In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) (41 page)
Read In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) Online
Authors: Catherine Gayle
The music was rich and sensual and evocative, our movements even more so. I was in awe of the way the videographer had filmed it—the lighting, the mood, the camera angles—and the way that Devin and I looked. You couldn’t exactly tell who we were. Our faces were almost never in the shot. It was all about our bodies moving together, the lines we hit, the way we touched.
It was amazing.
When the video ended, I shut down my phone.
Sara whistled. “That was hot.”
I had to agree. Instead of being worried about seeing my body on film, which is supposed to add fifteen pounds, I was just entranced.
“You’re going to be getting all sorts of work soon,” Laura said.
“Burnzie’s going to
die
when he sees that,” Rachel added. “He’ll want a private performance.”
Talk like that continued for a couple of minutes until most of the girls went back to their seats. Dana and Noelle kept walking, though, and the teams came back out to the ice.
The official dropped the puck. The game was back underway. And Dana cursed under her breath.
“You guys?”
We all turned around to look at her.
Her eyes were huge and round. “It’s time. My water just broke.”
The game all but forgotten, everyone sprang into motion. Rachel was on her phone, Laura was ordering people around like a drill sergeant, and Noelle was right by Dana’s side, holding her hand and saying calm, soothing things to her.
Sara sidled up alongside me. “Get used to this,” she said, waving her arm to indicate the ordered commotion going on all around us. “These girls never change.”
They might not, but I sure had. I grinned at her and followed along with the circus in front of me, doing what I was told. I supposed I was part of this group now, and that was all right with me.
We got Dana down to the ambulance and her husband jumped in with her, still in full uniform including skates and helmet. Then we broke off into groups to follow them to the hospital.
They turned the game on for us in the waiting room so we could see how our guys were doing. The Storm won in overtime, with Nicky making some key stops before Soupy knocked in the final goal, winning it for his best friend, brother-in-law, and captain.
Not long later, the guys started to arrive at the hospital. Keith came straight to me and wrapped me up in his arms. “Nothing yet?”
“Nothing yet. Soon, probably. Or maybe not.”
Laura and Rachel had continually reminded us that first babies could be extremely unpredictable in how fast they decided to come into the world.
“I have a secret to show you, though,” I said, pulling out my phone. We sneaked off to a quiet spot so I could play the video for him. He pulled me down onto his lap while he watched over my shoulder, and I could feel him growing hard beneath me as it went on.
“You know I’m going to have to watch that about seven thousand times a day for a while, right?” he said, laughing. He grabbed my phone from my hands and started pushing buttons. I glared at him, but then I realized he was sending the link to his phone.
“Or something like that,” I agreed.
He had just tipped my chin up to kiss me when Zee burst into the waiting room. He’d put on scrubs instead of his hockey uniform, and he had the hugest smile on his face.
“It’s a girl!”
Everyone jumped up to congratulate the new father, and Keith used the pandemonium to sneak in a kiss.
“One of these days,” he murmured against my lips. “That could be us.”
It could be. I hoped it would be. He hadn’t asked me to marry him yet, but we’d talked about it a bit, and we knew we were heading in that direction.
The cats and I had moved into Keith’s house a couple of weeks ago. His parents had come for a visit, too, the first time they’d done that in a long time. Keith and Shane talked on the phone almost constantly these days, growing as close as they should have been all along. We were even planning a visit to Illinois so he could meet my family, working it around his hockey schedule and all the new performances I’d lined up thanks to my collaborations with Devin.
Cole and Shane hadn’t continued their relationship beyond Shane’s visit. I kind of thought that might change sometime, though. They’d been good together…really good.
Kind of similar to how things were between me and Keith.
Everyone in the waiting room went off in groups to see the newest arrival to the Storm family, looking at her through the windows of the nursery as she was getting her first bath.
“She looks kind of… I don’t know, red, I guess,” Keith said when we got to look in and see her.
“Nice, Burnzie,” Babs said. “That’s the best thing you can say about Zee’s daughter?”
Keith cuffed Babs on the back of the head. “I could say she has a bunch of hair. Kind of like you. Maybe you could teach her how to comb her hair…if you ever learned, yourself.”
“Brie, I will go ahead and apologize for him now,” Babs said to me. “Because when you two have a baby, Burnzie’s going to be more concerned about whether the kid has combed his hair than he will about anything else.”
“Some things just aren’t worth worrying about,” Cole said, winking at me and Keith.
He was right. And there were too many other things worth enjoying to let those worries take over our lives.
Catherine Gayle is a USA Today bestselling author of Regency-set historical romance and contemporary hockey romance with a New Adult feel. She’s a transplanted Texan living in North Carolina with two extremely spoiled felines. In her spare time, she watches way too much hockey and reality TV, plans fun things to do for the Nephew Monster’s next visit, and performs experiments in the kitchen which are rarely toxic.
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IN THE ZONE is the fifth novel in the
Portland Storm
series. If you enjoyed it, please look for the other books in the series: BREAKAWAY, ON THE FLY, TAKING A SHOT (a novella), LIGHT THE LAMP, DELAY OF GAME, and DOUBLE MAJOR (another novella). The sixth novel, COMEBACK, will release in February, 2015. The seventh novel, DROPPING GLOVES, will release in April, 2015.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents