“Nothing is stupid,” he finally said after a pause.
“Okay, this is going to sound as if I’m hysterical, but I have this playlist, it gets me into the right headspace before games—”
“What’s on it?”
Shit. “Classical stuff mostly.” I was the odd one out in the dressing room, most of the guys liked heavier stuff, but there was something soothing about classical music.
“What has it been changed to?”
“Just noise, metal, I guess, bands I don’t know, why? Is it important?”
He shrugged a little. “At this stage, I treat every tiny detail as important.”
“I’m probably selecting the wrong playlist or something.”
“Do you actually have playlists of bands you don’t know on your phone?” He sounded skeptical, and I wondered how his brain worked. Was he like one of those PIs off the television, all flash and lucky coincidences, and diving in front of a bullet? Or was he the sort of bodyguard I’d find in a psychological thriller, all calm and brilliantly analytical.
“No, I don’t, which is why I thought it was odd. Does the music thing seem weird to you?” I asked after a moment’s pause.
“It might be a concern.”
Finally, I couldn’t take the short answers and weird silence. “What exactly is your job here, with me?”
He loosened his stance and reached into his pocket, pulling out a blank envelope and handing it to me.
Great. So he’s the strong silent type.
“You want me to read it?”
“No, I thought you could eat it,” he deadpanned.
I narrowed my eyes at him. The power dynamic in this weird relationship was screwing with my head, and I needed to pull my shit together if I had to have him around me for very long.
“Ha freaking ha.” I opened the envelope and pulled out a photo, tilting it so I could see it.
It was a capture from another of my naked photoshoot pictures, only this time there was a photoshopped knife in my chest, and blood dripping from it, along with a chilling message. I cleared my throat of the sudden tightness, then read out loud.
“Time to die number twenty-three.” I swallowed, then carefully put the photo back in and returned the envelope to Jason. “Well, shit,” I murmured as a sudden chill skittered down my spine.
“My job, Mr. Howell, is straightforward.” He paused a moment until I glanced up at him, and our gazes connected. “I’m the one who will keep you alive.”
Chapter Three
The silence was deafening, and the reality of what was happening was like having a bucket of frozen water tipped over my head.
“Take a seat and we can talk, Mr. Howell.” Jason instructed.
I bristled at his tone, “Garrett.”
“Take a seat, Garrett.”
I did as I was told, but not before I’d made it deliberately obvious that this wasn’t something I wanted to be doing. It was a petulant, childish thing to do, but for a few seconds, it made me feel better. He tilted his head and stared at me as if he was trying to crack a code, and my defense mechanism kicked in. Being belligerent wasn’t going to help in this situation, but feeling vulnerable and exposed was something I’d never wanted to experience again. My childhood hadn’t been golden, a dad who drunk himself into an early grave, a mom who’d fucked off to god knows where… yeah, not golden at all.
“I don’t have a choice in this, do I?”
There was no question there, the Dragons paid me the big bucks and for that, I was a commodity, currently a hot property, and that wasn’t just me blowing smoke up my own ass, that was true. I was a piece of the giant chessboard that is NHL hockey, useful today for my skills, an asset for the time being, but should it change, there would be no hesitation in the team trading me. I’d seen friends move on, and not even my limited no-trade contract was enough to stop them from getting rid of me. All they had to do was leave me open in the next expansion draft, and I was gone. I wanted to stay with the Dragons, end my days there, but if this stranger fucking with my life had messed it up for me, then I had no idea what I’d do.
“Earth to Garrett?”
I looked up at him, realizing that firstly he’d been speaking to me, and secondly he hadn’t sat down as I had. Was that some kind of psychological thing? If so, that meant he was probably one of those clever bodyguards with CIA experience or some shady shit that meant he had a new identity or—
“Garrett? Are you listening?”
“Sorry, I’m just pissed at this whole thing.”
“Surprise, disbelief, anger, acceptance.” He pulled a chair toward him then sat at the table. “We’re generally called in at the pissed stage, and I have every confidence we will catch the person or persons responsible for this. Are you listening?”
My first instinct was to call him a patronizing fucker, but to be honest, he’d had to pull me back to the conversation twice, at least. “Go on.”
“The Jumbotron incident has already hit social media, but so far it hasn’t gone viral, but that could be because fans of other teams haven’t picked up on it. When it does go viral, we’ll run a counter-campaign, charity photos, playing videos, maybe an interview, but for now, we’ll ride the social media wave. On no account do you post about it on social media, nor acknowledge it in post-game interviews. Understand?”
“Okay.” That much I could agree to.
He opened a notebook and clicked his pen, then wrote my name at the top of the page. “Garrett Howell, AKA?”
“Huh?”
“Nicknames, middle names, pseudonyms for illicit midnight liaisons with women or men of ill repute?”
I couldn’t work out if he was messing with me, because his tone didn’t change at all. But the need to snap back at him was right there itching under my skin. Goddamn asshole with his plump lips and his shoulders and his… stop.
“My middle name is James, guys on the team call me Hooly.”
“Grindr? Tinder?”
“Neither.” He looked right at me, and even though he didn’t do that skeptical eyebrow raise, I could see he was going to repeat the question and ask me if I was sure. “I live and breathe hockey, and I’m not stupid enough to think I can hook up anonymously and not get some kind of public legal action thrown at me after. I’ve only ever been with men, yet I’ve been cited in three paternity suits. One of them was a woman in Australia, for God’s sake. She’d never left home, I’ve never been to the place, so unless you can get someone pregnant over Skype then fuck knows what happened there.”
“You were talking to her over Skype?”
“No, I didn’t… no, I was using it as an example, it was a joke.”
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t joke and that we stuck to the facts.”
Was he messing with me? I bit my tongue when the fuck you on the tip of my tongue was hovering right there, waiting to escape. “Middle name, James, Hockey nickname, Hooly,” I repeated the simple explanations.
After a moment’s pause, he dutifully wrote down the names, and he rapidly filled the page with all kinds of information. It ranged from my lack of any sort of family, including first and second cousins, right up to and including the hospital I’d been born in. I had a hard time recalling cousins, but I gave him enough to work on, and he’d made the appropriate sympathetic noises as I explained about my parents and the foster care.