“How’s your room?” he asked.
It was like every other room. “It’s fine.”
“Good.” He took a drink of his beer. “Any problems with the players?”
“No, they all pretty much avoid me.”
“They don’t want you here.”
“Yes, I know.” She took a sip of her martini. The sugar around the top of the glass, the floating lemon slice, and the perfect mix of Absolut Citron vodka and Triple Sec almost had her sighing like a seasoned alcoholic. But becoming an alcoholic was one thing that Jane didn’t have to worry about, for two reasons. Her hangovers were too painful to ever allow her to turn pro, and when she got tanked her judgment went out the window, sometimes along with her panties.
Jane and Darby’s conversation turned from hockey to other interests. She learned that he had graduated summa cum laude with an MBA from Harvard at the age of twenty-three. He mentioned his membership in Mensa three times, and that he owned a five-thousand-square-foot home on Mercer Island, a thirty-foot sailboat, and drove a cherry-red Porsche.
No doubt about it, Darby was a geek. Not that that was necessarily bad; besides being a fraud, she sometimes felt like a geek herself. To keep up her end of the conversation, she mentioned her undergraduate degrees in journalism and English. Darby didn’t seem all that impressed.
Their food arrived and he looked up from putting butter on his baked potato. “Am I going to end up in your Single Girl column?”
Jane paused in the act of placing her napkin on her lap. Most men feared showing up in the column. “Would you mind?”
His eyes lit up. “Hell, no.” He thought a moment. “But it has to be good. I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was a bad date.”
“I don’t think I can lie,” she lied. Half the stuff in her column was made up.
“I’d make it worth your while.”
If he wanted to wheel and deal, the least she could do was listen. “How?”
“I could tell the guys on the team that I don’t think you’re here to report on the size of their Johnsons or strange sexual habits,” he said, which immediately made her wonder exactly who had strange sexual habits. Maybe Vlad the Impaler. “And I could assure them you haven’t slept with Mr. Duffy to get this job.”
Complete horror dropped her jaw, and she raised a hand to her mouth. She’d figured that there might be some small minds in the newsroom who’d assumed she’d exchanged sexual favors with Leonard Callaway, because, after all, he was the managing editor and she was just that woman who wrote that silly column about being single in the city. She wasn’t a real journalist.
But it had never entered her head that anyone would think she’d slept with Virgil Duffy. Good God, the man was old enough to be her grandfather. Sure, he had a reputation for dogging younger women, and there had been a time in her life when her standards had hit a real low patch and she’d had sex with some men she’d rather forget about, but she’d never dated anyone forty years older than herself.
Darby laughed and dug into his beef. “I can see by the look on your face that the speculation isn’t true.”
“Of course not.” She reached for her martini and polished it off. The vodka and Triple Sec warmed a path to her stomach. “I’d never even met Mr. Duffy before that first day in the locker room.” The unfairness of it hit her and she signaled for another martini. Usually Jane hated to cry “no fair.” She believed that life wasn’t fair, and that crying about it only made things worse. She was a get-over-it-and-get-on-with-your-life type of girl, but in this case it really wasn’t fair because there was nothing she could do about it. If she made a fuss and denied it, she doubted anyone would believe her.
“If you write about me in your column, make me sound good, I’ll make things easier for you.”
She picked up her fork and took a bite of her wild rice. “What, are you having trouble finding a date?” She’d been joking, but by the brilliant blush to his cheek, she could tell she’d hit a nerve.
“When women first meet me, they think I’m a dork.”
“Hmm, I didn’t think so,” she lied, risking the bad karma.
He smiled, and the risk was worth it. “They never give me a chance.”
“Well, maybe if you didn’t talk about Mensa and about your advanced degrees, you’d have better luck.”
“Think so?”
“Yep.” She was halfway through her salmon when her second drink arrived.
“Maybe you could give me some pointers.”
Right, like she was an expert. “Maybe.”
His shrewd gaze bored into her as he took a bite of potato. “I could make it worth your while,