Mistletoe Face Off (Chicago Blizzard Hockey #1)

Chapter 2Holly

Chapter Two

Holly

I lower my camera and watch as the door through which I spotted a half-dressed Santa only seconds ago slams shut.

Did I really just see Santa without his shirt? Scratch that. Did I really just see a totally buff Santa without his shirt, revealing an enviable set of pecs, abs, and shoulders almost too wide enough to fit through doorways?

I pull up my recent shots on my camera to check I’ve not started hallucinating all things Christmas, which is a risk you can run at this time of year when you’re told by your boss to cover every single Blizzard Christmas event out there.

Yup, there he is. Santa in all his buff and burly glory.

Huh . Who knew Santa was packing such an impressive rig under his shirt? Maybe I should alert the elves? Ask them about Santa’s gym routine for my next article?

Maybe… not.

Maybe instead I’ll do the job I was sent here to do and stop checking out the poor schmuck who’s been roped into playing Santa for the kids at the Hawksworth Community Center’s annual Christmas party. Which, incidentally, involves me not only covering the event, but, thanks to Raj, my photographer, calling in sick only a couple hours ago, also involves me taking the photos.

If I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it now: I am one lucky reporter.

As I flick my camera back into action mode, I feel a set of arms wrap around my leg, a face buried in my open jacket.

Oh, and take care of my eight-year-old daughter on the day my ex was meant to have her but, as he so often does when he’s in town, he let her down, coming up with some flimsy excuse I didn’t even bother reading on my phone.

“What’s up, honey?” I ask, petting her soft blonde hair, much like my own when I was her age, the blonde that was over by the time I hit puberty, giving way to my chestnut locks.

She looks up at me and I see that look on her face that always tugs at my heartstrings. The scared one. The one that means she’s finding this all too much. “Can we go home now, Mommy?”

“But we only just got here. Can’t you go enjoy some of the fun Christmas activities they’ve got going on? Look, there’s a coloring station over there. You love to color.”

“But I want to go home,” she repeats.

I crouch down beside her, engulfing her in a reassuring hug. “You know Mommy’s got to work, honey, but I promise we won’t be too long.”

“But I don’t like it here,” she says, her voice muffled by my jacket.

Thinking of the muscled visitor from the North Pole I captured with my camera, I reply, “Santa’s here, and I know how much you love him.”

“He is?” Her eyes are alight, huge in her face, as she pulls her head out from my jacket. “Is it the real Santa? Because sometimes they’re someone pretending to be Santa.”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see to find out,” I reply with a smile.

I can almost see the cogs in her mind whirring as she works out whether it's the real Santa or otherwise coming, and if it's actually worth staying for. The thing is, she doesn't have a choice. With my ex lumbering her with me at the last minute despite the fact I'm working, it's either here with me at the Community Center, or here with me at the Community Center.

That’s what you get when you parent on your own approximately 99.9% of the time.

Did I mention my ex is a prize jerk? Because I bet he’s got a whole shelf full of prize jerk trophies by now. Combine that with the fact that I'm doing my job reporting on the Chicago Blizzard hockey team’s involvement here today as well as my photographers job, I've more than got my hands full this afternoon. Not to mention the fact I have to interview a bunch of too-big-for-their-boots hockey pros—my least favorite kind of guy on the planet—trying to get an angle beyond the sporting platitudes they always throw at me for my story.

“Okay. I guess we can stay,” Macy replies on a sigh that sounds so much more grown up than her eight years.

“Attagirl,” I say with a kiss to her forehead. “Hey, do you want to go get your face painted?” I ask, gesturing at a station where volunteers are painting kid’s faces. “You could be an elf?”

Her lips lift into a smile. “Can I be a figure skater instead?”

“Of course you can, honey,” I reply, wondering exactly what brief I could give a face painter to transform my eight year old daughter into a figure skater.

I shouldn’t be surprised that’s what she wants to look like. Macy has loved figure skating her whole life, right from the first time I took her to see Disney on Ice when she was only two years old. Since then, she's practiced the moves in our living room and watched endless YouTube clips for technique, but she's never actually got on the ice. I know, right? She’s a figure skater without skates.

The thing is, her anxiety gets too much for her when she’s faced with actually stepping out onto the ice, and try as I might to encourage her to at least give it a shot, she always shies away. It breaks my heart. The one thing she would love to do is the biggest thing she's so desperately afraid of.

I take Macy’s hand and we make our way through the throngs of people involved in activities such as cookie decorating, coloring pictures of Santa and his reindeer, and a snowball tossing game, involving soft white balls made to look like snowballs. It might be snowing outside on this chilly late-November Chicago day, but there's no way the organizers of this event would want actual snow in here.

One of the face painting volunteers, a woman about my mom’s age with curly blonde hair, looks up at us with a broad smile. “Hey there, sweetheart. Do you want your face painted like an elf?”

Macy shakes her head but no words come out.

“My daughter, Macy, would like to be a figure skater, please, if you could manage that?” I ask.

The woman pinches her brows together momentarily before her face breaks out into a fresh smile. “Of course we can manage that. I will make you into the prettiest figure skater in the whole Community Center.”

“What do you think, honey?” I ask.

Macy presses her lips together and nods in response.

“All right. How about we get you sitting your figure skating self down over here on this stool and I'll get right to work,” the woman says kindly.

I shoot her a grateful smile. “I've got to go interview some people then take a few shots for the paper I work for. Is it okay if I leave Macy here with you for a while? I won’t be long.”

“Of course it is,” she replies. “I'm Margaret.”

“Nice to meet you, Margaret. This is Macy, and I'm Holly.”

“Holly? Well, aren't you in the right place at the right time?” she says on a laugh, and I give her a smile. I get that joke about my name approximately seventeen times a day at this time of year, people always thinking they're being so original.

They're not.

“Macy, honey? Mommy is going to do some work now but I'll be back real soon, okay?”

She has a worried expression on her little face, and I silently curse my ex for putting her in this situation. Her and me.

“I'll be fine, Mommy,” she says bravely, her voice quavering a little, and it gets me, right in the chest.

“What’s your work?” Margaret asks.

“I'm a journalist. I'm here to cover the Blizzard team’s involvement in their month-long Christmas events.”

“Oh, aren't you lucky? Such a pleasant and polite group of guys, and so very obliging here at the Center.”

Pleasant, polite, and obliging are not the words I would use to describe NHL players, but then I might be a touch biased against them considering my ex is one of their kind.

“Are there many of the team here?” I ask, scanning the crowd and spotting a few guys a good head taller than normal people. Yup, that’ll be the hockey players all right. Big, bulky, and burly. The three B’s of the athletic, totally self-absorbed, paid-way-too much-for-their-own-good bunch.

I know this from bitter experience.

“Oh, I’ve seen a few of them,” Margaret assures me.

I pause before I ask, “Is Harrison Clarke here?”

I can feel my cheeks heating before his name has even fully fallen from my lips. Don't judge. It's not as though I've got a crush on the guy or anything like that.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I did have a crush on him back in high school when he started at my school Senior Year, but that’s only because he and I were at the same school and shared some of the same classes. He was in my face, like, a lot . Not that we moved in the same circles or anything. I was on the school paper, on the debate team, and had a tight-knit group of mainly girl friends. Harrison, on the other hand, was Mr. Popular, talented hockey player, classically good looking, and boyfriend to the beautiful and sweet captain of the cheer squad.

Half our class had a crush on the guy, so it’s not like I was the only one.

And besides, high school was a lifetime ago. I’ve moved on, my crush long since forgotten.

“Do you have a particular interest in seeing Harrison Clarke?” Margaret asks, her eyes dancing, clearly looking for a juicy story.

“I need to interview him for the article, that's all,” I reply lightly, willing the heat in my cheeks to burnout—and fast.

She gives me a knowing look. “If you say so, sweetie. But he is handsome, and such a great defenseman.”

Time to end this conversation.

“Thanks for transforming my girl into a figure skater, Margaret.” I plant a kiss on the top of Macy's head. “Have fun. I'll be right over there, but you stay here till I get back, okay, honey?”

“Okay, Mommy,” she replies solemnly.

“Don’t you worry, Christmas Holly. By the time you're done interviewing those handsome young NHL players Little Miss Macy and I are going to be great friends, that I can promise,” Margaret says before she throws me a wink.

I mouth “thank you” before I scan the room once more for six foot five men wearing hockey jerseys with self-satisfied smirks on their faces.

It does not take me long.

Men like that always stand out in a crowd—not to mention they are all wearing their Chicago Blizzard jerseys over jeans, virtually screaming for everyone to look at them.

Yes, I hear it. I'm cynical. But I have firsthand experience of what these hockey pros are like. And sure, they’re not all as arrogant, self-absorbed, and disloyal as my ex, but I would bet my last dollar most of them are. I'm a hockey pro marriage survivor. I've got the badge and the T-shirt—and the battle scars.

The one good thing to come of my brief and regretful train wreck of a marriage is my daughter. The light of my life. My reason for being.

Now if only I could get her daddy to follow through on some of his promises—you know, like actually taking her Christmas shopping today when he had been promising for weeks that he would when he came to town—then we'd all be a lot happier, Macy especially.

I approach a group of three guys, surrounded by Blizzard fans. I recognize one as the captain, “Dan the Man” Roberts, another as Casey Phillips, the goalie, and the final as Liam Carruthers, a rookie defenseman with a party boy image. They're chatting and laughing and posing for selfies, without a care in the world.

I snap a few shots of them interacting with people as I wait, hoping I've got the exposure right for the lighting, or whatever it's called on the camera. But they'll get what they’ll get. I can't become a professional-level photographer after a pimply intern back in the office showed me how to switch the camera on. When it comes to photography, I’m a point and click girl, and it suits me just fine. But it’s fair to say I won't be winning any photography prizes anytime soon, that's for sure.

I glance back over in Macy's direction. She's still on the stool, sitting perfectly still as Margaret concentrates, chatting away to her about who knows what.

My phone rings as one of the women in front of me gushes over Liam, and the guy laps it up, clearly loving every compliment thrown his way. I roll my eyes as I check the screen. Stephen McFarlane, Section Editor, aka my boss, aka Slippery Stephen, and one of my least favorite humans.

“Hey, Stephen,” I say brightly into my phone. “I'm at the venue and about to interview some of the players.”

“Which ones?” he asks.

“The captain is here, Dan Roberts, as well as their goalie and that rookie defenseman who joined the team last season, Liam Carruthers.”

I'm proud of myself that I recognize all these guys. It was a seriously difficult task, having to stare at their images and names to lodge them firmly into my brain. Okay, not exactly difficult because they’re an alarmingly handsome team. Big and burly, of course—they’re hockey players, not yoga teachers—several of whom have square jaws sharp enough to cut glass, and all of whom have those three Bs I mentioned before.

So, yeah, not that difficult.

Statistically speaking, at least a couple on the team should be lacking in the looks department, but I'm sad to report that as far as I can tell, none of them do.

“You won't get any dirt on Dan Roberts,” Stephen says. “That guy is as squeaky clean as a germaphobe’s doorknob. Played on the Ice Breakers charity team in Washington State at the start of the season and is currently dating his high school girl. Please .”

Despite being a hockey pro, Dan Roberts sure sounds like a standup guy to me.

I don't mention it to my boss.

“I'm not looking for dirt, am I?” I ask, uncertain. I mean I didn't come down in the last snow shower. I am a journalist. I know what makes for good press. But my brief today was to cover the Blizzard’s involvement with underprivileged kids here at the Community Center, not dig for dirt in their private lives.

I may not be a huge fan of pro hockey players, but I have my standards.

“Is ‘The Enforcer’ there?” Stephen asks, referring to Hunter Adams, the tough defenseman of the team, known for getting into the odd fight on the ice. Another one of the impossibly good looking guys, but with a hard edge to him that says “don’t mess with me.”

“I think I spotted him before, but I don’t see him now,” I reply.

“See if you can find him, because he's meant to be there, and in the meantime interview the party boy rookie, Carruthers. He’s slipped up a few times in the media since he joined the team this season. You're an attractive young woman. He may well flirt with you. See what he says.”

“Sure thing,” I reply without having any intention of getting Liam Carruthers to flirt with me, despite the fact his party-boy-slash-womanizing reputation precedes him. And the fact I don't want to offer myself up as bait for some poor guy. Standards, remember? Sometimes they're hard to maintain in my job. But I've got to at least try.

“Get your interviews. I'll let you know who I want you to zero in on. I got a tip off I’m following up on.”

Great.

“You got it, Stephen,” I reply with fake brightness.

I end the call just as Liam Carruthers himself catches my eye, shooting me his famous grin.

“How are you doing?” he asks with a flash of a smile and a raise of his chin.

Did this guy learn how to talk to women from watching Joey on Friends ?

“I'm great, thank you, Mr. Carruthers,” I reply smoothly. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m good,” he replies with a wink.

Oh, good grief.

“Did you want a selfie?” He lifts a muscled arm as though to wrap it around my shoulders and tuck me up against him.

“Actually, as tempting as that is, I'm a reporter for The Chicago Beacon. My name is Holly Coleman. Do you have a few moments to chat?”

“If it's with you, then I've got all afternoon,” he replies with a smirk and it takes all my strength not to roll my eyes at his sheer cheesiness. Definitely Joey.

“That's kind of you, Mr. Carruthers.”

“Please, call me Liam.”

“Okay, Liam.” I click on my recorder. “What have you been doing here this afternoon at the Hawksworth Community Center?”

He pulls his features into a more serious look. “Well, Holly, we've been here at the Community Center raising the spirits of underprivileged kids. We want to show them what Christmas is all about.”

“That’s super kind of you. Is Christmas all about hockey players chatting with pretty female fans?” I ask innocently. Okay, not so innocently. But in my defense, that’s exactly what he was doing.

He laughs. “That's just a perk of the job.” His features drop once more. “But what we're really here for is to show community spirit. We may be hockey players, but we have hearts. Big ones, and not just because we're big guys.”

I press my lips together to stop from laughing, because you know what they say about big guys? Big hearts.

Yeah, that's what they say.

I open my mouth to ask a follow up question—such as do hockey players have big gallbladders and livers as well—when someone switches on a microphone and it makes that ear-piercing screech over the speakers that cuts right through you.

“Oops. Sorry about that,” a middle-aged woman with short cropped hair, pink glasses, and a smiling face says into the microphone. “I'm not very good with these things.” She taps the microphone a few times, creating a loud thudding sound.

“She should not be doing that,” Liam says at my side.

“You got that right,” I reply, covering my ears with my hands.

Thankfully, she stops tapping the microphone, coming to the realization that it is in fact on, something the rest of us knew from the get go. “Isn’t this fun? I’m Daphne Albright and I run this community center here in Hawksworth. I know you've all been busy with face painting and cookie decorating and all the fantastic things we’ve got on offer here today, but I have an exciting announcement to make. Guess who's in the house?”

A bunch of kids yell an excited, “Santa!”

“That's right. Mr. Santa Claus himself pulled up on the roof with his reindeers only just this minute and he is dying to get in here and meet you all and hear what you want for Christmas. I wonder, have you been naughty or nice this year?”

A loud, high pitched cheer erupts around the room, with kids yelling that they’ve been nice. I throw Liam Carruthers a smile and thank him for talking with me before I make my way through the crowd to Macy. She's grinning and looking oh-so beautiful, with her blonde hair tied up in a bun at the nape of her neck, pink lipstick on her lips, and soft eye makeup. Margaret did a great job making her look, well, like a figure skater.

“Honey, you look so beautiful,” I tell her as I pull my phone from my purse and click on the camera so she can see herself.

“But Mommy, didn’t you hear? Santa’s here!” she exclaims, and I let out a laugh. My daughter is the sweetest soul I've ever known, and she loves all things Christmas. “Can I go see him? Please? Can I?”

“Of course you can,” I say and catch Margaret beaming at me.

“She’s a sweetie, this one,” she says.

I open my mouth to reply when another voice booms over the sound system.

“Hello, children. I’ve come all the way from the North Pole just to see you all!”

I look over at a guy dressed as Santa, his rotund belly encased in his red suit and a large black belt, a sack held over one shoulder. Of course I know what’s hidden beneath the suit is an impressive set of abs, but I’m not about to shatter my daughter’s glee with the truth.

He’s tall, rivalling any of the hockey pros in the place, and he’s really pulling this whole Santa vibe off, ho ho ho-ing as the kids gaze up at him with broad smiles.

I thank Margaret for the wonderful job and we join the throngs surrounding Santa. I snap a few shots of him talking with the kids as he hands out candy canes, noticing how great he is with them. Whoever this guy is, they sure chose him well for the role.

Finally, it's Macy's turn.

“And who have we got here?” Santa says in his deep, booming voice.

“My name is Macy,” she says carefully.

“Well, hello Macy. I'm very pleased to meet you.” Santa’s eyes shift to mine and I smile at him, noticing that his eyes are an attractive shade of green.

Not that I'm going to go getting ideas about me and Santa. Or rather the hot guy playing Santa. It’s hard enough being a single, working mom without throwing Santa’s girlfriend into the mix.

“Are you Macy’s mom?” he asks me.

“Sure am. I’m Holly.”

“Do you know Holly is one of my favorite Christmas decorations?” he asks, and I roll my eyes.

Another Holly joke, only this one’s from Santa.

“Tell me, are you on the naughty list or the nice list?” he asks Macy, although his eyes flick briefly to mine.

Wait. Is Santa flirting with me? I narrow my eyes at him, but he’s focused back on Macy. I must have imagined it. Too many hockey pros around here.

“I'm on the Nice List,” Macy declares with a serious tone. “Aren’t I, Mommy? I've been good all year.”

“You sure have, honey,” I tell her.

“In that case, I have something for you.” Santa rummages in his sack, pulls out a candy cane, and hands it to her.

“Thank you so much, Santa!” she exclaims, and to my astonishment, she wraps her arms around him and gives him a hug.

Usually, my daughter is so shy at stepping forward. So reserved. But there's something about this Santa that she clearly responds to.

“You stay on that Good List now, Macy,” Santa says and my daughter gives him a solemn nod of her head.

“I will, Santa,” she replies, reaching for my hand.

“Thank you,” I say to the man behind the beard.

“It was my pleasure.” The skin around his eyes—those attractive green eyes of his—crinkles into a genuine smile. And is that a prosthetic nose?

My phone chimes and I pick up to see a message from my boss.

Stephen:

There's a rumor flying around that Harrison Clarke isn't the stand-up guy we all thought he was. Find him and interview him. He'll be our lead story.

I tap out a quick reply, wondering what the good looking, popular jock from my high school days has done.

Me:

I haven't seen him here today yet.

Stephen:

He'll be there somewhere. He’s on the list of Blizzard team members attending. He's your story. Deliver it and I’ll support you in your bid for that promotion.

I chew on my lip. How can I interview a guy that I can't even find? But I know one thing for sure, I want that promotion. Scratch that. I need that promotion, because that promotion means moving from the Lifestyle team over to National News and, most importantly, away from Slippery Stephen.

Me:

I'm on it.

As I turn to leave, knowing I’ll have Macy’s hand in mine the whole time I'm trying to interview these self-absorbed jocks, I glance back and see Santa still smiling at me. He lifts his hand in a wave, and I return my attention to my daughter, wondering who the man with the kind words and equally kind eyes really is, and figuring I'll never know.