Ever After Read online

  “No, thanks.” She shook her head.

  “You can’t just sit here and mope! I know you didn’t want to leave Minneapolis but it’s just temporary until—”

  “I like Vegas, Dad,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  “Then let’s go for a swim.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You never want to do anything,” he protested. “You’ve been through hell, but it’s time for you to—”

  “I said I was fine.” She got to her feet. “I’m going to get something to eat.”

  “Lexi, stop it!” Her father’s voice showed his irritation, but Lexi didn’t care.

  Fighting cancer at sixteen had been the hardest thing she’d ever imagined, but the after effects were still destroying her emotionally. “I don’t want to go swimming.” Lexi faced her father, fists clenched at her sides as she tried to keep her voice down. “I wanted to stay home. You made me come but you can’t make me have fun.”

  Rob threw up his hands. “You have to stop hiding under oversized clothes and wigs! You’re a smart, beautiful girl who should—”

  “Should what?!” Lexi finally snapped, her voice rising as she stared at her father. “Go swimming?!”

  “Lexi!” Rob took a breath, glancing briefly at his teammates and their families, who were all starting to watch.

  “What?” she cried. “Why do you want me to stop wearing oversized clothes? So everyone can see what my body looks like?” She yanked her shirt over her head and threw it aside.

  “Lexi, I—”

  “How ‘bout if I take my bikini top off too?!” Lexi was furious, tired of her father’s double standard. “Huh? Why not, Dad? I mean, that’s what you want, right? You want me to stop hiding so none of the guys on the team will look twice at me, so here you go!” She yanked the tie to her bikini top and let it fall to the ground. She whirled around and threw up her hands. “This is what a double mastectomy leaves behind—what an eighteen-year-old with no tits looks like!”

  “Oh, Lexi…” Mack took a step forward, her eyes filled with concern.

  “Happy, Dad? Now all your teammates know I’m deformed and will never look twice at me. My virtue and your puritanical sensibilities are all safe..”

  “Honey, I didn’t…” Rob took a deep breath.

  “Just leave me alone,” she cried, grabbing her top as she stalked back into the house.

  For a moment no one moved and then a quiet voice broke the silence. “I’ll go talk to her.”

  Zaan Hagen was a new kid on the team. He’d just finished his rookie season and was a finalist for the Rookie of the Year award. He’d been drafted at eighteen and though most players his age either stayed in the major juniors or went to the AHL to develop, Zaan had been ready for the big leagues. He’d had a hell of a season and the team expected big things from him.

  “You don’t even know her,” Rob muttered.

  “Rob.” Mack’s soft voice at his side made him turn. “She needs someone her own age right now. Let Zaan talk to her.”

  Blowing out a breath, Rob nodded. “Yeah, okay, thanks. Be careful, though—she bites.”

  Zaan snorted. “You think she’ll be the first teenage girl who’s tried to bite me?” He went off in the direction Lexi had gone amidst a spattering of muffled laughter

  .

  Walking through the house he’d lived in for almost a year, Zaan looked around, wondering where she’d gone. She wasn’t in the downstairs guest bathroom, kitchen or family room, so he headed towards the den behind the stairs. He’d spent a lot of time there himself last summer, wondering what the hell he was going to do playing in the NHL, making nearly a million dollars a year, and living with the team’s married captain and his family. Living with the Armstrong’s had been a stipulation of his contract, to make sure he had a little balance in his suddenly out-of-control life. He’d hated it at first, and the bright airy den had been where he’d gone to hide and think; he had a feeling he would find Lexi there.

  She was sitting on the built-in bench in the bay window, her knees pulled tight against her chest, her cheek resting against her knees as tears slipped from her eyes.

  Tenderness or humor, he wondered as he watched her. Humor, he decided, though part of him yearned for the other. He had to tread carefully because Rob’s beautiful daughter was a spitfire—he saw it in her eyes—but the cancer had obviously impacted more than her breasts.

  “Never thought I’d see one of my teammates’ adult daughters go topless at a team party,” he said lightly, leaning against the wall.

  She swiped at her face. “Go away.”

  “Come on, I’m just kidding. You okay?”

  “Do I look okay?”

  “You look angry,” he said, slowly walking towards her. “I don’t know much about what happened, but based on the scars, it must have been pretty awful.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry you had cancer—are you better now?”

  “I’ve been cancer-free for almost a year, but they check me every six months.” Lexi stared out the window.

  “Your dad won’t let you get implants?” Zaan didn’t know how personal to get, but at this point, he figured she might react better if none of these topics were off-limits.

  “We tried,” she said quietly. “They had to take out the expanders because of infection.”

  He nodded, even though he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Can you try again?”

  “They don’t think I’m a good candidate for regular implants. If we try again we have to do this other thing…” She sighed. “Anyway, why do you care?”

  “Cause you seem bummed.” He sat on the edge of the bench and looked out the window. “We’re about the same age and, trust me, I know how it feels to be different. I’m the youngest guy on the team, making a ton of money, with all this pressure to be some superstar. Most of my friends are either still in Juniors or college, and here I am, trying to be an adult—it’s fucking exhausting.”

  “But hockey is what you do, isn’t it?” she asked softly, her eyes meeting his for the first time.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “But it’s not who I am. I’m just a kid from Canada who got lucky playing sports and is suddenly some hockey star.”

  “I’m just a girl from Minnesota who got really un-lucky and doesn’t have anything to look forward to.”

  “Why? Cause you don’t have boobs?”

  “I missed my senior year of high school,” she whispered. “Chemo and radiation were really bad, my mother lost her mind and is still trying to get back with my dad even though she and my dad are both remarried—and on top of that, we keep moving so I never have time to make friends or have fun. I just want my life back.”

  “That sounds pretty shitty,” he said. “I won’t say anything stupid like ‘things are going to get better.’”

  “You’re not?” She looked up, confusion in her hazel eyes.

  “I have no idea if things are going to be better,” he admitted. “So why say it? But I do know you can make every day better in some small way. Start doing research on that other procedure if you want boobs—”

  “I do want them,” she whispered so softly he almost didn’t hear her. “I want to look normal with clothes on. I want to be able to wear a bra. I want cleavage. I’ll never have nipples or breastfeed a baby, but I want to look normal on the outside!”

  “So start working on that other procedure. What are you waiting for?”

  She shrugged. “Things keep changing. I need to be settled in one place for a while because it’s a long procedure and even though my stepmom is a plastic surgeon, there’s a lot involved...”

  “You’re not staying in Vegas?”

  “Dad and Mack are, but we’re supposed to go back to Chicago for the summer and then hopefully I’m going to college in New York. They bought a house here, but it won’t be ready until September so we’re going to Chicago until then.”

  “Three months,” he said gently. “Use that t
ime to get your head on straight. Whatever makes you feel strong—exercise, dancing, yoga, painting—whatever it is, figure it out and do it. Focus on what you’ll need once you get to school—”

  “That’s just it—I don’t know for sure where I’m going. I’m supposed to start in the fall but… ugh, that’s another clusterfuck.”

  “Why?” Zaan sank onto the edge of the bench, wishing he had the nerve to touch her. She was way out of his league, even without boobs, and Rob would never allow her to date one of the Sidewinders. He talked about his daughter as though she were made of glass, and while he’d never come out and said she was off-limits, Zaan wasn’t stupid; Rob Rousseau would never let the team rookie date his barely-legal daughter.

  “I want to go to Julliard but because I took online classes and graduated late, the process was a little more complicated. I did well on the SAT and ACT, but I had pneumonia in March when I was supposed to do my audition and they told me to re-apply next year. Mack went to bat for me, though, and sent in all my medical records, trying to say there were extenuating circumstances. They said they’d review and there might be an exception made, but it’s June and I still haven’t auditioned.”

  “Oh, wow, that’s really frustrating.” Zaan wasn’t sure what to say. She’d been dealt a shitty hand in life the last couple of years. “You want to get out of here?” he asked impulsively.

  Lexi looked up, uncertainty in her eyes. “I… um, yeah, but my dad—”

  “I’ll ask him,” Zaan said, standing up. “He won’t say no, not after that stunt you pulled a little while ago.”

  She smiled faintly. “You’ve been really sweet but you don’t have to do this.”

  “I want to,” he interrupted quietly, his eyes meeting hers. “Hang tight. I’ll be back.”

  2

  Lexi watched him go and couldn’t help the little sigh of pleasure at the sight of his retreating back. Zaan was beautiful as far as she was concerned; tall, blond and muscular with a gorgeous backside. His bare back was glorious too, his broad shoulders narrowing at the waist and hips. She’d always had a crush on the young Russian on the team, Vladimir Kolnikov, but he was now engaged to a movie star and probably too old for her anyway. That was before she’d moved to Las Vegas nine months ago and met the new guy, Zaan Hagen. Holy crap, he’d been an eighteen-year-old bundle of hot Norwegian-Canadian hockey-playing sex appeal.

  Lexi was eighteen, turning nineteen later this year, but had been too sick to do a lot of dating. She wasn’t a virgin, but had only slept with one guy and it had been an awkward, messy disaster. She’d been determined to lose her virginity before her mastectomy, but poor Jerry Thompson had been sixteen and even less experienced than she was. They’d done the deed but it had been disappointing for both of them and she’d never had the nerve to try again.

  It might have been more about how sick chemo had made her and how much she hated her post-cancer body, but it boiled down to almost no experience with sex. She’d finally gotten settled in Las Vegas but now they were leaving for the summer, so if Zaan wanted to take her out on a pity date, she wasn’t too proud to let him. It would be the best thing that had happened to her since the cancer, and she desperately needed something good in her life.

  She looked up as her father came into the room.

  “Zaan said you two are going for a drive,” he said quietly, sitting on the bench beside her. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She frowned. “You’re not going to threaten him or try to talk me out of it?”

  Rob shook his head. “You’re eighteen, so that would be ridiculous. Zaan and I are teammates. I don’t have to warn him about disrespecting my daughter—or me. My only concern is you.”

  “Me?”

  “He’s a good-looking kid, a hot shot in hockey right now, and the girls are crawling out of the woodwork… I don’t want you to get attached to a boy who’s not in a place in life to be good to you.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not stupid. This is a pity date, so you have nothing to worry about.”

  “I think you’re wrong about that, but have a good time.” He leaned over to kiss the top of her head. “Just go thank Suze for having you today, okay?”

  “Of course.” She hugged him tightly. “Thanks, Daddy.”

  Twenty minutes later Lexi had changed into denim shorts and a T-shirt instead of her bathing suit and large cover-up, and was in the passenger seat of Zaan’s red SUV. She looked over at him, waiting for first-date nervousness to set in, but nothing happened; she was completely relaxed. He was fiddling with the radio and finally settled on a station playing Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.” Without missing a beat, he pulled into traffic and started drumming on the steering wheel, singing at the top of his lungs. She couldn’t help but sing too; Rob had raised her and her brothers on classic rock. Before she’d gotten sick, she and her friends listened to pop and rap, but privately she loved all the classics: Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Deep Purple and more.

  “I’m a classic rock slut,” Zaan admitted when the song was over and he turned the volume down.

  “Me, too,” she smiled. “I can listen to ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Smoke On The Water’ on repeat, all day long.”

  He glanced at her. “Stairway To Heaven?”

  She nodded.

  “Oh my God—will you marry me?”

  She laughed. “We’ll have to find a few more things in common before we head to a twenty—four-hour chapel, but we can discuss it after you tell me—Marvel or DC?”

  He arched his brows. “That’s a question? Marvel.”

  “And we’re one step closer to the chapel.”

  “Xbox or Playstation?”

  She snorted. “Duh—Xbox.”

  “Shit. Now we have to go ring shopping.”

  “Sausage or pepperoni?”

  He sighed. “I guess the engagement is over cause I have to say neither—I’m a Hawaiian fan.”

  She buried her face in her hands. “My dad’s gonna be so pissed when I tell him we eloped.”

  Zaan chuckled. “We definitely have to hang out. I know you’re going to Chicago, but until then, my Xbox One has been really lonely.”

  “We leave in a week,” she sighed.

  “A week’s better than none, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So where do you want to go?”

  “This was your idea,” she shrugged. “We’re not really dressed for much.”

  He was thoughtful. “There’s a place I like, outside the city… how do you feel about motorcycles?”

  She couldn’t help her smile. “I love them…”

  “Yup.” He was chuckling. “We’re definitely getting married.”

  Zaan kept his classic Harley-Davidson FXDB Dyna Glide in a storage unit on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The unit was leased in his brother’s name and no one knew about it except his brother and one of his teammates, Zakk Cloutier, who was a Harley aficionado and had helped him pick it out. He wasn’t allowed to ride during the season but he was damned if he would stay off it in the summer. He’d been riding motor bikes of various kinds since he was a kid and it was one of his passions. He was excited about taking Lexi for a ride—no one else had been on the back yet.

  The fact they liked almost all of the same things was so cool he wasn’t quite sure what to do. Now that he’d gotten to know her a little, it bugged him she was leaving in a week. From the moment they’d started talking, he’d forgotten all about whose daughter she was. He liked her and sensed she liked him too. Seeing her bare chest had been jarring, but not because she didn’t have breasts; all he could think about was how awful the ordeal must have been.

  There was no hiding the effects of what she’d been through. She was painfully thin, though her legs were lean and toned, and a lot paler than most girls who lived in Vegas. Though she was wearing the shoulder-length blond wig she’d worn every time he’d seen her, Rob had told them her real hair was still just a few inches long and embarrassed her. Zaan
didn’t think it would matter; with a face like hers, her hair wasn’t an issue.

  Her blue eyes were framed by the longest lashes he’d ever seen and when she smiled, her face transformed into something he couldn’t quite explain. She was radiant, and after talking with her for the last hour or so, he wanted to know everything about her. Since they weren’t dressed to go anywhere in particular, he’d sensed she would want to ride with him and he was taking her somewhere they could relax.

  He heard her intake of breath when he wheeled the Harley out and he smiled. “You like it?”

  “She’s beautiful,” she sighed, running a hand over the cream tank with the red and blue 50-year Anniversary logo on it.

  “She?” He gazed at her curiously.

  “Don’t guys always make their vehicles girls?” she asked.

  “Not always,” he laughed, “but probably most.”

  “If I ever get one of these, it’s going to be a girl because I like the idea of a girl being as strong and powerful as a motorcycle.”

  He reached out and tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “Well, this is definitely a powerful girl. She’s a carbber, with an 81.5 cubic inch engine. That’s partly why I bought it—it’s a real Harley...” He went on to talk about how much power the bike had and why he’d picked it.

  “I don’t know anything about engines except how it feels to be on the back.”

  He grinned as he handed her a helmet. “Put this on—make sure it fits securely.”

  She nodded, putting it on her head. She strapped it under her chin and he nodded.

  “You’ve ridden before?”

  “Zakk’s taken me out a few times.”

  “Zakk helped me buy her, but no one else knows, so please don’t mention it to your dad.”

  “I won’t,” she chuckled. “He’d probably have a heart attack about me on a motorcycle, so my lips are sealed.”

  “Good thing,” Zaan murmured, swinging his right leg over the seat. “Hop on.”

  She got on behind him and he smiled as she pressed up against his back, her arms sliding around his waist.