Cade: Fire And Ice: A Second Chance Hockey Romance Read online

  Cade: Fire And Ice

  A 'Second Chance' Romance

  By

  Alana Hart & Jessica Lake

  Copyright © 2015 Alana Hart & Jessica Lake

  All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 and over.

  Published by Hartfelt Books

  Cover design by Resplendent Media

  Image by Deposit Photos

  Sneak Peek!

  I met Cade after the game was over, the Ice Kings' victory was secure and the arena had mostly emptied of its happy crowds. His hair was soaking wet from the shower and neither of us could keep the huge smiles off our faces. He practically ran up to me and I couldn't help but react to the juxtaposition of his youthful, boyish enthusiasm with his tall, muscular and decidedly un-boyish body. The electricity inside me as I stood in front of him made the blood rush in my veins.

  "Well?" He asked, grinning. "What did you think?"

  I feigned nonchalance. "Oh, I thought you did OK."

  "OK, huh? Just 'OK'?"

  He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off the ground, nuzzling his head into my neck and laughing. And when he put me down, something in the air had changed, suddenly and without warning. Neither of us was smiling anymore. When Cade reached out and put one of his big hands on my hip the feeling of that hand - firm and strong and inevitable - sent a bolt of heat jolting through my body.

  "Cade."

  My voice sounded soft and breathless. I hadn't meant to speak, but I didn't know what else to do. When he bent down and opened my lips with his mouth the sweet, hot turmoil inside me was almost overwhelming. It was my first real kiss and all of the insecurities and worries I'd always harbored about not knowing how to do it or making a fool of myself were nothing in the face of Cade Parker, post-game and brimming with testosterone.

  When we came up for air we just stood there for a few seconds, looking at each other. Cade smiled and ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head.

  "What?"

  "I don't know, Ellie. I just don't know about you."

  I was aching to be touched again, kissed again, but I wasn't sure what he meant.

  "You don't know about me? How do you mean?"

  He shrugged, still grinning.

  "I just, Ellie, it's hard to say. You make me feel so fucking happy whenever I'm around you."

  He looked down at the ground after he said that, fidgeting with the bottom of his t-shirt. I watched his hands.

  "Is that lame as hell?"

  I shook my head. "No, it isn't lame. I feel the same way."

  It was true. The day I met Cade Parker I'd been almost frozen with insecurity and nerves but since then, as we'd spent time together in class or walking home after school, he had slowly become the one person I felt like myself around. It was always a relief to be with him. I didn't know how to say it, though, so instead of saying anything I took a step towards him and put my face against his warm chest - the very thing I'd wanted to do since he'd walked into history class that day. It felt like a long time ago.

  "Ellie," he whispered, "you're killing me."

  "Am I? How?"

  I put my hands on his chest without thinking. He made it possible for me to do things like that, even small things, without torturing myself over all the possible outcomes. And he felt so damn good, so completely male.

  He chuckled at my question and caught my eye.

  "How? Do you really want to know?"

  I nodded and Cade took one of my hands in his and lowered it slowly downwards, hesitating for just a second before pressing it gently against him.

  "Oh my...God. Cade."

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Ellie

  Chapter 2: Cade

  Chapter 3: Ellie

  Chapter 4: Cade

  Chapter 5: Ellie

  Chapter 6: Cade

  Chapter 7: Ellie

  Chapter 8: Cade

  Chapter 9: Ellie

  Chapter 10: Cade

  Chapter 11: Ellie

  Chapter 12: Cade

  Chapter 13: Ellie

  Chapter 14: Cade

  Chapter 15: Ellie

  Chapter 16: Cade

  Chapter 17: Ellie

  Chapter 18: Cade

  Chapter 19: Ellie

  Chapter 20: Cade

  Chapter 21: Ellie

  Chapter 22: Cade

  Chapter 23: Ellie

  Chapter 24: Cade

  Chapter 25: Ellie

  Chapter 26: Cade

  Chapter 27: Ellie

  Chapter 1: Ellie

  The first time I saw Cade Parker I was in twelfth grade history class, staring out the window at a monochrome fall day and fighting the urge to fall asleep. He walked in with our teacher, Mr. Small, and woke me up instantly.

  I'd seen cute boys before. Hell, it was high school, I had a new (and consistently unrequited) crush every month. So it wasn't just Cade's classic jock good looks that perked me up, although they didn't hurt. Six foot four at eighteen years old and already sporting the kind of broad, muscular build usually seen on men who have long left their teenaged years behind, he was striking in a way that made the blood quicken in my veins. I wasn't the only one who noticed it, either. The entire feeling in the room changed when Cade walked in, towering over our teacher and wearing a cocky little half-smile on his face. Katy Grebling and her clique of popular girls immediately started whispering excitedly behind me and the boys, well, they sensed the presence of an alpha male just as quickly as the girls did.

  "Class, this is Cade Parker. He's, uh, he's transferred to North Falls Senior Secondary while he plays hockey for the Ice Wings. I hope you all make him feel welcome."

  The Ice Wings. One of the top junior hockey teams in the whole country and the sole reason for anyone to move to North Falls. With players consistently drafted by the NHL and a coach as famous for his outsized personality as he was for producing future stars, well-off hockey parents from all over the USA fought to get their sons onto the team. Cade Parker certainly looked the part, right down to his shaggy hockey hair and his almost cartoonishly enormous hands.

  And what did Cade Parker do when asked to find a seat? He glanced over the room and took a seat next to the biggest social outcast of the class of 2005. Poor, plain Ellie Hesketh with her wild mop of tangled brown hair and her shrinking demeanor. Me.

  An audible murmur of surprise rippled over the classroom at his seating choice but Cade didn't seem to notice. I felt him looking at me expectantly as he sat down but I didn't - couldn't - meet his gaze or show any outward acknowledgement of his presence at all. High school boys - especially po
pular ones - can be surprisingly dense when it comes to social hierarchies. It was a luxury I myself could not afford. Katy Grebling, undisputed queen of North Falls Senior Secondary and leader of a tight group of girls who wore a lot of pastel cashmere and drove sporty, expensive cars, was two seats behind me. I knew as sure as I knew the sun was going to rise in the east the next morning that her claim to the handsome, hockey-playing new boy was staked the minute he'd walked into the room. I also knew, having been on the receiving end of some of her beat-downs, that she had absolutely no qualms about defending her territory. So I didn't look back at Cade Porter when he sat down next to me. Instead, I spent the rest of class acutely aware of his physical presence next to me, barely able to breathe and young and naive enough not to fully understand why.

  When class ended and everyone began gathering their things, he introduced himself simply and with the total confidence of a person who has never experienced social ostracism.

  "Hey. I'm Cade."

  I could feel numerous pairs of eyes boring into me, waiting for my response.

  "I'm Ellie," I mumbled, jamming my tattered notebook into my equally tattered backpack.

  "What?"

  Oh God. He had no idea what he was getting me into.

  "I'm Ellie." I spoke louder and clearer that time but I kept my eyes on the ground, afraid to look up.

  I knew he was about to keep talking and believe me, it isn't that I didn't want to talk to Cade - I did. There was also a strange little instinct to turn towards him and press my face into the warm expanse of his chest until my nose was full of the scent of him and Katy Grebling and her minions melted away into the background. It was all out of the question anyway - the talking or the face-to-chest nuzzling. So before Cade could say anything else I scooped up my bag and scuttled out of the classroom like a frightened mouse, praying that I hadn't pissed Katy off too much.

  My avoidance tactics didn't work. Katy and three other girls were waiting for me at the school gates at four o'clock, a full forty-five minutes after the final bell of the day. I tried to walk past them quietly but Katy sauntered into my path and blocked me with her body.

  "What's up, Ellie?"

  Her voice was dripping with malice. The anticipatory adrenaline running through my body had me shaking hard. Was I afraid of the ass-kicking I knew was coming? Yes. As frequent as they were and had been throughout my school years, getting beaten up isn't really something a person gets used to. But I was more afraid of my mother's reaction if I came home with bloodied clothes again. Katy Grebling was one thing. My drunken, enraged mother was quite another.

  "Nothing."

  "What?"

  Just like I had with Cade, I raised my voice just enough to be heard.

  "Nothing."

  "You got wet panties over the new guy, huh?"

  There was no response to that question, so I didn't give one. One of the other girls with Katy, a brunette with a perfect little ski-jump nose, stepped forward and shoved me hard enough to almost knock me over.

  "Answer me, bitch. Did you, or did you not cream your cheap little Wal-Mart panties over Cade Parker?"

  Every time it happened I tried not to cry and every time I failed. It wasn't even the physical pain, it was the humiliation. The absolute knowledge that I wasn't going to put up a fight and that whatever it was Katy felt like dealing out, I was going to take. The hot tears stung my eyes and I tightened my body in resigned expectation of the next blow. It didn't come. When I straightened up to see what was going on I spotted Cade walking towards us, looking down at his phone. Katy and her friends had also seen him. When he finally looked up it was me he focused on, smiling broadly.

  "Hey, Ellie."

  "Hi Cade," I replied, swallowing hard and trying not to look too obvious as I tried to blink away the tears. It didn't work - he instantly noticed something was up.

  "Is something wrong?"

  I swear I almost started properly bawling right then and there. The concern in his voice was so real - and so unfamiliar. I wanted so badly to answer him, but I knew I couldn't. Katy herself stepped in before I could even speak, wrapping one of her arms around my shoulder and pulling me close enough to smell her sweet, vanilla-tinged perfume.

  "Nothing's wrong, Cade. Ellie's just having a bad day. Aren't you, Ellie?"

  She dug her nails into my shoulder and I nodded, sniffling a little and desperate to take my chance and get away from her before Cade could leave.

  "Are you sure?" Cade asked, still addressing me rather than Katy, whose face was turning visibly pink.

  "I'm Katy, by the way."

  Cade shook Katy's proffered hand and then the hands of her friends as she introduced them one by one, but I could feel his attention remaining mostly on me.

  Katy tried again. "So you're new here, huh? Ice Wings?"

  "Uh-huh," Cade nodded, reaching up and rubbing the back of his thickly muscled neck, still completely unaware of what he'd just walked into.

  "You should come party with us this weekend. Sara's parents are going to Chicago for three days."

  Katy was laying it on thick, tilting her head to the side as she spoke to Cade and biting her lower lip as her sugar-cookie blonde hair tumbled around her face in glossy waves. Like him, she was clearly used to positive attention from others.

  Cade turned back to me.

  "Are you going, Ellie?"

  The look of genuine shock on Katy's face at that moment was almost worth the beating I knew I was going to get either that afternoon or at sometime later.

  "Uh," Katy stuttered, thrown off by Cade's question, "Ellie, um, Ellie's busy this weekend."

  I knew I had to get the hell out of there so I took my chance when Cade turned to me for confirmation of my absence at the upcoming party.

  "Yeah, I'm busy this weekend. And I'm late for work so see you guys later."

  I ran the whole way home from school, terrified that Katy was going to catch up with me. Then I waited in the debris-strewn driveway of my family's trailer until my breathing slowed. The last thing I needed was a grilling from my mom.

  It was dark when I stepped quietly through the front door, taking care to ease it closed so it didn't make a sound. Darkness was good, it meant my mother was probably passed out in bed. I tip-toed down the narrow hallway to the second bedroom and opened the door. All three of my little brothers were sat on the floor, whispering to each other as they pushed toy cars around an old plastic racetrack one of them had found in the woods a few weeks ago. At the sound of the door opening, they all looked up at me. Three round, grubby, anxious faces, terrified they'd woken my mother.

  "It's just me, little ones."

  Jacob was seven, pale and dark-haired like me, and he was the one who watched the two younger ones when I wasn't around. Then there was David. David was four years old, quieter than any small child had any right to be and prone to hiding in cupboards when our mom was on the rampage. Finally, Baby Ben. That's what we called him - Baby Ben. Barely two and the only blonde in the Hesketh family. All three of them were underdressed, hunched over their cars and pressed against each other to try and keep warm in the drafty, mostly unheated trailer.

  "Ellie!"

  Baby Ben's face creased into a wide smile but even he knew to whisper when he spoke. I noticed the crust of snot on his upper lip, as well as the rattle in his chest whenever he inhaled. He'd had some kind of cold or chest infection for a couple of weeks by that point and the fact that it didn't seem to be going away was starting to worry me.

  "Have you boys eaten?"

  Three little heads shook back at me. They hadn't eaten. I left them playing in the bedroom and walked back to the kitchen, ignoring the hollow feeling in my own belly and opening the cupboards one by one, knowing I wasn't going to find anything but going through the motions anyway. A few slices of bread so stale it was hard and speckled with mold and a jar of instant coffee that seemed to have solidified into a solid mass. The fridge was no better. Off-brand ketchup, an empty container
of milk and some bananas so brown and squishy that none of the boys had yet tried to eat them. Also, a half-full bottle of vodka on the bottom shelf and two six packs of beer. Helpless anger rose up in my chest at the sight of the fresh alcohol, which hadn't been there that morning when I fed the boys the last of the cereal and told them mom was going to go shopping that afternoon. They needed to eat. Baby Ben needed medicine so he didn't spend the whole night hacking and coughing.

  I searched through the couch cushions and my bag and managed to come up with just over four dollars in change. It wasn't enough. So I walked out to the shed - one place I knew my mother would never look - to find the crumpled Zip-loc bag I'd stuffed between two rafters for situations like this. There was a single ten dollar bill inside it. Fourteen dollars. I wasn't about to sneak into my mom's room to check her purse so it was going to have to be enough.

  Chapter 2: Cade

  I offered to go to the grocery store for my mom out of boredom, not helpfulness. We'd been in North Falls for a little over a week at the time and it was only just starting to sink in that it was home for the next ten months until I got drafted. I wasn't worried, really, because worry wasn't an emotion I experienced at that age, but I was disconcerted. By all of it. The smallness of the town. The way total strangers seemed to know who I was. The way they guilelessly engaged me in conversation in a way that would never have happened back in New York City. I looked down at my mother's list, written in her neat, looping handwriting.

  "fresh tarragon

  white wine vinegar

  3 heirloom tomatoes

  Ghirardelli baking bar (60%)

  unsalted butter"

  North Falls' dinky little grocery store had only one of those things - unsalted butter. For fresh tarragon I substituted dried, for the baking bar I bought chocolate chips, for the heirloom tomatoes I made do with the pale, rock hard variety and for the white wine vinegar, well, I had no idea what to buy instead of that. I wandered up and down the aisles in a kind of daze, wondering if my dad had accidentally driven us all into a random wormhole somewhere along the highway and we'd popped out in 1980 or thereabouts. Everything about North Falls seemed to have some kind of dulling filter placed over it, right down to the people themselves.