Body Check (6 page)

“Even if doing so is an investment for the team's future.”

“Back to that again, the deep pockets argument?”

Janna held her tongue, trying to keep the rising tide of anger and desperation within her in check.

“Look, I told you. If I feel moved to do something at some point, I will. But in the meantime, I think you're wasting your time and energy trying to change my position. I'm not gonna budge.”

Janna looked down at the floor, counted to three, then looked back up. “Can I ask you a question?”

“You can ask me anything.”

Janna checked his expression; was he flirting with her? She decided he was not.

“Would it kill you to do
just one
appearance at a hospital or hit a few golf balls for cancer? Would it?”

“Funny, Kevin said the same thing yesterday.”

“And what was your response?”

“My response was that Kidco doesn't care about the integrity of the game
or
about anyone playing it, so as far as I can see, I owe them
nothing,
least of all any of my precious free time.”

Janna stared at him. “You don't get it, do you?”

“You said that yesterday,” Ty pointed out, mildly amused.

“And I'll say it again, because it's true. You're so hung up on sticking to your principles you don't even realize you're shooting yourself in the foot. Fine, refuse to do PR, suit yourself. But understand this: I am not going to give up. I'm being paid to hound you and your teammates, and I will. Every time you turn around, Captain Gallagher, there I'll be, with my dreaded list of community events. I'm going to be the pebble in your shoe you can't get rid of, the annoying song lyric you can't get out of your head. You better get used to me bugging the hell out of you, because it's going to be one of the constants in your life from now until the season ends in June—assuming you make it to the Playoffs, of course.”

“Oh, we'll make it to the Playoffs,” Ty replied breezily, casually massaging the back of his neck with his towel. “The real question is whether
you'll
last that long.”

With a knowing wink, he finished the last of his juice and sauntered away, leaving Janna standing there, a white-hot ball of fury beginning to coalesce in her gut.

Had he just made a veiled threat to see to it that she lost her job? Or was he simply insinuating she didn't have what it took to stay the course? Either way, his parting shot made her furious.

Of course, she was the one who'd taken aim first, she had to admit that.

She had to go and make that jibe about the Playoffs. She couldn't just bite her tongue. And what did it get her? Nothing, with the possible exception of an enemy for life.

She went over to the buffet table, picked up a gleaming red apple, and bit into it, hard. So much for sweetness and light. Ty Gallagher had thrown down the gauntlet. She would pick it up. The battle had officially begun. He might have won the first two rounds, but in the end, she would win the fight. She was expected by Kidco to win. She was being paid to win. She'd fight Ty Gallagher to the bitter end. Not because she wanted to, but because she had to.

 

 

 

 

“Tyyyyyy. Tyler-Wyler.
Wakey, wakey.”

Ty cracked open one weary, bloodshot eye. The bodacious redhead he'd brought home the night before was playfully straddling him as if he were her own personal hobbyhorse.

“Could you please get off me,” he muttered politely, the jabbing headache behind his eyes surging every time she bounced up and down.

“That's not what you said last night,” she teased, leaning forward so her breasts grazed his chest.

“This isn't last night,” he replied, closing his eye. His head felt bolted to the pillow, the pain was that heavy and intense.
All play and too much Rémy Martin makes Ty a hungover boy
. The woman whom he'd brought to screaming ecstasy the night before—Laurie? Laura? Lauren?—stopped bouncing, but she made no move to unwrap herself from his torso. In fact, her face was now buried deep in his neck, which she was biting in the hope he would revive and give a command performance. It wasn't gonna happen.

“I mean it,” Ty said gently. “I need you to get off me, I'm not feeling too great.”

The woman clucked her tongue disappointedly then rolled off, allowing him to feel like he could breathe again. He forced open both eyes, and with what felt like every ounce of strength he had, slowly turned his head toward his night table to see the time. Ten-thirty A.M.
Oh, shi—no wait, wait. Ten-thirty A.M . . . Sunday. Whew
. For a second there he'd been seized with panic that he'd overslept and had missed practice. But then he remembered: Last night had been Saturday, and he'd gone with a couple of the guys to check out some private club down in Noho. The club owner, clearly thrilled to have a sports celebrity in his midst, had told Ty he could drink on the house. And Ty had, the sharp edges of the night growing increasingly fuzzy the more cognac he enjoyed. He remembered ducking into a cab with the redhead now beside him, and could somewhat recall the acrobatics they'd engaged in the night before. But the fact that she was here in his bed was proof he'd had too much drink. Usually, if he was interested in making love to a woman, he made sure they went back to her place. That way, he could leave after a respectable interval of afterglow and not have to spend the night. Now he was stuck.

The redhead was sighing contentedly to herself and snuggling down beneath the covers, clearly intending to go back to sleep. Ty propped himself up on his elbow, and as nicely as he could, gently shook her shoulder.

“I hate to do this, sweetheart, but there's somewhere I need to be.”

“That's okay,” she mewed in a kittenish voice. “You can just leave me here.”

Ty chuckled, surprised to discover that even his face hurt. “No can do, honey. It doesn't work that way at Chateau Gallagher. Why don't you run along to the shower and I'll arrange for a cab to pick you up in a half hour or so?”

The woman sat up, huffing. “Fine.” Pulling the sheet to her chest, she rose, Ty's bedding trailing after her as she stomped off into the bathroom. “I know when I'm not wanted.”

Thank God for that
, Ty said to himself, grabbing his robe from where it hung on the back of the bedroom door. While standing seemed to ease his headache somewhat, he was now acutely aware of the gritty insides of his mouth, which felt as if an invading army had marched through it. Keeping the shades drawn, he made his way into the kitchen, the light from the Sub-Zero fridge blinding him as he opened the door to check what was inside. Bottles of juice. Unused rolls of film. Batteries.

Palm to pounding forehead, he began rustling through the kitchen in search of coffee. His housekeeper, Inez, was always rearranging the damn cabinets, so he never knew where anything was at any given moment. In the freezer, he found the precious ground beans that he hoped would alleviate his headache. Putting up a pot in the Krups, he called the doorman to arrange for a cab for Laura-Laurie-Lauren, fervently praying that she took her time in the shower and didn't emerge in time for a cup of joe and a chat.

For one thing, he wasn't a morning person, especially when he was hungover. For another, he really had nothing to say to her. His mind circled back to the night before—to the sex, specifically. It had been good, no doubt about that. And then he remembered . . . Janna. The bottom dropped out of his already queasy stomach. At some point during foreplay, his imagination had taken over, and he had pretended it was Janna he was kissing deeply on the mouth, Janna's smooth thighs he was parting.
Oh, Jesus.

Shaken, he went to sit in his huge, glass-walled atelier living room, daylight stabbing him. This is what he needed: to be brutalized by bright morning sun so that he'd come to his senses. Ever since his exchange with Janna in the lounge the day before, he hadn't been able to get her off his mind. She had guts, standing up to him like that, and he admired her for it. Some of his own guys longed to go toe-to-toe with him, but didn't have the balls to do it. But this tiny woman—who would, no doubt, be busting his chops day and night as she threatened to do—she let him have it but good. He
loved
that. It turned him on. Showed she had brains, spirit, and courage—the same stuff needed to make it out on the ice.
I'll be the annoying song lyric you can't get out of your head. Man, she was right about that
. Now he just needed to figure out what to do about it, because there was no way in hell he could let himself fall for this woman, not when she worked for those corporate bastards at Kidco, not when he couldn't afford to divert his attention from winning. He had to expunge her from his thoughts. Avoid her. Ignore her. Whatever it took.

“Can I at least get a cup of coffee before you throw me out?”

The sharp voice of Laurie-Laura-Lauren behind him brought Ty back to himself. He turned from the window to see his playmate from the night before standing by his large, cream-colored leather couch glaring at him, her low-cut emerald dress from the night before looking cheap and incongruous now in the morning light.

“Sure,” Ty replied, moving toward the kitchen. A cup of coffee and cab fare was the least he could do. But even as he was politely pouring out the steaming black liquid into a mug, his mind was fixated on one thing: Janna, and how to nip his desire for her in the bud. It wouldn't be easy, but he could do it.

 

 

Her father's greeting as she pulled into the circular driveway of her parents' Connecticut estate never failed to bring a smile to Janna's face. Ever since she could remember, those had been the first words out of his mouth whenever he'd catch sight of her. He had been bent low over a bed of Japanese anemone, their pale pink blossoms quivering slightly in the September breeze. He straightened up when he saw her, the bright eyes, set deep in his ruddy, weathered face, twinkling with delight. Peeling off his dirt-caked gardening gloves, he let them drop to the ground and came forward to hug her. Janna reveled in the comfort of his crushing embrace as she took in his scent: light sweat mixed with Dial soap, an aroma that took her straight back to childhood, to the happiness of time spent with him.

“How's it going?” she asked, inspecting the beds. Everything she knew about gardening, she'd learned from her father. How many hours had they spent together poring over seed catalogs, planting and digging, weeding and watering? She wasn't sure which had been his greatest gift: his unwavering belief in her, or the love of gardening that he'd passed on. She was certain she never could have survived her crazy childhood without both.

“They're taking over,” her father replied in answer to her question. “I'm trying to get them trimmed back before they choke out everything else.”

Janna nodded sympathetically. He looked tired; then again, when didn't he? Patrick MacNeil was known as a “workhorse.” Back when he'd first started out, working in construction, he was renowned for his sheer brute strength and stubborn endurance. There was no task his squat, square body wouldn't tackle and keep at until it was done, and done properly. It was that same determination that had allowed him to strike out on his own as a builder.

Now, thirty-five years later, he sat at the head of a small building empire, the word
delegate
nonexistent in his vocabulary. He oversaw every detail of every operation from start to finish. Janna knew it was more than a matter of pride. She'd figured out long ago that losing himself in work gave her father a much-needed respite from the battleground that was his marriage.

As if on cue, Janna heard her mother's tinkling laughter float through the open front door. Courtney MacNeil was the
Town & Country
woman come to life: tall, regal, unmistakably WASP. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she had never quite forgiven Janna's father for temporarily yanking it out during their early years together, despite the fact that his business now earned more money than she could spend in a lifetime—although God knows she was trying. At fifty-four, she had the body of a woman half her age, and people viewing her from a distance, struck at first by her long mane of ash-blond hair, often mistook Courtney for one of her daughters, usually Petra or Skyler, which pleased her immensely.

Janna loved and hated her mother simultaneously. Loved her because a child doesn't know how to do anything else, and hated her because her mother had always made her feel she was lacking. Sandwiched as she was between her older sister, Petra, who was tall and brilliant, and her younger sister, Skyler, who was tall and gorgeous, Janna was the odd girl out—pint-sized, ordinary, the classic middle child who fought to shine but never even managed a flicker. At least not in her mother's eyes. One of her most painful memories was hearing her mother say to a room full of guests at a party, “Petra's got the brains, Skyler's got the beauty, and Janna”—here she had paused with pursed lips, obviously trying to think of
something
to say—“Janna's got the drive.”

The drive
. As if that was something lesser. No wonder she had always gravitated toward her father. He understood drive, didn't see it as gauche or somehow grasping the way her mother did. She looked at her father now, and tears began welling in her eyes. He was the one who had encouraged her to start her own business, who believed in her savvy, who told her repeatedly not to give up. So why had she? Why did she work for big corporations, and not for herself? The answer was simple: fear. She was afraid of failing. Afraid that what her mother had said was true—all she had to offer was drive with no talent to back it up. So what if she'd studied at the Wharton School? She was an impostor, always had been. She'd tricked her professors into believing she had a solid head for business, just like she continued tricking everyone into believing she knew how to do PR. Like Lou, for instance, who thought she was MENSA material. Well, her mother knew better.