Can't Buy Me Love (2 page)

“Six months’ recovery for a man half your age.” Addie raised a killing eyebrow.

“Why don’t you guys go back to giving him a hard time?” Billy jerked a thumb back at Luc.

“Don’t bring me into this.”

“You are the oldest man in the league,” Addie said to Luc. “Thirty-seven is—”

“I know how old I am.”

“You don’t think about retiring?”

“Not without winning the cup for Toronto first.”

Luc got knocked out at the end of the third quarter of game seven in the finals. The Bull Dogs were able to tie it up and The Cavaliers lost in a shootout. They’d been close. So damn close. If he and Billy hadn’t been laid up, he’d be drinking out of the cup right now, instead of answering questions no one should be asking him.

“What do you think of your chances next year?” Addie asked.

“Well, if we can keep everyone healthy, I think our chances are great.”

“And after that?” Addie asked, a sly grin on her face.

Matthews couldn’t give him any concrete proof that he had this Tav protein, or even would have it. So he had a buildup of scar tissue on his frontal lobe? There wasn’t a pro athlete who didn’t, except for maybe the baseball players. But the increased chances of future concussions was going to be a problem when his contract was up.

Post-concussion syndrome wasn’t something anyone wanted to have. And he had it. And it was documented.

The league was getting twitchy about head injuries. Lindros and his glass jaw had changed the game. And that was before Sidney Crosby’s concussion made global headlines. No one wanted to take a chance on a guy who couldn’t take a hit without getting knocked cold.

All that aside, if Luc wasn’t thirty-seven years old, standing at the edge of his contract, the word “retire” wouldn’t have even passed Matthews’s lips.

He’d accused Matthews of that, but the old man had disagreed. Said he’d seen too many athletes burn themselves out, damage themselves beyond repair in pursuit of the dream.

The damage a second concussion would do to your brain will end your career. You’d better pray you don’t get another concussion and you’d better pray you
don’t get traded. Without Billy Wilkins chasing guys down, it’s open season on you. This is your last year in the league
.

This next year was the year he was born to play, on the team he’d helped create. He was going to make history. Oldest man in the NHL, bringing the cup back to a city that hadn’t seen it in over fifty years.

No one, not even his old man, could look at that and call it nothing.

“Ice Man?” Adelaide said when he didn’t answer her question. “Your contract is up after next year, are you planning on going free agent?”

“After that, I’m done.”

His heart burned as he said it, but that was the agreement: rest, recoup, finish the contract and get out.

Reporters hummed at the news, practically vibrating at the unsolicited retirement announcement.

“Come on,” Billy scoffed. “Any team will want you for a few more years. Look at Gary Roberts. Ray Bourque. There’s always room on a team for experience. Hell, someone should hire you just to teach Lashenko how to play the damn game.”

All the reporters laughed. Billy and Lashenko had a blood feud that had started in the Olympics three years ago.

Acid burned in Luc’s dry stomach. He wished he could agree. He wished he had two, three more years in him. He wished he could ride out his career for as long as he could—hell, he’d even go to Europe, play there until his body gave out.

But his body—not even his body, his brain of all things
—was
giving out on him.

“We’re done here,” he said, holding on to his anger, hiding it like a weakness that would eat him from the inside out.

The reporters fired more questions at him, but he held up his hand and cut through the crowd like a knife.

His life would be over in a year.

An hour later, Luc slid the key into the lock of his penthouse apartment and suddenly remembered that his home was not his own, and peace and quiet were probably not going to happen here.

But before he could take the key out and go over to Billy’s house, or find some dark bar on Front Street, the door swung open, revealing his sister, Victoria Schulman, looking about as tense and thin as a piano wire.

“Hey,” he said, accepting his fate and stepping inside. He loved his sister, adored her and her son Jacob, but trying to ignore the panic that she was so hopeless at hiding was exhausting.

Vicks
, he thought, not for the first time,
just let me help you
.

It was only money after all, and he had plenty of it.

“Where’s Jacob?” He looked over Victoria’s thin shoulder for his seven-year-old nephew. Luc had been carrying a whoopee cushion in his coat pocket for about a week and he kept forgetting to give it to him.

“Danny’s,” she said, her fingers nearly crushing a white envelope.

He shrugged out of his coat and dumped it onto the chair he kept by the door for just that reason. But she made that little coughing sound in her throat and with a sigh, he picked it back up.

She opened the closet door and handed him a hanger, as if she were the hostess of a party he’d been invited to attend. In his own house.

She did that sort of stuff all the time; announced dinner menus as though foreign dignitaries were about to sit down and eat chili with them. There were even flowers
in his house. Everywhere. Pink ones in vases he’d never seen before.

Being the Queen of Manhattan Society hadn’t prepared her to be a penniless guest in her brother’s home. Her husband, Joel the Jackass, had ripped away the only life the woman was capable of living with any comfort.

Made him want to beat the guy to a pulp for putting his sister in this position.

But Joel had handled that himself a year ago … with a bullet to his brain.

Luc took the hanger from her. “You don’t need to do this stuff,” he told her, trying to keep his patience.

“I’m just trying to help—” She caught herself and smiled, holding up her hands. “Okay.”

“So,” he said, hanging up his coat and closing the closet door. Her stress was like smoke in the air and he wanted to clear it. “Everything okay?”

“We need to talk.” She stuck out the crushed envelope.

“What is it?”

She shook the envelope at him. “Just … look at it.”

Swallowing his sigh, he slid two pieces of paper out, one big, the other smaller. He flipped over the smaller one.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he muttered, staring at the picture of his eighty-nine-year-old father, surrounded by the Angus cattle he adored so damn much, with a blonde wearing pink leather, and not much of it, draped across his wheelchair.

“She looks like a blow-up sex doll,” he said, and Victoria laughed.

“That’s what I thought.” For a second the tension dissipated, but then it surged back like a high tide. “Read the other one.”

He flipped over the big piece of paper and it took him
a second to realize he was staring at a wedding invitation.

His father was marrying the sex doll, whose name was Tara Jean Sweet. Who the hell had a name like that? Porn stars, that’s who. Strippers.

The blessed event was happening next month at Crooked Creek Ranch. Pig roast to follow.

Time slowed for Luc, the way it did when he was in that sweet spot behind the net, the ice open in front of him. He could see every move in every player’s head and outsmart them all.

The bastard was getting married.

Funny, he had never seen that coming.

“It’s a joke, right?” Victoria asked. “It has to be.”

He shoved the invitation and that ridiculous picture back in the envelope.
Tara Jean Sweet. Please
.

“Who cares?” He tossed the envelope on the hutch in the foyer. It slid right off, landing on the floor, and he didn’t bother to pick it up.

But Victoria scrambled to grab it.

“Who cares?” Victoria followed him when he took off down the hallway toward the living room. “I care, Luc.”

“You shouldn’t.” He pulled loose his tie, then tossed his coat across the white couch some designer had picked out for him. No doubt Vicks was going nuts at the negligence, but he didn’t care. “Didn’t he disown you?”

“No. I mean … I don’t think so. He just kicked me out.”

Christ, his head hurt.

“That money.” Her voice was climbing the rafters; the neighbor’s dogs were going to go berserk in a second. “I need—”

The sigh—weary and impatient—slipped from his mouth before he could stop it and she closed her mouth, pinching her lips together.

The gray day outside the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows suited him. The traffic jam on Yonge Street matched his frustrated mood.

He just could not catch a break.

“You don’t need anything from him.” He tried to sound like a never-ending well of patience, a beacon of gentle understanding, but it was a total lie and Vicks knew it.

“We have nothing.” Her voice creaked like an old floor tired of all the weight. “Jacob and I—”

“I can take care of you and Jacob. I’ve told you that.”

“I don’t want your charity.”

“But you’ll take that bastard’s? You’ll take money from him?”

“I earned that money.” She lifted her chin. “We both did. Being that man’s child was a job. Those summers—”

“I want nothing from Lyle.” End of that discussion. He stepped into the cream and black kitchen—again some designer’s sense of masculine—and pulled open the stainless-steel fridge to get a beer.

He felt her eyes on him as he paced and drank, trapped in sophisticated clothes and an ugly kitchen. “You could get a job,” he offered. “Hell, I’d pay you to redecorate this condo.”

“A job?” she asked as if he’d suggested she become a hit man. He didn’t understand this attitude of hers, as if work were something totally out of reach. She had jobs before. Not great ones but, she’d worked. “I have no qualifications or experience.”

“I’m not sure my designer did, either.”

“This isn’t funny!”

“I’m not laughing. I’m trying to get rid of this stupid idea I can see in your head.”

“I need the money.”

“Vicks, maybe if you hadn’t given it all to the lawyers—”

“I couldn’t keep that money.” Funny how strong her voice was now, how resolute. “Joel stole from those people. Bankrupted some of them—”

“I know, I get it. I do. But, Christ, you’re stubborn.”

She smiled slightly. “I learned it from my big brother.”

He sighed, bracing his hands against the counter. She was going to go down to Texas and take on their father—her intentions were a neon billboard all over her pale face. “We should at least find out if it’s really true.”

“You’re going to call Dad?”

He laughed and pulled out his cell phone. “Better,” he said. “I’m going to call his keeper.” He hit speed dial before holding the phone up to his ear.

“Maman,” he said with a smile.

A year ago, Victoria had had her pride shoved down her throat by her husband and as humiliating and awful as that experience had been, as soul-crushing and horrifying, it freed her from pride. From hubris. From everything in her life except Jacob.

In return, it gave her clarity. A worldview that was based on survival.

She’d earned her inheritance. She needed it. And there was simply no way a woman named Tara Jean Sweet was going to take it away from her.

Victoria carefully pushed herself into one of the terribly uncomfortable bar stools that lined the kitchen counter. Luc was on the phone with Celeste, his mother and Lyle’s ex-wife, who paid lawyers a lot of money to stay on top of the old man and make his life miserable. If anyone could find out if this was joke, it was Celeste.

Luc ran a hand through his dark hair, rubbing a spot on his forehead as if something under the skin was bothering him. He’d been doing that a lot lately, and she’d
started to wonder if that hit he took in the last game had done some serious damage.

“Non. Non.”
His laugh was a revelation and it made her smile. French wasn’t a language they shared. Because her own mother, Lyle’s mistress, had been a bored New Yorker with an appetite for self-destruction and Celeste had been an elegant and snobby French-Canadian model.

In those long and bleak summers she and Luc had shared in Texas, learning to hate their father, the “half” part of their relationship had become irrelevant. They were born eighteen months apart and they might as well have been twins.

Luc’s conversation grew terse. His hands were white-knuckled around the phone and the neck of his beer, and Victoria’s stomach sank with a sick gurgle into the soles of her feet.

Not a joke.

Luc hung up, and Victoria felt herself begin to fray and snap. She smoothed the hem of her gray wool skirt with shaking fingers—as if that would help. As if all that stood between her and a life of security was a wrinkled hem. “It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked, not quite able to look her brother in the eye.

She wished she were a different woman. Better able to care for herself and her son. But she wasn’t. She was Victoria Schulman and right now, she needed her father’s inheritance.

“It’s true,” he said. “Maman was notified by her lawyer that Dad changed his will two weeks ago. If he marries that … woman, she inherits everything.”

His eyes were so pitying and she couldn’t pretend not to see it.

“And I’ll lose everything.”

“I’m not going back there, Vicks,” he said through clenched teeth. His shoulders curled and bunched as if
he wanted to hurl the beer bottle across the room. “I haven’t been back there in twenty years and I don’t give a shit who he marries, or if he’s dying. I’m not going back.”

“I’m not asking you to.” But she was. Oh, she was. And he knew it; her act didn’t convince anyone, least of all her brother. “You’ve done enough. I’ll go alone.”

“Right,” he scoffed. “You down there with him … by yourself? Someone will get killed.”

“It might be Bimbo Barbie,” she said with a smile.

Luc laughed through his nose and it took a few minutes, but she saw his mind change, just like she’d known it would. If there was one thing she could count on in this world, it was her brother.