Losing an Edge Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About this Book

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Roster

  Other Catherine Gayle Titles

  About the Author

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  Losing an Edge

  Copyright © 2016 by Catherine Gayle

  Cover Design by Kim Killion, The Killion Group

  Published by Night Shift Publishing at Smashwords

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without written permission.

  For more information: [email protected]

  This one’s for all my readers who’ve been wanting more of those Babcock boys. I hope Levi fits the bill.

  There comes a point in the middle of writing each book when I wonder if I will ever find a way to pull it off, because nothing is working out the way I expected it to. I start to feel as if I’ve lost the touch, that it’s all gone and will never come back. That voice was magnified in the writing of this book due to my writing time being chopped to bits and slashed right down the middle, thanks to having a couple of surgeries to close out 2015. Thank goodness I have critique partners, beta readers, and close writing friends who help me to see I can still make it all work out. This book might not have been finished on time, if not for them.

  Tired of being the second-best Babcock, Levi “501” Babcock is ready to outshine his older brother. Outranking his brother proves harder than he imagined—until he meets a sinfully sexy gold-medal-winning figure skater. She might be the prize he’s been searching for all along.

  Bubbly and spirited Cadence Johnson is determined to escape the shackles of her former partner. Moving to Portland gives her the fresh start she’s craved, but the last thing she can afford is a distraction like Levi Babcock.

  When Cadence’s past comes back to threaten her and her life is on the line, Levi might be the safety net she never realized she needed. But will Levi still care about Losing an Edge to his biggest rival, or can he finally step out of his brother’s shadow to become the hero in his own game?

  LOSING AN EDGE is Book 8 in the Portland Storm hockey romance series written by USA Today bestselling author Catherine Gayle. If you enjoy it, look for the other books in the series.

  BREAKAWAY

  ON THE FLY

  TAKING A SHOT

  LIGHT THE LAMP

  DELAY OF GAME

  DOUBLE MAJOR

  IN THE ZONE

  HOLIDAY HAT TRICK

  COMEBACK

  DROPPING GLOVES

  HOME ICE

  MISTLETOE MISCONDUCT

  LOSING AN EDGE

  There are also currently two boxed sets of books within the series, if you would prefer to purchase them in that way.

  PORTLAND STORM: THE FIRST PERIOD (Contains Breakaway, On the Fly, Taking a Shot, and Light the Lamp)

  PORTLAND STORM: THE SECOND PERIOD (Contains Delay of Game, Double Major, In the Zone, Holiday Hat Trick, and Comeback)

  GAME BREAKER will release on August 11, 2016. DEFENSIVE ZONE will release on February 9, 2017. Also, join Catherine’s mailing list to receive ICE BREAKER, a Portland Storm short story prequel that you can’t get anywhere else.

  Want to join in the Portland Storm discussion? Join the Facebook reader group.

  If you enjoy this book and want to try more of the same, be sure to look for the spinoff series, the Tulsa Thunderbirds. Book 1, BURY THE HATCHET, and Book 2, SMOKE SIGNALS, are out now. Book 3, GHOST DANCE, will release on May 19, 2016. Book 4, RITES OF PASSAGE will release on November 10, 2016. The T-Birds also have a reader group on Facebook.

  Interested in buying your own customizable Portland Storm and Tulsa Thunderbirds jerseys, T-shirts, and more? Find out how here.

  MY OLDER BROTHER, Jamie Babcock, had the puck on his stick, racing toward the Team Sweden goal and our Portland Storm teammate, goaltender Nicky Ericsson. Jamie had a clear breakaway, and the only chance Swedish defenseman Peter Nylund—a former teammate—had to stop him was to trip him.

  Which was exactly what Ny did. The ref’s arm went up for a penalty shot. Not something you normally expected to see in the Winter Games.

  But Jamie—being the impossibly perfect guy he’d always been—somehow got off a backhand shot while his feet flew through the air. Nicky grabbed a piece of the rubber with his glove, but not enough. The puck bounced off his glove, then the crossbar, and then it went in. The goal negated the penalty shot and put Team Canada up three goals to one late in the third period.

  This was the final game of round robin play. The quarterfinals were up next. Talking to Jamie and the other guys, it was obvious Team Canada could practically taste them already.

  There was nothing I wanted more than to be out on the ice with my brother for a moment like this. For the majority of my life, I’d dreamed of being at the Winter Games. Those dreams had always included me participating in them, though, not being forced to watch from the stands as my brother and several of our friends and teammates represented their home countries out on the ice.

  Jamie’s fiancée, Katie Weber, was currently on her feet and screaming her head off while waving a Canadian flag in the air, all wrapped up in scarves and hats and whatnot. But at least I had one of my other teammates sitting up in the nosebleed seats with me. Cam “Jonny” Johnson and his family had all made the journey halfway around the world to watch his sister, Cadence, skate for the gold medal in the pairs figure skating competition. In between her events, he was hanging out with me. We were watching hockey instead of playing it, for once. Not exactly what either of us would prefer, but we weren’t the sorts of players who often got chosen to represent Canada in international play these days.

  I used to be. Back when I was playing in juniors, I was one of the best. Something had happened when I made the leap up to the NHL, though. Now I fucked things up more often than I got them right. There were only so many spots for a defenseman in these things, and the competition was crazy tough. So these days, I was on the sidelines, watching my older brother earn all the glory.

  Play started up again, and Jonny glanced down at his watch.

  “Time to head over to watch Cadence?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Mom and Sara are holding a seat for me, but if I don’t head that way soon…” There wasn’t any need to finish that sentence. Figure skating was one of the hottest tickets at the Games, and just because he had a ticket for entry to the event, it didn’t guarantee him a particular seat.

  He slipped his arms into the sleeves of his coat. “See you after a while,” he said, already halfway down the steps toward the exit.

  Even though the only reason I’d come was to watch my brother compete, at the moment I had a bad taste in my mouth. Envy—it tasted like bile. Jealousy wasn’t doing me any damn good, though. All it did was pry open a wound t
hat had been festering for decades…at least as long as I could remember. I glanced up at the game clock on the Jumbotron overhead. Four minutes left. The Swedes were good, so there weren’t any guarantees that Team Canada would win, but I didn’t want to sit here and watch any more of my brother’s heroics. Twenty-three years of seeing him be the best had already been more than enough.

  I leaned over so Katie could hear me. “I’m gonna go with Jonny and watch his sister.” Once she nodded her understanding, I grabbed my coat and darted down the stairs to catch up with him. By the time he got outside, I was keeping stride with his determined pace.

  He raised a brow. “Not staying?”

  “I think watching some figure skating will do me good. Besides, Cadence is going for gold tonight. This game doesn’t matter in the long run. None of them do until the medal rounds.”

  He nodded and let out a grunting sound. “I don’t have an extra ticket for you, so you’re going to have to figure out how you’re getting in on your own.”

  “Someone will be hawking them.”

  That had been the case so far at every event we’d been to, with the scalpers’ prices often being five times the face value. I wasn’t worried about the money. I could more than afford whatever they demanded. My bigger concern was escaping the shadow my brother always cast over me, even if only for a while.

  Jonny texted Sara to see if she could wrangle a second seat, since I was coming, too. We got in Jonny’s rental car to head across the city to the figure skating venue. The event had been going on most of the day already, with the pairs who’d received lower scores in the earlier round taking the ice well before we arrived.

  Sure enough, I found someone scalping tickets outside the rink. I forked over an astronomical sum and hurried inside after Jonny. Sara and Mrs. Johnson had their hands full with Sara and Jonny’s kids, not to mention holding on to a couple of seats for the two of us, but they looked up with massive smiles.

  “Just in time,” Sara said, plopping her two-month-old daughter, Cassidy, on Jonny’s lap. “The final group is coming out for warm-ups.”

  Three-year-old Connor climbed up my back and flung himself over my shoulder, trusting that I’d catch him before he catapulted himself to the ground and giggling like a maniac. Then he tugged on my shirt to pull himself upright to stand on my thigh. As soon as he could reach, he held out some sort of snack and shoved a couple of fingers into my mouth. They tasted like applesauce and Cheetos.

  I glanced over to Jonny for help.

  He didn’t give me any. “You wanted to come. You hold the kid for a bit.”

  “I hope Jamie and Katie don’t get any bright ideas about making babies any time soon,” I grumbled, trying to readjust the little boy since he’d taken a step and landed his foot firmly on my junk. Something as tiny as a toddler’s foot shouldn’t hurt like a motherfucker, even if it was on the most sensitive part a man had. Who knew I needed to wear a cup to watch figure skating?

  “You know they’re going to try soon,” Sara said. “At least once Katie’s doctors have given her the go-ahead.”

  Before too much longer, the skaters all cleared the ice, and an American couple was announced. They skated to some classical piano concerto or another and performed very well right up until the guy tossed his partner for a jump and she fell on the landing.

  Mrs. Johnson made a tutting sound next to me. “This might knock Whitby and Young out of it. They were already behind…”

  I didn’t know the first thing about figure skating other than the fact that their toe picks tore the shit out of the ice, leaving all sorts of holes all over the place, so I nodded for her benefit.

  Falling wasn’t good. Got it. The judges’ marks made no sense to me when they popped up on the scoreboards, but Mrs. Johnson pursed her lips together and nodded like she’d seen them coming.

  A German pair followed. They were far enough out of sync on some spins that even I noticed, and they had a few other bobbles.

  “They were starting from a lower base value, so I think they’re out of it,” Jonny’s mom said. The score they received was higher than the Americans’, but only by a couple of points.

  Then a Chinese couple took the ice as Connor’s fingers discovered the lobe of my ear. He yanked hard.

  “And that’s why I don’t wear earrings anymore,” Sara said from behind me.

  To my eyes, the Chinese couple skated an almost flawless routine. That wasn’t saying much, given my lack of knowledge of the sport. The judges scored them much higher, and Mrs. Johnson white-knuckled the armrest of the seat between us. She didn’t say anything this time.

  Then Cadence Johnson skated out to the center of the ice along with her partner, Guy Archambeault.

  Mrs. Johnson seemed to take a breath and hold it.

  Cadence was tiny next to her partner. He had to be close to my size—I was six foot three and a hair over two hundred pounds—but she was like a brown-haired pixie out there. A crazy-hot pixie, but I kept that thought to myself. I didn’t need to be thinking like that when it came to Jonny’s sister. Not if I wanted to keep the body parts his son was currently mashing where they belonged.

  “After the short program,” Jonny said, leaning in toward me in an odd move likely designed to keep Connor’s sticky fingers off him, “they’re behind the Russian pair by slightly under two points, and they were barely ahead of the Chinese. And considering how well the Chinese pair just did, there’s no room for error.”

  “At all,” his mother said, even though I was positive she wasn’t breathing.

  The crowd hushed except for Connor, who had started bouncing up and down on my lap and laughing to himself. I held on to his waist and attempted to keep him from propelling himself down a few rows. The strains of a familiar tune from some ballet or another filled the arena. Cadence and Guy slipped into motion, fluid and powerful, all at once. He lifted her overhead and she soared through the air. They did side-by-side jumps and joint spins and all sorts of other things I couldn’t possibly name and would never in my lifetime dream of being able to do. Then Guy picked Cadence up by the waist and threw her the same way as the other couples had all done, only she went higher, faster, farther as she spun.

  She landed on two feet, and Mrs. Johnson cursed under her breath.

  “Damn it,” Connor repeated, only to have Jonny hush him.

  “That wasn’t good?” I asked Jonny, clueless. “She didn’t fall.”

  “She needed to land on a single foot,” he explained. “They’ll deduct some points for two-footing it.”

  It felt like forever waiting for the scores while the judges viewed replays of the performance to verify whatever they needed to be certain of. Finally, the scores flashed up on the screen, and Mrs. Johnson leaped out of her seat, screaming her head off and waving a Canadian flag with a massive grin on her face.

  Cadence and Guy had come in a few points ahead of the Chinese couple, but the Russian couple had yet to take the ice. No matter what, these scores guaranteed at least a silver medal in the biggest competition of their lives.

  A shot of Cadence and Guy flashed up on the Jumbotron. They ought to be elated after their performance. Tonight’s effort had been the culmination of years of hard work and sacrifice. But even though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could tell he was giving her an earful about something.

  She listened to him, a smile still plastered on her face for all the cameras trained on them, but the usual glitter wasn’t in her eyes. I’d seen enough pictures of her over the years to know she was always smiling, always laughing, happy as could be. She was Jonny’s exact opposite in that way.

  Jonny, Sara, and Mrs. Johnson were all still cheering and screaming. I didn’t get the impression they’d noticed what I’d seen. Hell, maybe her reaction was all in my head.

  Before I could overanalyze it the way I tended to do with most things, the Russians took the ice and skated an almost flawless piece. Their performance was so perfect, in fact, that I had no ide
a they’d done anything wrong until Mrs. Johnson grabbed my hand and squeezed all the blood out of it.

  “She doubled the lutz,” she said hopefully. “They’ve got a chance. A tiny chance, but we’ll take it.”

  Once again, the judges took an enormous amount of time before settling on a final score for the Russians. The whole arena was so quiet I wouldn’t have been surprised if everyone in the place could hear little Connor singing to himself—something about smelly farts—on my lap.

  But then the scores flashed on the screen—and they were a whole 2.03 points behind Cadence and Guy. Jonny was instantly on his feet, tucking Cassidy securely over his shoulder and covering her ears to protect her from the sudden noise. The crowd erupted as the cameras landed on his sister and her partner.

  This time, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. Not only was she not floating somewhere up on cloud nine where she ought to be, but Cadence Johnson was almost in tears. And not the good sort of tears. The sort that made me want to bash her partner’s face in, because there was zero chance in my mind he wasn’t the one behind it.

  Maybe I should have stayed to watch hockey.

  ALL AROUND THE National Hockey League, there are guys who have reputations for being clutch. They’re the sort of guy who, when his team reaches overtime of Game Seven, everyone in the stands and on the team wants the puck to be on his stick. Those guys score huge goals in even more important games. They lay jaw-dropping hits that change the tone of not just a game but an entire series, maybe even instigating a rivalry with another team that will last for years to come. They fight the right guys at the right times to drag their teams back into the fray. They’re the ones who always seem to play their best when the stage is at its biggest and the stakes are at their highest.

  My older brother was one of those guys. Jamie was the golden boy, the one who could do no wrong. He was the captain of the Portland Storm, the team we both played for. He was the guy who, whenever our team needed a spark, found the perfect moment to put the whole team on his back and carry us to the finish line. Hell, he’d just done it last postseason. We wouldn’t have gotten to the Stanley Cup Finals if not for the way he’d dragged us along with him. Jamie got shit done. He made people believe—in him, and in us.