So Over You (Chicago Rebels #2)(13)

Then there was his primary use: he made an excellent mediator between Vadim and Victoria Wallace. Using his sister as a buffer smacked of cruelty, and that was where Alexei came in: screening his calls because Vadim refused to speak to his mother.

“You are sick of my cooking?” Alexei asked, his spatula raised ominously over the frying pan.

“Some variety wouldn’t kill you.”

Alexei gave nothing away, but that was par for the course. The two of them together were like Easter Island statues, yet Vadim suspected that after many years those strange monoliths understood one another.

“Something is bothering you,” Alexei said, his attention back to the stove as he cooked scrambled eggs—with yolks, of course—for himself. “Is it the Chase girl?”

Vadim snorted. The Chase girl. Alexei was never afraid to let his feelings about Isobel be known.

“It’s nothing.” Their first practice together was in an hour, and he was oddly nervous. Around Isobel! He found himself wanting to please her, which was ridiculous. She needed to impress him. Her future in coaching was on the line.

“You remember what happened last time?” Alexei asked. When Vadim didn’t answer, Alexei carried on with uncharacteristic passion. “She ruined your career.”

“And you accuse me of drama.”

He was waving the spatula now, little pieces of egg landing on the counter like ice chips flying during a vigorous skate. “She drew you into her web, and your path to the American professional league was closed off. That was her fault.”

Vadim had thought so once, but on reflection, he realized that Isobel was as much a pawn in all of this as Vadim was. Clifford Chase was protective, an alpha wolf shielding his cub. He had a vision for his daughter, and when he came across them that day, twined together in naked, postorgasmic abandon, he had seen what Isobel had not.

Vadim would have pursued this girl to the ends of the earth.

He wanted her beyond all reason, and he would have shocked and awed to make her his. A man like Clifford knew obsession when he saw it staring him in the face. With no sons, he had placed all his hopes and dreams in his daughter’s tentative career. Nothing would stand in the way of Isobel’s rise as the greatest female hockey player to grace a rink, especially not an infatuated Russian teenager.

Chase’s tactics, while not sporting, had been understandable in his mission to push his daughter to glory.

Ensure that Vadim’s visa was revoked.

Blackball him with the NHL commissioner.

Darken his name with Isobel.

I don’t care if your father is Joseph Fucking Stalin, I will end you if you come near her again, Petrov. She’s going to make history, but not if she has to play second fiddle to your career.

Of course he’d had help. Between Clifford Chase and Sergei Petrov, Vadim’s own father, any chance he’d had with Isobel was destroyed.

The KHL was not such a bad training ground. The money was terrible compared to the NHL, but Vadim didn’t need money. And Lord knew his father was pleased to have him close to home again, away from the potentially bad influence of Victoria Wallace, not that he’d heard from her. His own mother, only one time zone away in New York, and she made no effort to connect with the son she left behind when he was ten years old.

It was in the past—both his mother and Isobel. Five years ago, he had started his pro career in North America, his exile at an end. His life so far had been based in Canada, and while his forays into the States for away games placed temptation in his way, only once had he given in to his urge to see the Girl with the Blazing Skates.

It had ended disastrously.

He turned to Alexei, who was now shoveling what looked like a half dozen scrambled eggs onto a plate. Fucker. Now he placed his plate on the table and sat, knife and fork at the ready, a precursor to more “advice.”

“You will let her control your destiny again. This is not the Petrov way.”

Vadim pushed back his plate, annoyed because Alexei was right. Petrov men determined their own fates, and they certainly did not allow a woman to own them—on or off the ice.

“I will handle Isobel Chase,” Vadim said with more assurance than he felt. “Now eat your eggs, you old fool.”



“Again.”

With one foot crossed over the other, Vadim rounded one of the face-off circles at the end of the rink, then continued in a figure eight around the other one. With each completed circuit, his anger bubbled beneath his usually calm surface. Finally he’d had enough, so he braked in a cloud of ice shavings.

“Again.” Completely devoid of emotion, Isobel repeated the instruction.

He went again.

Boiled again.

Stopped again.

“A—”

“—gain?”

She blew out a breath. “I didn’t tell you to stop, so that’s all you’re going to hear from me until I do tell you to stop.”

“I know how to skate crossovers, Isobel. I’ve been skating since I was three years old.”

She placed her iPad down on the bench and glided over to him. For a tall woman, she displayed remarkable grace and fluidity, but then those qualities had been the first things he’d noticed about her. Isobel Chase had remarkable talent, was a natural-born skater. Back then, he had tried to give her tips, only to discover that she needed nothing of the sort from him.