Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) Read online

  Firebird

  By Jennifer Loring

  Firebird

  Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Loring.

  All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: October 2015

  Limitless Publishing, LLC

  Kailua, HI 96734

  www.limitlesspublishing.com

  Formatting: Limitless Publishing

  ISBN-13: 978-1-68058-322-9

  ISBN-10: 1-68058-322-0

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  To Katie (Kenyhercz) McGinley, for inspiring me to step outside my comfort zone.

  And to Ron Shannon, who was taken from us

  far too soon.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter One

  Stephanie

  Stephanie Hartwell marched into her editor-in-chief’s office, flung the door shut, and slammed her stained coffee mug on his desk.

  “No. Give me that story, Dave. Those assholes out there have had the chance to prove themselves. A million chances. I didn’t go to USC to write theater reviews.”

  Dave failed to suppress a smile. “Nothing personal, Steph. The Volynsky trade is a big deal, and I need someone familiar with Seattle sports to cover it.”

  The veins in her neck throbbed, and a flush burned her face. She’d never been good at controlling her emotions, especially anger. Especially when he was underestimating her because she had tits. “I’ve been here three years. You want ‘familiar’? Volynsky has played all eighty-two games for the past four seasons. Eighty points or higher in each of those seasons. Leads the league in shots on goal and is top ten in assists. He’s a plus-three, plays at least twenty-one minutes a game, and averages forty-eight goals per season. Shall I go on?”

  Dave’s eyebrows inched toward his receding hairline.

  “You know what they call me behind my back, Dave? ‘Puck bunny.’ I played hockey most of my life. I know the game. You show me a puck bunny that does.” She stabbed her finger at him. “Give me the story.”

  “All right, all right, Jesus.” Dave waved his palms at her like two white flags. He clacked out what she presumed was a follow-up email relieving Shawn of his Volynsky duties. Stephanie tensed in a preemptive, involuntary defensive posture for the verbal assault she expected as soon as she left Dave’s office.

  “How do you know all this, anyway?”

  “Would you ask any of the guys that?”

  “Not everything is an attack on you, Steph. I’m on your side. I know you feel like you have to be better than everyone just to be considered average.”

  Stephanie let her shoulders sink and her fingers uncurl. The muscles in her neck ached. She expelled a long breath and shifted her gaze to the view of Puget Sound out the window. The past had compromised her objectivity, but it would not compromise her job.

  “Steph? You still with me?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking of the right lead.”

  “That’s why you’re the best. Okay, the season opener is tomorrow night. You’re on it. Get him to agree to an exclusive story. I’ll see what I can do on my end. Rumor has it he’s difficult.”

  She’d heard all the stories. Everyone had. The hard-drinking, womanizing bad boy. A modern-day Derek Sanderson and stereotypical star athlete, whose behavior fed rising public disgust with pro-sports salaries and Seattle’s own taxpayer-funded, three hundred fifty million-dollar Amazon Arena. The Seattle Earthquakes had struggled from day one two years ago in a market with an inexplicable lack of hockey fans, fewer than even Arizona or Florida. Giving away the farm for Volynsky—eight years, ninety-two million dollars, and two top prospects—volatile as he was, had become a last-ditch effort to avoid the fates of the Predators, Coyotes, and Panthers, all relocated to Canada.

  “I deal with bullshit from entitled man-children every day. I can handle him.” She’d done it before. In another life, when he’d been someone else.

  Dave chuckled and shook his head. “I almost feel sorry for him. Now go. Do me proud.”

  “You got it.” Stephanie plucked her mug from his desk and left the office. Her spine stiffened when she saw Shawn glaring at her over the long table, lined with computers on either side, at which the staff worked. She’d have no privacy unless she earned her coveted promotion and an office.

  “We all know why you wanted that story.” His gaze landed on her chest, which wasn’t large, and she crossed her arms. The mug dangled from her fingertips. She stifled the urge to smash it over his head. But that would be all the ammo he’d need to prove he’d been right all along—that she was too irrational, too emotional, to handle the job.

  Too female.

  “Oh? Do tell me, Shawn. I mean, we’ve had so many deep, meaningful conversations. It couldn’t possibly be because I played hockey from age five until I graduated from college and still play adult league.” She lifted her chin and drilled her stare into him, hoping his head would explode Scanners style. “Why don’t you spend less time worrying about me and more time figuring out why you’re such a whiny, self-absorbed, spoiled little shit?”

  A chorus of chuckles and “oohs” rose from the table. Shawn’s jaw muscles tightened, and his eyes were like an overcast day on the lake, reflecting her hatred back at her.

  “Bitch,” he muttered as she walked away. With her back to him, she pretended to let the word roll off her like a raindrop, unimportant and unworthy of her attention. She slid into her chair, furious when tears pricked her eyes. She distracted herself with the mail left beside her monitor during her meeting. The latest People, their “One Hundred Most Beautiful” issue. Mindless eye candy. Just what she needed. She opened the magazine and skimmed the list.

  Her heart stopped, skipped, restarted.

  Number ninety-eight.

  Aleksandr Volynsky: With his GQ looks and killer body, this twenty-five-year-old power forward has been setting the NHL on fire for seven seasons already. The six-foot-five Russian stud, as notorious for his off-ice antics as for his puck-handling skills, is surprisingly coy about his love life. “There is someone, yes,” he says. “We’re just not in the same place right now.”

  He was naked from the waist up and clad in his hoc
key gear from the waist down, holding his stick in his right hand. They’d Photoshopped the scar on his right cheek, where four years ago an errant puck had split his face open, broken his jaw, and shattered several of his teeth.

  God, he was beautiful.

  She was tracing the contours of his muscles, from his chiseled pecs dusted with black hair down to his six-pack. Four percent body fat. She stuck her finger in her mouth and chewed the nail. She’d read in a fitness webzine that during the off-season he worked out six days a week and during the season maintained a four-day-a-week training regimen. After breakfast each morning, he ran for an hour, followed by an hour of soccer. He ate lunch and took a short nap but was back at it in the afternoon for an hour of weightlifting, an hour of basketball, and half an hour of swimming. He could also do two hundred push-ups in one session. Not surprising, judging from those biceps.

  He stared at the camera, green eyes smoldering, promising to do things most women had never heard of and make them love every second of it. A slight smirk, arrogant yet playful, teased his lips.

  Jesus, she was getting hot from a picture. A picture of someone who didn’t need the ego trip.

  There is someone, yes…

  She wished it didn’t bother her so much.

  ***

  Stephanie opened one of the cabinets and retrieved a wine glass, then poured a substantial amount of merlot and leaned back against the granite countertop. She downed half the glass in one gulp.

  “Rough day?” Joe wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek. She nestled against his shoulder.

  “Shawn again. Dave gave me the Volynsky story.”

  “Congratulations, hon! This is the break you’ve been waiting for.”

  “He called me a bitch, Joe.”

  “Can’t you file a harassment complaint or something? Do I have to kick his ass?”

  Stephanie snickered. Joe was the quintessential Pacific Northwest hipster art director, complete with beard and black-rimmed glasses. Shawn was the typical college-town meathead. “It’s such a boys’ club. And I know Dave means well, but he doesn’t get it. This has to be the best story of my life.”

  “You know, back in Philly we had a lot of women covering local sports.” He smiled, his arms locked around her waist. “I’m just saying.”

  “You want to go home.” She’d grown up in LA and gotten her journalism degree at USC, where she’d met Joe. They hadn’t left the West Coast since, but Joe hadn’t stopped craving his East Coast metropolises, either. “I know, babe. I figured with the new team, I’d have a better shot at breaking in.”

  “It’s just an option. So is not working at all.”

  Not this shit again. “Joe, I’m not going to be a housewife. And I don’t want kids. What fucking decade is this?”

  Joe pushed her hair behind her ear. “We’ll talk about it later. Since you’ve had a hard day…” He trailed kisses down her neck. She set the glass on the counter; her arms and legs had become as pliant as fresh pasta sheets. She giggled—alcohol always hit her fast—and let Joe tug her toward the master bedroom.

  ***

  Aleksandr

  “What?” Sasha barked into his phone.

  “You’re lucky to have me, Sasha. You could offer most agents fifty percent, they wouldn’t touch you with that attitude. You ever think about seeing someone?”

  “What, like a shrink? Talk about my feelings and shit?”

  “Yeah, you know, get some of your aggression out.”

  “That’s a great idea, Danny, really. It’s not like I play hockey to get my aggression out.”

  Danny snorted. “Fuck you, Volynsky. Listen, I got a call from King County Today. You know it?”

  A glossy, full-color monthly magazine with more frequent website updates and a topical podcast. He knew it, if only for one reason. “Yeah.”

  “They’re gonna have someone at the game, and they want an exclusive story. Set something up, okay? They’re a big deal regionally. Look like you want to be here.”

  “No one wants to be here.” Sasha stood before his condo’s floor-to-ceiling windows and gazed at the distant, snowcapped Cascade Mountains. The call informing him he’d been traded still hurt, though he’d known it was coming. In the era of free agency, teams could no longer hinge their identities on one or two players, and almost no one spent his entire career with one club anymore. Add in the salary cap, and the NHL was a business more than ever. He’d waived his no-trade clause as a financial favor to the team that had made him a star.

  “Can the bullshit for an hour. I’m not afraid to walk, Sasha. I have plenty of other clients. You’re not a novelty like the guys from France or Switzerland. You’re just another Russian.”

  He winced as if hit with a high stick. Most people fawned all over him in their sycophantic attempts to please. No one else was real with him, and thus, despite his energetic social life, he trusted few people as actual friends. Relationships without risk of any emotional investment, good or bad. Hangers-on, devouring his attention and leaving him hungry for something he would not have recognized anyway, not after this long in the spotlight. Easier to push everyone away when he could not distinguish honest affection from base civility. Of course, he projected mere persona anyway, the one they desired and expected. Quid pro quo. A Lady Byng contender he was not.

  “Yeah. Fine. I’ll do the interview.”

  “Good. The reporter is Stephanie Hartwell.”

  He held the phone away from his face for a moment, as though the screen might explain to him what he’d heard. Someone had shoved a fist into his throat. Of all the people they could send, why her?

  “Sasha?”

  “Stephanie Hartwell. Got it. Thanks, Danny.”

  “No need for thanks. Just remember what I said.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Talk to you later.” Sasha stuck the phone in his back pocket. He studied his reflection in the glass, his eye blackened by a fight that had earned him a five-minute major, his forearm bruised by a wayward puck, his neck boasting a hickey from some woman whose name he’d already forgotten.

  Stephanie Hartwell.

  He twisted the tarnished, sterling-silver ring he hadn’t taken off in over eight years. The one she had given him with ‘I love you’ engraved on the inside. Despite the passage of years, he’d often searched for her in crowds, knowing she would not be there but needing confirmation, however improbable, that she was more than emotional background noise.

  He had been sixteen, in America for the first time—he thought of it as his own scouting mission, as he intended to play North American hockey—and living with a host family in an LA suburb for the next ten months. On his first day of school, he had reported to the administrative office to fill out paperwork, receive a copy of the school’s handbook, and wait for the peer language partner assigned to him.

  He’d been studying the handbook, his English good enough to pass the SLEP test for the exchange program but laden with a heavy Russian accent when he spoke. He did not grasp the point of articles, of the th sound nonexistent in his native language, and all the other idiosyncrasies that added to the difficulty of learning English. The secretary nodded at him and cast her gaze toward the doorway.

  A tall, blond, blue-eyed girl with freckles splashed on her heart-shaped face stood before him. They stared at each other. Time slowed and then stopped altogether. He thought for a moment he might be dying. An electric buzz in his stomach sparked through his lungs, flaring into an impulsive smile even as it shorted every circuit in his brain.

  “Um, hi.” Her voice was like falling snow. “I-I’m Stephanie Hartwell. Welcome to Montecito High School.”

  They clasped hands. Somehow, he had always known her, as though the future had been speaking to him in his dreams, from a time in which he and she were already together.

  His knees shook with a frisson of exhilaration, and moisture flooded his mouth. He hoped he wouldn’t start drooling. “My name is Aleksandr Dmitryevich Volynsky. People back home cal
l me Sasha. But you may call me Alex if you like.” A more American name, which he hoped to hear falling from her lips as often as possible. Here, Sasha was a girls’ name.

  “Like Ovechkin.”

  “You know hockey?”

  She was still holding his hand, and he prayed she would not let go. “I play on our school team. I heard you’re a star in Russian juniors. So why Sasha?”

  “Sasha is short form of Aleksandr. Like…how do you say? Nickname.”

  “We, um…We’re in the same classes, so I’ll help you with your English. Hockey practice starts in October. The season starts in November.”

  “Okay,” he said. It sounded stupid, but words, especially English ones, had fled him. “I mean…thank you.”

  She smiled, and it was more beautiful than anything in heaven or on Earth.

  His heart would not hurt, he was certain, had she remained a fantasy, a photograph in his mind whose bright colors and sharp lines time would have faded had they never touched. Had he not fallen so utterly and pitiably in love with her, that love a work of art she’d chosen to abandon rather than complete.

  He’d returned home after his exchange year to play another season with SKA-1946 in the Junior Hockey League, and in that final year of juniors had captained Russia’s World Junior Championship team, where the Buffalo Gladiators had scouted him. His parents had demanded he focus on hockey; they’d given up so much for him. They required tangible results, not a teenage boy sullen over the ephemerality of high-school love. After all, she had stopped emailing him less than two months later. He had battened down the emotional hatches after that. Become the thing everyone now believed he was.

  The Gladiators drafted him that June. He made the training camp cut to start his career as their second-line left-winger instead of being sent to Rochester or juniors like most of the new kids. He would accept nothing less. He had earned his top-line spot by the end of the season, at nineteen, and became captain at twenty.