Heated Rivalry (Game Changers #2)
Rachel Reid
Prologue
October 2016—Montreal
Shane Hollander was as close to losing it as he ever allowed himself to get.
He’d endured two periods and twelve minutes of one of the most frustrating hockey games he’d ever played. It should have been a glorious win at home for his Montreal Voyageurs against their archrivals, the Boston Bears. Instead it had been a grueling humiliation, and the score stood at 4–1 for Boston, with less than eight minutes left on the clock. Shane had had no less than five beautiful scoring chances. He’d taken shots that should never have missed. But they had. And the Bears had capitalized on the Voyageurs’ mistakes.
One man had capitalized more than anyone. The most hated man in Montreal: Ilya Rozanov. The near century-old rivalry between the Montreal and Boston NHL teams had, over the past six seasons, become personified by Hollander and Rozanov. Their intense animosity was clear even to the fans in the farthest, cheapest seats.
Hollander bent at the face-off circle now, facing Rozanov as the referee prepared to drop the puck after the Russian’s second goal of the game.
“Having a good night?” Rozanov asked cheerfully. His hazel eyes sparkled the way they always did when he was talking shit.
“Fuck you,” Hollander growled.
“Still time for a hat trick, I think,” Rozanov mused, his English barely comprehensible between his thick accent and his mouth guard. “Should I do it now, or wait until last minute? More exciting that way, yes?”
Hollander gritted his teeth around his own mouth guard and didn’t answer.
“Shut up, Rozanov,” the referee said. “Last warning.”
Rozanov stopped talking, but he managed to find an even more effective way of getting under Hollander’s skin: he winked.
And then he won the face-off.
“Fuck!” Jean-Jacques Boiziau, the Voyageurs’ giant Haitian-Canadian defenseman, hurled his stick at the wall of their dressing room.
“That’s enough, J.J.,” Shane said, but there was no real threat behind it. To make it clear that he was in no mood to fight, or even argue, with anyone, he slumped into his dressing room stall.
Shane’s left wing line mate, Hayden Pike, sat on the bench next to him, as always. “You all right?” Hayden asked quietly.
“Sure,” Shane said flatly. He tipped his head back until it met the cool wall behind him and closed his eyes.
Using the word “passionate” to describe Montreal hockey fans would be an understatement. Montreal loved the Voyageurs to the point of absurdity. Their arena was one of the toughest places for visiting teams to play, because they faced not only one of the best teams in the league, but the loudest fans in the league as well. The fans also had no problem letting their own beloved team know exactly how disappointed they were with them.
But when Montreal fans were really devastated, like they had been tonight, they were almost silent. And that was Shane Hollander’s least favorite sound.
“You know what would be sweet?” Hayden asked. “You know that movie, The Purge? Where you get to, like, break whatever laws for one night with no consequences?”
“Sort of,” Shane said.
“Man, if that was real, I would murder the fuck out of Rozanov.”
Shane laughed. He couldn’t disagree that bludgeoning that smug Russian face would be at least a little satisfying.
Their coach entered the room and voiced his disappointment with remarkable calm. It was early in the season—this had been their first regular season matchup against Boston—and they had been playing well most games. This was a glitch. They would move on.
Then it was time to face the press. At that moment, Shane would have preferred to see a pack of starving wolves enter the room, but he knew there was no avoiding the reporters. They always wanted to talk to him, specifically, after every game, and especially after games where he faced Rozanov.
He pulled his sweat-soaked jersey off over his head so the CCM-branded athletic undershirt would be seen on camera. Part of his endorsement contract.
A semicircle of cameras, lights, and microphones formed around him.
“Hey, guys,” Shane said tiredly.
They asked their boring questions, and Shane gave them boring answers. What could he even say? They’d lost. It was a hockey game, and one team lost, and that team was his team.
“Do you want to know what Rozanov just said about you?” one of the reporters asked gleefully.
“Something nice, I assume.”
“He said he wished you’d been playing tonight.”
The crowd of reporters was silent. Waiting.
Shane snorted and shook his head. “Well, we play in Boston in three weeks. You can let him know that I will definitely be at that game.”
The reporters laughed, delighted that they had gotten their Hollander vs. Rozanov sound bite for the night.
An hour later—showered, changed and finally alone—Shane drove himself home. Not to his Westmount penthouse, but to the one nobody knew about.
Shane only spent a few nights a year at the small condominium in the Plateau. It was where he went when he wanted to be sure of total privacy.
He parked in the tiny lot behind the three-story building, let himself in the back door, and quickly climbed the stairs to the top floor. He knew the other two floors were unoccupied because he owned those too. The bottom floor was rented to a high-end kitchenware boutique, which had closed for the night hours ago.