Page 14 of Hockey Wife

“This isn’t funny.”

“Oh, but it is. You were always so insistent that no one could pin you down and now what? A few shots of tequila and some little cutie slips a ring on it?”

He wished he could blame alcohol. The real reason this happened was because he was at a particularly low point. Thinking about the end and what came next. Vulnerable to the temptation of a gorgeous smile and shapely legs and … what else? There had to be more.

Back in college, he wasn’t exactly a player, but neither was he interested in settling down. Not like Delaney who married the first woman he met at some orientation mixer in his freshman year. With New York, Denver, then Nashville, Banks had attended more weddings than he scored goals. All the guys he came up with were paired off with ankle-biters milling around. With each passing year, Banks was left squiring the youngsters on the team while the veterans headed to hotel rooms or home to get domestic with their special someones.

The Rebels were no different. More loved up idiots. He wanted to play cards at the weekly poker night, and they wanted to talk about their abundantly fertile women.

Another text came in on the group thread, and his heart, already hovering an inch above the floor, plummeted on a hell-bound hurtle toward the earth’s core.

April

When were you going to tell us?

Sandy

Screw that. When are we going to meet her?

April

I’m guessing he doesn’t want us to meet her, ergo the secrecy.

Kelly

The website said it happened in Vegas … nuff said.

The coven, as he labeled his sisters. If they knew, it wouldn’t be long before?—

April

She knows. And she’s thrilled!

The “she” in that sentence was his grandmother, Constance Flora Bankowski.

He dragged his gaze away from the group thread, which was chirping on merrily without his input.

“John, how do I get out of this?”

The gravity in Banks’s tone had Delaney switching to business mode. “You put in a petition for dissolution. Usually goes through in three months as long as both parties are in agreement and there are no complications with assets or child custody arrangements. One of you needs to be a resident in Nevada for six weeks before you file, though.”

“Kind of hard for me to be in two places at once.”

Delaney chuckled. “You could ask your wife to move there.”

Something tickled his brain. “What about an annulment?” That’s what he’d signed before. He’d been so pissed that he hadn’t even looked at it closely, just dropped his John Hancock on the dotted line.

“Possible, though the bar is higher there. Bigamy, underage, fraud, want of understanding, insanity.”

Insanity? That sounded about right.

He checked the family text thread again. They’d moved on to wedding reception planning.

Meanwhile, Delaney had launched into a patter about decrees and alimony implications. Banks inhaled a deep breath and seesawed back to the coven’s text thread.

She knows. And she’s thrilled!

Then from Kelly:

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