Benched: Gold Hockey Book 4 Read online

  Benched

  Gold Hockey Book 4

  Elise Faber

  BENCHED

  BY ELISE FABER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

  * * *

  BENCHED

  Copyright © 2019 Elise Faber

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946140-24-1

  Cover Art by Jena Brignola

  For Noah.

  Because you’re as special as they come.

  Contents

  Gold Hockey Series

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Gold Hockey Series

  Also by Elise Faber

  Acknowledgments

  Gold Hockey Series

  Blocked

  * * *

  Backhand

  * * *

  Boarding

  * * *

  Benched

  * * *

  Breakaway

  Prologue

  Max

  Max stood on the perimeter of the crowd, edging toward the door.

  Yes, he was an asshole to escape in this moment, but Blane and Mandy wouldn’t miss him.

  Plus, he’d been here for the big event, after all.

  No one would even know he’d gone.

  He cracked the door, slipped out into the hall . . . then nearly mowed down a tiny little fairy.

  Okay, not so much a fairy as a woman with pale amber hair and a curvy little body. Some players were all about the statuesque model type, but not Max. He liked them curvy, and he certainly didn’t mind them small.

  That meant he could more easily lift them up, that they could wrap their legs around his hips while he—

  Fuck. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman.

  And this tiny, voluptuous angel was trying to make a quick getaway.

  “Hey,” he said, snagging her arm when she would have slunk down the hall. “You lost, sweetheart?”

  Shoulders straightened and she ripped out of his grip. “Don’t touch me,” she snapped, keeping her back to him, and fuck, even her voice made his cock twitch.

  “Okay. No problem.” He slid around to her front. “But this area is off limits.”

  Her gaze stayed on the floor, her jaw clenched tight. “I was invited.”

  “Oh?” Max crossed his arms, leaned back against the wall. Sexy voice, banging body—he was desperate now to see her eyes, the shape of her nose, her lips. Please, let her be as pretty as she sounded. “By who?”

  Finally, she looked up.

  Max sucked in a breath as though he’d been gut-punched.

  Those eyes. They were—

  “Mandy Shallows,” the woman said. “I’m . . .” She hesitated then lifted her chin and said, “I’m her sister.”

  Mandy has a sister? Holy shit.

  But something was off. Max took a step closer to her, noted that the tip of her nose was slightly rosy, her lids reddened and puffy. “Why don’t I think those are happy tears for her engagement?”

  The woman pushed around him, striding down the hall before stopping and hanging her head again. “I didn’t mean to intrude,” she said. “I—” Her voice caught. “She said anytime, but I should have called first. This wasn’t mine to witness.” A sigh. “If she saw, if she’s upset, tell her I’m sorry.”

  She started walking again, this time faster.

  “Wait,” he said and caught her arm again. “I’m sure Mandy will be happy—”

  “No.” She yanked out of his grip, her purse slipping down her arm and falling to the floor. The contents went every which way.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.” He knelt to help her, but she batted his hands away.

  “Just go, dammit! Just leave me the fuck alone.”

  “Okay—” he began but didn’t get the chance to leave.

  Because she’d snatched up her things and was gone.

  Sighing, he turned back toward the PT Suite. He should probably face the music. Congratulate the couple, break the news of Mandy’s sister running off.

  He took a step and the crinkle made him freeze.

  Max bent, picked up the paper that must have fallen out of the woman’s purse. It was an email addressed to . . . Angelica Shallows.

  One

  Max

  “Daaaaaad!” Brayden yelled, crashing through the door to his bedroom. “It’s time for school!”

  Max opened his bleary eyes, wincing when the doorknob slammed into the wall. He’d already repaired a handle-shaped hole from that particular spot more than once. His son never moved in anything less than a sprint.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, stretching his arms above his head and blinking against the sunlight streaming into his bedroom.

  “Fuck is a bad word,” Brayden said, plunking onto the mattress and cuddling close to Max.

  And that right there.

  His baby boy burrowing into his side, bedhead on full display, bright blue eyes staring up at him made every single thing over the last seven years worth it.

  “You’re right, bud,” he said. “Now, what’s this about school?” Max reached an arm for his nightstand. “My alarm hasn’t even gone off—”

  Well, fuck.

  It was time for school.

  Okay, past time for school. As in, they were already late. But he’d set his alarm. Last night after stumbling into the house at a quarter past three—professional hockey players and flight delays upon returning from a five-game road trip did not make for a happy team—he remembered opening the clock app on his phone and setting the alarm for seven . . .

  He glanced down at his phone screen.

  “Fuck,” he muttered again.

  Because seven P.M. was not going to get them to school on time.

  Brayden opened his mouth. “That’s—”

  “I know,” Max said. “Bad word. Bad Dad.” He clapped his hands together. “Okay, bud, so we’ve gotta move. You get your teeth brushed and shoes on. I’ll meet you in the kitchen with a yogurt and cereal in three minutes, yeah?”

  Brayden nodded, a soldier ready for battle, then took off down the hall.

  Flinching at the sound of another door crashing into another wall—Brayden’s bedroom this time—Max rolled out of bed, yanked on a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and a hat. He took thirty precious seconds to brush his teeth before shoving his feet into a pair of shoes, pounding down the stairs, and hustling through the hall to the kitchen.

 
Another slam indicated Brayden had moved on to brushing his teeth.

  Max opened the fridge then scrambled to grab Brayden’s Minecraft lunchbox—he needed to give his nanny a raise for having made it the night before—and snagged a yogurt pouch. Two seconds to snip the top of the yogurt tube, ten more to grab a cup and fill it with Cheerios, then a few more frustrating ones as he fought with the zipper on his son’s overpriced Jurassic Park backpack before managing to stow his lunch inside.

  He was breathing harder than after a shift on the ice by the time Brayden came in, shoes on, hair miraculously tamed, and smile wide.

  “Anna”—their nanny—“taught me how to do my hair.”

  Max’s heart clenched. With guilt for not being the one to teach his son, with anger that his ex hadn’t been there to show Brayden either, with fury that she’d bailed and left them both with a giant hole that he had no clue how to fill.

  Stuck in his head, in the memories of his ex-wife, Max had taken too long to reply to Brayden’s statement.

  His wide smile started to fade, the brightness in his eyes dimming.

  Max hurried across the kitchen and scooped Brayden up. “It looks awesome, dude. Can you do mine like that when you get home from school?”

  Brayden grinned and threw his arms around Max’s neck. “Yup.”

  “Good.” Max set him down. “You breakfast. Me backpack. Us car.”

  A giggle, but Brayden grabbed the makeshift breakfast and pushed through the door leading out to the garage. Max snagged the ridiculously expensive backpack—fine, he was still salty about spending over fifty bucks on a cheap-looking plastic covered bag with a zipper that rarely worked—but Brayden had loved it and his son rarely asked for anything.

  Which meant that any time he did ask, Max caved like a chocoholic at a Hershey’s convention.

  Luckily, he only lived about ten minutes from Brayden’s school, in a little suburb south of San Francisco, where his team, the Gold, was headquartered. They practiced and played in the city, but Max had wanted something a little quieter for his son, especially after the huge media storm that had resulted from his and Suzanne’s separation.

  He thanked social media for that one.

  Namely, his wife’s—ex-wife’s—uncanny ability to relay every personal, painful, juicy, and often exaggerated detail of their lives . . . as well as including plenty of flat-out falsehoods on the Twitter-verse.

  Fuck, if there were a person in the world he could hate, it was Suzanne.

  But he couldn’t, because she’d given him Brayden.

  The rest of it, though, the lies, the scheming, the always-cry-wolf, those he could never forgive.

  He started up the car, listening and chiming in at the right places as Brayden talked all things video game.

  But his mind was unfortunately stuck on Suzanne and the fact that women were not to be trusted.

  He snorted. Brit—the Gold’s goalie and the first female in the NHL—and Mandy—the team’s head trainer—would smack him around for that sentiment, so he silently amended it to: most women were not to be trusted.

  There. Better, see?

  Somehow, he didn’t think they’d see.

  He parked in the school’s lot, walked Brayden in, and received the appropriate amount of scorn from the secretary for being thirty minutes late to school, then bent to hug Brayden.

  “I’ll pick you up today,” he said.

  Brayden smiled and hugged him tightly. Then he whispered something in his ear that hit Max harder than a two-by-four to the temple.

  “If you got me a new mom, we wouldn’t be late for school.”

  “Wh-what?” Max stammered.

  “Please, Dad? Can you?”

  And with that mind fuck of an ask, Brayden gave him one more squeeze and pushed through the door to the playground, calling, “Love you!” over his shoulder.

  Then he was gone, and Max was standing in the office of his son’s school struggling to comprehend if he had actually just heard what he’d heard.

  A new mom?

  Fuck his life.

  Two

  Angelica

  Angie shut down her computer and stood up from her desk with a groan. It was late, way later than she would normally work, but she’d been so close to figuring out the issue in her code that she’d been unable to quit for the day.

  Not until she’d found the line that was causing the whole program to crash.

  She rubbed bleary eyes as she waited for everything to shut down then picked up her cell and sent her boss, Sebastian, a quick text, letting him know all was now good with her part of the project.

  Sebastian was technically on the Steele side of the RoboTech-Steele Technologies venture—as the former assistant of Clay Steele, the CEO himself—while Angie was on the RoboTech side—headed by Clay’s wife, Heather O’Keith—so Sebastion wasn’t quite her boss. But when the two CEOs had gotten married last year, their respective companies had begun several joint projects, and Sebastian was now in charge of making sure all of those endeavors, including the one she’d just finished, were running smoothly.

  Angie normally wouldn’t be this hands-on with a specific project, as she’d moved more into management over the last several years, but she’d recently brought on a new hire, in the form of a brilliantly talented woman named Kelsey.

  Kelsey Scott was a few years older than her, but she was looking to move from the government sector back into the private one. RoboTech was funding one of her innovative proposals, which meant most of Angie’s software engineers were otherwise occupied and couldn’t take on the small project she’d just spent the last week tackling.

  Well, sometimes being the boss meant she had to get her hands dirty.

  And considering how long it had taken her to diagnose the simple problem with her code that day, it was clear she needed to get those mitts dusty a little more often.

  Sebastian replied with a thanks followed by a message telling her it was too damn late and to go home.

  On it, she sent back with a smiley face.

  Sebastian was good people, and she’d enjoyed working with him over the last few months. He was fun, nice, and a ruthless taskmaster when needed.

  Which was, more often than not, most of the time. Especially since the majority of his job included wrangling a multitude of different departments, numerous vendors, and, she had to face facts, stroking egos. Still, Sebastian was good at balancing all of that, and Angie had made it a point to file away some of his techniques for dealing with the egos in her own department.

  Over the last few years, she’d largely done away with any troublemakers, but occasionally one of the older men liked to mansplain her job to her.

  Annoying.

  But unsurprising considering she was nearing thirty and still looked like she was eighteen.

  For God’s sake, her dad had been a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound hockey player and she was what? A buck ten on a good day? Five-two rounding up?

  She was short with a big ol’ apple bottom and barely-there boobs. Her sister, on the other hand, was petite, but in all the right ways, perfectly hourglass with porcelain skin and gorgeous high cheekbones.

  Angie had a hell of a time just finding jeans that fit.

  Because life was . . . well, shit, it was really lifey sometimes.

  Why had she thought about her sister? It had been close to four months since Angie had accidentally walked in on her engagement in progress, had almost ruined one of the few happy moments Mandy’d had in her turbulent and tragic life.

  “Ugh,” she muttered, grabbing her hoodie and shrugging into it. Her backpack followed suit and though she moved quickly toward the stairs, the thoughts of Mandy didn’t fade so easily.

  Thoughts about the email sent the previous year gently disclosing their shared father.

  Followed up by an earnest plea to get to know one another.

  Except, Angie already knew all about Mandy. She’d known her from her earliest moments, resente
d her sister for years, hated her, despised her until she’d known the truth.

  See?

  No.

  And she hadn’t either.

  Because Angie hadn’t been old enough to understand cheating and affairs and other families.

  She’d only known what her mother had told her.

  That Mandy and her mother had stolen her father away.

  That the bare glimpses, the extremely brief visits he’d been able to make were their fault.

  If they weren’t there, Angie and her mother would have all the attention.

  Thankfully, her phone buzzed at that moment, pulling her out of the rabbit hole of her brain and depositing her right back into the present.

  Probably a robocall, since she’d done a damn good job of pushing away any friends she’d had over the last few years. Kind of hard to be a friend to someone when her entire childhood had morphed and twisted before her eyes.

  God. Part of her wished she’d never found the NDA in her mother’s paperwork.

  It was ill to think of the dead, and that particular piece of paper had made it all but impossible not to.

  “Hello,” she said carefully, after swiping across the screen and putting her cell up to her ear. She started descending the stairs and was surprised to find a familiar voice on the other end of the call.