Double Major: Portland Storm, #6

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

Double Major

Copyright © 2014 by Catherine Gayle

Cover Design by Kim Killion, The Killion Group

All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without written permission.

For more information: [email protected]

For Monica, because you wanted a wedding. Now you have two.

Trademark Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

NHL: National Hockey League

AHL: American Hockey League

Buffalo Sabres

LA Kings

Montreal Canadiens

New York Islanders

Toronto Maple Leafs

Winnipeg Jets

This is a novella of second epilogues to books 1-4 in the Portland Storm series. It is approximately 35,000 words long.

It’s the NHL’s draft day, but the whole Portland Storm team is back together for an entirely different event. Complete with a double wedding, an unanticipated guest, overdue apologies, unexpected goodbyes, and fresh starts, this big day has the potential to get them all called for a Double Major.

DOUBLE MAJOR is Book 4.5 in the Portland Storm hockey romance series written by USA Today bestselling author Catherine Gayle. If you enjoy it, look for the other books in the series in the following order.

BREAKAWAY

ON THE FLY

TAKING A SHOT

LIGHT THE LAMP

DELAY OF GAME

DOUBLE MAJOR

IN THE ZONE

HOLIDAY HAT TRICK

COMEBACK

DROPPING GLOVES

HOME ICE

MISTLETOE MISCONDUCT

LOSING AN EDGE

GAME BREAKER

DEFENSIVE ZONE

POWER PLAY

There are also currently two boxed sets of books within the series, if you would prefer to purchase them in that way.

PORTLAND STORM: THE FIRST PERIOD (Contains Breakaway, On the Fly, Taking a Shot, and Light the Lamp)

PORTLAND STORM: THE SECOND PERIOD (Contains Delay of Game, Double Major, In the Zone, Holiday Hat Trick, and Comeback)

Also, join Catherine’s mailing list to receive ICE BREAKER, a Portland Storm short story prequel that you can’t get anywhere else.

Want to join in the Portland Storm discussion? Join the Facebook reader group at Cat’s House.

Interested in buying your own customizable Portland Storm and Tulsa Thunderbirds jerseys, T-shirts, and more? Find out how here.

I’D ARRIVED EARLY. It was an old habit, but one I doubted I’d break anytime soon. One of my first coaches had always told us that to be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, and to be late… Well, you’d just better not be. Now, a decade or more later, I couldn’t seem to make myself show up anywhere merely on time. Hardly anyone else was there yet for the rehearsal—no one I knew, anyway—so I plopped down on one of the seats up near the front, right by the altar, and pulled out my cell to scan the half a million texts I’d gotten in the last hour from Levi.

Levi was my younger brother, the oldest after me. We had five more brothers younger than him, too. There were kind of a lot of us. And he’d been texting me like crazy all day because tomorrow was the National Hockey League’s Entry Draft, and he was expected to be picked in the top five. No matter what, he should definitely be the first defenseman taken in this year’s draft. Two years ago, I was in a similar spot. I was selected seventh overall by the Portland Storm, and I somehow made the team right out of training camp as an eighteen-year-old rookie.

Because I had been in that same position and could coach him on what to expect, right now I felt like the shittiest brother in the world. Levi and the rest of our family—even our uncle and cousins—had all been with me when I’d been drafted. And they were all in New York with Levi right now, helping to keep him calm as he went through his meetings and media interviews and physical tests, and all of the other insanity that goes with being a top prospect.

But where was I when I ought to be with him? I wasn’t in New York; I was in Providence, Rhode Island. Two of my teammates were getting married tomorrow. That made me a good teammate, I supposed, but not a very good brother.

Team captain Eric Zellinger—Zee to the guys—and his childhood best friend, Brenden Soupy Campbell, were both tying the knot, and for some reason they’d asked me to be one of their groomsmen. I wasn’t sure why they’d chosen me and not one of the guys who had been around the team longer, like Ny or maybe Monty. I mean, yeah, I’d lived with both of them, but that didn’t make me groomsman material, did it? Either way, they hadn’t asked those guys; they’d asked me.

I looked around the mostly empty chapel. At least being here early gave me time to respond to Levi’s texts. I spent a few minutes poring over them. He’d had a good meeting with Jim Sutter and the rest of the Storm’s executives at the draft, but Jim had already warned me countless times not to get my hopes up. He wasn’t slated to make a pick until number eighteen this year, and Levi would be long gone by that point. The only way Levi would be drafted by the Storm was if Jim somehow worked out a trade with another general manager and was able to move up. But he had told me again and again that it just wasn’t likely to happen. Which wasn’t news to me. Trading up would mean losing prospects, and they were a commodity he was trying to stock up on, not trade away.

Since Levi knew he wasn’t likely to be chosen by the Storm, he had his sights set on the Toronto Maple Leafs. They were the team we’d always been fans of, my brothers and I, growing up in Ontario. They had the fifth pick this year, but Levi said his meeting with them hadn’t gone well at all so he didn’t have a good feeling about it.

It went much better with the Montreal Canadiens, but they weren’t picking until number twelve. He felt pretty confident about his interviews with the Buffalo Sabres and the New York Islanders, too—both were slated to pick within the top five—so in all likelihood he’d be playing for one of those two teams.

His best interview of the day, though—at least so far—was with the Winnipeg Jets. There was a small part of me that hoped the Jets would choose him. They were a Western Conference team, like Portland, and so Levi and I would get to play each other more often than if he were with some team in the Eastern Conference. They were slated to pick sixth, and everyone was saying that they were looking for defensemen in this draft, so there was a definite possibility there.

Levi still had meetings scheduled with five other teams for later on in the day, so it was anyone’s guess where he would end up.

I was just about to respond to his slew of messages when the door opened and about a dozen people came in—Zee and Soupy, their fiancées Dana and Rachel, and most of the others in the wedding party like Liam Kally Kallen and his girlfriend, Noelle Payne. I only had eyes for one of them, though—Katie Weber, the oldest daughter of my former teammate, David Weber.

I’d had a thing for Katie for two solid years, ever since I first joined the Storm. These days, it was much more than that. I was half in love with her.

I hadn’t seen her since I left Portland almost six weeks ago, and it took me by surprise to discover that she had some hair now. A few months back, she’d been diagnosed with leukemia. She’d had to go through radiation and chemotherapy and all that, so she’d lost her hair and wore scarves to cover her baldness most of the time. Or at least she did the last time I saw her.

I knew she’d finished her chemo before we’d been knocked out of the playoffs, but I guess I hadn’t thought about the fact that her hair would be growing back already. It was short, like a pixie cut, and it looked soft to the touch. Thinking that only made me want to touch it, though, and that probably wasn’t the best idea with her dad standing right beside her.

Webs caught my eye and inclined his head in my direction, but I still couldn’t ever determine what the looks he gave me meant. Hi? Come on over? Take one step in this direction and I’ll rip your balls off and stuff them down your throat? I couldn’t be sure. If his wife, Laura, had been paying attention, I might have been able to get a read on him from her, but she was caught up talking to Sara Thomas, our former head coach’s daughter. So Laura was no help to me right now.

Webs had just retired as a player, and this season he was going to be one of the Storm’s assistant coaches. That should work out just great…as long I didn’t misinterpret any of the looks he gave me.

The Storm made it all the way to Game Seven in the second round of the playoffs last season, but the LA Kings had gotten the best of us in the end. We couldn’t really hang our heads over that. Our team hadn’t been to the post-season at all in the previous five years, so getting to the second round was a lot further than anyone had expected us to go. Plus, the Kings went on to win the Stanley Cup, and we’d nearly taken them out in the second round. That was definitely nothing to be ashamed of. We were all hoping to take what we’d done last season and improve on it this coming year—and that meant making the most of the time off we had this summer.

I’d gone home to my family pretty much as soon as I’d finished clearing out my stall. I think I slept for about a week straight once I got there, but then I’d gone back to life as usual. All my brothers played hockey, too, so we were all training together—some of us more seriously than others. But then again, Jack—the youngest—was only eight, and most of the boys really didn’t need to work out like Levi and I had to. It was still fun, us all being together like that. Especially since Levi and I had started using the youngest boys as our weights, bench pressing them, that sort of thing.

Katie and her family had remained in Portland after the season ended because she and her younger brother and sister had to finish out the school year. Now she’d graduated, though, and she’d finished all of her cancer treatments. Webs had let us all know a few weeks ago that her latest tests showed she was cancer free.

That meant she could move forward with her life. I just wasn’t certain if I was part of it.

I’d taken her to her prom, and we’d spent some time together since then…but she had been sick and still in high school, and I had been in the middle of the playoffs for the first time in my