Page 55 of Pipe Dreams
A secret.
Lauren cracked open her salad and unwrapped a plastic fork. A month from now, she might be pregnant. Two months from now she might have morning sickness. She placed a hand on her very flat belly and imagined a baby growing in there.
Sitting all alone in her suite, she began to smile. It didn’t matter that her parents would freak out about this decision when she eventually got around to telling them. This was her journey, and she was ready to embark. In fact...
She lifted her hand off her belly and propped her chin in it. She’d never expected to be single at thirty-one. And she sure hadn’t expected to be dumped by the love of her life. But now that the shock and anger were finally wearing off, she could acknowledge that the experience had made her into a more confident single person. Sometime during these past two years she’d stopped waiting around for her happily-ever-after and started crafting it herself.
Take that, Mike.
She ate her salad and then went to work on Nate’s rather overburdened calendar. Now that the play-offs were sure to drag on, there was planning to do. She cast an eye on Nate’s calendar all the way out to June and tried to figure out where all the landmines lay. There was a trip to China on his docket over Memorial Day.
That was almost exactly the moment that the Stanley Cup finals would be played. But there was no way of knowing which day, though, as the league didn’t schedule each new set of games until the participants were decided.
Her own graduation ceremony would occur during the play-offs, too. If the Bruisers kept winning, she might have to inform Nate that she would miss a couple of days of team travel to don a cap and gown.
Nate wouldn’t make her miss her own graduation. He wasn’t an ogre. “Just don’t take your shiny degree and defect to the competition,” he’d said more than once.
She wouldn’t, though. In the first place, she’d used thecorporate tuition-matching program to cut the cost of her education in half. If she quit she’d owe that money back. But more importantly, she didn’t want to leave either Nate or his company. Even if getting a new job with more responsibility elsewhere would be a thrill, Nate paid her really well to run his C-suite. And she wanted the stability of her seniority there when she became a single mother.
Nate’s company was one of the few in Manhattan to offer on-site day care, too. The first thing she planned to do after getting a positive pregnancy test was to register on the waiting list for a spot. Unlike so many other working women, she’d be able to swing by the nursery and breastfeed her baby. Given all that she’d read on the mommy forums she’d begun trolling, that luxury was worth its weight in gold.
Maybe Nate didn’t know it, but Lauren was about to become the most loyal employee who ever lived. She nibbled on her roll and checked the private jet’s flight plans for Beijing again.
And tried really hard to forget about Mike Beacon’s smile.
SIXTEEN
TAMPA, FLORIDA
MAY 2016
Two days later, the team did only a short practice in Tampa, to keep the guys rested before game two. But Beacon spent some extra time with Silas and the goaltending coach, practicing drills and reviewing strategy.
Silas looked good, too. No matter what Coach fired at him he stayed cool, deflecting puck after puck with a Zen-like concentration.
“You were killing it out there,” Beacon said as they got dressed after showering. They were the last two in the locker room. Their teammates were already watching tape in the conference room. “You feel good?”
“Sure. But I always feel good in practice. I don’t blow it until later,” the kid grumbled. He was probably thinking back to his last time in the net—in February. Mike had gotten a touch of food poisoning and Silas was called in last minute. The game had been a total disaster.
“Hey,” Mike said, squeezing the kid’s shoulder. “Don’t talk yourself down. It’s not like you to get all mopey. You’re a better team player than that. I heard you were doing greatin Hartford this spring, too.” Though it was unlikely the kid would mind the net at any point during the play-offs, unless Mike got hurt.
Silas grit his teeth. “Did pretty good in Hartford. But my expectations were pretty low, so I wasn’t a basket case, you know? I didn’t used to be that guy who cracks under pressure. But now that I know how it feels to be that guy, I don’t know how to shake it off.”
“You go back to basics,” Beacon said. “You remind yourself there’s never been a goalie with a hundred percent save average. Never. That’s what I tell myself every time someone scores on me.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. Because if I stand there and worry about it, I’m not doing my job for the team. My job isn’t to feel bad about what just happened. My job is to make the next save. And I can’t do that if I’m beating myself up.”
Silas made a grunt of acknowledgement. Beacon thumped the kid on the back and left the lockers, ducking into the conference room where the rest of his team was watching video from their first game in Tampa. They’d lost 2–1, but they weren’t disheartened. Not yet. They’d fought hard, and their opponent had gotten lucky with both unlikely bounces of the puck and with the ref’s calls.
Tampa was crackable. Everyone knew it.
“Look,” Coach Worthington said as he pressed Pause on the footage. He pointed at the screen. “That’s a little sloppy right there. It’s the same story we’ve been looking at all morning. This team has had terrific success the last couple of years, and everyone expects great things from them. But they look stressed out and it shows in their skating.”
He turned, and his gaze took in every man in the room. “We can do this. It isn’t about skills anymore. And it isn’t about the stats. We’ve got those already, and we’re pretty healthy, too. The team who wins this series will be the team whobelievesit can. It’s going to be about heart, and aboutfaith. I have mine.” He put a hand to his chest. “Right here. So I need you to show me yours tonight. Bring it with you from this room, and carry it with you onto the ice.”
Mike lifted his gaze to the frozen players on the screen—to Tampa’s center lunging for the puck. Coach was right. These guys were hungry, but their hunger had a wild-eyed desperation to it. They feared coming close to the Cup yet another year, and then failing in the clutch.
