Dark Blue

Focus.

That had become nearly impossible as of late, with everything going on in his life he never saw coming. Of course he believed in love. He believed in finding someone special in your life to spend forever with, but he had absolutely no idea soul mates actually existed.

His soul mate, his other half . . . she was near him. He wasn’t sure where yet, but he knew she was here. Aside from the fact that she had been at every game and event since the beginning of their five years together, she had become his sixth sense.

It wasn’t like the Iceoplex was the biggest place he had ever played hockey in, nor was it overly crowded with sports fans cheering the Penguins on as they fought to win.

No . . . it was only practice.

She tried to stay relatively hidden, back away from everyone’s eyesight as she sat at the very back of the Iceoplex, merely watching and waiting for the guys to finish up. Never being one to interrupt anything, or speak up even when she needed to, she knew how to blend.

Even when Sidney occasionally looked around, obviously trying to place exactly where she was, she managed to stay hidden. It also helped that when he started looking, she ducked down behind the seats in front of her and hid from him.

As Sidney’s gaze scanned over the seats and still couldn’t find her, a small grin played on the corners of his lips. That girl . . . one of the spunkiest and craziest people he had ever met. Sidney wasn’t what you would call “serious,” but she opened up a level of fun in his life he had never experienced before.

At twenty-six years old, he found himself enjoying hide-and-seek on a regular basis. That’s how wonderful Aris was. Even the most childish things . . . Sidney could spend the rest of his life being a big child with her.

Underneath that porcelain skin, that huge smile, there was a sensitive heart and a strong soul. Though she acted like a child sometimes, she was far from it. When the child wasn’t out to play, she was such a deep and brilliant person in so many aspects in life.

Well . . . she was a bit lacking in the common sense department, but that was completely endearing. Watching as her eyes widened, those shimmering cyan eyes that caught his attention the moment they connected with his, while she tilted her head to the side as she thought long and hard about what a certain joke one of the guys made might mean, Sidney couldn’t help but smile.

Everything about her was charming, from the scar on her hip she got when she was in the eighth grade to the crooked curve of her nose she was born with. Of course, breaking her nose four summers in a row didn’t really help make it “normal,” in her words, but all the things she hated about herself, Sidney adored.

Some of the guys noticed when their captain looked towards the stands, and of course they knew why. Unlike Sidney, they had seen her when she arrived.

Geno was the only one to smirk about it, though. He didn’t say anything, not until practice was over and everyone started heading off the ice.

Sidney wasn’t looking where he was going, not really. His eyes and attention were focused on finding his girlfriend, who was being absolutely adorable and hiding, still. He knew he would have to get changed and find her, and he couldn’t wait.

His heart raced, even still, at the idea of getting to kiss her again, but then, his mind wandered off to the thing that had been on his mind lately. It made his stomach twist and knot in fear, and all of the sudden, he was on the verge of hyperventilating.

Geno slid up behind his captain and slapped him on the shoulder, something that both surprised Sidney and nearly made the man lose his balance. “Where Aris, Captain?”

Sidney swallowed hard and looked back to one of his greatest friends. “Uh . . . somewhere. Why?”

“Has Sid decided?”

Sidney knew what he was asking, the same thing that made his stomach churn. It shouldn’t have scared him so much, but really, it did. The whole idea of it . . . and it wasn’t so much that he was nervous she would say no. As a matter of fact, he knew her answer already, and he had already gotten her father’s blessing—the two things that most guys worried about when it came to proposing.

Not Sidney. He worried about screwing it up because even though Aris claimed that her life could’ve been much worse, she didn’t really have anything special that happened to her. She was a writer, a damn good one in Sid’s eyes, and she was actually in the process of getting her first book published, but before that? She was mostly invisible.

Sure, she had a few really great friends along the way, but in the end, she only still talked to one of them. When she moved to Pittsburgh, away from her tiny town in Montana, she lost all contact with most people in her life.

Not that they really noticed much . . . and that was something Sidney couldn’t wrap his head around. How could people forget about her? She was so utterly special that Sidney hated spending a day without seeing her.

That was how Aris preferred it, though. It was why she sat in the front of the room and wore ordinary clothes, why she didn’t say much both at school and at home.

With the guys, however, they brought her inner self out, and there was no quiet girl in the back. She was bubbly and energetic, and she could make even the most upset person smile.

Hell, she managed to make Sidney smile even after the guys got their asses kicked.

But that was the main reason why Sidney wanted his proposal to be perfect and special because she deserved to have something as perfect and special in her life as she put in everyone else’s. The other reason was when the two had first started dating casually, she, in a mostly offhand comment she never expected him to remember, she said that she wanted someone in her life who would be romantic, who would make the proposal special and put effort into it—nothing like the man her sister was marrying, who asked her on Valentine’s Day by putting the ring in her champagne. It wasn’t the worst way to propose in the world, but there was no thought put into it. It was cliché.

That wasn’t what Aris wanted, and if everything went according to plan, that wasn’t what Sidney was going to give her.

He would make her feel as special as she really was.

“Yeah, Geno. I’ve decided.”



There was nothing about her that didn’t captivate him; she fell across his path upon chance years ago via one of his teammates, and from that moment forward she was the primary thought, primary concern are the foremost part of Jonathan’s mind.

He adored her, truly, on the most basic of levels—though, that’s not to say he didn’t want to do unspeakable things to his darling little pixie-like angel. His. The word tumbled around his thoughts and he rolled it around on his tongue; tasting it, exploring it, dreaming it. The way it had leapt into the stream of thoughts startled Jonathan; that’d never happened before. As he continued to humor himself and dwell on it, he came to a simple realization—one that immediately made his lips pull downward into a scowl. That was just the thing—Devin wasn’t his by any stretch of the imagination. She, as per self-declaration, was married . . . “married to the single life,” as she so eloquently put it.

Brushing past that, he let himself settle on the electric current that slipped through his veins at the three-letter word.

His.

The electric current was shock, no doubt, but again Jonathan’s lip twitched downward in a frown while his brow met in the center of his forehead. The girl was hardly someone Jonathan would consider even his friend. She was mostly close friends with two of the Sweedes on the team, Niklas Hjalmarsson and David Rundblad. The only reason he had stumbled on the chance of meeting Devin was because Patrick Kane had taken quite a liking to her, claiming the poor girl as his partner in crime. Poor, unsuspecting Chicago..

But, though Jonathan disproved of some of Devin’s adrenaline surging extracurricular activities that Patrick was slowly but surely beginning to acclimate himself with, the Captain couldn’t help but suggest to his teammates she accompany them after a game to this bar, or that party, or simply to dinner. She was intoxicating, and Jonathan couldn’t for the life of him quite place his finger on the reason he felt such a desire to simply be near the girl.

Bringing him out of his thoughts, Jonathan’s phone buzzed loudly in the passenger seat. His dark eyes flickered briefly from the dark interstate to the device, lighting up with a picture of Lindsay. A soft sigh pushed through his lips, and he answered the call.

It was nothing new. Lindsay had been phoning him before bed since they began talking, just after he won the Stanley Cup last year. His eyes narrowed in anger, reliving every moment in their 7 games with the Kings where they were robbed; robbed of the chance to truly defend their title as Champions.

Jonathan didn’t let it sour his conversation with his girlfriend, though. He listened with mild attentiveness as she went through her day. After half an hour, he bid her goodnight and basked in the only sound surrounding him—the engine of his Audi R8—as he zipped effortlessly through the light, late-evening interstate traffic.

In a moment of weakness, he decided to text her . . . later, after he’d slept some, and when he knew she would be awake.