“It looked like you got your stick on that puck right before it went into the net.”
The scar on his chin appeared especially white, but his face remained expressionless. Jane only dug in her heels.
“Isn’t it hard to concentrate when fans are yelling at you?”
With the edge of the towel, he wiped his face. But he didn’t respond.
“If it were me, I think I’d have a hard time ignoring those nasty insults.”
His blue eyes continued to stare into hers, but one corner of his mouth turned down as if he found her very annoying.
“Until tonight, I had no idea hockey fans were so rude. Those men behind me were drunk and disgusting. I can’t imagine standing up and yelling, ‘Eat me,’ in a crowd like they did.”
He pulled the towel from around his neck and finally said, “Ace, if you’d stood up and yelled, ‘Eat me,’ doubt you’d be standing here right now bugging the hell out of me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I imagine, you’d have gotten a taker or two.”
It took a few moments for his meaning to become clear, and when it did, shocked laughter spilled from her lips. “I guess it’s not the same thing, is it?”
“Not quite.”
He stood and hooked his thumbs beneath the elastic of his underwear. “Now run along and harass somebody else.” When she didn’t move, he added, “Unless you want to embarrass yourself some more.”
“I’m not embarrassed.”
“You keep blushing like your face is on fire.”
“It’s very hot in here,” she lied. Was he the only one who’d noticed? Probably not. “Very hot.”
“It’s about to get hotter.” He’d said aboot again. “Stick around and you’re going to get an eyeful of the good wood.”
She turned and beat a hasty retreat. Not because he told her to or because of the threat of getting an eyeful of the good wood, but because she had a deadline. Yeah, she had a deadline, she told herself as she walked from the locker room, careful to keep her gaze from falling on any more naked parts.
By the time she made it back to the hotel, it was ten o’clock. She had a column to write and a deadline to meet, all before she could put herself to bed. She plugged in her laptop and got to work on her first sports column. She knew the beat reporters at the Times would tear it apart and look for flaws, and she was determined that they would find none. She was determined to write better than a man.
Chinooks Tie Coyotes; Lynch Makes Only Goal, she wrote, but she quickly discovered that writing sports copy wasn’t as easy as she’d anticipated. It was boring. After several hours of struggling to get the words just right and answering repeated nuisance phone calls, she took the receiver off the hook, pressed delete, and began again.
From the second the puck dropped in the America West Arena tonight, the Chinooks and Coyotes treated fans to a wild roller-coaster ride of hard hits and white-knuckle suspense. Both teams kept up the frenetic pace until the very end, when Chinooks goalie Luc Martineau denied the Coyotes a smoker from the blue line. When the final buzzer sounded in overtime, the score remained tied at one with…
Along with Luc’s many saves, she wrote about Lynch’s goal and the hard hits on the Hammer. It didn’t occur to her until after she’d sent the article early the next morning that Luc had been watching her in the locker room. As she’d been bouncing around like a pinball, not everyone had been ignoring her. Again she felt a disturbing catch in her chest and alarm bells rang in her head, signaling trouble. Big bad trouble with baby blue eyes and legendary fast hands.
It was a good thing he didn’t like her. And she most definitely didn’t like anything about him.
Well, except his tattoo. The tattoo rocked.
Early the next morning, the Chinooks dressed in their suits, ties, and battle scars, and headed for the airport. A half hour into the flight heading for Dallas, Luc loosened his tie and broke out a deck of cards. Two of his teammates and the goalie coach, Don Boclair, joined him in a game of poker. Playing poker on long flights was one of the only times that Luc truly felt a part of the team.
As he dealt, Luc gazed across the aisle of the BAC-111, at the heavy soles of a pair of small boots. Jane had pushed up the armrest between the seats and was sound asleep. She lay on her side, and for once her hair wasn’t scraped back from her face. Soft brown curls fell across her cheek and the corner of her parted lips. One hand was folded beneath her chin.
“Do you think we were too rough on her last night?”
Luc looked up at Bressler, leaning over the back of his seat. “Nah.” He shook his head, then laid the deck on the tray table in front of him. He glanced over his cards and bet on a pair of eights while the guy in the seat next to him, Nick “the Bear” Grizzell, folded. “She doesn’t belong here,” Luc added. “If Duffy was going to force a reporter on us, he could have at least picked someone who knows something about hockey.”
“Did you see the way she kept blushing last night?”
They all chuckled as the remaining players discarded.