See Jane Score (6 page)

Jack planted a foot on the bench in front of him and glanced across his shoulder at her. His cheek had an angry red welt, and an old scar creased his top lip. He unwound the tape from the top of his socks and took so long to respond that Jane began to fear he didn't plan to answer at all.

“I hope so,” he finally spoke. Three words. That was it.

“How do you feel about the tie?” asked a reporter next to her.

“The Coyotes played a tough game tonight. Naturally we wanted the win, but we'll take a tie.”

When she tried to ask more questions, she was talked over and shut out. She soon felt as if she were being conspired against. She tried to tell herself that she was probably being paranoid, but when she moved to the small group interviewing the captain of the Chinooks, Mark Bressler, he looked right through her and answered the questions put to him by other reporters.

She talked to a rookie with a blond Mohawk, figuring he'd be grateful for any exposure, but his English was so poor, she didn't understand more than two words. She walked toward the Hammer, but he dropped his cup and she kept going. While she could tell herself that she was a professional and this was a job, she couldn't bring herself to walk up to a totally naked man. Not on the first night.

Soon it became obvious to her that some of the other reporters resented her too, and the players were not going to answer any more of her questions. She wasn't all that surprised by the male journalists' attitudes. The sports-beat reporters at the
Times
hadn't treated her any better.

Fine, she could write the column with what she already had, she thought as she made her way to the team's goalie. Luc sat on a bench in the corner of the room, a big duffel on the floor by his feet. He'd removed everything but his thermal underwear bottoms and socks. He was bare from the waist up, and he'd wrapped a towel around his neck. The ends hung halfway down his chest, and as he watched her approach, he shot water from a plastic bottle into his mouth. A bead of moisture dripped from his bottom lip, slipped down his chin, and dropped to his sternum. Leaving a trail of moisture, it descended the defined planes of his chest and hard stomach and dipped into his navel. He had a black horseshoe tattooed on his lower belly. The shadowing of the groove and nail holes gave depth and dimension to his flesh, and the heels curved upward on each side of his belly button. The bottom of the tattoo disappeared beneath the waistband of his underwear, and Jane doubted he needed the luck of a horseshoe tattooed above his goods.

“I don't give interviews,” he said before she could ask him a question. “With all that research you've done on me, I'd have thought you'd know that.”

She did, but she wasn't feeling particularly amiable. The boys' club had shoved her out, and she felt like shoving back. She turned on her recorder. “How do you feel about tonight's game?”

She didn't expect him to answer and he didn't.

“It looked like you got your stick on that puck right before it went into the net.”

The scar on his chin appeared especially white, but his face remained expressionless. Jane only dug in her heels.

“Isn't it hard to concentrate when fans are yelling at you?”

With the edge of the towel, he wiped his face. But he didn't respond.

“If it were me, I think I'd have a hard time ignoring those nasty insults.”

His blue eyes continued to stare into hers, but one corner of his mouth turned down as if he found her very annoying.

“Until tonight, I had no idea hockey fans were so rude. Those men behind me were drunk and disgusting. I can't imagine standing up and yelling, ‘Eat me,' in a crowd like they did.”

He pulled the towel from around his neck and finally said, “Ace, if you'd stood up and yelled, ‘Eat me,' I doubt you'd be standing here right now bugging the hell out of me.”

“Why's that?”

“Because I imagine, you'd have gotten a taker or two.”

It took a few moments for his meaning to become clear, and when it did, shocked laughter spilled from her lips. “I guess it's not the same thing, is it?”

“Not quite.”

He stood and hooked his thumbs beneath the elastic of his underwear. “Now run along and harass somebody else.” When she didn't move, he added, “Unless you want to embarrass yourself some more.”

“I'm not embarrassed.”

“You keep blushing like your face is on fire.”

“It's very hot in here,” she lied. Was he the only one who'd noticed? Probably not. “Very hot.”

“It's about to get hotter.” He'd said
aboot
again. “Stick around and you're going to get an eyeful of the good wood.”

She turned and beat a hasty retreat. Not because he told her to or because of the threat of
getting an eyeful of the good wood,
but because she had a deadline. Yeah, she had a deadline, she told herself as she walked from the locker room, careful to keep her gaze from falling on any more naked parts.

By the time she made it back to the hotel, it was ten o'clock. She had a column to write and a deadline to meet, all before she could put herself to bed. She plugged in her laptop and got to work on her first sports column. She knew the beat reporters at the
Times
would tear it apart and look for flaws, and she was determined that they would find none. She was determined to write better than a man.

Chinooks Tie Coyotes; Lynch Makes Only Goal
, she wrote, but she quickly discovered that writing sports copy wasn't as easy as she'd anticipated. It was
boring
.
After several hours of struggling to get the words just right and answering repeated nuisance phone calls, she took the receiver off the hook, pressed delete, and began again.

From the second the puck dropped in the America West Arena tonight, the Chinooks and Coyotes treated fans to a wild roller-coaster ride of hard hits and white-knuckle suspense. Both teams kept up the frenetic pace until the very end, when Chinooks goalie Luc Martineau denied the Coyotes a smoker from the blue line. When the final buzzer sounded in overtime, the score remained tied at one with . . .

Along with Luc's many saves, she wrote about Lynch's goal and the hard hits on the Hammer. It didn't occur to her until after she'd sent the article early the next morning that Luc had been watching her in the locker room. As she'd been bouncing around like a pinball, not
everyone
had been ignoring her. Again she felt a disturbing catch in her chest and alarm bells rang in her head, signaling trouble. Big bad trouble with baby blue eyes and legendary fast hands.

It was a good thing he didn't like her. And she most definitely didn't like anything about him.

Well, except his tattoo. The tattoo rocked.

Early the next morning, the Chinooks dressed in their suits, ties, and battle scars, and headed for the airport. A half hour into the flight heading for Dallas, Luc loosened his tie and broke out a deck of cards. Two of his teammates and the goalie coach, Don Boclair, joined him in a game of poker. Playing poker on long flights was one of the only times that Luc truly felt a part of the team.

As he dealt, Luc gazed across the aisle of the BAC-111, at the heavy soles of a pair of small boots. Jane had pushed up the armrest between the seats and was sound asleep. She lay on her side, and for once her hair wasn't scraped back from her face. Soft brown curls fell across her cheek and the corner of her parted lips. One hand was folded beneath her chin.

“Do you think we were too rough on her last night?”

Luc looked up at Bressler, leaning over the back of his seat. “Nah.” He shook his head, then laid the deck on the tray table in front of him. He glanced over his cards and bet on a pair of eights while the guy in the seat next to him, Nick “the Bear” Grizzell, folded. “She doesn't belong here,” Luc added. “If Duffy was going to force a reporter on us, he could have at least picked someone who knows something about hockey.”

“Did you see the way she kept blushing last night?”

They all chuckled as the remaining players discarded.

“She got an eyeful of Vlad's dick.” Bressler threw down his cards. “One.”

“She saw the Impaler?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Her eyes about bugged out of her head.” Luc dealt Don Boclair two cards while he took three. “I don't think she'll ever be the same,” he said. It was a well-known fact within the team that Vlad had an ugly dick. The only man who didn't think so was Vlad himself, but everyone also knew that the Russian had taken a lot of hits to the head.

Luc bet on three eights and his win was recorded in Don's book. “How long did you keep her up with calls to her room?” Luc asked.

“She finally took the phone off the hook around midnight.”

“That first night I felt a little bad when we all went out and she was sitting by herself in the lobby bar,” Don confessed.

They all looked at him as if he were nuts. The last thing any of them wanted was a reporter—especially a woman—hanging around when they relaxed and cut loose. Be it relaxing in a strip club or nothing more than discussing an opposing team in the hotel bar, everything stayed within the team.

“Well,” Donny backpedaled as he dealt, “I hate to see any woman sitting alone.”

“It was kind of pathetic,” Grizzell added.

Luc looked over his cards and placed his bet. “Don't tell me you feel bad too, Bear?”

“Hell, no. She's got to go.” He threw down his cards. “I'm out for good.”

“Too rich for your blood?”

“Nah, I'm going to kick back and read for the rest of the flight.” Everyone knew that the Bear didn't read anything that didn't have pictures. “Reading is fundamental.”

“You got a
Playboy
?” Don asked.

“I picked up a
Him
last night after the game, but I haven't been able to get it away from the Stromster,” he said, referring to the rookie Daniel Holstrom. “He's learning English by reading
The Life of Honey Pie
.
”

They all laughed as Don recorded Bressler's win in the book. Living in Seattle especially, a lot of them were fans of Honey Pie. They read her column each month to see who she was screwing into a coma and where she'd left the body.

Luc shuffled the cards and glanced over at Jane sleeping peacefully. No doubt she was the kind of woman who'd get her panties in a twist if she saw one of the guys reading porn.

The talk around him turned to the previous night's game. No one was satisfied with the tie, least of all Luc. Phoenix had made twenty-two scoring attempts, and he'd made twenty-one saves. Not a bad night at the office, but out of all the shots on goal that night, he'd love to have that one back. Not necessarily because it went into the net, but because the goal had been more a fluke than a skilled shot. While Luc was intensely competitive and hated to lose, he really hated to lose on a fluke rather than a contest of skills.

Luc glanced again across the aisle to the woman sleeping like the dead. Her chest moved as her softly parted lips drew breath. Was last night's tie a fluke? A loss in the normal course of the season? Probably, but Luc had a lot on his mind these days, and that goal had come a bit too easy. Was his personal life affecting his game? He had yet to hear anything from his personal manager, and the Marie situation was still unresolved.

In her sleep, Jane pushed her hair from her face. Or was this the beginning of the curse of the woman reporter? Of course, one tie didn't a curse make. But it might be the beginning if they lost this Friday night in Dallas.

As if Bressler had read Luc's thoughts, he said, “Did you know that it was considered bad luck for a woman to board a pirate ship?”

Luc hadn't known that, but it made perfect sense to him. There was nothing that could mess up a man's life quicker than an unwanted female.

Friday night the Chinooks lost in a four–three nail-biter with Dallas. Saturday morning while Luc waited outside for the bus to take them back to DFW, he read the sports section of the
Dallas Morning News
.

The headline read, “Chinooks Spill Blood and Guts,” and that pretty much summed up the game after Chinooks rookie Daniel Holstrom took a puck to his cheek early in the second frame. The puck that dropped Holstrom like a rock had come from a Dallas stick. Holstrom had been helped off the ice and hadn't returned. Tempers flared, retaliation was sought. The Hammer mixed it up with the Dallas offense, grabbing a winger in the third period and giving him a glove rub in the alley.

After that, things got ugly, and while the Chinooks may have won the battles in the corners, they'd ultimately lost the war. Dallas's deep offensive lines had taken advantage of every power play and peppered Luc with thirty-two shots on goal.

This morning no one was saying much. Especially after the ass-ream they'd been given in the locker room by Coach Nystrom. The coach had closed the door on reporters and had proceeded to shake the cinder-block walls with his loud tirade. But he'd said nothing they hadn't deserved. They'd drawn stupid penalties and paid the price.