Center Ice (Boston Rebels Book 1)

When I pad into Drew’s kitchen in the morning, he’s standing at the big marble island in nothing but a pair of sweatpants. I don’t know how long he’s been up, but he’s got a mug of coffee in one hand and a stack of papers he’s sorting through with the other. When he sees me, he sets the page in his hand down on top of the pile.

“What’s that?” I ask, nodding to the pile of papers.

“Nothing.”

“It’s obviously not nothing,” I say, keeping my voice light as I take in the guilty look on his face. “But I’m the one in your space, so if it’s none of my business, or you don’t want to talk about it, you can just say so.”

He licks his lips and sets his coffee cup on top of the stack of papers. Then he sighs. “It’s just medical bills.”

“For your mom?” I come around the island and run my hand over his back.

“Yeah. I’m responsible for all the bills and stuff.”

“I’m not trying to pry, but what do you mean by responsible?” I glance up at him, and he looks at me affectionately.

“I don’t want to hide things from you, Audrey. But talking about money is so…I don’t know…taboo, I guess.”

He lifts me by my hips and sets me on the counter, and when the cold marble meets the backs of my bare thighs, goosebumps erupt all over my skin. I’m wearing one of Drew’s Rebels t-shirts and nothing else. He steps up between my legs.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” I say, cupping his face in both my hands and kissing the flat bridge of his nose. “But if you want to, I’m always here.”

“That’s the thing,” he says, and I draw back to see him better. “I want you to always be here. I want you in my kitchen in the mornings, and in my bed at night. I want to eat dinner with you and Graham right there.” He nods his chin at the dining room table that runs parallel to the massive island I’m sitting on. “And I want to curl up on the couch with you and watch TV together after Graham goes to bed.”

My breath hitches. I spent the night for the first time last night, and he’s talking about me and Graham moving in?

“But there’s so much you don’t know about me and my life,” Drew continues, brow furrowing, “and so much I don’t know about you and your life. And I know it’ll take time to get to that point, for you to be ready—but I don’t want to hide things from you and slow-roll it just for the sake of taking it slow.”

“You don’t have to hide things, Drew.” I run my thumbs across his cheeks, loving the scratchiness of his early morning face. “And in case I didn’t make it clear before you left, I’m all in. Especially now that we’ve told Graham. I thought I’d want to take this slow for his sake, but he’s clearly on board with us being together, and…this is what I want. Am I ready to move in tomorrow? No. But do I see that in our future? Yes.”

He squeezes his fingertips into my hips and pulls me up against him. “I am so fucking impatient. I want you with me, always. I want to be the kind of man who deserves to marry you, and who deserves to be Graham’s dad. I want everything with you.”

How did I get so lucky with this man? How did I sleep with the irresponsible playboy he was six years ago, and wind up with the grown-up version of him who wants to be a husband and a father?

“You already are that kind of man, Drew. Every day, you’re showing me more and more who you really are.”

He trails kisses along my hairline, then past my ear and along my jaw. “And I’m going to keep showing you, until you let me put a ring on that finger. And then I’m going to start putting more babies in you, and showing you how good I am with the newborn stage too, until we’ve built our whole family.”

“Oh yeah?” I laugh, not hating the idea of giving Graham some siblings as long as Drew is the father. “And how many babies are you planning on giving me?”

“At least a hockey team’s worth.” He nips my neck playfully with his teeth.

“You want SIX kids? Like hell that’s happening.” I push his face away from my neck and give him a death glare as he laughs.

“Okay, maybe, one or two more?”

I smack his shoulder. “You said six just so that I’d say yes to fewer, didn’t you?”

“Guilty. But hey, I missed seeing you have our first child. I missed the baby and toddler years with Graham. I missed out on so much, and I want to be there for everything this time around—the ultrasounds, the baby shower, choosing baby names, the birth. And I want to watch Graham become the best big brother to those babies too…”

I want all of that too, and I want it with him. “Okay, one or two more, then. And, I’m looking forward to seeing you experience all of that, and getting to go through it with you.”

He wraps his arms around my lower back, holding me to him. “I fucking love you.”

I nuzzle my face into his neck, loving the closeness—not just physical, but the emotional connection we have, too. “Always the romantic.”

“I mean, I could have said ‘I love making you scream my name.’ Which is what I plan to do as soon as I tell you about these medical bills.” He pats his hand on the pile of papers beside me.

“Drew, I’m exhausted. Not only did you keep me up half the night⁠—”

“You didn’t seem to be complaining while I was giving you orgasm after orgasm.”

“—but then you woke me up early this morning for more sex!” Am I really complaining about this man taking care of me in ways I didn’t even know I needed to be taken care of? No.

I thought sex was an itch I needed to scratch every once in a while when I got tired of taking care of my own needs. I had no idea what it could be like when I was with a man who loved me and loved bringing me pleasure.

“Listen, we get Graham back in”—he glances at the clock on the oven—“like, two hours. And there’s no way I’m not coming inside you at least one more time before then. We can call it practice.”

I burst out laughing, and he looks at me like I’m crazy.

“Practice? Like, for what? Having more kids?”

“Yeah, because the minute you’re ready, we’re doing that again,” he says. My heart squeezes in my chest. He’s so ready for the next step that it makes me feel like I could be ready, too. “But stop trying to distract me with talk about sex, because I have important stuff to talk to you about regarding my mom’s health care.”

That blasts me right out of my love-infused stupor. Drew’s mom is wonderful, and the thought of her having a degenerative disease like Parkinson’s is heartbreaking—and I’ve only known her for a couple of weeks. I can’t imagine how it weighs on Drew, Missy, and Caitlyn.

“Okay. What’s going on?” I ask.

He updates me on the course of his mom’s treatment, a bit of which he’d already told me when we talked about the need to remodel the first floor of her house. “All the doctor’s visits and treatments are expensive, and I manage it all.” I try not to shudder at the thought of all those visits to hospitals, because this is his future, and that means it’s mine too. But watching another terrible disease take another mother away from her kids, like cancer did for mine, has my eyes filling with tears. “Hey…” he says, cupping my face. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m so sorry. This isn’t about me. I don’t know why I’m crying.”

He gently strokes the tears off my cheeks with his fingers. “I didn’t even think about what you’d told me about your mom and all those doctor visits and hospital stays. Is that what this is about? I’m so sorry.”

“No, I just…I know what the journey through a terrible disease is like. And I hate that you’re going to have to go through that with your mom.”

He kisses the top of my head and runs a hand up and down my back. “Parkinson’s isn’t deadly, but I’m not going to pretend that it’s going to be easy. There will be more doctor’s appointments, and more hospital visits. In the long run, there will be live-in nurses and home health aides. I’m committed to giving her the best possible care that’s available, no matter the cost. But the end isn’t going to be pretty.”

“I hate this for you.”

“I hate this for us. Because we’re going to have to be there for her together. The good news is, she still has a lot of good days ahead of her.”

“I’m sorry about the crying,” I tell him as I use my fingertips to wipe away any leftover tears. “It’s just that, knowing what this disease is like in general, and then imaging how it’s going to impact your mom specifically, felt like very different things. I know I’ve only met her once, but I adored her and so did Graham. I hate to think he’s finally going to have a grandparent in his life, and she’s so wonderful, and then he’s going to lose her.”

“We all lose our grandparents eventually,” Drew reminds me. “I think the best we can do is to make sure he gets many happy years with her.” I nod up at him, knowing he’s right. “Which is why, after you go get Graham at Jameson’s, and I sit here and pay all these medical bills, we’re going to go to my mom’s for Sunday dinner.”

“My family usually does Sunday dinner together,” I tell him, though lately it seems like it’s been less frequent. Tonight, for example, we aren’t all getting together because Jameson and Lauren are meeting up with one of her brothers and his wife who are in town for the weekend. “But, we can probably switch off—go to my family some weekends and yours others?”

“I’d like that,” he says. “Normally, Missy does it at her house now, but she’s going to cook at my mom’s tonight. Given that Graham’s been there before, and knowing that this whole experience of meeting aunts and uncles and cousins he didn’t know he had is probably going to be overwhelming, it seemed best to have it at my mom’s, where it’s familiar for him.”

“You sure made a lot of plans before asking me.” I raise an eyebrow.

He squeezes the back of my neck as he brushes a kiss across my forehead, and his touch—both supportive and loving—instantly relaxes me. “No, I made sure these plans were possible before asking you. Now I can tell Missy it’s a yes. Right?”

“Yeah. Is it crazy that I’m nervous about meeting your whole family?”

“No, but you better let me help with those nerves, anyway. I know exactly how relaxed you get after you’re done screaming my name …”

“Can I go up?” Graham asks when Drew shows him the treehouse in the backyard at his mom’s house. The exterior walls are freshly painted a deep blue-gray that matches the house, but I don’t know how old the structure actually is. The wood at the base of it isn’t fresh, except for a few added supports.

“Of course,” Drew says. “That’s what it’s here for.”

“Are you sure it’s safe?” I ask him.

“I had a structural engineer check it out, just to make sure,” he tells me.

“You know a structural engineer?”

“I know your sister,” he says, “and she stopped by the other day on her way out to that house in Wellesley that you guys are working on. She gave it her seal of approval.”

“How did you coordinate all this—the notes and the treehouse—with Jules?”

He gives me a wink. “I have my ways.” Then he turns to Graham. “Are we going in?”

“Yes!” Graham yells as he runs toward the tree. He grabs hold of the rope ladder and climbs up, and Drew follows behind him.

“You know,” Drew’s mom says from behind me, and I turn in surprise. She’d been up on the deck a moment ago, and I didn’t even hear her come down the steps. “He’s been working on that thing every single time he’s been over here for the past few weeks.”

My heart feels like it expands in my chest. There are so many reasons I adore Drew, but watching him grow into being a dad makes me love him even more.

Love? The realization that I just used that word, even though it was only in my own thoughts, rips through me. I love Drew. I love the way he shows up for me and the way he takes care of my body. I love the way he tells me how he’s feeling, and makes me feel things I didn’t know were possible. And maybe, most of all, I love watching him with our kid—how patient and kind he is, how he wants Graham to feel loved.

“He built it?” I croak out the words through the lump in my throat. Based on the gray color of the wood at the base, I assumed the treehouse had been here for many years.

“No, it’s the one his dad built for him when he was little. Watching him fix it up and make it like new again for his own son—” Her voice breaks, and she stops speaking, instead swallowing hard as her eyes fill with tears. I wrap an arm around her shoulder, and we stand there for a moment, listening to the sound of Drew and Graham’s conversation, which we can barely hear, flowing from the treehouse while we both try not to cry.

“I got so lucky with him,” I tell her. “Graham is the best thing that ever happened to me, but having Drew in our lives and watching him get to experience fatherhood…it’s more than I ever hoped for.”

“I think it’s the last thing he expected, and probably the best thing that ever happened to him, too.”

“Hey, Ma?” Missy’s voice rings out behind us. She was inside getting dinner started when we got here, so we got a chance to meet her. But her husband and boys haven’t arrived yet. I appreciate that Graham is getting a little time here with Drew first, before the rest of the family descends.

I can’t wait for him to meet his cousins, but I also don’t know if he’s going to be overwhelmed by all these new people in his life. Graham seems to take things in stride though, probably because five-year-olds don’t have the capacity to complicate things like adults do. I know I need to stop projecting my own worries onto him because he seems fine.

Mrs. Jenkins turns toward Missy. “Yeah, honey?”

“Can you help me with the sauce?” her daughter calls from the sliding glass door. “It seems like it’s missing something.”

“Sure, I’ll be right there.” She turns back to me. “Thank you for coming over today. I know that meeting a whole new family is going to be a lot for you and Graham, but we’re really excited to have you guys here.”

“Thank you for welcoming us like you have,” I say, returning her soft smile.

When she heads inside, I take a seat on the stairs leading up to the deck. I love listening to Drew and Graham as they hang out together in the playhouse. They’re talking about Spider-Man, Graham’s favorite superhero, when the sliding glass door opens behind me and Mrs. Jenkins pads across the deck to take a seat next to me.

But when I glance over, I find Caitlyn sitting there instead. I’m sure I don’t do a good job of masking my surprise, because she says, “I’m sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I just thought you were your mom, is all.” I don’t really know what to say to her after our last interaction, where she called me a Puck Bunny and chastised Drew for being late to his mom’s appointment because he was with me.

“I owe you an apology,” she says, and that shocks the shit out of me. From the way Drew talks about her, an apology was the last thing I expected. “I’m sorry I made the assumptions I did when we met.”

“It’s okay. I showed up out of nowhere. You don’t know me.” I pause, wondering if I should hold back the next thought in my head, but it’s out of my mouth before I can stop it. “And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think you really know your brother, either.”

It’s probably not my place to say this to her. But, if she’s going to be my sister-in-law someday, I want to make it perfectly clear that I’m not going to tolerate her treating Drew like she has been. He deserves better than that, especially because he’s a wonderful son who goes above and beyond for his mom, and he clearly has a good relationship with Missy. I don’t think he’s the problem here.

She sighs. “You’re probably right. Which is sad, because I practically raised him after our dad died.”

“I know how hard that is,” I tell her, and she looks at me, seemingly taken aback.

“You do?”

“Yeah. My mom died when I was fourteen, and my dad left when I was fifteen. I helped raise my sister, who’s three years younger than me.”

“Helped who?” she asks.

“My brother. He used to play for the Rebels, but retired when my dad left so that he could be there for me and Jules. He got guardianship of us, but it was me who did most of the day-to-day stuff because he was so busy building his career as a sports agent. He’s Drew’s agent, actually.”

“Wait, Jameson Flynn is your brother?”

“Yep.”

“And he gave up his hockey career to raise you and your sister?”

“Yeah.”

“Does he…” It’s like she can’t find the right words. “How does he feel about that?”

“He doesn’t really talk about it, but my future sister-in-law says that he told her he’s never regretted his decision for a second.”

“Are you and your sister close?” she asks, propping her elbow on her knee and resting her chin on her fist.

“She’s my best friend. I was supposed to go to Georgetown for college. It was where I’d dreamed of going since I was little. I got in, but the thought of leaving her, of missing those high school years, was unfathomable. After my parents were both gone, Jules and Jameson were all I had. I didn’t want to miss out on any of the milestones. So I went to BU instead.”

“Where you met Drew…”

“Yeah.” I nod.

“How did he not know about Graham?” she asks, but her tone holds no judgment.

“He’d moved to Vancouver before I found out, and there were some missed phone calls and miscommunication.” If she wants to know more than that, she can ask Drew herself.

“And then…?”

“I ran into him at my brother’s house when he first moved back to Boston. He met Graham, and it was pretty obvious whose kid he was.”

“I’m still having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of Drew being a dad,” she says, her eyes flicking from me to the treehouse where laughter has just erupted again.

“Well, he’s a pretty great one, if I do say so myself.”

She opens her mouth to respond, but that’s when the side gate opens and two boisterous boys run toward us, both of them carrying several plastic action figures in their hands. When they approach us, Caitlyn introduces me to Missy’s husband, Rusty, and their boys, Ryan and Finn.

Then Drew’s walking across the lawn with his hand on Graham’s back, and tears fill my eyes as I watch my son meet his cousins for the first time. And when my eyes meet Drew’s, and I see the tears in his eyes too, mine start to fall down my face. I wipe them away through my smiles, and when Drew comes over and wraps his arm around my shoulders, I snuggle into his side, wondering how I could possibly be any happier.