On Thin Ice (14 page)

Authors: Susan Andersen

BOOK: On Thin Ice

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Sasha leaned her cheek against the cool glass of the bus window and watched the scenery go by. Connie sat quietly beside her, thumbing through a magazine. Normally it was a reasonably quick ride from Tacoma to Seattle but traffic was very heavy today. There was some sort of multicar pileup just this side of a place called Federal Way, causing them to creep along and turning a forty-five minute drive into something much longer.

Sasha tended to doze off at the drop of a hat, and Connie would poke her awake if she appeared to be sleeping too deeply. During moments such as this between doze and poke, her thoughts, like rats in a maze, were inclined to dash to and fro without discernible results.

She was dealing with some major perplexities and her thought processes felt as mushy as her head. In part, the dead-end walls that she kept mentally running up against had to do with that perpetually confusing man/woman issue. Now there was a puzzle she had yet to figure out. However, the majority of her confusion stemmed from her accident, and trying to make sense of
that
was like hitting the wall going ninety.

If there was any way to avoid it, in fact, she'd opt in a heartbeat not to think about it at all today. She'd much prefer to put off any speculation concerning what had put her in this condition until she felt a hundred percent up to snuff again, for her thoughts left her feeling uneasy and alone. Made her feel almost isolated. But it was not an easy matter to ignore. Because it shouldn't have happened.

She had assumed, last night, that she'd had a moisture rot problem in the sole of her boot. Serious skaters had their boots custom made from individual forms of their feet and the blades were glued and screwed on, as opposed to the riveted blades on skates that were sold off the rack to beginners in sporting goods shops. Eventually the waterproofing wore off, however, and moisture got into the plates, dissolving the glue. Screws dropped out with great regularity, which could be a real hazard on the ice. The sole around the blade plates softened from the constant bombardment of ice spraying up beneath it and eventually gave way. So when she'd felt the wobble, she'd thought, Oh God, Harlick sure doesn't make as good a boot as they used to. But this morning, when she'd looked at her skate . . .

She'd had to make her silent apologies to Harlick, for the soles were in perfectly good condition. Yet every damn screw had come out at the same time.

And that simply wasn't possible. There were six screws holding the blade to the toe and four securing it to the heel. Now, maybe it was conceivable that a few could have loosened and perhaps, if you stretched credibility to the limit, even simultaneously on both heel and toe. But all of them at once out of an undamaged piece of leather?

Yet . . . what was the alternative here? That it had been done deliberately? That someone had just happened to know that her bag had been left in the bus on that particular night and had snuck into it to loosen the screws on her skate? Good God, talk about stretching credibilityâher head must have been banged up even worse than she'd thought.

Who would have any reason to hurt her? And why, for God's sake? Even supposing she had some heretofore unknown enemy lurking in the shadows just dying to dump her on her ass, what kind of wussy method was that to harm someone? It was too uncertain. She might have checked the blades before her performance, and truly it was just bad luck that her double axle had been performed on the periphery of the rink. It could just as well have been executed in the middle of the rink where the worst that would have happened to her would have been to spin around the ice on her face in front of thousands. Embarrassing, sure. But hardly the stuff of a mad assassin.

And yet the uneasiness persisted.

It was a relief to finally pull up to the hotel that afternoon. Sometimes the lack of privacy that was so much a part of this life got to her. Usually she thrived on it, but her defenses were down today and she just wanted to get into a room where it was quiet and calm and she wasn't surrounded by constant chatter. She slapped on her softly structured hat, yanked it down to her brows, and climbed to her feet.

Mick looked up from his clipboard when Sasha stopped in front of him. With a gesture lacking her usual animation she held out her hand for her room key. He ran a critical eye over her face as he handed it to her.

Despite the jaunty little cloth hat she wore, with its cheerfully feminine garden print and its big silk flower pinning the floppy brim back to the crown, she looked wan. Her hair exploding out from under the hat's restraint was just as lustrous as always, but her cheeks, normally so rosy in her warm, golden-skinned face, were pale, her complexion sallow.

It wasn't his place to be bugged by it.

“You have that release?” he inquired crisply as he passed her the room key and marked it off on his master list.

“Yes,” she replied coolly. She patted a couple pockets and then shrugged, too lethargic to search any further. “I'll bring it to you in the morning.”

“See that you do, Miller. Without it, you don't get back on the ice.”

“So you said this morning.” Sasha turned away before he could see the tears that rose to her eyes. She never cried. Hardly ever. Her armor was just a little thin this afternoon; that was all. She'd be back in fighting trim by tomorrow.

But she would never, not until the day she died, understand the rules in this damned man/woman game.

Now granted, her brains were pretty scrambled last night. But she could have sworn that Mick hadn't begrudged taking care of her. No one had asked him to, after all; he'd just sort of taken it upon himself to take charge. And he'd been patient and gentle and, truly, for a man of his temperament, pretty downright sweet actually.

This morning though . . . Well it wasn't as if he'd suddenly turned into a snapping, snarling adversary or anything. In a way she would have understood surly, because taking care of someone who's ill is not exactly a laugh a minute and he'd probably gotten even less sleep than she had. But it hadn't been like that. There'd simply been this . . . wall. This lethally polite, impenetrable wall.

She'd never seen him distant like that, and it was amazing how authoritative a little aloofness could make a man appear. She'd gotten the strongest impression he wanted her off his hands, as if she were a stranger he'd accidentally knocked down in a train station and now all he wanted to do was to pick her up, brush her off, and send her on her way. He'd checked her eyes for pupil reactions with cool, impersonal professionalism, declared the worst of the concussion over, and as soon as was decently possible had passed her off to Connie with strict instructions that she be taken back to the hospital to have her neuro signs checked.

When she'd tried to demure, feeling, if not one hundred percent better, then at least worlds improved from the night before, he'd looked at her without an iota of the previous night's gentleness and demanded, “You want to skate again, Miller?”

“Y-yes, of course,” she'd stammered, feeling unaccountably betrayed by his abrupt coldness.

“Well, you're not going to do so without a doctor's release.”

“Yes, sir,” she'd snapped out smartly in response, drawing herself up, damned if she'd allow him to see that it mattered to her how he acted. She'd stood there feeling vulnerable and exposed in his oversized T-shirt; then, with a dignity she'd taught herself years ago and pretending she wasn't buck naked underneath a piece of cloth that suddenly felt insufficient, she'd gone quietly around the room gathering her scattered belongings. She'd turned to Connie, who had been standing silently, looking from her face to Mick's. “Do you have my room key?”

“Yeah.” She'd produced it and handed it over to Sasha, who had turned once again to Mick.

“Thank you for your care last night,” she'd said quietly. “I appreciate it.” She'd turned and walked out of his room without a backward glance.

She didn't glance back at him now as she walked to the elevator. But Mick watched her. His jaw tightened as he saw Morrison run to catch up with her, solicitously helping her aboard the car and bending down to murmur something in her ear. He watched until the doors closed behind her . . . and that son of a bitch Morrison. Then he turned back to the next person in line.

Lon had intended to stay away from Karen. It was a promise he'd made to himself the minute he'd found out that she, too, was skating for
Follies on Ice.
And what a little bombshell that discovery had been.

The skating world was a small oneâhe'd known thatâbut this almost bordered on the ridiculous. Good God, small was one thing . . . but who the hell would have expected it to shrink to these proportions?

Well, shrunk it had and it didn't matter whether he was prepared for it or not. The basic fact couldn't be changed: he and Karen Corselli were skating for the same company. So, looking at it realistically, avoiding her entirely was probably out of the question. The next best thing, he had determined once he got past the shock, was to simply steer clear of her.

No ifs, ands, or buts. He wasn't about to put himself in the way of temptation, and that was the beginning and end of the matter. Jesus, especially not that temptation. Karen Corselli was one lesson he'd learned the hard way. He was keeping his distance.

But he had forgotten the strength of her will when there was something she wanted. At the moment, apparently, that something was him. And she was certainly one enticing woman. He was as fascinated now by the contrasts in her personality as he had been several years ago.

Sasha had never known about his association with Karen, and Lon would just as soon keep it that way. She had never thought to ask who had turned him on in the first place to the fast money to be made in drug trafficking, and since he'd actually been caught because of his own stupidity, he'd been careful not to bring Karen into it.

The woman had a real flair for intrigue; she loved the sneaking around and meeting on the sly; she got off on presenting one image to the public while displaying something entirely different in private. Way back when, her two different sides had drawn him in. They continued to tug at something inside of him today.

He found it amazing that her public persona wasn't some hypocritical display put on simply to fool the troops. She had a sincere abhorrence of hearing anything that smacked of taking the Lord's name taken in vain, and her fight to combat smutty language wherever she encountered it was a genuinely held conviction, one that she lived by. You wouldn't hear obscenities passing Karen Corselli's lips in public or in private.

But, ah God, the other uses that woman would willingly put those lips to behind closed doors was enough to raise the dead.

He looked down on them now, unpainted and innocent looking, engaged in an act that was anything but innocent. His hands clenched in her hair, his eyes closed, and his head fell back as he groaned. Call him weak; call him a fool. He'd known how good it would be and in the end just hadn't been able to stay away.

But there always seemed to be some kind of payment required when it came to sex with Karen, a hidden cost, which when the heat and need were upon him he tended to forget about. Afterwards, however, lying depleted in sweet postcoital bliss with Karen's head nestled on his shoulder and her fingers strolling lazily up and down his chest and stomach, he was forcibly reminded of it.

“That was nice,” she murmured. She twirled a curl of chest hair around her finger. “Turn on the night-light, will you? It's getting dark.”

He complied, amused as always by her irrational fear of the dark when she was so fearless in every other way. But he knew better than to comment. Karen had no sense of humor whatsoever when it came to that particular little frailty; she refused to speak of its origins, and he had wisely learned to keep his amusement to himself.

They lay quietly for several moments. Then she inquired casually, “How are you set for money, Lon?”

He shrugged. “It's tight, but I'll get by until payday.”

“How would you like to earn a nice little nest egg?”

Lon raised his head up and tucked his chin into his neck to stare down at her. “Doing what?” he asked flatly.

“Nothing you haven't done before, doll.” She smiled up at him, her hand stealing down to stroke him to hardness once again.

“Uh-uh, no way.” He reached down and removed her hand, determined that this time at least she wouldn't use that particular method to make him do what she wanted. “Where'd you get scag to sell, anyway?” he demanded. “I thought you got out of the game when they sent me up.”

“Um-hmm.”

He jerked up on one elbow, dumping her off his chest and onto the mattress. “Jesus, Karenâ”

“Don't
take the Lord'sâ”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry. You did give Quintero the seventeen kilos I gave you to give him back, right?”

“Ummm.”

“Right?
”