Page 2 of Wyatt

It could choke him with the expectations.

Turn him into a man he either loved or hated.

The shot came hard, through traffic, and he dropped quick, his legs in a butterfly position, his pads flat against the ice, his arms in close.

The puck bounced off his leg pads, and he slapped the rebound away with his stick.

His defenseman, a rookie named Brummer, took it behind the net, and Wyatt caught his breath, his heart a hammer in his chest.

Breathe. Stay cool.

Except his hips were practically on fire, and shoot, but he should have iced down better after yesterday’s game.

If he didn’t stay loose, Kalen would take over, and Wyatt would get bumped to the second line. Wyatt could nearly hear Jace Jacobsen, one of their coaches, in his ear.If you’re not 100 percent in, you can’t be at your best.

Oh, he was all in.

His body just didn’t want to agree.

His head might not be in the game either, because even as the play went deep, back over the center line, into the Polish end of the ice, Wyatt’s brain went to Coco.

To the words of his sister, Ruby Jane, six weeks ago when Wyatt had met her, of all places, on a billionaire’s yacht in the middle of the Caspian Sea. He’d never felt more in over his head than when he’d jumped on a plane with his former-Ranger brother, Tate, and flew over the Atlantic to the country of Azerbaijan to rescue their sister and a woman whose last spoken words to him were,We have to talk, Wyatt.

It was a conversation they’d never had, even online.

He’d gone cold when they tracked down Ruby Jane, nearly human trafficking prey on a Russian freighter and rescued her, only to hear her grim sit-rep.Coco’s been shot.

Of course there was more—so much more. Namely the fact that RJ had barely escaped Russia with her life after being framed in an assassination attempt of a Russian general. Along the way, she’d met up with Coco, had dragged her into the chaos, and then left her in some remote hospital in Siberia, the KGB on her tail.

No.FSB. It was hard to keep up.

As Wyatt was trying to get his head around that, and more—namely that RJ was some sort of Jack Ryan CIA analyst—he also had to assimilate the fact that Coco was the daughter of said Russian general.

A fact that she’d left out the entire time she was living in Montana. With his family. Probably for KGB-slash-FSB security reasons, but yeah, that was a Big Omission that now had her hiding.

Somewhere in Russia.

Because, you know, bad people wanted to kill the general. And Coco could too easily be a pawn in the Russian game of cat and mouse.

He’d tried to contact her through their forum and gotten a shutout.

And in the back of his head, as his defensemen chased the Poles down the ice, as Wyatt dropped to one knee and deflected a shot, kicking it away, he knew he was probably in over his head. Again.

Another shot, and he caught it in his glove. Dropped it behind the net. Brummer brought it down the ice, passed off to Deke. Shouts from the audience—mostly Russian in this newly built sports complex—thundered through him as the clock ticked down. Eight minutes, twenty-four seconds.

Wyatt heard Ford’s voice in his head.You don’t have a visa, you don’t speak Russian. You’re a hockey player, for cryin’ out loud.

Ouch.

Especially when superhero Ford the SEAL added,I nearly got RJ and Red killed, and I actually know what I’m doing.

So Wyatt wasn’t a superhero. He wasn’t Tate or Ford or big brother Reuben, who jumped from airplanes to fight fires, or even Knox, who stared down bucking bulls.

Wyatt merely stopped pucks flying 110 mph straight at his head.

The Poles had the black and were slapping it down the ice, passing, playing with it. Another shot on goal, and Wyatt hit his knees, slamming them together. He felt the puck hit his chest, bounce down, and he clamped a glove over it.

Around him, ice chipped into his face. The sounds of sticks on ice always reminded Wyatt of gunshots across the fields—a crazy comparison because he’d barely spent time hunting with his father. That was something Tate and Ford and probably Knox and Reuben had done.

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