Free Agent

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About this Book

  Author's Note

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Roster

  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.

  Free Agent

  Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Gayle

  Cover Design by Kim Killion, The Killion Group

  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: catherine@catherinegayle.com

  Can you fall in love when you’ve never loved yourself?

  Universally misjudged, Blake Kozlow doesn’t let society get under his skin. After all, those misunderstandings have never affected his career. As a center for the Portland Storm, he’s lived his life as a Free Agent—particularly with women. But when he meets a gorgeous, curvy special education teacher, Blake realizes he’s finally met the one person who truly understands him.

  Beatriz Castillo knows exactly what she wants—to teach her students that nothing can hold them back. A few years ago, her health was spiraling out of control, but Bea took her life back. Now, she uses her vivacious personality to prove to everyone, especially her students, that anything is possible.

  Perpetually impulsive and spontaneous, Blake turns on the charm. But Bea’s unprepared to be on the receiving end of such brazen attention. As they grow closer and their attraction intensifies, their inner demons threaten everything. They’ve both always lived on the fringes of life. But moving forward will require Bea and Blake to step into the spotlight—together.

  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

  GAME BREAKER

  DEFENSIVE ZONE

  POWER PLAY

  NEUTRAL ZONE

  FREE AGENT

  JOURNEYMAN

  SLEIGH BELLS & SLAP SHOTS

  There are also currently three boxed sets of books within the series, if you would prefer to purchase them in that way, with a fourth coming soon.

  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)

  PORTLAND STORM: THE THIRD PERIOD (Contains Dropping Gloves, Home Ice, Mistletoe Misconduct, Losing an Edge, and Game Breaker)

  PORTLAND STORM: OVERTIME (Will contain Defensive Zone, Power Play, and Neutral Zone)

  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 group at Cat’s House.

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

  A lot of people have a lot of opinions about weight-loss surgery.

  Some say it’s cheating. Some say it’s a mistake and a surefire way to ruin a life. Some say it should only be used as a last resort. Some say it should only be offered to the most extreme cases. Some say it shouldn’t be covered by health insurance as it’s an elective procedure.

  If you believe any of these things or anything else remotely similar, please refrain from sharing those opinions with me. I thoroughly researched the subject matter and am fully aware of all potential pros and cons related to this and other procedures of the sort. Anyone considering undergoing gastric bypass or any other weight-loss procedure should discuss the same with their health care provider to ensure proper education.

  LET IT BE known that my assholish tendencies have never been in doubt, and I have always been aware that I am a fucking douchecanoe. Absolutely, without a doubt, I know I’ve got issues. I even realize the shit that comes out of my mouth is bad.

  Problem is, most of the time, I recognize the issues with what I’m saying after the fact—once it’s too late, and the words are already out there and I can’t take them back. That’s especially troublesome when I don’t even mean the shit I say, which happens more often than some people might believe.

  I just don’t have a filter—don’t take the time to think about the ramifications of what I’m doing and saying until it’s too late. Occasionally, if I’m lucky, I’m able to recognize there’s a problem even as the idiocy is falling from my trap.

  The warning bells never seem to go off in advance, though. Or at least not when it matters—not with enough time for me to put a cork in it and keep my lips zipped. But if I catch my mistake before I’ve turned the situation into a mammoth problem, I can usually do damage control.

  Every now and then, I’m able to sense the douchebaggery before I let it fly, and I can stop it in its tracks. I doubt anyone believes that ever happens, though, because of how often I do and say stupid shit that I immediately regret.

  Maybe my grandma believes it, but she knows the reason behind it all. And besides, she’s my grandma—the only person in my life who’s ever given a shit about me.

  Everyone else, though? It’s extremely doubtful that they believe I’m not the jackwad I come across as being. Even the guys I consider to be my friends probably believe the worst of me nine times out of ten.

  Still, whether people believe it or not, I try to keep as much of my worst behavior contained as possible. Maybe I fail more often than I succeed, but I am at least trying. And I’m getting better. I’m succeeding more often than I’m failing in these kinds of endeavors.

  Or at least I think I am.

  Most of the time…

  But then there were days like today, which made me question everything I thought I believed about myself. Maybe everyone else was right and I was wrong. Maybe I was just an ass, underneath it all.

  It was sure starting to look that way.

  This was the shit racing through my head on my way between having a game-day meal with my Portland Storm teammates at Amani’s Family-Style Italian Restaurant and facing my impending doom in the general manager’s office.

  Because—as already mentioned—I’m an asshole, and I have a problem keeping my lips zipped. Or in this case, my problem had been with knowing when not to put one of the dumb-ass thoughts racing through my head out there for the whole world to see on social media.

  My idiotic tweet had been deleted less than three minutes after I’d posted it, but in those two-plus minutes of its existence, it’d been re-tweeted and screen-capped and spread all over the world. By now, less than two hours later, no fewer than three of the biggest hockey bl
ogs following the NHL had posted about my thoughtless stupidity, and it was sure to be news on every major sports news site before the day was out.

  Hence the reason I was sitting just outside the team’s general manager’s office, waiting to have my ass handed to me on a platter.

  Rachel Campbell, the GM’s assistant and wife of my teammate, Brenden “Soupy” Campbell, kept giving me I-can’t-believe-you-were-such-an-idiot looks over the top of her computer screen in between answering phone calls and doing Lord only knew what on her computer. She was a master at those looks. Probably gave them to her four kids all the time, not to mention to her husband. Soupy might not be as much of an ass as I was, but surely he had more than his fair share of idiotic moments.

  At the moment, he was sitting beside me, along with a couple of our other teammates, Cam Johnson, and our team captain, Jamie Babcock. Ostensibly, all three of them were here to keep me from bolting or something. Well, Jonny had practically hauled me here on his own, so he didn’t exactly need the help of the other two. But still, I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d done the crime, and now I had to do the time. Maybe I was an asshole and a fucking idiot, but at least I always owned up to it. I wasn’t too chickenshit to face the music.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Jonny asked me quietly. He was staring down at his hands, cracking his knuckles. Not in a menacing way, though. It was more that he had to crack them to keep them from freezing up on him or something. Jonny was getting up there to still be playing pro hockey.

  Not that I’d ever say something like that to his face, if I could manage to keep it all inside. I didn’t have a death wish.

  Instead, I said, “I was thinking someone asked me a fucking question on Twitter, so I answered it.” Simple enough, right? Truth was, I hadn’t been thinking. Which they probably all knew already, anyway. If I would have taken just a moment or two longer to think things through, I would’ve realized it wasn’t a question I should answer.

  Jonny snorted, and Babs shook his head. Soupy just scowled at me like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever had the displeasure of meeting. Too bad for him—hell, for all of my teammates, really—they were stuck with me, at least for the foreseeable future. Unless this meeting was all about how fast the team was planning to ship me off to Timbuktu or Abu Dhabi so I could spend the rest of my playing days all by my lonesome.

  But then Rachel’s phone rang again, saving me from the need to come up with some better response than what I’d given them. She pressed a button and said, “Yeah, Jim?” into her headset. Then a moment later: “I’ll send him straight in.” After pressing the same button again, she gave me a pitying look and said, “Jim’s ready for you.”

  “Should we go?” Soupy asked his wife.

  She shook her head. “He wants all of y’all, actually.” These days, most of Rachel’s Texan accent remained hidden—but a y’all or an over yonder came out every now and then, reminding us all of where she’d come from.

  I tried not to scowl as my teammates ushered me into the general manager’s office. Surliness wouldn’t help my cause.

  Mr. Sutter sat behind his desk, and the entire coaching staff was positioned throughout the room. The assistant GM was here, as well as a few people from the communications department and almost half a dozen other people whose jobs I didn’t even remember—only that they worked for the team in some capacity or another. Paying attention to details, at least when they didn’t pertain to me? Yeah, not my forte.

  “Have a seat,” Mr. Sutter said, folding his bifocals and setting them on the desk in front of him.

  I plopped down in the chair he’d indicated, but when I glanced up, he’d spun his computer monitor around so everyone in the room could see it. A screen-cap of my idiotic tweet filled the screen, blown up to larger-than-life size so everyone in the room could witness just exactly how much of a moron I’d been.

  Must be a retard to think it’s okay to hit chicks.

  My laughing, fuck-you-all-very-much face was sitting right next to the words, complete with me flipping off the photographer. Probably another strike against me, but they’d never tried to police the photo I used on my social media profiles before.

  Didn’t matter that I’d just been responding (like the moron I was) to some fan who’d asked what I thought about some douchecanoe in the league who’d been suspended for beating up his girlfriend. Didn’t matter that I’d been condemning behavior that every fucking person in this world with any goddamned sense ought to condemn.

  The only thing that mattered was that I’d used the very same word that I’d always loathed anytime someone had used it against me. Retard.

  If the evidence wasn’t staring me in the face, I might not believe I’d done it. Somewhere in my mind, I might have been able to convince myself it was a hoax. Staring at that word on Mr. Sutter’s screen made me feel physically ill. I wanted to puke, but giving in to that sort of weakness would only prove I was a chickenshit. So I swallowed down the bile and forced myself to look at that fucking tweet without showing everyone in the room how it made me feel.

  “We have a bit of a situation,” Mr. Sutter said, his words coming out calm and smooth, somehow, even though I knew he had to be almost as pissed at me as I was at myself.

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Mattias Bergstrom bit off. Bergy was our head coach. I’d never seen the guy look so pissed off before, and that was saying something, because pissed off was his usual state of affairs when it came to dealing with me.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I don’t care what you did or didn’t mean,” he growled, cutting me off. “You know what I care about? I care that Sophie’s going to hear about this, and I’m going to have to deal with convincing her that one of my players doesn’t think she’s a fucking retard.”

  That stung worse than anything else to this point. Sophie, his stepdaughter, was one of the sweetest kids I’d ever met. And she had Down syndrome.

  I fucking adored that little girl, and I would never intentionally say something that would hurt her.

  But I had.

  Goddamn fucking pisswanker, why could I not rein myself in before I did stupid fucking shit like this? I needed a keeper. I needed someone to commandeer my phone and computer. Someone needed to take over every aspect of my life to keep me in check, but fuck if I’d ever let that happen. I was too much of a control freak, always needing to be in charge of every aspect of my life so something wouldn’t send me into a tizzy.

  Grandma was going to rake me over the coals as soon as she heard about this. I could hear her voice now, even though she was thousands of miles away. You’re better than this, Blake. You’re only hurting yourself.

  But this time, I wasn’t only hurting myself. What I’d said had the potential to hurt all sorts of people…including a lot of people I cared about. Like Sophie.

  I sank lower in my chair, wishing it would swallow me up. No such luck. The weight of a dozen stares wasn’t enough to push me under.

  “It goes a lot further than our own families, though,” Jim said, sobering me to an even greater degree. “This is going to be a PR nightmare.”

  “You going to trade me?” I asked around a thick tongue that felt too large and too dry to belong in my mouth. That was what my previous team had done, and I hadn’t even fucked up this badly when I was with them. It was just a bunch of my usual shit, not anything so blatantly callous and unthinking.

  “Trade you?” Mr. Sutter’s eyebrows went up almost comically high into his hairline, and then he gave me a kind smile that I definitely didn’t deserve. “Why would I trade you?”

  “And who’d want you in return?” Soupy added.

  “Plenty of teams would—including us,” Mr. Sutter said. “We still love what you bring to the table on the ice, Blake.”

  I shrugged. “But then I could be someone else’s problem.”

  He stifled a soft laugh and shook his head. “We knew what we were getting when we brought you here, son—both on and o
ff the ice. We did our research. We were prepared then, and we’re even more prepared now that we know you as a person and not just as an athlete. But we do have to act fast, see if we can turn the tide of public opinion, maybe find a way to spin this in a more positive light.”

  Unbidden, my gaze traveled over to Bergy. He looked like he was having extreme difficulty biting his tongue.

  Maybe Mr. Sutter wouldn’t hold this against me for too long, but Bergy? I’d be living in his doghouse for the rest of my days playing in Portland. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that he’d ever forget my unfortunate choice of words or let me forget them, either.

  “So how do we do that?” David Weber, one of the assistant coaches, asked.

  “First,” Mr. Sutter said, scanning the room to include everyone, “we have the PR team draft up an apology for your poor choice of language, and you’ll issue it as a public statement. It’ll go out on all of the team’s social media channels, be posted on our website, and you’ll post it to your own social media accounts, as well.”

  Fair enough. I could easily handle that. Grandma would insist on it, actually, whether the team did or not. She’d raised me to be better than this. I nodded my agreement, keeping my eyes on Mr. Sutter. He seemed to be the only person in the room who was on my side in all of this.

  Shouldn’t surprise me. He’d always acted like a father figure around me, since he’d first brought me to Portland.

  “Second,” he said, and this time he looked straight at me, “you agree to let the team’s public relations department oversee your use of social media for the next six months. You don’t post a tweet or anything on Instagram or Facebook without first running it by them and having them approve it. Not even a reply to someone else, whether public or private. Everything goes through them first.”

  That would suck, but even I could see the need for the team’s oversight. Maybe they could help rein me in and keep my assholishness in check. Hell, maybe with six months of social media supervision, I’d learn how to self-moderate or something. It was at least worth a shot.