Can't Buy Me Love (33 page)

“You could always go back to school.”

She hit the turn signal with more force than was necessary. “I don’t think this is any of your business—”

“You’re smart, Victoria, despite your taste in men. Your mother—”

“Don’t you dare,” Victoria breathed, her anger a blowtorch eradicating any thought of a bridge between the two of them.

“Your mother,” Celeste repeated, her voice pitched low, “was no example.”

Victoria snorted, every lesson in manners and grace learned in her life with Joel vanished.

“You can do better. You should expect better for yourself. For Jacob.”

“Don’t you think I want that?” The words scorched her throat. It was like standing naked in front of a mirror and pointing at every fault. “Don’t you think that’s the whole point of my life?”

“I do,” Celeste said, and Victoria turned stunned eyes to the older woman. “I think you are a very good mother. But everyone needs help sometimes, and I … I would like to help you. With school.”

“Jacob had to miss a lot of school last year,” Victoria said, wondering why she was even contemplating this gift. “He’ll need tutoring—”

Celeste shook her head. “For you.”

Victoria sat silently, tied up in knots she couldn’t even begin to unravel.

“Think about it,” Celeste said, awkwardly patting her hand, and then, as if dismissing Victoria, she turned slightly and stared out the window.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, unable to keep the wonder and pain out of her voice.

“I feel … I feel partly to blame … for the way your father treated you. If I had stayed …”

Victoria could only gape; that Celeste would think that was ridiculous. And it was on the tip of her tongue to tell her so, to relieve her of that burden.

But she didn’t.

With shaking hands, Victoria turned up the radio.

“You’re on the front page of the Sports section,” Tara Jean said, stepping into Luc’s hospital room. She tossed the Sunday
Dallas Tribune
onto the unmade sheets on his hospital bed and he glanced down at the headline:

“That’s a bit much,” he muttered and didn’t bother to read the rest of it. He didn’t have the stomach to watch his career go up in newspaper headlines. Adrift from who he was, from the career that had defined him for more than twenty years, he was more than a little numb.

Numb, however, didn’t come close to his reaction to Tara Jean.

He didn’t want her here.

She’d been relentless in her good cheer. A bright sky of optimism, and all he wanted to do was curl up in a corner and die.

Even the way she was dressed was no doubt supposed to elicit some kind of positive reaction: a tight red halter top, a denim skirt that flirted with her knees, and cowboy boots.

She looked like a Southern wet dream, and previous to this exact moment he couldn’t say it was a look that worked for him. But it did. It really did.

That she had no doubt gone to the effort for him pissed him off. Being an object of pity made him sick. Made his ruination even more sour.

“Why are you here?” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“To take you home.”

“Anyone could do that. Why you?”

“You … you don’t want me here?”

“I don’t need your pity, Tara. Or your fucking Florence Nightingale routine.”

He expected her to flinch, to reel back in pain, because he was a bully and she had lunch money.

“You want me to show you my boobs?”

She managed to stun him out of his acrimony.

“Tara—”

She kicked shut the door and reached behind her to untie the red halter top from around her neck. Her arms, elegant and white, flexed with hidden muscles and his mouth went dry with sudden desire.

Her eyes sparkled with Eve’s knowledge as she peeled the cotton/spandex blend from the tops of her milky breasts, pausing just slightly as the top of her nut-brown nipples were revealed.

He was a teenager at a peep show. Transfixed. Turned on. Despite himself.

She ran her thumb across the front of the fold between her breasts and the fabric. Those nipples went hard. So did he.

She pushed the shirt past her breasts, white and perfect. High and round.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured.

She pulled her shirt up and tied it back around her neck. “Somehow I don’t think you feel better.”

“My career is over, Tara Jean. It’s going to take more than a peep show.” He felt the bite of despair, of a loss so huge it didn’t even register.

“Hey, hey, Luc—” She cupped his face, kissed his cheeks. “You’re going to be okay.”

“You don’t know that, Tara.” He grabbed her arms, trying not to squeeze, trying not to hurt her, but the well of pain inside him knew no boundary. “I appreciate the efforts, but you really don’t have any idea what my life is going to be like.”

Finally, the unflagging optimism took a hit and she backed away.

“All right.” She crossed her arms over her chest, hiding what she’d just flaunted. “I get it. You want me to call your mom or Billy?”

The way he treated her was one more knife to his throat.

But he was caught up in this current and didn’t have the energy to extricate himself.

“No, I just want to go home.”

The cell phone beside his bed buzzed and Tara Jean—who’d stayed until after all the tests had been run last night, filing her nails and telling the nurses who were trying to enforce visiting hours that she was his spiritual guide—arched her eyebrows at him when he let it ring.

“You going to get that?”

“It’s my agent.”

“You don’t think you should talk to him?”

“He’s only going to tell me that Toronto has dropped my contract and that some headache medicine wants to sign me on as a spokesman.”

“That doesn’t interest you?”

He sighed and pulled on his jeans. “ ’Fraid not.”

“Okay.” Tara Jean was all business and that suited him, gave him something to rest his anger against. “Anyone you need to talk to before we leave?”

“Nope.” He picked up his discharge papers and the stuff his sister and mother had brought from home last night.

He had an appointment in a few days to come back and talk to the neurologist, and he’d already talked to Dr. Matthews back in Toronto. He was going to fly in to consult at the appointment.

It was all very neat and tidy. Official. Appointments and meetings. None of it seemed to have anything at all to do with the long, slow scream in his head.

“I’m sorry, Luc,” Matthews had said. “I can’t clear you to play, not for a while. And my opinion is that you are a liability on that ice.”

Luc had told him it was okay. But the word was like a bubble of oil in his mouth, leaving nothing but grease on his tongue. The end of his career tasted like bad onion rings.

The orderly with the wheelchair waited outside the door and Luc tried to protest, but Tara cut him off.

“Get in, hotshot,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

He waved at the nurses at the desk; he’d signed all their husbands’ and sons’ and fathers’ autographs and he’d been repaid in extra breakfasts. Even a private stock of chocolate chip cookies. And they had let Tara Jean hang out long past visiting hours despite her spiritual advisor nonsense.

Another orderly stopped him in front of the regular exit.

“There are a lot of reporters out there,” the man said.

Tara Jean stopped pushing him. “You want to deal with that right now?”

“No,” Luc answered. One of Beckett’s messages, one of the more frantic ones, had told Luc not to talk to reporters until he and Beckett could come up with a statement.

He’d hold off on talking to any reporters.

“Have you remembered what happened?” she asked, wheeling him through white brightly lit hallways.

“Not yet.” No matter how hard he tried to pull up the memories of the hit, all he recalled was talking to Billy before starting the workout with Tyler. And fear ate him, fear that more memories would get snatched away by this concussion until he was walking outside his house wondering where he lived.

“Did you see it?” he asked.

“Not all of it.” She stopped pushing the chair and stepped around to face him, her eyes like ice picks. “Dennis was there.”

“What?” His funk was blown apart and it felt good to be mad, so he fed that particular fire until his body was alive with something other than self-pity. “Did you call the cops?”

“I got a little distracted, Luc.”

He took the hit in stride. “What did he say?”

“That he wants the money.”

“I hope you told him to go to hell.” Part of him worried that despite severing her connection to her past, she might get sucked in by Dennis.

“Of course I did. But he also said you have some investigator on him, asking questions.”

The censure in her eyes put a slight dent in his righteousness, but he met her head on, refusing to apologize for doing the right thing by his family.

“God, Luc, I told you not to do that. I told you—”

“I know what you told me. But it’s my family, Tara. I can’t sit back and do nothing.”

She turned away and he heard her swearing at him under her breath, and he would rather have this woman, with all her vulgar fire, than the sweet nurse she’d been the last twenty-four hours.

She started to push him again with a jerk and his head
snapped back. “Do it your way, but if this blows up in your face it’s on you.”

“Of course it is.”

“Listen to you, tough guy. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

She pushed him through the last door into the sun-splashed parking lot and he stood up. The world was the same, much to his chagrin. It wasn’t as if he expected anything different, but with his life so in ruins, the bright, sunny Texas morning seemed like a cruel cherry on top of his crap sundae.

Would a little rain to match his mood be too much to ask?

“Here.” Tara handed him sunglasses and put on her own. “You’re going to need these.”

Luc was being
a baby.

She didn’t know who he thought he was kidding, sitting in the passenger seat of the SUV cloaked in his indifference. His cool control. While at the same time he was throwing off so much sadness, she was fighting back tears.

Tears she blinked away. Pity, she knew, would not go down well with the Ice Man.

That little show at the hospital, telling her he didn’t want her there, stung. But she understood. Weeks ago, that had been her. Hurting him just because he was there and he was trying to see behind the mask she was determined to keep on.

She couldn’t look at this man—holding on so hard to his control it was cracking in his hands—and not see the man with tears in his eyes in that destroyed locker room. And he probably thought the same when he looked at her.

It was as if all that ice the Ice Man surrounded himself in had thawed and she saw the collection of fears and misgivings, all the human foibles and dreams held together with chicken wire and masking tape.

And he was all the more beautiful because of it. Not that he’d see that. Not now, maybe not ever.

And he was feeling really shitty right now.

Which was almost enough to make her forgive the
childish behavior, but she was no man’s doormat. And considering that twenty-four hours ago she had been ready to go to bed with him—and she still wanted to—she’d need an apology of some kind if he thought he was ever going to see down her shirt again.

Her spine popped straight.
Listen to me
, she thought, surprised by this new feminine strength and proud of it. Once upon a time she would have slept with him just so he’d apologize.

“I’m sorry,” Luc said as if he’d read her mind. She turned and met his sad eyes. “For in the hospital. I was mean.”

“You were. But I’ve thrown a few fits in my life. You don’t scare me.”

“Still. I’m sorry.” He touched her hand, curled his finger over hers. “I liked seeing your boobs. I’m glad it was you picking me up. I’m glad … I’m glad you’re here.”

As far as apologies went, it was world class. For her, anyway.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and he lifted her hand, kissing her knuckles. Charming, even in his grief.

Oh, what the hell?
she thought. In her experience there was one surefire way to make a sad man feel better.

Time to get naked.

She got them off the interstate, onto the two-lane highway leading to the ranch, and then took the first gravel road on the left.

Two hundred meters in the distance there was a left turn down a dirt road that dipped behind the hills. She punched the gas and took the corner so fast gravel spit up behind them.

Luc grabbed onto the handle above the door.

“What are you doing?”

Dust flew up around them as she barreled down the road, stones pinging off the windshield.

“Are you going to kill us?”

She stopped the car under the long branches of a roadside willow.

The silence and the shadow were the perfect cocoon.

She turned off the car and turned to him.