Sweet as Pie by Alicia Hunter Pace

Hell on Earth.

Pro hockey defenseman Jake Champagne understood the meaning of the phrase, but had never lived it until that March day at the end of his second season with the Nashville Sound.

He woke to the sound of pounding and the smell of hockey stench. At first, he thought the pounding was in his head but, as the fog cleared, he realized someone was intent on getting into his hotel room. When he opened his eyes, the first image he saw was a blurry half-empty bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. No wonder he couldn’t see straight. He was usually a beer guy, but special nights called for special liquor and last night had been spectacular—though not in a good way.

Oh, no. Not at all. After hoisting the cup two years in a row, his team had gone four up and four down in the playoffs. Plus, it was cold here in Boston and he hated the cold, hated the snow. You wouldn’t catch any snow on the ground in March in the Mississippi Delta—or any other time either. That was just one of the things he missed about home.

The pounding on the door became more intense just as a warm body rolled over next to him.

Hellfire and brimstone. It was all coming back now, and that was where the hockey stench was coming from. She was wearing his nasty jersey, had insisted on wearing it while they made love. He laughed under his breath. Made love. Ha.

He pulled on his sweatpants and caught sight of the clock as he crossed the room. Five forty-one freaking a.m.! The team plane didn’t leave until ten o’clock. He was going to kill somebody—probably Robbie. His best friend most likely hadn’t been to sleep yet. The last time he’d seen him, Robbie’d been doing shots with a redhead, the companion of the blonde in his own bed. He jerked open the door. “What do you want?”

Not Robbie. It was Sound staff member Oliver Klepacki, who frowned at the tone of Jake’s voice. “Sparks.” He used Jake’s nickname.

Dread washed over Jake. This man was not in the habit of knocking on hotel doors at this hour. In fact, from the looks of him, he had just rolled out himself. “Sorry, Packi. Is something wrong?”

“You need to call your mother.”

After closing the door, Jake reached for his phone with shaking hands. He’d turned it off last night, even before coming back to the room with his latest charming companion. Not wanting to talk to anyone who might want to commiserate over the loss to the Colonials or the minutes he’d spent in the penalty box because he’d showed his ass on the ice for no good reason, he’d taken the landline phone off the hook.

But that seemed small now. Something bad had happened. Christine Jacob Champagne was a Mississippi Delta Southern belle who took breakfast in her room every morning at eight o’clock. She spoke to no one before then. In any case, she wasn’t the type to hunt down her grown son like a dog who needed his worm medicine.

He didn’t call right away. There had to be a clue on his phone, and he couldn’t take another breath without knowing if his dad and sister were okay.

Fourteen missed calls, five voice mails, and six text messages later, he knew. His uncle Blake—the man who had put him on skates at four years old—had had a heart attack.

And he was dead. The texts and voice mails hadn’t said so. His mother would never leave that in a message, but he had to be. Otherwise she wouldn’t have hunted him down in Boston at this hour.

He started to call, but paused and looked down at the woman in his bed. His mother would probably know she was here, would probably be able to smell her through the phone. He went into the bathroom, quietly drawing the door shut behind him before he dialed.

“Darling boy.” Christine answered immediately.

“Uncle Blake?” he said.

There were tears in her voice. “I know how you loved him.”

Loved.Jake hadn’t realized that he’d still held out a miniscule bit of hope until his mother spoke in the past tense. He had known before he even made the call, but—at the same time—how was it possible?

“So hard to believe...only forty-seven...” Christine’s voice trailed off.

“Forty-six.” Jake was very sure of that. Jake had been four and Blake twenty-five—just the age Jake would be come October—when Blake had moved to the Delta to work at Champagne Cotton Brokers. Not long after, he had married Christine’s younger sister.

“Forty-six,” Christine said. “You’re right, of course. Would’ve been forty-seven in June.”

Would’ve been.Cruel words.

There were things he should be saying, questions he should be asking to prove he wasn’t an asshole. “Aunt Olivia?” He said the words, but his thoughts were on himself.

In a land where football was king and baseball crown prince, Blake had taught Jake to skate by standing behind him, hands on his waist. Blake claimed trainer walkers that beginning skaters typically used to steady themselves encouraged bad posture and technique.

“She’s resting,” Christine said. “At least I hope she is.”

“I hope so, too.” The words were hollow. Hope wasn’t much of a word right now.

Blake had showed him the movie Miracle on Ice and bought him a souvenir 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team puck. At the time Jake didn’t understand that the puck had not been in the actual game—or for that matter, that Miracle on Ice wasn’t actual footage of the famous Soviet/U.S. match, or that the game had been played years before his birth. And later it didn’t matter. By then, the puck was his constant companion and good luck charm.

“Adam and Nicole?” Jake asked after his two teenage cousins. Even after Blake and Olivia had children, he had not forsaken his bond with Jake.

“About like you’d expect,” Christine said.

But what was that? How did anyone know what to expect?

Expect.Things would be expected of him by people who seemed to instinctively know the correct behavior for every situation known to man. “Naturally, I’m coming home.” For the first time today, his voice sounded sure and strong.

And suddenly, that was what he wanted, all he wanted—to be home in Cottonwood, Mississippi. He wanted to drive down Main Street, past the bakery, the hardware store, and the drugstore that still had a soda fountain. He wanted to go to the house that been home to three generations of Champagnes, sleep in his childhood room, and smell the bacon and coffee that Louella had made for his family every morning for thirty years. He wanted to take his grandmother to lunch at the Country Club and hit a bucket of balls with his dad.

But Christine was talking, interrupting the flow of his thoughts. “No, Jake. No.”

“I don’t need to wait until morning,” he assured her. “I won’t be too tired to drive. I’ll pack a few things and get on the road as soon as I can. I’ll get into Nashville around noon and be home by bedtime—well before.” Certainly in time to stop at Fat Joe’s and pick up a sack of famous Delta tamales.

“No, Jake! Listen to me.” Christine began to speak very clearly as if she were speaking to a child. “Do not come home. We’re all flying out tonight to Vermont. You need to go there.”

“Vermont?” Did they have tamales in Vermont?

“Yes. You do remember that Blake is from Vermont, don’t you?”

“Well, yes, but...” Of course he remembered. Vermont was the whole reason Blake had played hockey as a kid, the reason he’d taught Jake to love hockey. But it didn’t make any sense. Cottonwood had become Blake’s home.

Christine seemed to read his mind. “He has—had family there. His father is unwell and unable to travel under the best of circumstances. The funeral will be there. You need to go to Vermont. We’ve reserved a block of rooms.”

So, no home. More cold weather. Probably snow. But there would be people from home. That was something.

“Who’s going?” he asked. “Besides y’all, Olivia and the kids?”

“About who you would expect—your grandmother, your sister, Anna-Blair and Keith, your aunt—”

“Evie? Is Evie going?” He cut her off. The mention of his godparents, Anna-Blair and Keith Pemberton, naturally led to thoughts of their daughter.

“No,” Christine said. “She can’t get away from work.”

Evie had opened a pie shop in a fancy-pants section of Birmingham, Alabama, a few years back. There had been a time when she would have—pie shop, or no pie shop—crawled over glass to get to him if he needed her. However, that was before he’d let life get in the way and hadn’t bothered to take care of their friendship. But he couldn’t think about that right now. He had to get to Vermont.

“Okay, Mama. I’ll go there from here. Text me the particulars and I’ll book a flight. Or rent a car and drive. Yeah. Probably that.” It would be faster, and not nearly as annoying as dealing with a commercial airline.

“All right. Text me your ETA when you know. Your dad wants to talk to you. I love you, Jake.”

“I love you, too, Mama.”

“Son!” Marc Champagne’s big booming voice was the next thing he heard. Jake could tell in that one spoken syllable that his dad was driving this heartbreak wagon, bossing everyone around, and making them like it. He couldn’t fix it, but by damn, he would make it go as easy as he and his money could. If Marc had his way, he’d probably move Olivia and the kids into the Champagne ancestral home.

“Hello, Dad.”

“This is bad business, Jake. Bad.”

“As bad as it gets,” Jake agreed.

“Listen.” Marc always said that before he said something important, even when the person he was speaking to was already listening. “I’ll buy you a plane ticket back to Nashville from Vermont.”

Jake opened his mouth to remind his dad that he could afford his own ticket. But that wasn’t necessary. Marc knew how much the Sound paid him.

“Sure, Dad. Thanks.” Jake hung up and walked back out to the bedroom. He needed to get that woman—Meghan, if he recalled correctly—out of here. Goodtime girls had no place in bad times.

It was when he put out a hand to shake her awake that he saw it—the glint of gold on the ring finger of her left hand. Just when he thought he couldn’t feel any sicker, his stomach bottomed out. Since his divorce two years ago, he’d taken raising hell to a whole new art form, but there was one line he had never crossed: he did not sleep with married women.

“Hey.” He poked her shoulder.

“What? Stop!” When she jerked the covers over her head, he saw that the ring was not a wedding band after all, but some kind of little birthstone ring that had turned around on her finger. He didn’t feel much relief in that. He hadn’t asked, hadn’t even thought about it. That was a first. And if he had been willing to cross that line, what was next? His eyes darted to his bedside table. He was relieved to see an open box of condoms there, though it didn’t negate the panic and shame coursing through him. But this was no time for self-refection. “Hey, Meghan.” He pulled the covers off her head. “You have to wake up.”

She opened one mascara-smudged eye, seemed to consider, and decided to smile.

“Hello there, Southern boy. Come back to bed.”

“I can’t.”

She sat up. “Sure you can. I want to see if you speak Southerner as good in the morning as you do at night.” She ran a hand up his thigh.

“No. Really. You’ve got to go.” He moved her hand.

“Why? What time is it?” She frowned and picked up her phone. “What the fuck! Do you know what time it is?”

“I do. I’m sorry. But you have to go.” He was repeating himself, but apparently it was necessary.

She pouted. “I thought you liked me.”

“I did. I do. But you still have to go.”

She threw her legs over the side of the bed. He thought he had won, but she was relentless. “All right,” she said with a sigh. “I’m just going to jump in the shower. Why don’t you order breakfast? I’ve never had room service before.”

And he was done trying to trot out his Mississippi Delta Cotillion manners—not that he’d been very successful. “And you aren’t going to have it now.” She didn’t deserve it, but he was out of time, out of patience, out of everything except the raw feelings marching through his head and heart. He reached for his wallet and peeled off two hundred-dollar bills. “Buy yourself some breakfast and an Uber.”

Meghan looked at him like he was a snake recently escaped from a leprosy colony. He couldn’t blame her. She had signed up for a little uncomplicated fun and had woken up to a complicated man in a complicated situation.

When she didn’t say anything, he peeled off another hundred. “Ubers are expensive.”

“You are an asshole,” she said.

He nodded. “I am that.”

She snatched the money from his hand, gathered up her clothes and boots from the floor, and stomped to the door. With her hand on the knob she turned and hissed, “I’m keeping this jersey.”

He nodded. “Please. I want you to have it.” It was a good thing it reached her knees because apparently she couldn’t stand him another second, not even long enough to put on her jeans.

Understandable. He couldn’t stand himself.

Jake needed concrete evidence there was a time when he didn’t drink a six-pack every night and sleep with women who were more interested in his jersey than in him—needed to remember a time before he’d lost so many pieces of himself that he didn’t know who he was anymore.

He didn’t want to be a man Uncle Blake would have been ashamed of.

But if things didn’t change, he was going to become the kind of person that everyone hated as much as he was beginning to hate himself. He loved the Sound, loved his teammates, but it would be easier to start over somewhere else with people who didn’t naturally assume he was going to raise hell.

His scalp prickled at the thought.

Start over. Leave Nashville.

Leave the Sound? Maybe he ought to. The team had enough heavy-hitting veteran players that he was still the new kid in town. It would be years before he skated first line in Nashville, and who knew if he had years?

Blake certainly hadn’t.

Jake picked up his phone again and dialed his agent, Miles Gentry, who answered immediately, despite the early hour. “Jake! I was just—”

“Trade me,” he blurted out.

“What?”

“Trade me. Hopefully to somewhere I can skate first line. But it has to be a place where I don’t have to buy a snow shovel. I don’t care where. California. Texas. Florida. Arizona. Just get me the hell out of Nashville.”

“Are you sure about this?” Miles asked.

“As sure as the fact that death is coming for us all.”

Miles was quiet for a moment. “How do you feel about that new expansion team down in Birmingham? The Alabama Yellowhammers.”

Right. He hadn’t considered the new Birmingham team. It was still in the South—and Evie lived there. Maybe he could get their friendship back on track. Those were pluses, but the team was an unknown quantity. “Talk to me,” Jake said.

“They’ve asked about you. I was waiting until the playoffs were over to tell you.”

“Playoffs aren’t over. Just over for the Sound—and me.”

“Semantics,” Miles said. “So—Alabama. Brand-new state-of-the-art practice facility. Drew Kelty is the head coach.” Jake didn’t really know him other than by name, but Kelty had plenty of pro hockey experience—as a player and a coach. “From what they said, I would think first line is an excellent bet. Any interest?”

And Jake said something neither he, nor any other Ole Miss fan, had ever said before. “Roll Tide.”