Page 35 of No Pucks Given
If they didn’t win the President’s Cup, that was okay, since most of the time the President’s Cup winners didn’t actually win the whole thing. It would be much better to win the Stanley Cup.
After nearly a whole hockey season with a stalker, I wanted to get out and enjoy life again, which meant having date nights. And every once in a while, I wanted to be the picture-perfect girlfriend and go to Carter’s games. I didn’t care if we had tohave a security team with us, as long as we could do the same things as other couples.
Despite all our fears, I refused to stay at home any longer. I would only go out to a Legacy game when Stephanie was with her nan or her father. I didn’t want Stephanie to become a target because she deserved as much privacy as we could get.
As I walked into the family box, I immediately spotted Annette and Natalie. Natalie came up to me with a wide ass smile and a huge hug. “You’re here. You convinced my brother to let you out tonight?”
“Damn straight.” It felt good to be out and be seen with them again. It had been far too long. I had barely seen Annette between our girls’ night and her wedding to Scuba. “It feels good to be here.”
Natalie stared at her phone as we waited for the game to start up. I bumped her elbow. “You’ve been weird since you looked at your phone. What’s got your goat?”
Natalie shrugged. “Coop texted.”
Annette raised an eyebrow. “What’s going on?”
It was unusual for any of the guys to text this close to puck drop. While she was still doing some personal assistant stuff, I didn’t think Coop was one of her clients. So I was glad that Annette asked the question that was on my mind, and I wasn’t ignorant of something.
Natalie looked at her phone again. “Coop has his girlfriend here, and he wants us to help bring her to the family lounge after the game."
Since I barely left the set and Carter’s house, I felt so damn out of the loop.
My jaw dropped to the ground.
Did I hear that right? The guy who got super ass drunk at Annette and Scuba’s wedding was dating someone?
According to Carter, Coop hadn’t been sober since he came to the team, and the wedding was the last straw. After the morning brunch, the guys staged an intervention. That was about three weeks ago, and now he has a girlfriend?
Was that wise?
Maybe the writers atShady Oakswere wrong, but I thought addicts weren’t supposed to get into new relationships.
I felt lost. Damn being protected all the time and not hanging out with the other wives and girlfriends.
Annette dropped her phone. “She’s here?”
I couldn’t blame Annette for asking that. It was unusual for a girlfriend not to be sitting with us in the family section.
Hoping to learn as much as I could, I turned to them and said, “Fill me in.”
“You know how the guys celebrated the last win at that zero-proof bar without us? Well, Coop brought his girlfriend. According to the guys, they’re a good match. She’s been helping him get and stay clean. Not sure when they became an item, per se, since he’s a little standoffish.”
That did it for me. I had to know more. I had more security than normal, so I was totally going to meet the girl who seemed to help cure the team’s most problematic player.
I went over to Lou to tell him the plan to go meet a friend in the audience and bring her to the family lounge near the end of the game. He didn’t like the idea, nor did he try to stop me.
When it got to be the last three minutes of the game, Natalie and I dashed down to the lower bowl with Lou and Nash, one of the guys on Lou’s security team, right behind us.
Thankfully, Natalie knew where to go, and it wasn’t hard to get to the right spot. Sure enough, there was a girl sitting in the seat. Natalie immediately tapped her shoulder and asked, “Are you Emmy Symon?”
Thankfully, it was the right person, so Natalie continued, “Coop mentioned to my fiancé that you would be here, and we figured you might need some help to get to the family lounge.”
It was a little white lie, but it was understandable since if she didn’t know that Natalie was a personal assistant to several of the players, she might not understand why Coop turned to Natalie.
But that’s when Lou tapped my shoulder. We were talking too much out in the open, and he wanted us to get moving. As we made our way to the private area, Emmy asked, “Why are we in bodyguard central?”
“Unfortunately, I have an issue with a stalker, and C doesn’t like it when I take risks. But these games are too important to miss, so death threats be damned. This was our compromise. Although I probably shouldn’t have come to get you but I was damn curious. You’re the only woman that Coop’s been interested in.”
Chapter 33
