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“Yes. Hockey.” Jarrad had sound vaguely irritated. “Of course, hockey.”

  And now, weeks into the coaching thing, he was calling her. “Can I come up?”

  “You’re here?”

  “Right outside your building.”

  She rapidly considered her options. She could say no. Not an option with a big bro who had always been there for her and had so rarely asked for help. She could make him come running with her. Also probably not an option since he’d go at his athlete’s pace and then she’d get competitive and run too fast for conversation.

  So, she’d run later. She yanked her tights off. “Yeah, sure you can come up.” And then she scrambled into a clean pair of jeans and a blue shirt.

  When Jarrad arrived, he said, “I need your help.”

  “Trouble with Sierra?” She hoped that wasn’t it. She really liked Sierra and to see Jarrad with a sweet, normal woman was like seeing him grow up. She didn’t want to find out that he’d regressed again.

  He waved her words aside. “Nothing, but Sierra doesn’t understand hockey the way you do.”

  “I think we both need a beer to have this conversation,” she said, crossing into her galley kitchen to the fridge and pulling out two cold Granville Island lagers. She didn’t bother to offer him a glass, and, having grown up with brothers, she didn’t take one herself. They twisted off the tops and both drank.

  “So, is the problem hockey or Sierra?” She really needed clarification.

  Her big brother looked at her as though she might have drunk twelve beers instead of taking one sip. “What are you talking about? I love Sierra. It’s the coaching gig that’s the problem.”

  She crowed with delight and launched herself at him. “I knew it. I knew she was the one.” She squeezed her arms around his all-muscle middle. “This time it’s real love, isn’t it?”

  A crooked smile dawned, “Yeah. The forever kind.”

  “Ooh, I can’t wait to be an auntie.”

  “Sam, stop being a girl,” he ordered her sternly. “We’re talking hockey here.”

  “Right.” She pulled out of his arms, but nothing could stop the happy feeling inside her. At least one of them looked as though they had a solid romantic future ahead of them. “So, hockey.”

  “Yeah. I’m coaching Greg’s team.”

  “I know.”

  His long legs ate up the polished concrete floor of her Yaletown loft. Eight hundred and sixty two square feet had never felt so tiny. She was growing dizzy from watching him.

  “You don’t seem very happy about it.” Sometimes, she’d discovered, stating the obvious was the best way to get people talking. This time was no different.

  “Happy?” He swung round and actually stopped in his tracks long enough to make eye contact. “How can I be happy about it?”

  She thought about how it must feel to be an NHL heavyweight benched forever and the only coaching gig around was for a bunch of fire and police geezers. “Maybe this will be a stepping-stone to other coaching opportunities.”

  He shook his head at her, as though she’d said something incredibly dumb. Which couldn’t be possible. “I don’t know how to coach.”

  Ah, so it wasn’t the humiliation of the team, but fear of his own shortcomings that was stopping him.

  She walked forward, laid a hand on his shoulder. “How did you learn to play hockey?”

  “You were there. You saw me.”

  “Only if I hung out at the rink. You were always at the rink.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. That’s how I learned to play.”

  “Right. You practiced. Hour after hour. Maybe coaching is the same. You practice.”

  “I don’t know. These guys are seriously messed up. It’s so bad I’m taking advice from an elementary school teacher.”

  She bit back a smile. Coaching wasn’t the only thing he was learning from Sierra Janssen.

  “Here’s the thing, Sam, you have a good eye. Remember when you figured out way back in high school that moving Tom Delaney from right wing to left would improve the team? And we moved him and it was amazing?”

  “I remember. But it was easy to spot from the bench. He couldn’t shoot left worth a damn. But if he shot right, he had a killer aim.”

  “Not everyone can spot those things. You’ve got an instinct. And you know hockey so I don’t have to explain anything.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, you’ve been complaining since I got to town that we hardly see each other.”

  “I was referring to having dinner together or hanging out, not me helping you coach a bunch of over-the-hill amateurs.”

  “Look. Come down to the rink on Saturday morning. You’ve got good judgment, let me know what you think.”

  Her hand came off her brother’s shoulder and clenched involuntarily at her side. “Is Greg going to be there?”

  Jarrad’s eyes narrowed in irritation. “Of course he’s going to be there. He’s on the team. Come on. You guys are ancient history. I’m sure you could be in the same hockey rink without killing each other.”

  She wasn’t so sure about that.

  Talk about complicated.

  “I know you don’t understand, but—”

  “You’re right. I don’t. No one does. So, you guys went out all through high school, then you went away to college and you broke up. Big deal. Happens all the time.”

  “Well, there was a little more to it than that.” She still experienced a weird ache in her chest at the thought of all the history that was between her and Greg Olsen. They hadn’t only been boyfriend and girlfriend in high school. Looking back she realized now they’d been truly in love. They were probably the only two high-school sophomores who got Romeo and Juliet, who really deep-down understood the kind of teenaged passionate love that would cause you to die for each other rather than live alone.

  And yet she’d killed that love more completely than Romeo and Juliet had perished.

  In the most mundane manner. When Greg asked her to marry him, right before she’d left to go to law school in Toronto, she’d seen the gesture as an attempt to control her. As though he didn’t trust her to stay faithful to him.

  Oh, they’d seen each other in the intervening years since she’d been back in Vancouver. Ironically enough, usually at the wedding of an old friend from high school.

  They were polite, like distant acquaintances, the kind where you recognize a face but can’t recall the person’s name. Before, he’d been the first person she thought of when she woke in the morning, the last one she talked to at night.

  Jarrad was right. What was the big deal? Her brother was coaching the team. So what if her old boyfriend was part of the group? He was an old flame who’d sputtered out long ago.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll swing by on Saturday.”

  Maybe it was time to make peace with the past.

  2

  THE MULTI-RINK COMPLEX housed everything from kids’ amateur teams to the Vancouver Canucks training. The place was hopping on a Saturday morning. Even though Samantha had given up precious sleep to be here at 7:00 a.m. she knew many of the players would have started while it was still dark outside.

  She passed a yawning pair of parents carrying coffee in refillable containers that sported a kids’ hockey-team logo. Acquired in a team fundraiser no doubt.

  Before entering the rink where Jarrad was coaching, she stopped to fix her scarf in the neck of the absurdly expensive black woolen jacket she’d never even worn before. Even as she’d cursed herself for doing it, she’d taken extra time with her hair and makeup this morning, as though she were preparing for an important day in court, not to sit in on an amateur hockey practice at a ridiculously early hour.

  She slipped into the rink where the cops and fire fighters were practicing. There was Jarrad, one foot up on a bench, watching as the men practiced a scoring drill. They were passing the puck down the ice once, twice and then the third guy shot for the net.

  Twenty or so men skated ar