Whatever Happens Next (Triplets Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Two

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Also by Stacy Lane

  Acknowledgments

  WHATEVER HAPPENS

  NEXT

  a Triplets novel

  by Stacy Lane

  Copyright © 2019 by Stacy Lane

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is entirely coincidental or fictionalized.

  Cover design by Champagne Book Design

  For Kim

  Part One

  PROLOGUE

  CHELSEA

  I CAUGHT MY husband cheating, and the only thoughts my brain could formulate are ones about pickles. In hindsight, this was my heart and mind working together to divert the real emotions threatening to burst out. Kind of like my husband’s wannabe Jessica Rabbit breasts would spill out of everything she’s worn since I met her two months ago.

  How long has the affair been going on? How many women do I not know about?

  Override: pickles.

  I love pickles. LOVE them. No pregnancy required for me to eat them with ice cream. My favorite snack is wrapping one in a slice of American cheese. Oh God, and the pinwheels! Don’t ever ask me to bring those to a party. I’ll show up with an empty plate.

  My point is, pickles are essential.

  Pickles are life.

  Pickles are a pain in the ass to open.

  I retrace my steps out of his house. A home that never felt like mine. A home that has been suffocating me since the moment I moved to Tampa for his job.

  Instead of focusing on the issue with those revelations, all I can picture is a future filled with me banging pickle jars on the counter. The lids, to be more specific. They never just open on the first twist. For me, anyway. Vic would always pop them open right after I bought a new jar. Just in case he wasn’t home when I inevitably got into them.

  Now I would be banging them on the edge of the countertops in that pop-pop-turn method. I’m a weakling at opening anything with a tight lid.

  I acknowledge there’s an underlying issue with my way of thinking. I’m pissed. I’m numb after what I just walked in on. My mind is frozen. Stuck on how single life is going to suck so hard for one reason.

  I am a woman. I can run the world. But damn if I can open a pickle jar on my own.

  The cab I took here from the airport is long gone. I don’t have a car of my own, Vic made sure of that. My heavy, overpacked suitcase lags behind me on the cobbled driveway as I strut down the long entrance toward the gate.

  There are no sounds in this stuffy, pretentious neighborhood Vic chose for us several months ago. It’s Christmas day, and there are no giggles or happy screams from children running outside to play with new toys they may have gotten. No birds are singing lively morning melodies as if they know not to disturb the tight-asses that live here. And for a definite fact, there are no begging shouts from my husband as he chases after me. He’d have to get out of bed and dress to do that.

  Vic’s face was filled with surprise and—to my own surprise—indifference when I opened the door to our bedroom. I had been at my dad’s home in Vancouver for a little over two weeks. My husband was supposed to fly out yesterday to spend today with both of our families and me. He never gave me a locked down answer to his flight information. And when he texted last night that he wasn’t coming, with no explanation, I decided to fly back early.

  A large part of me read this situation as one of his tantrums. One of his moods. Vic never wanted me to go home for so long in the first place. I missed my family miserably. He had a five-day break in his schedule around Christmas to spend it with family. There was no excuse for him not to come.

  So I flew home. Gave in to Vic's wishes over mine as I’ve done for the last seven years.

  The hunch for his disapproval was usually spot on. Because he disapproved of everything I did.

  Except, a tiny part of me sensed another issue. Since his trade I have toggled the idea of separating from Vic. Maybe time apart would do us good. But that comfortability in marriage was my biggest crutch. Fear sucked me right back in.

  I learned real quick to never doubt my instincts again.

  Vic was only slightly startled by my appearance, but it was more for the interruption of his affair than with worry of being caught. He didn’t seem bothered, by the latter.

  That’s the moment I went numb. The stab to my heart a direct shot of lidocaine. Pain ceased, then I felt nothing at all. With the physical hurt gone in a snap of the finger, the seconds I stood there frozen in place felt more like years. Like the years of this unhealthy marriage I’ve exhausted myself with.

  He picked out the house, bought the house, provided the money for me to decorate the house. I had no say. I never did. After seven years of marriage, I never had a say in any part of our lives. It was about Vic and his need to control it all, including me.

  When I stepped inside that home, went to sleep at night, I reminded myself that I would have kids one day and everything would be all right. The loneliness in my own home wouldn’t last forever. The house wasn’t even the relevant part of it all. It was the love and the people I longed to share it with.

  But Vic took control of that too.

  After all, my undivided attention would no longer be on him.

  With my heart void of all feelings—except anger—my head blocked out worries associated with the end of a marriage. It wouldn’t last for long, I knew it was only a delicate amount of time before reality set in. Vic has been the expert card dealer from the very first day we met in grade eleven. He dealt the cards, he told me when to draw and when to hold, and when he had enough, he carried all the power to make me bust.

  So I thought about pickles of all things.

  Whatever works, right?

  The sound of my expensive Gucci high heels clicking along the cobbled street was all that accompanied me. I cabbed back to the airport and waited six hours for the next available flight to Vancouver. I flew home to where my entire family celebrated the holiday together. Met at the door by my three sisters—my best friends, my role models—and finally crumbled.

  I didn’t cry for that cheating bastard. Well, maybe a few tears were for him, after all, I loved Vic and have for the better part of my life. But my tears were for me. For what I gave up and never had because I let him decide for me. I cried for all the nothingness I was now left with.

  Never again.

  It was time to
put my wants and desires first. I hate that this is what it had to come to for my reality check.

  But a bunch of banging jars in my future sounded pretty promising to me.

  CHAPTER 1

  ALEX

  WHEN I AGREED to move into my brother’s condo, arriving in the middle of the night from a red-eye flight to Tampa, I expected to collapse onto the silk sheets awaiting my tired body. Not the silk nightie of an off-limits woman.

  The warm, smooth curves beneath me buckled in surprise by her unsuspecting bed-mate. An elbow lodged itself in my kidney, and a hand clipped my jaw. A knee aimed for my balls but missed as I hunched over from the injury in my side.

  I crawled backward out of bed, dropping—or more like plunging—to the floor before any further damage could be done.

  I’ve gone up against men my own size, and some larger, have been taken out almost permanently during a game of hockey, but this sprite of female somehow managed to knock me around beyond distinction.

  My flight landed an hour before. I’ve been traveling back and forth between California and Florida these last few months, attempting to settle in before the final move, but nothing seemed to work in my favor. I had no place to live, the shippers with my belongings drove across the country in the wrong direction, and my car wouldn’t be delivered for two more days. The realtor was yanking my chain, so I fired him and hired a new lady. Finally, I said fuck it and made the last move whether I had shit to sleep or eat on or not.

  With all of my good suits in transportation to New York, I had an early appointment with a tailor in the morning. A press release for the announcement of the Fury’s new GM is next week. I didn’t want new suits. The current ones in my wardrobe were broke-in just how I liked them. Ever since I agreed to take the job as the Fury’s new general manager, nothing has worked out in an orderly fashion.

  Orderly is how I function.

  Everything I do, down to the exact time I take a shit, is done by a schedule.

  My brothers and my parents swore I would love it here in Florida, but I was starting to believe Florida may not like me in return.

  I needed sleep to get rid of the bags under my eyes. My muscles were tight from stress and lack of rest. The condo was supposed to be empty.

  My brother, Brooks, moved in with his girlfriend last week. The furniture remained, Jo didn’t need it, she had her own place before meeting Brooks. Not relishing the idea of sleeping in the bed where my brother has had sex in the past, I dragged my feet down the opposite hall to the guest bedroom.

  The room was pitch black, like the rest of the apartment, and I had no plans to bother with removing my clothes. The mattress was all I cared about.

  So I face-planted the bed.

  Well, the bed was my destination. A silky-clad, vanilla scented body turned out to be what I landed on.

  Her breasts, to be exact.

  The woman bolted so quick from the intrusion that I’m not a hundred percent positive. But considering I’m a man who loves boobs, I can almost guarantee they are what my face came into contact with.

  Rolling away from the bed—away meant safety, after all—my back smacked into the leg of an armchair. I groaned at the piercing pain that shot from the sensitive area in my lumbar and dispersed into pangs all throughout my lower half.

  I heard the faint sound of rustling sheets. Hazy from the ringing in my ears, it was hard to figure out if the woman was scurrying away to leave or to find a weapon.

  Light flooded the bedroom. Squinting with one eye open, I track the brightness toward the bed, up and over the mattress, and discover the culprit sleeping in my rented room.

  “Alex?” On her knees, champagne pajamas hugging her hips, clinging to the curves of her breasts, and a thin strap slipping off one shoulder, Chelsea peers down at me.

  Groaning deeper than before, I tear my gaze away from her indecently inviting style of nightwear. I rise to a sitting position, bending my knees, and lean back against the chair in the corner of the room.

  She kneels at the head of the mattress by the nightstand. Curls frame her face with a sleep mask pushed up and holding back the blonde ringlets.

  “What are you doing here? It’s three in the morning.” Chelsea’s gentle voice asks with confusion. Her chest rises and falls with exertion from the scrappy self-defense skills.

  My eyes again drift back to the thin layer of silk straining against her deep inhaled breaths.

  “I know what time it is. That’s why I was going straight to bed,” I grumble, shifting to find a comfortable position for my back.

  “Oh, God. Did I hurt you?” She climbs off the bed, walking the short distance to where I’m perched.

  “I’m fine,” I reply through clenched teeth.

  The problem with having a career-ending injury—everyone knows about it. There’s no peace. Constant questions and mothering from people who aren’t even my mother.

  And Chelsea and I barely know each other. We’re not friends, hardly acquaintances. Had her marriage not ended recently, she would have been the wife of one of my players.

  “Let me help you up at least,” she says, bending at the waist and gifting me nearly a full show of the mouth-watering mounds beneath the flimsy material.

  Groaning for a totally new reason, I repeat, “I’m fine.”

  “You Labelle men are such stubborn asses.” Chelsea turns away, walking to the opposite side of the room where a robe is draped over a large suitcase.

  Thank the powers above she’s covering her tight little body. Those tiny shorts hide nothing. Her ass peeks out the bottom, swaying with each step. She slides on the rose-colored robe, ties it at the waist, and spins around.

  My eyelids lower to half mast.

  The second layer of silk only enhanced the curve of her breasts, and if the peddled buds indicate anything, someone is a little chilly.

  This is a problem.

  This has been the problem since I was introduced to Chelsea.

  She became fast friends with Brooks’s girlfriend, Jo. The first time I met Chelsea, she stood across the room of a suite at the Fury arena. I was there with my family to attend a hockey game, and to meet Jo—the woman who, at that moment in time, had caught my brother’s attention. But Chelsea stole the limelight for me.

  We talked, and I learned she was married.

  She’s off-limits, yet my rational brain has no power over the strength of where my eyes intend to roam. Everything about her is inviting. Her smile, her infectious, bubbly personality, her kindness—she draws attention no matter what.

  “Why are you at Brooks’s place?” I ask.

  “I’m living here during the off-season.” Chelsea crosses her arms over her chest. Thank God.

  “Since when?”

  “Since last week.”

  “What’s wrong with your house?”

  Chelsea’s chin drops, and I instantly feel like the ass she pegged me for. “My soon to be ex-husband is in our home. Probably with the same puck bunny, unless he’s got someone new already.”

  Shit. I am a jerk.

  The season has another week left. Which means Vic is still in town. Either way, I expected her to stay with Jo if she hadn’t immediately moved back to Vancouver.

  Brooks told me about catching Vic cheating on Chelsea in Vegas. The team had been in Nevada for a game and Brooks had stayed at a different hotel that one night when some of the WAGs—wives and girlfriends of the athletes—flew out there for a short trip. My brother returned the next morning before they were set to fly out. It’s like Vic wanted to get caught.

  On Christmas day, Chelsea walked in on him in their bed with a puck bunny that’s been making her way around the team.

  Victor Mathias hasn’t even been with the Fury for an entire season yet. They signed him last year to a three year, no trade deal. The organization paid him a shit-ton of money and his performance this season did not leave me feeling like he was worth the investment.

  The guy came with baggage apparently,
and it wasn’t looking up from here either.

  For all I know, he and Chelsea could have been having marital trouble for a while, and that’s what has been distracting him. Time will only tell when the next season begins.

  But I run my ship differently than Peters. The soon-to-be-released GM lost sight of what good hockey is. He built a roster of rookies with no game-plan. He might as well have fed those boys to the sharks. Luckily, I have a plan. A vision. And this team was young enough to turn it around for the better.

  And assholes like Vic who were more concerned about the stick in their pants over the one in their hands on game nights were going to get on board or get booted out.

  “Sorry,” I apologize. “Brooks told me his place was empty.”

  “Well, it’s just one night. I can take the couch.”

  “No,” I cut her off, shaking my head. “I’ll sleep on the couch. But… I was supposed to be staying here until I find a place.”

  “Oh.” She runs her hands slowly up and down the velvety skin of her thighs, drawing my gaze. “Brooks did not mention that.”

  Yeah, and I would like to know why.

  It’s not a big deal, but in my family, everybody has an ulterior motive. And Brooks is riding the happy bus into the bliss of new love. Chelsea’s a beautiful woman, inside and out from what I know of her, but she’s married to one of my future hockey players. Brooks knows that. So why shack the two of us together and keep it a secret?

  “Let’s get some sleep, and we’ll figure it out tomorrow.” I stand, rubbing my hand along the soreness in my side, and using the other hand to massage the muscle in my lower back.

  She follows me to the door and then down the hall. I spin around in the darkened setting, city lights and moonlight cascading through the large windows in the living room. Chelsea stumbles to a stop before crashing into me.

  “Why are you following me?” I ask in a gruff, tired voice.