The Nature of the Game (Stick Side Book 2), page 1
STICK SIDE SERIES
On the Ice
The Nature of the Game
LIGHTHOUSE BAY SERIES
Christmas Lane
LAKESHORE SERIES
The Heights
Other books:
Ballerina Dad
Picture Winter
As Big As the Sky
The Play of His Life
The Nature of the Game
Copyright © 2019 Amy Aislin
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Beta read by Jill Wexler at LesCourt Author Services
Edited by Brenda Chin
Copy editing by Boho Edits
Proofread by Between the Lines Editing
Cover art by Natasha Snow Designs
Interior design and formatting by Champagne Book Design
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
TITLES BY AMY AISLIN
COPYRIGHT
AUTHOR’S NOTE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Nature of the Game takes place several months after the final chapter (but before the epilogue) of the first book in the series, On the Ice. If I’ve done my job right, The Nature of the Game should stand on its own, but I hope you’ll check out On the Ice too. Thank you for reading!
AUGUST 2009—PRESENT DAY
Dan Greyson stood on the sidewalk at Bay and Richmond in downtown Toronto’s sticky late-summer heat and swallowed hard. On the other side of the door of the bookstore across the street waited his biggest regret. Two of his biggest regrets, actually.
At least he’d started to make amends with one. The other . . .
The other involved broken hearts and broken promises. Was there any mending that?
The part of him that didn’t enjoy confrontation—or people in general—wanted to hide out in the pub down the street, maybe order a full Irish breakfast. The big brother part of him knew he’d never do that—he’d promised he’d be here.
There was a line of people that started inside the bookstore and trailed out the door, all the way down the street. His brother’s boyfriend’s book launch was a huge success, and it hadn’t officially started yet.
Dan checked his watch. Only a few minutes until the launch.
Taking a deep breath in through his nose, he released it through his mouth. He’d dressed up for the occasion in a blue checkered collared shirt tucked into a pair of fitted black pants. It was too hot for his outfit, and the crush of bodies at this intersection made the humid air seethe and push against him. If he didn’t get inside soon, he’d sweat through his shirt.
The next time the lights turned green, Dan crossed the street with a dozen other people. Toronto reminded him a lot of New York City but with fewer people. Smelled like NYC too—car exhaust, BO, sewer water, and cigarette smoke with an undercurrent of some kind of spice from one of the nearby restaurants.
He didn’t realize his hands were clenched into fists until he reached for the bookstore’s door handle.
“Excuse me, sir.” A woman with a headset and a clipboard blocked his entrance. “If you’re here for the signing, you need to head to the back of the line.”
“No, I’m . . . I should be on the guest list. Dan Greyson.”
“Oh, right.” She marked something on her clipboard. “Mitch said to expect you right about now. Go on in.”
Dan couldn’t help the burble of laughter that rose in his throat. He and Mitch, his younger brother, had a bad habit of arriving at a scheduled event at the last possible second.
Inside the bookstore, it was cool and bright, crowded and noisy. There were a few browsing customers, but most people stood in a line that extended from the back of the store, wound around bookshelves and displays, down the center aisle, and out the front door.
Man, there were a lot of people in here. So many people in a large space made it feel tiny. Throat constricting, Dan opened the top button of his shirt and wiped sweat off his brow.
Mitch had told him that the signing station would be near the back, next to the employee lunchroom, so Dan headed there.
He didn’t find Mitch, the first of his two biggest regrets, but he found his dad and Mitch’s best friend. They stood off to the side with a group of tall and fit guys Dan recognized as Alex’s teammates.
Alex Dean, Mitch’s boyfriend, played professional hockey for Tampa Bay’s NHL team.
And it was just Dan’s bad luck that the second of his two biggest regrets, Ashton Yager, also played hockey for Tampa. Dan, in full stalker fashion, had continued to follow Ash’s career after . . . Well, after.
But not once in the past six years had he thought he’d ever actually run into the guy again. He’d wanted to, sure. Dreamed about it often. But he wasn’t fanciful enough to think that he’d willed Ash back into his life. Their being in the same place at the same time today had everything to do with Mitch and Alex: Mitch being Dan’s brother and Alex being on the same team as Ash.
They were bound to run into each other at some point.
Ashton Yager had been Dan’s first everything when it came to men. Before Ash—and after—he’d dated strictly women. Before, because he hadn’t known he was bisexual until he met Ash. And after, because he’d yet to meet a man who affected him as much as Ash had. And, truthfully, the thought of being with someone other than Ash, of having what he’d had with Ash but with someone else, man or woman, had hurt too much. He hadn’t had the kind of intimacy and trust he’d had with Ash with anyone else since.
Six years was a long time to yearn for someone, which probably made Dan utterly pathetic, especially since Ash hadn’t sat around yearning for him in return. No, Ash had gotten married. Then divorced, although Dan couldn’t find the reason why online. And since his divorce four years ago, Ash had been linked to more than one woman.
So yeah. Dan needed to get over it. Maybe if he faced Ash head on and apologized for what he’d done six years ago, he finally would. Apologizing to Mitch had put them on the right path. Why wouldn’t it be the same with Ash?
But maybe not just yet. He took the easy way out and avoided the crowd of hockey players altogether, heading instead for his dad.
“Hey.” His dad clapped him on the back. “I was starting to wonder if you’d make it on time.”
Dan checked his watch. “Just. Seems Alex is late, though.”
“He’s nervous,” Alex’s mom said from his dad’s other side, her French-Canadian accent a musical lilt. “He’s in the lunchroom.” She tilted her head in that direction. “Mitch is talking to him now.”
“Alex is nervous?” Dan asked. “Doesn’t seem like him.”
His dad shrugged his huge shoulders. “Happens to the best of us.”
Dan shifted slightly, putting his back to the pack of hockey players. He hadn’t spotted Ash yet, but Ash was definitely in there somewhere. Dan knew from both Mitch and Alex that Ashton Yager was Alex’s best friend on the team. There was no way he’d miss Alex’s book launch.
“How’d your meeting go this morning?” Dan asked his dad.
“Good.” His dad leaned against the bookshelf behind him, a section of self-help books obscured by his huge bulk. “You should see this printer they were trying to sell us.”
By us, he meant Westlake Waterless Printing, the company they both worked for, of which Dan’s mother was CEO. The company, started years ago by his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, was the biggest environmentally friendly print company in the United States. Dan listened as his dad talked about the new printer he’d gone to see and all of its snazzy new features. Apparently, there was only one of its kind in North America, and if Westlake Waterless Printing bought one, it’d give them an edge and allow them to print more boutique-type products.
Except it cost $3.5 million dollars.
“It cost how much?” Dan goggled at his dad. “Jesus, Dad. And you want us to buy it?”
“Not necessarily. I was doing Shawn in purchasin
“Can we afford a $3.5 million-dollar piece of equipment?”
“Beats me. You’re the financial analyst.”
A job Dan didn’t hate as much as he thought he would, but he didn’t exactly enjoy it either. Although he had a feeling that the reason he was so apathetic toward it had more to do with his mother than with the job itself. Simply the thought of working for and with her for the rest of his life made him sweat.
“How did your meeting go?”
Dan grunted. “It was fine. They were trying to sell us a new analytical tool we don’t need.” He sighed. “Look at us, working on a Saturday.”
“Yeah. Listen.” His dad cleared his throat and straightened, squaring his shoulders. “I told your brother earlier but didn’t have a chance to tell you. I found a place in Burlington.”
Dan’s heart sunk. “You were serious about moving to Vermont?” Not that he didn’t want his dad to live closer to Mitch, who attended college in Vermont, or for Mitch to have more access to their dad. But if he moved to Vermont, it’d leave Dan all alone in Manhattan with no family except their mother, and Dan’s relationship with her had moved a level past strained a long time ago.
“With your mother and I divorcing, I don’t feel comfortable living in the house anymore or working out of the same office. The move to Vermont, transferring to the office in Burlington . . .” His dad’s smile was small, but it was pleased. “I think it’ll be good for me.”
Dan thought so too, but—
“What about you?”
“Huh?” Dan blinked at his dad. “What about me?”
“You ever think about moving? Transferring offices? Westlake’s got twenty satellite offices you could work out of.”
“I’ve thought about it more and more lately, to be honest, but . . .” He scuffed the heel of his loafer against the carpeted floor.
“But?”
“I don’t know. I’m comfortable there.”
His dad grinned and squeezed his shoulder. “Get out of your comfort zone and live a little, kiddo. Pick one of the satellite offices and try it out for a couple of weeks.”
“I can do that?” Dan asked.
“Why not? Talk to Grace in HR. She’ll make it happen.”
Question was, did Dan want it to happen? He liked the city. His condo, as well as the office, were both in Manhattan, and everything he needed was within walking distance. He might not be a people person, but everyone ignored everyone else in New York anyway, so he might as well have been on his own island.
Trying a new office wouldn’t be so bad, though, one in a big city. Westlake had an office in Chicago. San Francisco. Denver. Nashville.
Tampa.
Don’t even go there.
Alex’s publicist, a tiny blonde with a huge attitude, marched past them and stopped in front of the employee lunchroom door. Mitch must’ve seen her coming from the other side of the glass window; he stepped out, had a short conversation with her, then slipped back into the room. The publicist headed back to her post next to the table set up as Alex’s signing station. She didn’t look happy.
The table was adorned with a white tablecloth, an assortment of pens, and a dozen copies of Alex’s new book, No Guts, No Glory, which Alex described as the dark side of professional sports. Next to the table was a stand holding a poster with the book’s cover, short quotes from reviewers praising the book, and a picture of Alex’s face.
Hovering nearby were what Dan could only assume were reporters and bloggers, weighed down with cameras and notepads.
Finally, Alex came out of the lunchroom. Dressed in fitted black suit pants and a light-blue shirt paired with a forest-green tie that made his green eyes pop, Alex appeared anything but nervous. In fact, his expression went from confident and determined to shocked mixed with pleasure as his teammates let out a roar of cheers and applause.
Dan jerked, cold sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. The thundering of the crowd was too much, too loud. Surrounded by people on all sides, hidden in the bookstore’s stacks, there was no exit, no exit, no exit. It was like being trapped in a closed box. He stepped back with a muttered, “Excuse me,” when he bumped into someone, and—
“Dan?”
—blindly found his way around bookshelves, vision growing fuzzy, until finally he reached the store’s front where the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto the outside world finally allowed him to breathe.
For fuck’s sake. Who’d have thought he’d get hit with a dose of claustrophobia in a damn bookstore?
“Of all the bookstores in all the world,” a voice said, “you happen to walk into mine.”
Dan whirled, pulse skyrocketing, and there he was—Ashton Yager, in the flesh. Or in a lovely charcoal-gray tailored suit with a lavender shirt and shiny black loafers, as it were.
Dan’s knees turned to water. He was unable to blink. Unable to breathe. He was swimming in regret and lost opportunities, and it kept him frozen in place.
“Yours?” he managed to croak.
Lips twisting wryly, Ash hitched up one shoulder in a half shrug. “You don’t know that it isn’t.”
“That’s . . . true.”
Dan might’ve purposely avoided seeking Ash out since he arrived, avoided looking too closely at the hockey players for fear that he’d spot Ash’s six-four bulk and huge shoulders and be unable to do anything but stare, but he’d been prepared to see him. Had been psyching himself up since Alex had invited him to this book launch weeks ago. And yet, the butterflies on crack that erupted in his stomach were still a surprise.
Who was he kidding? He was so not prepared, and he was sure the expression on his face conveyed everything he was feeling, starting from his hesitancy to the joy that made him light-headed and made his fingers tingle.
Though that could’ve been the claustrophobia talking.
The look on Ash’s handsome face, however . . . Stupefaction, anger, confusion. Maybe a hint of pleasure? And a whole lot of what the fuck are you doing here?
Ash had started going prematurely gray a few years ago and now, at twenty-seven years old, he had a full head of gunmetal gray hair. But his eyebrows were still the chocolate brown Dan remembered, and they rose high up his forehead as Dan watched him try to add up one and one to arrive at two. Because from Ash’s perspective, one and one was adding up to a giant what the fuck.
Dan stepped toward him, pulled in by those eyes of his, an unremarkable shade of medium brown with unique tawny-colored marbled undertones that only became apparent in close range. Extra close range.
Ash crossed his arms over his chest, biceps and shoulders making the material of his suit jacket stretch taut. He was as big as he’d been six years ago. Except for his lower half, which actually appeared bigger, if that was possible. The NHL had clearly been good to him.
“What are you doing here?” Ash asked. By the tone of his voice, he might’ve asked Dan why he’d poisoned the water supply.
Not an auspicious start.
Dan threw his shoulders back. “Mitch is my brother.”
“Your . . .” Comprehension dawned, Ash’s eyes going wide. He gave a tragic-sounding chuckle. “I never put that together.”
“Why would you? Greyson’s a pretty common last name.” Rallying, Dan rubbed his chest over his slowing heart rate, intent on . . . something. Getting Ash not to look at him like he was something vile underneath his shoes? “You look good, Ash.”
Ash cocked his head. “And you look like you’re about to pass out. Can I buy you a coffee?” He gestured at the bookstore’s coffee shop a dozen steps away.
Dan really should head back to Mitch. He was here to support him after all. Well, he was here to support Mitch’s boyfriend, which was basically the same thing. But it was so stuffy over there, too many people packed into a small area. The coffee shop, on the other hand, was currently empty.
“That’d be great. Thanks, Ash.”
Ash grunted and led the way into the coffee shop. “Don’t thank me. I don’t want an ambulance showing up at Alex’s book launch.”
Fuck him. He shouldn’t have said that. It was mean. True, but mean.
Standing in line at the coffee shop, Ashton Yager caught himself turning to where Dan sat alone at a table for four next to the window—and abruptly straightened.
