About the Author
Sarina Bowen is a USA Today bestselling author of contemporary romance, including the Brooklyn Bruisers series, the Ivy Years series, and the Gravity series. She lives in Vermont’s Green Mountains with her family, six chickens, and too much ski gear and hockey equipment.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
Friday, January 29th
31 Days Before the NHL Trade Deadline
Brooklyn, New York
Top Team Headline: “Will the Brooklyn Bruisers Name a Coach At Last? Press Conference Called for 10 am” (New York Post)
Cobblestone streets did not pair well with high heels. So Georgia Worthington took her time walking to work through Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood.
Luckily, the office was just another block away. Her job didn't often call for heels and a suit, but today she needed to look authoritative. That wasn't easy when you were five-feet-three-inches tall, and every athlete and coach in the Brooklyn Bruisers organization towered over you. Today she'd need those extra inches. The press conference she'd planned would prove to the organization that they didn't need to hire another senior publicist to replace her boss, who had left two months ago.
Every day that went by with Georgia at the helm of the hockey team's PR effort was a victory. She only needed a little more time to prove she could handle the job alone.
Just like she needed a little more practice time in these shoes. Georgia was practically invincible in a pair of tennis shoes. She could serve a ball down the court at a hundred miles per hour. She could dive toward the net for a short shot, return the ball, and then pivot in any direction. But walking down Water Street in her only pair of three-inch Pradas? That was a challenge.
It was a sunny February morning, and a stiff breeze blew off the East River, though Brooklyn was especially beautiful at this hour, when the slanting sunshine gave the brick facades a rosy hue and sparkled off each antique windowpane. She turned (carefully) onto Gold Street, quickening her pace toward the office. The doormen of the buildings she passed were in the midst of their morning routine-sweeping the sidewalks, hosing off any filth that may have landed there in the night. That was more or less what she'd done herself for the past few years-leaning hard into the morning sunshine, banishing the darkness into the well-scrubbed corners of her mind.
In two hours she would host a press conference where the team's owner would announce that the newest NHL franchise had finally anointed a new head coach. She'd set the whole thing up by herself, and it needed to go off flawlessly.
They all had a lot riding on this announcement. As the youngest team in the conference, the team needed the visibility. It had been not quite two years since Georgia's boss had bought the Long Island franchise and rebranded it as a Brooklyn team. It was a risky maneuver, one that many sports pundits had already decided would fail.
As if the stakes weren't high enough for Georgia already, the new coach just happened to be her father. After twenty years coaching college teams and then a stint as assistant defensive coach for the Rangers, he'd just agreed to take the riskiest NHL job in the nation.
Having your dad show up and outrank you at the office wasn't exactly a dream come true. But Georgia had always been close to her father, and she knew this was a big step for him. She was just going to have to make the best of it.
And anyway, he was a tough coach, and she wanted her boys to win, right? No, she needed them to win. There was a chorus of voices ready to write the team off as a failure. They said the tristate area had too many hockey teams. They said the Internet billionaire who'd bought the team didn't know what he was doing. It was Georgia's job to help combat all those unwanted opinions with a polished public image.
Their critics were wrong, anyway. In the first place, there could never be too many hockey teams. And she'd seen signs that the young owner knew exactly what he was doing.
She climbed the steps to the team's headquarters and tugged on the brass handle. Georgia wasn't ashamed to admit that she loved the office building with the glee that other people reserved for obsessing over a new lover. She liked the weight of the big wooden door in her hand, and the golden sheen of the wooden floors inside. Like many of the buildings in this neighborhood, their headquarters had been a factory at the turn of the century. The team's owner-Internet billionaire Nate Kattenberger-had bought it as a wreck and had had every inch of it lovingly restored. Every time she stepped into this entryway, with its exposed brick walls and its old soda lamps overhead, she felt lucky.
Just inside the entry hall hung a wall-mounted screen showing clips of the boys winning in Toronto. Back when she'd just started as the publicity and marketing assistant, Georgia had edited that film herself. It gave her a private thrill to know that the first thing every visitor to headquarters saw was her handiwork.
Working for the Bruisers was her first job out of college. She'd landed it when Nate Kattenberger had just begun his tenure as owner. He'd fired nearly everyone from the old franchise and started fresh. That was a bad deal for the lifers, of course, but pretty lucky for a twenty-two-year-old new graduate. In the early days she'd done everything from fetching coffee to answering phones to arranging photo shoots.
Nate still referred to her as Employee Number Three. You had to know Nate to understand that the nickname was a high form of praise. At Internet companies, being an early employee was a status symbol.
Georgia didn't care if she was Employee Number Three or number 333. But she really wanted to hang on to the top post in publicity.
When the senior publicist quit eight weeks ago to move to California with his boyfriend, Georgia was given his job on an interim basis. But so far the general manager (Employee Number Two) had been too busy trading players before the deadline to shop around for a more seasoned PR replacement.
At twenty-four years old, she was (at least temporarily) the senior publicist of an NHL franchise.
Pinch me, she thought as her heels clicked importantly on the shellacked floors. From the lobby, a girl could follow the left-hand passageway toward the athletic facility and the brand-new practice rink that Kattenberger had built. But Georgia went the other way, toward the office wing on the right. The double doors in her path were made from wavy old bottle glass, and she loved the way they gave the hallway beyond an underwater sheen until she pushed open the door.
The first sound she heard on the other side of the door was her father's voice. And he was yelling.
Uh-oh.
Later, when she reran the events of the day in her mind, she'd remember this as the moment when the wheels came off. And it wasn't even nine o'clock yet.
"Why am I even here?" her father hollered. "You said I'd have veto power over your trades. But I'm in the building ten fucking minutes when I find out that you took a player I don't want?"
"Actually," another voice began. Georgia knew that voice, too. It belonged to Nate, the thirty-two-year-old owner of the team. The self-made billionaire had built a browser search engine in his dorm room eleven years ago which was now active on eight hundred million mobile devices.
Nate started a great many of his sentences with the word "actually."
"Actually," he said again, "we grabbed this player one day before you stepped into the building. Totally our prerogative. Read your contract."
"I shouldn't have to read my fucking contract!" her dad hollered. "I put my whole career on the line to lead a team that everyone thinks will fail. You said, Trust me, Karl. I need you, Karl. And then you pull this crap?"
"Legally . . ."
"'Legally' is for pussies. That's some underhanded shit you just pulled, and a real man admits that."
Oh Jesus no. She began skating in her heels toward Mr. Kattenberger's office, hoping to end this conversation. Calling the owner's manhood into question was not a good strategy. The boss was a little touchy about that.
Okay, a lot touchy.
When she rounded the corner into the outer office, her heart dove. She counted two or three bodies as she passed by them in a blur. If any of them were reporters, they'd just overheard every ugly word of the argument in Nate Kattenberger's office. If any of them recorded this dustup, her week had just gotten twice as long.
She ripped open the door to Nate's office and slid inside. "Gentlemen," she said quietly. As she feared, the two men were staring each other down, shoulders squared as if for battle. They were an interestingly mismatched pair-Nate with his steely eyes and his five thousand dollar suit on a lean frame, versus her square-jawed jock of a dad with his military haircut and I-eat-men-like-you-for-breakfast snarl.
"Princess!" her father barked. "I didn't know you worked for a weasel."
"Coach," she warned. She'd decided ahead of time that she would call him Coach at work. Because calling her own father by his first name was just weird. And calling someone "Dad" at the office was not good for a girl's image. "Listen to me," she begged. "We are expecting thirty or forty reporters in this building today. And there are people out there listening to you two chew each other up. That's not what we want in the sports section tomorrow. So you can have this argument using your inside voices."
"He just . . ." Nate began.
Georgia held up a hand. "Your publicist says to tone it down right now, or I'm sending both of you to the penalty box."
They stared each other down while she held her breath. Her father folded his meaty arms in front of his chest. "We're not finished with this conversation," he hissed. "If that kid's contract is unsigned, I'm tearing it up."
"Too late!" Nate said cheerily as her father's lip curled. "They sent us a scan of the signed file last night. Georgia, please add our newest player to your press release. We'll have two additions to the Bruisers to announce today." He reached across his desk and handed her a file folder.
"Yes, captain." The boss had a thing for Star Trek, too.
Her father gave her a look. But what else could she say? Georgia and the big boss had a great relationship, and that was because she'd figured out early on that Nate had no idea how to be a team player. When you make your first billion while other college kids are playing beer pong, it's the social skills that suffer.
And she'd warned her father that Nate was egotistical. You have to handle Nate. And shouting at him always failed. So she gave her father a look right back. We talked about this, she telegraphed.
He's such an asshole, his sneer replied.
And it was probably true. But when she looked at Nate she saw a kid who'd been shoved into lockers during high school. And now he wanted the last laugh, taking every opportunity to throw his (nerdy) weight around. He'd bought a hockey team, and he was going to make the jocks do his bidding, at least until the day he realized that vindication wasn't everything in life.
"Now," she said quietly. "Let's go over the announcement." She set her leather briefcase on the corner of Nate's egotistically sized desk and pulled a folder from the outside pocket. From inside, she pulled a page for each of them. "Nate will introduce you, Coach. I have him leading with your win record at the college level, because it's pretty spectacular." She winked at her father and saw him relax by a degree or two. "Then we'll hit your NHL years, for depth . . ." From her coat pocket, her phone began dancing a jig. There was too much going on this morning to ignore it. "Sorry, one sec."
She pulled out the phone and took a peek at its massive screen. Everyone who worked for Kattenberger was issued a big-screened, turbofast, ubersecure phone that Nate had designed himself. The call she'd received wasn't business, though. It was from her old friend DJ. It wasn't until after she rejected the call that she realized his timing was a little odd. DJ never called her at work. It made her worry that today's big announcement had already leaked to the media.
God, she hoped it hadn't.
"Georgia," her father grumbled, breaking her train of thought, "was this the shirt you meant for me to wear with this tie?" Her father tugged at his half Windsor knot. The tie was purple, of course-the team color. Georgia had messengered it to her childhood home out on Long Island yesterday. The fact that she still bought her father's clothes for him was not something she wanted to put in a press release. But Georgia's mother had passed away when she was six years old, and her father did not like to shop.
"You look dashing." She smiled at him, hoping he'd lighten up. "Now, can you two play nicely together until after the press conference? It's either that, or you need to double my salary, because I'll have to work twenty-four hours a day to undo the damage."
Coach Worthington sighed. "I won't shout anymore. But we can't keep this player."
"Bullshit," Nate hissed. "The kid is good. And I got him cheap."
"Quiet!" she whispered. "I'm begging you both. Now I need to head into my office for half an hour, before we're overrun with reporters. Stay out of trouble until the press conference, okay? I'll fetch you right before I speak to the players."
Her father set his jaw into a grim expression of acceptance. Georgia was fairly certain he wouldn't start yelling again when she left the room. He was passionate, but he was smart, too. "Okay, honey." He put a meaty palm on her shoulder.
Unfortunately, she picked up her heavy briefcase at just the same time, and the weight of his hand destabilized her. "Whoa," she said as she teetered on the stilts that passed for her shoes.
Her father reacted fast, catching her by the elbow before she could fall down. "Christ, Princess! Are you okay? Should you be wearing those things? I thought you swore off heels after that incident at your eighth grade graduation . . ."
Nate snickered behind his desk, and Georgia felt her face flush.
She stood up straight again. "Coach, a favor? Don't call me Princess at work."
Her father tucked the strap of her briefcase over her shoulder, the way you would for someone who was about five years old. "Sorry, Miss Worthington." He grinned. Then he pecked her on the cheek.
