Page 9 of Hot for the Hockey Player
She grinned and disappeared into her room, emerging a moment later withThe Importance of Being Ernesttucked under her arm.“Smells good, Mothership,” she said, coming over to press a kiss to my cheek.Damon was already taller than me, and it’d only be a matter of a couple of years before Laurel was my height or taller.Their father had been tall, but thankfully, height seemed to be the only genes of his that were seriously taking shape.Oh, and Damon’s gray-blue eyes, but that was about it.
She dipped her pinky finger into the marinara sauce simmering on the stove and popped it into her mouth, humming in delight.Then she donned her Chelsea rainboots, winter coat, and grabbed a picnic blanket from the cupboard before taking her leave of me.
I finished dredging the chicken, then put it into the preheated oven to bake.Then I got to work on preparing the Caesar salad, garlic toast, grilled asparagus, and rotini.I loved to cook; the kitchen was my happy place, and feeding people was one of my love languages.Particularly since—as my cousins liked to say—I wasn’t big on physical touch, words of affirmation, or compliments.Fair enough.We couldn’t be perfect at everything.The physical touch thing was also a trauma response.I didn’t like to be touched unnecessarily, so I never assumed others did either.
But food?Food was my way of letting people know I cared about them.It was how I expressed my love for others when I couldn’t get my mouth and brain to cooperate to say it out loud.Even my kids were better at expressing their emotions than I was.Mind you, we worked hard on that since they were little.Just because I sucked at expressing myself didn’t mean I needed to pass on that failure to my offspring.
Normally, I would invite one or all of my cousins to have dinner with us, but Raina and Marco were having dinner with her new boyfriend, Jagger, and Naomi and Danica said they were going to just stay home and do their own thing for dinner tonight.
I never took offense to that.Just because we all lived on the same property and worked together, didn’t mean we had to do everything together all the time.
We’d just have leftovers … well, maybe not if Maverick was coming over and with the way Damon ate these days.
I unplugged my earbuds from where they were charging and popped one into my ear.I always kept one in and one out so I could hear if the kids needed me.Then I turned on my favorite kitchen playlist: a true crime murder podcast.
I added the anchovy paste to the tall, narrow blender jar for my Caesar dressing, just as the story was getting to the part where the abused woman and her best friend hauled her husband’s corpse, rolled up in a rug, out of the back of her minivan at a construction site in the middle of the night.There was deep, wet concrete, and that’s precisely where they planned to dump the body.
I clucked my tongue.“Not smart, ladies.You want to bury the body three feet deep, no deeper, for optimum and quick decomposition.Preferably under a protected tree and across state lines.It’s not going to decompose that way.”I shook my head.“Amateurs.”
I hit the “on” button for my immersion blender, the salad dressing ingredients swirled together to make one delicious-smelling concoction.I turned it off and scoffed.“No wonder you got caught.You need toburnyour clothes and toss the weapon into deep, muddy water.Don’t throw it in the trash.Ugh.It’s like you wanted to get caught.”A snicker behind me had me spinning around.
“Hi,” said the incredibly handsome, smiling Maverick Roy, holding a bouquet of flowers.He stood between a ready-to-burst Damon and a smug-looking Laurel.
“Guess he’s fine, huh?”Damon said.“And he came here to see us.”
Even though I knew he was coming, I was still struck a little dumb seeing him standing there.Our meeting in the grocery store wasn’t a hallucination.“Hi,” I finally said, having to wrestle the cat away from my tongue.I shook my head and blinked a couple more times.
Did the kids notice my weird behavior?I was stumbling over my words, and Gabrielle Campbellneverstumbled—over anything.
“He’s staying in a cabin at the brewery,” Damon said with excitement.“Says you ran into each other at the store and you invited him for dinner as a surprise for me.”The look on my son’s face was reminiscent of him as a five-year-old at Christmas and he just opened up the firetruck he wanted so badly.“He’s seeing Maz at Unger Wellness,” my kid went on.
“You mean Rolph Mazurenko?”Maverick asked, handing me the flowers.
My head bobbed as I tried to keep my eyes on his face and not on the way his long-sleeve Henley wrapped around his arms like a second skin.I used the flowers as an excuse to busy myself, and showed them my back as I grabbed a vase from under the sink, filled it with water, and unwrapped the bouquet from the plastic.“We just know him as ‘Maz,’ the PT god who also sells the best free-range eggs on the island,” I said, focused on plucking the extra leaves off the stems of the dark-purple mums.
Maverick snorted.“I’ll have to ask him if I can buy some eggs off him.”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Damon said.“It’s awesome.”The thundercloud that my son wore as a hat when he went outside to kick the soccer ball around, had been replaced by a big ray of sunshine.I couldn’t remember the last time my moody man-boy, who really needed to wash his greasy hair, smiled like that, let alone had been so outwardly excited.
“Yeah,” I agreed, a lump at the back of my throat.“It’ll be so great to catch up with you, Maverick.”I set the vase, now filled with pretty plum and ivory chrysanthemums, on the island and met Maverick’s gaze.
He nodded, his blue eyes twinkling in a very disarming, flirtatious way.“It definitely will be.”
Thank god I made as much food as I did, because between Maverick and Damon, there weren’t any leftovers.Maverick had a very healthy appetite when he lived with us—thankfully, his parents compensated my monthly payment for his endless hunger—but it seemed like that never-ending need to eat had only intensified.
“Still the best cook in the world, Mrs.Campbell,” he said, taking a sip of water.“This chicken parm is amazing.”
“Please, Maverick, call me Gabrielle.We’re both adults now, and while I haven’t changed my last name, I’m not a missus anymore.”
His gaze met mine and something heated flickered there.Then it was gone.
He regaled us with tales from his NHL career, and Damon ate up every word with starry eyes and a thousand follow-up questions.
“Barbier needs to get more than a five-game suspension,” Damon said, scooping more rotini onto his plate, then ladling marinara sauce over it.“That’s ridiculous.If you’re out for the rest of the season—hopefully not—but if you are, and your vertebrae are crushed, he needs to be suspended too.”The venom in my son’s tone surprised me, and for a hot minute, he reminded me a lot of his father.Quick to anger about simple things.Things that had nothing to do with him.Things he had no control over.But Damon wasn’t anything like Cyrus, and I knew that.I made sure the gentle tingle of alarm bells going off in my head didn’t show on my face and simply took a bite of my garlic toast.
“Barbier is a known aggressor,” Maverick said casually.“I’m sure the five-game suspension won’t be all he gets.My coach and the team manager are looking into greater repercussions.”
“Barbier has taken cheap shots at you before,” Damon went on.“He’s a meathead.I’ve heard him give interviews.The guy can barely string two coherent sentences together.”
