Chapter One
Jenna gaped at Owen’s phone screen and bit down so hard on the inside of her cheek that she drew blood.
“He’s hilarious, right?” Owen turned the phone back toward himself and swivelled in the lumbar-corrective office chair. Afternoon light poured through the office windows, shining a spotlight on Owen’s outstretched hand.
“Mmhmm.” Jenna worked to swallow the lump in her throat that was forming faster than traffic on Deerfoot Trail. What the hell was Gentry Maddox doing on TikTok? More importantly, why was he shirtless, and how did Owen, the office nepo baby, of all people, find out about his channel before her? “I don’t see how that’s relevant to the training, but I can see how you’d find it entertaining.”
Owen shot her a look that said, C’mon, you don’t want to be that uptight, and Jenna pointed at the computer monitor. “Running reports might not make you feel fulfilled, but it is unfortunately part of this job.”
He sighed as she launched into yet another explanation of the database. Jenna wanted to smack him and send his ironic wire-rimmed glasses flying. Since she was a good person and he happened to be her boss’s nephew, she refrained.
Jenna made a valiant effort to keep her mind from wandering back to the image of Gentry’s torso as she waited for Owen to sort by date, but as it was now scrawled in Sharpie on her retinas, she drifted back to it like a leaf caught in a whirlpool. Every muscle on her ex-boyfriend’s body was sketched in her mind’s eye with maddening perfection. Those hadn’t been there the last time she’d seen him naked. Though, he’d only been twenty-one then. She could cut him some slack.
When Owen finished clicking through the steps, Jenna pushed back from the desk and stood, straightening the pleats on her trousers. “Let me know if you have any questions, but I think you’re good to go.” That was a lie. Based on his performance last week, she’d be repeating this training by Wednesday at the latest.
She barely heard Owen’s thanks as she left the office and strode down the hall to her own. Owen was twenty-seven, had just come off a broadcasting gig in Moosejaw, and had already shown up at the office late three out of his nine work days. Normally those details would’ve set her at ease, considering he was competing for the same position as her. However, since he shared the same DNA as John Allen, one of two current executive producers at Hockey Evening in Canada and the only one with plans to retire, she enjoyed no such respite.
Her mind felt like a yo-yo held hostage by a toddler. Gentry Maddox was on TikTok!? You have work to do, Jenna, including submitting headlines to John by three. But he was commentating live hockey games through a phone camera and had hundreds of thousands of followers?!
She couldn’t wrap her head around it. So, she took the obvious next step and plunked down, avoided her looming task list, and scrolled through his thumbnails on her own phone where she could take her sweet time exploring his new geography.
Jenna’s eyes traced over the bulk of his shoulders, then settled on the lopsided smile frozen on his face. The familiarity of his bone structure stunned like she’d just flown into streak-free glass. How had it been thirteen years? And why was her heart racing like their relationship had died yesterday?
She scanned the thumbnails, gawking at the number of videos that had reached over a million views. Insane. Here she was, working for the premier hockey broadcast in the country that would kill for that kind of consistent visibility. John was breathing down all their throats to increase ratings, but nothing they’d come up with had made more than a temporary blip.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. Their team had improved their graphics and stats. The interns had put together live quizzes and polls. Jenna had arranged exclusive behind-the-scenes Q&A sessions with the players. While the viewers had enjoyed the content, based on the data, it wasn’t encouraging new people to tune in.
Jenna jolted as a realization slapped her like a splash of cold water to the face. This was why. Networks all over the country were being hit hard with competition from online streaming services, a few of which Globespan and GCBN had exclusive agreements with. Why would they, at Hockey Evening in Canada, expect to walk away unscathed? Because HEC was a tradition? Loyalty rarely survived better pricing or convenience.
Or entertainment. Jenna slumped over the phone and pressed play on one of Gentry’s videos. Gentry hunched over his knees, his eyes fixed on the screen. His words ran in punchy sentences, punctuated by laughs from whoever was behind the camera. He was engaging. Funny. Smart as hell.
It was intolerable.
But just as she started to shrink into herself, the wheels in her head kicked into motion. Maybe they’d been looking inward when they should’ve been looking out. Gentry had an audience—a huge one, full of hockey lovers who were frothing at the mouth for his content based on the comments under each of his posts.
Her stomach clenched as a potential solution to their ratings quandary, and her battle for executive producer grew deeper roots. If Jenna took this to John, she’d get credit for the idea of bringing on a guest sportscaster. She’d prove yet again that she was dedicated to this network, plus demonstrate that she had an open mind when it came to troubleshooting.
On the flip side, if she proposed they bring Gentry on as a guest, she’d have to see him again. In person. There was no way around it. She’d have to be in the studio, and he’d discover she was back in Calgary and that she had been for some time.
Jenna groaned and clicked her screen off. None of that mattered, did it? This was her shot—her chance to show she was invaluable to this network. It wasn’t fair that she had to jump through twice the hoops Owen did, but she had to convince John and especially their second executive producer, Archer, that she was worth taking a chance on.
How many times had she hustled her way to the false summit only to be kicked back down before the final climb? She was sick of networks telling her she was good enough to assist the boss but never be the boss.
Jenna knew hockey. Not only as a fan but as a player. She’d scrapped for ice time from the time they’d told her she couldn’t play peewee. It didn’t matter. Execs saw what they wanted to see, and they didn’t care if she could beat them one-on-one in the rink.
So. If they wouldn’t let her sit at the desk, she sure as hell wanted to be calling the shots on who was and what they were talking about.
She already had two strikes against her, being a woman and having built experience with a competing network. None of said experience had shown her that hard work would tip the scales. It hadn’t made a lick of difference at Globespan, and she wouldn’t put her eggs in that basket here at GCBN either.
Jenna needed all the baskets.
She’d have to deal with the soul-sucking anxiety and her pulverized heart over the weekend.
_____
“So what was so important it couldn’t wait for my lunch break?” John Allen clasped his hands on top of his desk. His office was a large step up from Jenna’s, or anyone else’s on the floor, really. The furniture was made of rich mahogany, a plush rug covered the industrial carpet, and a fiddle-leaf fig tree stretched its leaves toward the windows from the corner.
John reminded her enough of the actor Victor Garber to make her almost believe he could be grandfatherly. If he didn’t regularly dismiss her thoughts in the boardroom as fanciful notions and hold the keys to her job promotion in a vice grip. He still had the build of a hockey player even though it had been nearly forty years since he’d been in the NHL.
