“Maybe you can get us all an invite to the mansion,” Sam persisted.
She looked up and smiled. “Win the Stanley Cup, and I’ll see what I can do.”
The heels of Faith’s red pumps clicked across the lobby as she made her way to the bank of elevators. She’d just left Jules and Darby Hogue at the pub, talking hockey and acquisition. It was a little after ten, and Ty and the other hockey players had cleared out of the pub by nine. She didn’t know where they’d gone. They hadn’t said, but it was Saturday night, and she suspected they’d joined their other teammates at various bars around town.
She pushed the button and the empty elevator opened. The back wall was mirrored and she looked at herself as the doors closed. She pulled the band out of her ponytail and scratched her scalp as the elevator moved upward. It had been a long, exhausting day, and she was tired. She had a slight headache from the Irish beer or the ponytail or both.
A few floors up, the elevator stopped and the doors slowly slid open. Inch by inch, Ty Savage appeared in the mirror. In the glass their gazes met and held as he stepped inside. He still wore the deep blue dress shirt and jeans he’d had on earlier, and a nervous little flutter settled at the bottom of her sternum. She turned and spoke first to cover her nerves. “We meet in an elevator yet again.” Although why he would make her nervous, she didn’t know. Maybe it was his height. Tall men had never made her nervous in the past.
He acknowledged her with a slight nod of his head and pushed the button for the floor above hers.
“I thought you’d be out partying with the guys.”
The doors closed and he leaned a shoulder into the mirrored wall. “I don’t party during the play-
offs. I was just in Sam’s room talking to his kid on the phone.”
“Sam has a kid?” He seemed so young.
“Yeah. He’s five.” As the elevator moved up, Ty’s gaze moved down. It started at the top of her head, lowered over her face and throat and paused for a few heartbeats on her breasts. “Does it bother you,” he said as his gaze slid down her stomach and legs to her shoes, “that the guys have seen you naked?”
She was used to men looking at her body, but with Ty it was different. The warm little flutter in her chest slid to the pit of her stomach. “Roughly four and a half million men worldwide have seen my pictures in Playboy. If I worried about who’s seen me naked, I’d never leave the house.”
Slowly he raised his gaze back up her body and he looked into her eyes. “So that’s a no—eh?”
“That’s a no—eh.”
The doors opened and she stepped out.
“How long were you married to Virgil?” he asked as he followed.
“Five years.”
“And you’re what?
Aboat thirty?”
“I just turned thirty.” She looked up at him. “Don’t judge me. You don’t know anything about my life. Sometimes you do what you have to do to survive.”
“Not all women would have chosen to get naked or marry an old man to survive.”
He sounded angry. Like it was any of his damn business. “Not all women have lived my life.”
Judgmental jerk. She moved down the hall toward her room and he walked beside her. “Is your room on this floor?”
“No. Yours is.”
“Are you walking me to my room?” she asked and didn’t bother to hide her irritation.
“Yes.” But he didn’t sound happy about it.
“Why? I don’t need you to walk me to my room.”
“I’m a nice guy.”
She laughed without humor and glanced up at him out of the corners of her eyes. “If you believe that, you’re delusional. Maybe you’ve been punched in the head one too many times.” She stopped at her door at the end of the hall and reached into her big purse. She pulled out the card key. “You’re not nice.”
“Some women think I’m real nice.”