Page 111 of Cross-Checked

His chest rumbles with what feels and sounds like a growl, and I’m sure he’s remembering everything that happened that day, just as I am. I’ve spent years trying to put that day behind me, but there’s no way to deny that it was a tipping point—for my marriage, for my career, and for McCabe’s career too.

I smooth my palms against his chest and tilt my head up to look at him. “He threatened to press charges. Assault and battery carries a minimum sentence of seven years in Missouri, and if the court had considered your hands as deadly weapons, which wouldn’t have been much of a stretch given that fightingon the ice is part of your job, you could have spent half your life in jail if convicted.”

“Alessandra,” he whispers into my hair as he presses a kiss to my forehead.

“That’s what I meant, when I said I didn’t have a choice but to trade you. Not only would it have been impossible for you to play for Chet after that, but if I didn’t trade you, he was going to try to send you to jail.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“Because that was part of the agreement. If I told you, he’d press charges.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“In the legal world, I think they call that a plea bargain,” I say with a sad shrug.

“Only if I had known and agreed to the offer.”

“You would have.”

I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but what other choice would he have had? The low rattle in his throat is his tacit agreement.

“I wish I could have told you, because then you’d have understood that I wasn’t choosing Chet over you. If anything, I was choosing you. And then, I couldn’t even tell you when I came to Boston, because the statute of limitations in Missouri is five years. If he’d found you knew, he still could have pressed charges. That video footage was so damning. There’s no way you wouldn’t have been convicted.”

He runs his thumb along my jaw and tips my chin up as he says, “That means you could have told me three years ago. The statute of limitations would have expired...”

“Three years ago, you hated me. We had a decent working relationship where we kept our distance, and you weren’t doing anything that could risk your career for me. It seemed safer to leave the past in the past.”

“Were you afraid that telling me might have led us down this path sooner?” His hands move along my shoulders, down the sides of my breasts, and to my hips, where he grips me possessively.

“I don’t know,” I say honestly as I bring my hands up to cup his jaw in my palms, smoothing my fingers across the perpetual stubble that I find along his cheeks. “I thought I was protecting you, and I was probably also trying to protect myself. Honestly, I just tried to put it out of my mind.”

“Because . . .?”

“Because when you’ve been married to someone like Chet, when you’ve been fooled and made a fool of, it’s hard to trust your own judgment. When it comes to work, I’m always sure what the right thing to do is. But in my personal life, I don’t know...it just felt easier to only focus on work.”

“You deserve so much more than what he gave you,” he says. “You deserveeverything.”

I press my eyes closed as I try not to let the tears fall. It feels so good to be with someone who always has my back and wants what’s best for me.

“And that’s what I feel like you’re giving me. I just hope I can do the same in return.”

“I’m not sure why you would even question that. You are everything I never knew I wanted. Your strength and determination, your tenderness with Abby, the fierce way you protect the people you care about...how can you even doubt that you could be that person for me?”

I gulp over the lump in my throat. I’m about to respond when my phone rings. “Shit,” I mutter, moving to open the small bag that hangs from my shoulder because I recognize the ringtone for a video call. “It’s Lauren, I have to get this.”

“Alright, I’m going to call Jameson,” he says, but his phone buzzes just as he pulls it from his pocket. “And right on cue, that’s a text from him telling me tofucking call him.”

He heads into the bedroom, and I take a seat at the desk in the small living room. Once I’ve updated Lauren on the situation, she agrees that the best course of action is to get ahead of the story, and she suggests we pull Morgan into the conversation. Together, we craft a statement, and Morgan has a plan for some social media coverage to “make us the couple everyone’s rooting for.”

I’m hopeful she can soften people’s view of us together.

“You should get Frank and Sarah’s approval first,” Lauren says, when I tell her that McCabe just read the statement I’d texted him and gave me a thumbs up. “As much as it sucks to say this, you’re not releasing this statement as an individual. You’re releasing it as a representative of this team.”

I want to call bullshit on that, because this is my private life we’re talking about, but she’s right. If I weren’t the Rebels’ GM, I wouldn’t need to put out a statement about being in a relationship with their team captain.

“I’ll tell them I’m releasing a statement. What it says isn’t up for debate. We’ve already worked through that, McCabe’s good with it, and they’ll need to trust our judgment here.”

“It’s up to you how you want to handle this,” Lauren says, pulling her long red hair back into a bun. “But I also know you’re a realist, and we don’t know what the public’s perception of this will be. It could really go either way.”

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