Someone is in my apartment.
I didn't realize it when I stumbled in after a long, grueling shift at the hospital, but I should have. The signs were everywhere. The bathroom door was closed, and I always left it open. The light was off in the kitchen and I always leave it on when I know I'm coming home after dark. I know better than to miss these signs. I'm street-smart because I used to actually live on the street. I'm a survivor.
But yet, the realization that I am not in this space alone feels like a dream… not real. Logic tries to stamp it down. This is Silver Bay, Maine. And my apartment is in the barn on Jordan and Jessie Garrison's property. The Garrison family is the closest thing this town has to celebrities. No one would dare break into this place.
The bathroom door swings open.
Fear floods my veins. I jump up from where I collapsed on the couch a few minutes ago, exhausted from twelve hours on my feet. Before my eyes can register more than a backlit shadow, I scream. The figure jumps and screams too.
“What the fuck?” a deep male voice yells. I hurl the only thing I’m holding directly at him. My keys. They hit him square in the middle of his forehead. “FUCK!”
Both his hands shoot up to his face, which means he’s let go of the towel at his waist. It’s his only piece of clothing. It drops to the floor and now I’m face-to-face with a naked intruder. Well, naked except for the bubbles on his shoulders and chest. My serial killer was taking a bubble bath? God, I wish I was going to be around to see that Dateline episode.
My brain is screaming 'Help!' but all that comes out of my mouth is another blood-curdling wail. As I bolt toward the door, to run to freedom and safety and all those good things, I manage to get a good look at the face of my potential murderer. In the dim glow of the single string of Christmas lights I bothered to hang in the living room window, I see the light brown hair, the strong chin, and the sharp angle of his high cheekbones. I stop running. My intruder is… a Garrison. Conner Garrison?
"Oh shit!" I gasp and then take a step toward him. But he's still naked and so I spin around to face the other way, covering my eyes for good measure. "I'm sorry. I thought you were a murderer or something. Are you okay?"
“No!” he barks out. “Who the fuck are you?”
Right. I know who he is because everyone knows who the eldest Garrison offspring is, but Conner hasn’t seen me since—I do the mental math—I was a freshman in college and he was still in high school.
“I’m renting this place from Jordan and Jessie while I intern at the hospital.”
“You should be a pitcher in the MLB with an arm like that,” he replies in a clipped tone and then he swears under his breath again.
“If you put on some clothes I can take a look at your forehead,” I offer. “I’m a doctor. Well, about to be. My specialty is psychiatry but the first few years is general medicine and I’m basically a GP at this point.”
“Wait…” The venom slips from Conner’s voice suddenly. “Mac? Mackenzie Larue?”
"Yes!" I'm so excited he remembers me I make the mistake of spinning around. Oops. He's still naked. Shit! I spin back around so fast that I stumble into the coffee table and fall onto the couch. And then—thud—onto the floor. "Fuck! Ouch!"
“This is a nightmare,” he declares, and I hear him stomp across the apartment as I rub my elbow and sit up and catch the back of his bare ass as he slips into my bedroom.
By the time I’m on my feet again, he’s emerging from my room and he’s clothed. Well, I mean he’s got on a pair of sweats that are snug in all the right places. Conner Garrison is no longer a gangly teenager. He’s all man.
My dad doesn’t play hockey professionally anymore but he’s still involved in the sport because he’s moved into coaching, although he’s in-between gigs right now. It’s still his main topic of conversation when I call or go home, and so I’d heard how Conner was a big, elite hockey player now. Big, elite hockey players are never gangly. So of course he’s standing in front of me all muscled, sculpted, and gorgeous. I feel heat creeping up my face because my brain keeps flashing back to the naked version I got a good look at, even in my panic. He is impressive on all fronts.
He scratches his light-brown hair sheepishly. “I had no idea someone was staying here. I didn’t know you lived in Silver Bay. I thought you were in Syracuse.”
“I was. For undergrad. Then I got a scholarship to the University of Maine for medical school,” I explain and walk around the couch, focusing on the red welt forming in the center of his forehead. There’s also a little trickle of blood. “Shit. I made you bleed.”
“You did?” He pinches his eyebrows and immediately winces.
I take his hand. It’s big, strong, and warm. A ripple of electricity courses down my spine but I ignore it. It’s just a not-so-subtle reminder I haven’t been with a man in almost an entire year. I pull him toward the bathroom, where I saw a first aid kit in one of the drawers when I moved in. “I need to clean it and put a Band-Aid on it before you go.”
“I’m not putting a Band-Aid in the center of my forehead,” Conner grumbles. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
I freeze on the white marble penny tiles and turn to face him. “I live here. I told you. I pay rent. It’s my place.”
“Yeah. Okay. But there’s a freaking blizzard out there,” Conner argues. He points toward the oblong window at the top of the bathroom wall. It looks like it’s got a piece of white Styrofoam blocking it but it’s just the pile of snow on the ledge outside.
He shouldn’t have to remind me about that. I just drove home from the hospital, white-knuckling it the whole way because of this blizzard. My eyes find his again. He looks sheepish as he adds, “Plus I don’t have anywhere to go.”
I make a face like he just skunked the room. “You’re related to half the town. You have a million places to go.”
His face twists in an emotion I know all too well—shame. But why? “My parents don’t know I’m in town and I want to keep it that way right now. If I tell a single Garrison, other than my sister Mae, they’ll all know by dawn. And I can’t… I’m not ready for that. When the weather calms its tits I’ll think about facing reality. But I’m not heading out in this storm, in the middle of the night to humiliate myself, okay?”
No. This is not okay. But he’s right. The weather is horrible and I’d have to be a complete bitch to kick him out into it, especially if it’s going to humiliate him somehow. And I guess I could insist he go stay in the main house, where his cousin Tenley lives, but he’s trying to avoid every single relative he has. I’ve had glimpses of the Garrison family dynamic and they’re as thick as thieves and wouldn’t avoid each other if they had the plague. So Conner’s reasons for ghosting them must be serious. Still, I point out a problem with this potential arrangement. “There’s only one bed.”
“There used to be a blow-up mattress in the closet of the empty second bedroom,” Conner tells me. “From when we used to… hook up with girls up here in high school.”
Classic. Of course, he and his cousins did that.
“There’s no door on that room,” I reply, pulling open the drawer that has the first aid kit. I grab the red canvas bag with the cross on it and put it on the counter.
“You’ve seen me naked. I think we’re past the door stage,” he mutters.
“I saw nothing,” I reply hastily.
“Doubt that,” Conner replies just as quickly. “I’m hard to miss.”
I freeze and look up at him. He’s wearing the cockiest smile. He chuckles as I ignore him and the blush traveling over my cheeks at the moment.
The tiny room still smells of my expensive bubble bath and when I tear open the antiseptic wipe, I notice all the bubbles still in the tub and the now nearly empty bottle of bubble bath. My jaw drops. “You used the whole bottle!”
“Yeah. I like extra bubbles,” Conner says like it’s no big deal. “I’ll buy you more.”
“It’s from Paris. It costs more money than I care to admit and even if you order me more it won’t be here in time for tomorrow, my day off and the day I intended to fill with self-care, including a bubble bath.” I pout as I pull out the wipe and reach up to dab his forehead with it. Way up. Conner is a good four inches over six feet. It makes me feel tinier than my five feet eight inches.
“Sorry,” he grumbles but he doesn't sound all that sorry. He sounds irritated like I'm the problem. "Ow! Shit that hurts!"
Conner jumps back from me like I just pressed a hot poker to his head. I smirk and make a poor attempt at stifling a giggle. His cheeks pink just a bit. “You know what? Maybe I should just face my family. It would likely be less humiliating than dealing with you.”
“Oh, so this is my fault?” I don’t know why I’m so offended right now. If he’s actually going to leave, then I get what I want… right?
I follow him, waving the Band-Aid, as he storms into my bedroom. He’s been here probably a couple hours and my room looks like a bomb went off. There’s a duffle bag open on the bed with clothes hanging out of it. His jacket and winter boots are on the floor, leaving a puddle of melted snow on the hardwood. His toiletry bag is open on my desk, on top of one of my medical textbooks. “What the hell…”
Conner grabs his toiletry bag, zips it, and shoves it into the duffle bag. Then he stops and stares at me. “Also, for the record, this place looks barely lived in. How was I supposed to know someone was staying here?”
“I left a light on.”
"Thought that was Theo last time he took a hook-up here," Conner replies with a shrug. "I didn't open the closet and you don't have, like, one single personal effect lying around. Except the textbooks, which I figured might be Aunt Jessie's old schoolbooks."
Right. His Aunt Jessie used to be a physiotherapist.
“Okay yeah, I guess I can see that,” I admit. “I moved out of my last place rather quickly and left almost everything. Look, you don’t have to go tonight. You should stay until the storm clears.”
“No point,” Conner replies and keeps shoving clothes back into his bag. “You tell your dad I’m here and my parents will know seconds later anyway.”
“It’s the middle of the night so I’m not talking to anyone,” I promise. “Besides, my dad used to coach you on the Barons, remember? He’s still got friends in the back office. I’m guessing whatever has you here instead of with the team, he may already know about it.”
“Do former coaches get told when it’s the end of someone’s career? I would ask my dad but no one has ever dumped him from an NHL team. I could ask my uncles but they’ve never spent five seconds on a farm team. They’re not failures.”
“What the hell are you spiraling on about?” I demand because I’m confused as hell and too tired to process what sounds like pure and simple lunacy. “You’re getting traded?”
He huffs out a short, bitter laugh. “I wish!”
"Look, my dad might have been a player, but I know very little about the business side of hockey," I tell him. “However I do know you were a number one draft pick. You're the Captain of the Barons, which your father was captain of, right? If hockey had a royal family, you’d be the crown prince. The sign entering town even says so. You can’t just have your career taken away.”
“Waivers,” he says like I’m supposed to know what that word means.
“Wafers? What?” I blink and he heaves out a very aggravated sigh.
“Waivers is a process by which a player—any player regardless of contract—can be dismissed from their team and sent to the minors,” Conner explains and when he steals a glance at me, his hazel eyes are filled with humility. “And my coach told me that they’re doing that to me.”
“Right now?” I’m confused. Conner is a great player. I remember everyone talking about how gifted he is.
“No one can waive a player between December eighteenth and December twenty-sixth. Guess they don’t want players to go through that kind of upheaval around the holidays.” Conner zips his duffle bag and slings it over his shoulder. "But my coach, being the prime-time asshole he is, decided to let me know that as of December twenty-seventh, I'm waived.”
“What a dick move,” I whisper because, as a mental health professional, I can see how this coach just defeated the purpose of the waiver freeze for Conner. He purposely told Conner to create emotional havoc. I really do want to call my dad now and discuss this with him. How can the league even allow that?
“Yep. So I pulled a dick move too and left," Conner explains. "They have a game tomorrow, the last one before the break, but fuck them. They can get used to playing without me."
“Can you do that?” I ask.
He shrugs his broad shoulders. "No. But I did. And my agent is handling it. I doubt the team will make a fuss publicly because if they make me look bad, no one will pick me up off waivers and they're stuck paying me. Not that anyone will want me anyway."
Okay, now I don’t really understand what he’s talking about, but I don’t think it matters. He slips by me and shoves his feet into his boots, which are next to my bed. I realize he really is going to leave and now I feel guilty.
“Just… use the blow-up mattress or whatever. It’s cool.”
He looks over at me, his eyes scanning my face. "Are you sure?"
"I'm sure," I say even though I'm not. I'm honestly too tired to think about it anymore. I yawn, walk over, and pluck his duffle off his shoulder. I walk to the tiny, barren guest room and drop it on the floor in the middle of the room as he comes up behind me. "I'd love to talk about this more with you in the morning. If you want someone to vent to. But right now I need sleep. I'm exhausted. So see you tomorrow?"
He nods, but it’s slow and hesitant. “Yeah. Thanks, Mac.”
“Sure,” I say simply as I cross the small distance back to my room. I close my bedroom door without another word. I manage to get off my scrubs and then drop into bed in just my underwear and sports bra. Yanking the covers up to my neck, I’m hit with a waft of a delicious smell. It’s woodsy and warm, yet crisp… he must have lied on my bed. It has to be his cologne or deodorant or something. And boy, it smells amazing…
That’s my last thought as I fall into a deep sleep.