Opening my eyes back up, I give him a sheepish smile. “Yeah…just a little stressed about seeing Hensley next week.”

Not a total lie. It’s not what I had been stressed about right at that moment, but I am in fact not looking forward to her arrival.

The girls are beyond excited, but then children have very forgiving hearts. When the girls first came to live with me, Hensley called them every day. Then when the hockey season started, and she was traveling with her young boy toy, the calls started to decline. Maybe four or five times a week, then down to just a few times, and now she calls every Sunday. That’s her pattern at the moment.

I’ve had to deal with the fallout. Ruby occasionally won’t sleep in her bed and cries for her mom. Violet will sometimes get off the phone with her mom and she’ll lose that dreamy look in her eyes. It’s replaced with something that looks a bit colder…a bit flatter.

Frankly, it freaks me out.

But then Hensley will call and they’ll get all excited again, because when it boils right down to it, she is their mom.

“Are you going to have to suffer the douche’s presence?” Zack asks as he drums his fingers on the kitchen table.

“God, I hope not. I better email her just to make sure she doesn’t bring him to the house.”

“You’d kick his ass again, huh?” Zack laughs.

And I realize…no, I wouldn’t.

I broke Sutter’s nose when I first found out that Hensley slept with him, because I was angry and betrayed, not just by my wife but with him as my teammate. But now I don’t feel anger. In fact, I don’t feel much of anything when I think about him. Just like I don’t feel much of anything for Hensley other than a vague fondness for her role as the girls’ mother.

I’m not a psychologist, but I think that might mean that I may not have been as invested in that marriage as a spouse should be. We had grown apart and things just got…comfortable.

For me, at least.

Hensley, of course, was anything but, and so she went out to sow her wild oats.

The stomping of feet down the staircase has me standing up from my chair and ignoring Zack’s question. With the girls about to make an appearance, we simply do not talk about the way Daddy punched out Mommy’s boyfriend.

The girls come scampering into the kitchen, Ruby chattering like a squirrel and Violet calmly telling me about the homework she has to do tonight. Zack hangs around for a bit and we sit out on the back deck and enjoy the ability to drink a beer out there in December.

He keeps me entertained for a while.

He keeps my thoughts off Gray.

I know after he leaves I’m going to be busy with the girls the rest of the night and I almost…almost dread where my thoughts will turn after they go to sleep.

Chapter 6

Gray

I glance at my watch as I exit the elevator and head toward the executive office suite. Two hours until the game starts and I want to be at home, in my pajamas, and watching from the comfort of my bed by then.

The Cold Fury is playing an away came in D.C. tonight and I didn’t go. I didn’t go for only one reason, which isn’t a very good one. It’s actually following me out of the elevator at this moment.

Chad Sykes, the senior columnist at Sports Elite, the nation’s biggest and most influential sports magazine. I’m apparently going to grace the cover next week, and while this isn’t my first interview I’ve given in the past seven days since I was appointed general manager of this club, it is the most important.

Per my father’s suggestion, Chad has been shadowing me all day, watching how the first female general manager in this league handles the operations of a $437 million franchise. For the most part, he just watched me, furiously typing away on his tablet when something I did interested him. I think he almost fell asleep when I met with our director of merchandising to go over loss leader products for the previous year. By the third spreadsheet I was reviewing with her, I actually saw his head nod.

Chad perked back up when I met with my replacement as head scout for the Cold Fury. Billie Mantle was my selection, and that’s a she-Billie, not a he-Billie. I chose a woman to succeed me because I thought it made a bold statement. It shows the world that women can have critical roles in men’s hockey.

Billie and I went over the reports from the scouting staff. We have twenty-one scouts currently who spend most of their lives on the road seeking talent that can one day translate into a solid score for our team. Chad had a few minor questions, easily answered, and he spent a great deal of time watching us with interest.

I think he may have nodded back off when I was testing a new software program I was having developed to help me analyze my data. Right now I am using some generic SAS software for my analytics, but I want something that is particular to the sport and isn’t available to the other teams. So I’m paying an exorbitant amount of money to an ex-SAS programmer to work for me directly.

Of course, I couldn’t let Chad see my computer screen, even though he signed a nondisclosure agreement. I wasn’t about to take the chance of this leaking, so I told him that I was going through some Excel spreadsheets over last week’s team stats that were confidential.

And now the day is coming to a close and the only thing I have left to do is submit to the sit-down interview with Chad. Then I can go home and watch my men play.

I lead Chad back to my office, which I made no effort to clean up. He looks around with interest at the cluttered mess and waits patiently while I clear off one of the chairs for him to sit. I take my own chair behind my desk and rub my neck muscles, which are starting to get stiff from the long day of work. I was in at five this morning and I haven’t stopped once since I started.