she’d thought at the time, discounting that whole I-like-sex part of the equation.

  “I thought you wanted kids someday?” he’d replied.

  She had wisely spared her father the retort that she only needed one part of a man, for a few minutes, to make that dream come true. Sometimes it was best to stroke your parents’ delusions. Like now. Her dad no doubt thought she was sitting inside, curled up with a good Regency romance. Well, let him live in ignorance for a while. It might take her days to die, and he’d be happy not knowing in the meantime.

  Turning her head to avoid the sharpest point of the rock she lay upon, she heaved another breath. A soft growl rumbled through the ground—had to be the thunderstorm bearing down on her—and she scanned the clouds overhead once again.

  The growl grew louder, more insistent, but no lightning lit the sky. What the hell? Gingerly, she tilted her head this way and that, then craned it in the direction where the rumble seemed loudest. Was that … an engine?

  Hoisting herself on her elbows as best she could, she looked around frantically. Yelling would do no good above the noise, but if she made herself visible somehow … waved her arms, a flag. Other than her long-sleeved white Henley, she had nothing to wave.

  While she debated the merits of pulling off her shirt—God, what if the driver was Jack Webster? Or worse, a rapist? Or not a rapist but someone who suddenly transformed into one after finding a half-naked woman?—the engine’s roar receded.

  Oh shit! He’s heading the other way. Well, if he’s a rapist, he has to free me to do the dirty deed. And no matter who he is, I’m dead if I can’t be found. Besides, he might turn out to be a she. Better to take my chances than be eaten alive by coyotes. She did have a sidearm on her belt that she’d be able to reach once she was free of the machine.

  Shimmying out of her shirt, Terra stretched as high as she could and twirled the garment above her head. The rumble seemed more distant now, but she continued spinning the shirt in the air. What if the mystery driver didn’t see it?

  As the noise fad
ed, so did her hope. But then it seemed to grow louder again, and her spirits lifted. She waved her makeshift flag with everything she had until finally—sweet baby Jesus!—the distinctive, throaty purr of an ATV grew louder.

  A blur of black-and-blond fur burst toward her, and terror rocketed from her belly into her chest. What would have been a slasher film-worthy scream was cut short, escaping her lungs in a squeak. The wolf-dog stopped and lay on its belly, mimicking a miniature sphinx, as if guarding her like trapped prey. It cocked its head, its gleaming, dagger-like fangs dripping with drool as its tongue lolled out of its panting mouth.

  “Go away!” she yelled, but the dog glanced over its shoulder toward the oncoming noise. The machine itself rounded a boulder and stopped a mere ten feet from where she lay.

  The engine cut off, and a deep timbre rolled over her. “Good girl, Grace. Stay.”

  Only as the man came into view did Terra think to toss her shirt over her bared torso. He was big-framed, even when he crouched beside her, one wrist dangling on a knee. A backward ball cap held back some unruly dark locks, and soulful brown eyes set in a stubble-jawed face scanned her. “Can you move?”

  “I don’t know. I’m numb where I’m pinned. C-could you tell your dog to back off?”

  The guy eyed her curiously, then rose and stripped out of an open flannel shirt, which he threw on top of her, leaving him in jeans and a light blue T-shirt that hugged well-defined muscles. “She won’t hurt you.” With that, he put those well-defined muscles on full display when he grasped the roll bar on the machine and heaved uphill with a loud grunt. The RZR budged a few inches, managing to put more pressure on the point where she was pinned.

  A cry flew from her. “Ow! Damn it, that hurts!” At least she’d felt it, so there was that.

  “Fuck!” he chuffed.

  Still gripping the roll bar, straining against the side-by-side still hovering several inches above her, he glanced down at her. “What’s your name?”