Parental Guidance (Ice Knights #1)
Avery Flynn
To the readers. Thank you.
Chapter One
Just when Caleb Stuckey thought it couldn’t get any worse, his mom walked in.
Now, some people might think getting an ass-chewing by the Ice Knights’ coach, Winston Peppers, and the team’s oh-my-God-our-players-fucked-up-again public relations guru, Lucy Kavanagh, was about as bad as it could get. They would be wrong. Having his mom join the ass-chewing party in Lucy’s office on the fifty-sixth floor of Harbor City’s Carlyle Building brought the entire shitstorm to a whole new level of misery.
Britany Stuckey—AKA Brit the Ballbuster, according to some of her players—wasn’t just a state champion high school boys’ hockey coach and one of the handful of female boys’ hockey coaches in the country, she was also the Stuckey family titleholder for taking absolutely, 100 percent no shit from anyone. The anyone, in this case, being him. And the fact that he was a grown man and a professional hockey player with the Harbor City Ice Knights meant nothing. He would, as she often told him, forever be her little Caleb Cutie—a nickname that proved a mother’s love blinded her to her offspring’s physical flaws—and she would probably treat him as such until the day one of them got hit by the number six crosstown bus.
He turned to Peppers, a man he thought would have his back despite the video-recorded smack talk that had been blown all out of proportion. “You called my mom?”
“Yes,” Peppers asserted, not bothering to slow his pace as he marched from one end of the room to the other as if he were still in the locker room giving his team a what-for in between periods. “Because she is a crucial part of this rehabilitation plan to fix your fuckup.”
Caleb slouched down in his chair. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“Really?” Lucy asked from her seat behind her desk, snark dripping from her voice. “Do I need to play the video again? I can, because every media site on the face of the earth has posted it. Bad Lip Reading even did a mockery of it.”
Yeah, and he would have laughed his ass off at anyone else who’d been caught running his mouth like an idiot. Objectively, it was funny. It wasn’t every day almost the entire first line of a hockey team got caught bitching and moaning about the team, their playing, the coaches, and the quality of puck bunnies they banged. They’d sounded like spoiled assholes, which he totally admitted wasn’t 100 percent not the truth.
Fuck, the next words out of his mouth were going to hurt.
“Okay,” he said, avoiding eye contact with every person in the room. “It was dumb. I should have shut it down sooner.”
“Dumb?” his mom said, how-in-the-hell-did-I-birth-this-idiot thick in her voice. “You were the most senior player in that car, and you let the younger guys trash their own team!”
He flinched. Yeah, that was not a good look. Still… “I’d had some beers, and they were letting off steam. And it should be noted that I did the right thing by taking an Uber instead of driving.”
His mom rolled her eyes. “That’s called doing the bare minimum to adult properly.”
The room went silent except for the mental buzz saw revving in his ears so realistically that he could smell the diesel fumes. He clenched his teeth hard enough that his jaw ached so he wouldn’t snap off a nasty retort at his mom. That wouldn’t get him anywhere. She hadn’t gotten where she was because she backed down from fights. He’d inherited the trait, but he’d learned that sometimes the best way to win was to appear like he wasn’t fighting at all. Guerrilla warfare. Psyops. Subterfuge. When it came to winning a war with his mom, those were the only ways to go.
Never mind that he was an adult with a mortgage, a retirement plan, and a degree in sports management. Sure, he’d had a lot of help from a tutor to earn his degree, but he’d still use it to open his own company when it came time to hang up his skates for good. To his mom, though, he would forever and always be Caleb Cutie who’d fucked up again. And again. And again.
It was fucking exhausting trying to meet Britany Stuckey’s expectations.
Lucy, who’d been uncharacteristically watching the goings-on with her mouth shut, broke the tense silence. “Here’s what it comes down to, Stuckey. You embarrassed yourself by not stopping the smack talk. You embarrassed the team. You embarrassed Harbor City. This has to be fixed. You are going to have to change the narrative and give everyone something else to talk about besides what dickheads you all are—that is, if you want to keep playing for the Ice Knights.” She gave him a second to digest that bit of yes, it’s been confirmed you’re an asshole, and if you don’t fix it, you’ll be playing in the reindeer league at the North Pole. “And that’s why you’re going to give the media a story they won’t be able to stop talking about. You’re going to let your mom be in charge of your dating profile on Bramble, and you’re going to tell her about each date so she can film video segments that the company will use in ads that will begin running immediately.”
He couldn’t breathe, and a throbbing started in his head right behind his eyes. “That’s not gonna happen. I didn’t even say anything about the puck bunnies. Why do I have to be part of a date PR nightmare?”
“Because you didn’t tell your teammates to shut the fuck up, either,” Lucy said. “And because you were the senior player in the car, and you have to set the example or pay the price, whichever the public decides needs to be done for the team as a whole to move past this.”