Georgia divided her attention between the action on the ice and the trainer who began to prod Leo. Only when the trainer left him alone did she really start to relax.
Luckily, all that tension lit a fire under Team Brooklyn, who capitalized on their power play at the one minute mark. Bayer fired a missile right past the goalie, tying up the game. That should have changed the tone down on the ice. But at the next stoppage of play, after the penalized player emerged from the sin bin, O’Doul threw off his gloves. Down went the other dudes’ gloves, and O’Doul grabbed him by the jersey and swung.
The impact made Georgia wince. Fighting was not her favorite part of hockey. When she was younger, the fighting didn’t used to bother her. But now that she saw the injured players right after every game, she was no longer so sanguine. Fighting hurt. So when O’Doul did his thing, she didn’t like to watch.
“Thank God Leo isn’t a brawler,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t be able to stand it.”
“Yeah,” Becca agreed. “That would be a tricky thing to explain to your future children. Daddy hits the other boys at work, but you still can’t drop the gloves in kindergarten.”
“Very funny,” Georgia scoffed.
“Is it? Just let me know if I need to shop the spring sales for something to wear to your wedding.”
“Shh! Stop trying to marry me off,” she said. “So we spent one night together. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“Jeez, I wonder how loudly I can call bullshit?”
“Pretty loudly, apparently.” Georgia looked over her shoulder to make sure nobody they knew was listening.
“In the past two weeks, have you strung together fifteen minutes without thinking of him?”
“Sure I have.” While I was sleeping.
Becca snorted. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” she said, pointing at the action on the rink below. “Doulie just crushed that guy. Ooh, gross. There’s blood on the ice.”
Georgia didn’t want to look. She studied Leo instead. Was he sitting funny? Several times he put a gloved hand up to his pectoral and seemed to probe it. Each time he did that, Georgia escalated her worries about him. Was he bruised? Broken ribs?
Heart attack?
Gah.
She watched the last part of the game with dread in her stomach. Her father kept sneaking looks at Leo, too. It was rare for him to take his eyes off the ice like that. So Leo must be injured. Except Leo was obviously pissed off at sitting out his shifts. At one point they stood toe to toe, faces red, arguing.
Leo didn’t skate until there were only two minutes left on the clock. Georgia scrutinized his movements, looking for trouble. But when a world-class hockey player skates at 90 percent instead of full out, it’s not easy to spot the difference, even for someone as invested as Georgia was. His skating was as powerful and fluid as always. She could watch him all night.
I still love him.
Ack. Now there was a messy thought.
When the buzzer rang the game was still tied 1–1. Five minutes of overtime went up on the clock, and the ice team came out to shovel. Reluctantly, Georgia made her way downstairs to prepare for the after-game press conference.
There was a monitor in the visitors’ lounge, though, so she and Roger stood there, watching. After the overtime period began, nothing much happened for the first couple of minutes. But then Leo’s assailant got hung up in front of the visitors’ bench, trying to dig the puck out of a scrum of skaters and sticks. And all of a sudden Silas, sitting in his usual spot on the bench, jerked the door open.
His opponent went down fast and hard, sprawled halfway into the visitors’ bench area, his legs splayed out on the ice.
“Whoa,” Roger breathed.
Georgia moved so close to the monitor that her nose was only inches away. Nobody touch him, she begged. Emotions were running high down there, and she couldn’t even imagine the bench-clearing fight that might break out if the Bruisers bench let loose on that guy.
The next two or three seconds seemed to last forever. Georgia didn’t breathe while the player curled his body back onto the ice and then hopped to his feet.
Meanwhile, O’Doul had captured the puck and run it down to the attack zone, where he scored on a breakaway.
Georgia just stared at the monitor for a few minutes, trying to make sense of what had just occurred. Then she grabbed her Katt Phone and asked it a question. “Nate, is the bench door prank against NHL rules?”
Her phone couldn’t find much mention of the bench door in the NHL rulebook. She learned that the benches for each team were required to be of equal length, with the same number of doors—two—for each side. There was nothing about yanking the door open to make the other team’s man fall over.
How crazy.
Regardless of its legality, Georgia had a PR quandary on her hands. She didn’t know whether to put Silas in front of every reporter in the stadium, or try to hide him and downplay the incident.
She had about ninety seconds to figure it out.
Georgia ran into the empty dressing room and out the other door. The first players were just clomping off the ice and down the rubber mats. Luckily, Silas was one of the first off the rink. She grabbed his arm and spun around to walk with him into the dressing room. “Nice work out there. But I don’t want you to brag about it on camera.”
Silas grinned. “Thought you might say that. I’m gonna say it was just an accident of timing that I happened to open the door then. Didn’t know their guy would fall on his face at our feet.”
“Perfect,” Georgia said. “Now come say that out in the hallway. But I’m not bringing you into the press conference, because that makes it look too official for something that was an accident.”
“Okay, boss.” Silas removed his gloves and hurled them toward his locker. “Let’s do it.”
In the hallway, a local sports reporter pounced, and Silas gave his quote about the “accident of timing.”
“That’s really your story?” the reporter drawled.
“Sure is,” Silas said, slowing down the words to match the other man’s southern accent. “I guess it’s just the same kind of coincidence your guy had when he accidentally clocked my teammate in the head.”
Georgia bit her lip to keep from laughing, then she sent Silas back into the locker room.
Of course, his teammates knew better. Their shouts could be heard even through the dressing room door. “Silas for president!” some player yelled. “Play of the year!” hooted another.
The hallway was chock-full of journalists looking for quotes from the winning team. When Georgia put her head into the locker room, asking for O’Doul, the GM told her that he’d refused to take questions tonight.