The Boy in the Boxers and Other Stories of Sweet Romance

By David H. Hendrickson

From Boston's Faneuil Hall to the sleepy suburbs…

From ancient Israel to "Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin"

Award-winning master of romance D. H. Hendrickson finds romance wherever he looks…

And these sweet tales prove it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pentucket Publishing
• Release date: Dec 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393245889

Book preview

The Boy in the Boxers and other Sweet Romances

The Boy in the Boxers and other Sweet Romances

DAVID H. HENDRICKSON

PENTUCKET PUBLISHING

Contents

Introduction

A Wheelchair and a Unicycle at Faneuil Hall

Shooting for the Moon

From a Dry, Bitter Stream Comes the Sweetest of Fountains

Seeing Him for the First Time

Beloved

The Boy in the Boxers

The Girl in the Glitter

Also by David H. Hendrickson

Acknowledgments

About the Author

To Brenda, the Best Wife Ever,

With you, I’ve got it all.

Introduction

This book is Kris Rusch’s fault.

Then again, I could blame her and Dean Wesley Smith for all of my books. They’ve been my life-changing mentors since 2008. Zero books before them; a dozen (and counting) since.

This book, however, is especially Kris’s fault. I hadn’t read romance at all until Kris and Dean’s mind-blowing Master Class, which included assigned reading in all the major genres. A Nora Roberts novel became my introduction to the romance genre, and I liked it plenty. I read for character above all else—who cares about the plot if you don’t love the character?—and romance is all about the characters. So I was a good fit for the genre even though I was, after all, a guy. (Still am. Kris Rusch didn’t change me that much.)

So I started sprinkling a few romance titles into my reading, and enjoyed them. The light, however, hadn’t yet dawned on my writing. I might be a romantic guy who would read the occasional romance novel, but writing in the genre didn’t even occur to me. That would take another Kris Rusch workshop and more assigned reading, including a novella by Deirdre Martin.

But not just any novella. Not just any romance. A hockey romance.

Hockey romance?

Who knew such a thing existed? What an unexpected combination! The rough-and-tumble world of hockey combined with romance, where the only tumbling done is in and out of love (and in and out of bed).

Well send me to the penalty box for ten minutes of misconduct! I was an award-winning hockey writer, a big fish in the tiny pond of college hockey. My name had once circled Boston Garden on its LED Ribbon Banner as a Legend of Hockey East. My first novel, Cracking the Ice, had been a Young Adult title about a fifteen-year-old black hockey player in the late sixties. It had been well-received by readers and critics even though it had been published dead by a publishing company that was closing its doors.

Welcome to my wheelhouse! I really enjoyed Martin’s novella, but thought that I could perhaps do an even better job on the hockey-specific details. I had a whole lot of catching up to do in every other area, but I could do hockey.

Suddenly, my friends in the gym saw me reading books with bare-chested hunks on the covers. Not that there was anything wrong with that. But eyebrows were raised and startled looks went my way.

Eventually, I was ready to give this hockey romance thing a try. It would be a simple experiment. I’d write a longish short story, say ten thousand words or so, and since there were no romance magazines, I’d put it up for sale in electronic format, and see what happened.

My ten-thousand-word short story experiment, however, exploded totally out of control. As the pages continued to accumulate, I perpetually guessed that I only needed another twenty thousand words to wrap it up. Twenty thousand down, twenty to go. Forty thousand down, twenty to go. Sixty thousand down, twenty to go. I kept being wrong.

In the end, my projected ten-thousand-word short story experiment came in at a mere twelve times the expected length. I was promptly told that one hundred and twenty thousand words was way too long for a contemporary romance novel, hockey or not. What had I been thinking?

Thinking? Who does that? I’d just been writing and having fun.

And I loved the result.

Thank goodness for indie publishing. Traditional publishers might have told me to hack my oversized behemoth in half, but I had other options. I got the novel professionally edited and laid out, then released it as Body Check.

It sold like hotcakes. Not Nora Roberts or Deirdre Martin hotcakes, but big sales numbers for me in the indie publishing world. Clearly, a hundred and twenty thousand words wasn’t too long for some readers. Bless them!

The romance short stories you find in this collection came later (and only two of them have anything to do with hockey). At the time, there just weren’t any romance short story magazines, so I wasn’t terribly motivated to write stories that would be difficult to get into readers’ hands.

Until, that is, along came Heart’s Kiss. Here was an honest-to-god, major short story magazine dedicated to romance. Sadly, Heart’s Kiss is no more, but in its few years of existence, it published four of the seven stories in this volume. To say I was a fan of the magazine and editors Lezli Robyn and Tina Smith would be an understatement.

Heart’s Kiss may be gone, but I’m still writing romance short stories. Two are already in the pipeline at other publications, and I’m sure more will soon be on their way. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll get back to writing the genre in novel form, finishing off the hat trick I began with Body Check and then continued with No Defense.

I do have a few ideas…

But until then, sit back and enjoy these stories of love and happily-ever-afters.

They are all Kris Rusch’s fault. And for that, I’ll be forever grateful.

— D.H. Hendrickson

July 31, 2020

A Wheelchair and a Unicycle at Faneuil Hall

Introduction to A Wheelchair and a Unicycle at Faneuil Hall

Ioriginally wrote this story for a romance anthology themed around Independence Day. It didn’t sell there, but that theme got me to write a story I never would have otherwise considered. That’s one of the many beauties of themed anthologies, and arguably its biggest attraction.

You do, however, have to write something different than the rest of the crowd. If you go after the low-hanging fruit, you’ll have to be more dazzling than the other bajillion writers who came at the assignment from the exact same angle. In this case, I figured most submissions would focus on July 4 th—well, duh!—so to be at least a little different, I began by making it a personal Independence Day, albeit one on just about the very same date.

For some time now, I’ve put a lot of time and energy into the cause of those who have suffered spinal cord injuries. This began with my first interview with Travis Roy, the hockey player rendered a quadriplegic eleven seconds into his collegiate career. Travis and I became friends and over the years, I wrote more feature stories about Travis and contributed to the Travis Roy Fund (which provides assistance to those who have suffered spinal cord injuries while also funding research into a cure).

Ultimately, I collected those pieces into Travis Roy: Quadriplegia and a Life of Purpose, which includes a foreword by Travis. All proceeds go to the fund, so I encourage you to buy a copy (or ten). You’ll be moved and you’ll be contributing to a great cause.

Since then, I’ve also written about Denna Laing, who tragically suffered a similar fate in what had promised to be a breakthrough game for women’s hockey, the first outdoor professional women’s hockey game.

One of the great difficulties faced by those who have suffered spinal cord injuries comes with managing romantic relationships, if such relationships can be achieved at all. For a quadriplegic, the barriers can feel insurmountable; for a paraplegic, the obstacles still loom large. So I suppose it was natural that while thinking of ideas for that romance anthology my mind latched onto a character facing such difficulties, needing a personal Independence Day. Not just because I was trying to be different from all the other writers submitting to the anthology, although that certainly was the case, but because the plight of those who have suffered spinal cord injuries will always be close to my heart.

As it turned out, the story was a near miss for the anthology. Not quite what the editor was looking for. That happens. A lot. Maybe Nora Roberts bats 1.000, but I certainly don’t.

By this time, however, Heart’s Kiss had come onto the scene as the one major magazine specializing in romance short stories. I had a place to send the story. Even better, its editor was Denise Little, who had previously purchased both Beloved (which appears later in this collection) and Back to the Garden for anthologies published by DAW. Those were two of my earliest sales, so I felt had a strong believer in my work in an important place.

Denise suggested that I send her both this story and another that follows in this collection, From a Dry, Bitter Stream Comes the Sweetest of Fountains. Delighted, I sent the two stories and held my breath.

And waited.

And waited.

Impatience turned to chagrin when I found out that Denise had not been ignoring me. She’d been replaced at the magazine. My heart sunk. I’d lost an ally. I’d submit to the new editors, Lezli Robyn and Tina Smith, but I’d be starting all over. They didn’t know me from Adam. And I knew what that meant to the odds my story would be taken.

As it turned out, Lezli and Tina became great champions of my work at Heart’s Kiss. I did bat 1.000 with them. Four of the stories in this collection appeared there, starting with this one. I loved working with them on each story.

Enough already? Time to shut my big mouth?

Got it.

I hope you love this story. I certainly do.

A Wheelchair and a Unicycle at Faneuil Hall

Julie O’Reilly saw the crooked-nosed creep wearing an old gray hoodie half an hour before he actually did anything. But though she’d thought it odd, really odd, that anyone would wear anything so suffocatingly hot, with the hood pulled up, no less, in sweltering ninety-five degree weather, she pushed it out of her mind because she was already rather tired of being spooked out.

This was, after all, Independence Day. Not the real Independence Day, July 4. It was only July 1, a Saturday, close enough to be called July 4th weekend, but not the actual holiday. But she’d chosen it as the day she would set herself free from the prison of her apartment’s four walls. A prison she’d locked herself in for the past eight months, a jail of lost dreams and sadness, one erected on the night of the car accident when everything changed.

She could get around in her wheelchair—her physical therapist called her a workout warrior—but Julie