I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw that Finn had foreseen that problem and sent me a message: Apartment 3102. Code for the elevator is 122786.
I breathed a sigh of relief and almost ran across the lobby to get to the elevators. I knew that I had to look like an idiot, but at that moment I didn’t care; I was finally getting an interview that might make my assignment possible, and I was going to make sure I did everything to make the most of it.
I got into the elevator as soon as the doors opened, and looked at the pad on the inside. There were thirty floors altogether, and I saw the top floor marked as Penthouse Suites: 3102 & 3103.
Wondering idly why there wasn’t an apartment 3101, I punched the button for the top floor.
“Please enter access code,” a quiet, feminine voice said over a speaker in the ceiling.
I looked at the text message from Finn and then punched the series of numbers into the keypad. The doors instantly slid closed.
The elevator moved up through the floors and I determinedly didn’t look at the time. It was going to be close—and I was more than halfway convinced that I was already late as it was. I took deep breaths, organizing my thoughts as best as I could, trying to calm down enough to get through the interview.
You’re acting like you did the time you got the go-ahead to interview the dean of the college, I thought, shaking my head at myself. There will be plenty of high-caliber interviews in your future if you make this one work out properly.
I almost jumped at the sound of the elevator’s ping when it arrived at the top floor, and when the doors opened I bolted out of it, hurrying down the short hallway. I looked from one side of the corridor to the other before I spotted the plate on the wall next to the inset door, proclaiming that it was 3102. I raised my hand and knocked briskly, my heart pounding in my chest.
A moment later, I heard the sound of the locks turning over, and then the seal on the door breaking as Finn opened it.
“You’re right on time,” he said, smiling at me.
“Are you sure I’m not late?”
Finn snorted. “I was going to give you five minutes’ leeway, since traffic was so bad,” he said. He opened the door wider and gestured for me to come in.
The apartment was so far beyond anything I’d seen before that, for a moment, it was almost impossible to believe. It looked like an actual house inside of the building. There was a sprawling living room with a crackling fire already started up in it, hardwood floors, and a huge couch hugging the wall below windows that reached up to the ceiling. There was a short staircase leading away from the living room, up to another level, and a big, open kitchen off to the side.
“Have a seat,” Finn suggested.
I looked around the living room. There was a pair of low, comfortable-looking chairs on either side of the coffee table, in front of the fireplace. That seemed like a safer option than the couch, though after our night together, it was strange that I could think the couch was dangerous. Probably because it would be too easy to remember how nice it felt to lie next to him, to have his arms around you.
I chose one of the chairs and began to take my gear out of my bag, intent on making the interview as up-front as possible. “So, I had an idea,” I told Finn as he settled in the chair opposite me.
“What was that?” he asked, watching me. “Oh—and do you want something to drink before we get going? Coffee? Hot chocolate?”
“Hot chocolate sounds amazing, actually,” I replied. I set the recorder on the coffee table and tested it with the remote. Finn stood and went into the kitchen, coming back with a Thermos and a couple of mugs.
“You okay with a little Baileys in it?” Finn asked, setting the mugs down. They each had a couple of marshmallows in them, and as he poured the thick, rich liquid into the two mugs, I could smell the slight scent of liquor—enough to flavor the drink, but not enough, I thought, to get either of us drunk.
“Yeah, thank you. Boozy hot chocolate always makes me feel super Christmassy,” I said with a smile.
I took a sip as Finn sat down across from me, and I noticed he’d changed into a more comfortable-looking sweater, a pair of slippers, and a worn pair of jeans.
“I had an idea,” I said, kicking my shoes off and tucking my feet under my knees.
“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Finn sipped his own hot chocolate and looked at me intently.
“I thought we could just treat this as a conversation—not like a normal interview.”
Finn raised an eyebrow at that. “Just a conversation?”
“Sure, just two people talking to each other,” I said.
“You think you’ll get more out of me that way,” he suggested.
“I might,” I said, shrugging. “But it’s up to you what you say and what you don’t want to answer.”
“Okay,” Finn said. He took another sip of cocoa and set his mug down. “Let’s do it.”
I started recording and did my standard disclosure, making Finn state that he consented to being recorded.
“This hot chocolate is actually amazing,” I said, taking another sip from my mug. “Did you order it in?”
“I made it myself, actually,” Finn said. “I might have looked up a recipe though.” He paused for a moment, looking at me curiously. “If we’re doing this as a conversation, do I get to ask you questions, too?”
“I guess it wouldn’t be fair otherwise,” I answered, smiling slightly. “What do you want to know—apart from everything you got me to tell you the other night?”
“I’ll wait to see,” he said casually.
“Well, why don’t you tell me about your parents?” I suggested. “I wasn’t able to find out much about your childhood in my research—other than high school when you started playing seriously.”
Finn thought for a moment. “I didn’t have parents, actually,” he said. “I mean, technically I did—I was born, after all—but I was all of a couple of weeks old when they put me in foster care.”
“Really?” I pressed my lips together, trying to stem the flood of follow-up questions to that fact. I was shocked to learn that Finn and I had something so deeply personal in common.
“Yeah. I bounced around a few different orphanages before they settled me at the Maclaren Children’s Home,” Finn said. “It was crowded, and way underfunded, but I’m still friends with a lot of the kids I met there.”
“You were never adopted?”
He shook his head. “When I was younger, I was something of a flight risk,” he said with a rueful smile. “They tried fostering me out once or twice—I barely remember it—but I’d end up running away back to the orphanage, so in the end they just decided to keep me there.”
“I was adopted when I was three,” I told him. “I never did find out much about my birth parents, just their names. I think…” I exhaled softly. “I think they were probably just not ready for a baby. They dropped me off at the hospital.”
“As far as I was ever able to find out, my parents skipped before they could be formally discharged from the hospital,” Finn explained. “I think they used fake names to check in—they were broke, and the hospital never managed to hunt them down.”
“So you were just never really that curious?”
That was hard for me to believe; I loved my adopted parents more than anything, but I at least had a little curiosity about the people who’d given me up.
“I figured that if they weren’t curious about me, it didn’t make sense for me to be curious about them,” Finn said, shrugging. “They gave me a name and a birthdate, and that’s about it.”
“You’re so successful, though,” I said, shaking my head. “You’d think they’d want to reach out at some point.”
“If they have, I never heard anything about it.”
“Does it make you feel more or less like you want a family of your own someday?” It was a question that I’d only ever asked other orphans, like me.
“Definitely more,” Finn said, nodding. “I
mean—I’ve been with women from around the world, and that’s fun in its own way, but what I’m really looking for is someone I can…make a life with. Someone who loves me for who I am.”
“What about your date the other night? The girl you were with at the club?”
Finn snorted. “I have to be seen to have a life outside of hockey,” he pointed out. “And so my agent, Heather—you’ve spoken to her—sets me up on dates with people.” He grinned wryly. “I think she’s given up on trying to match me with someone I might actually hit it off with though.”
“Why do you say that?”
He chuckled and took another sip of his hot chocolate. “The first few were sort of…” he glanced up at the ceiling, thinking. “They were fans, so it was weird. They wanted to be on a date with Finn McClane, ‘playmaker of the Minnesota Magpies.’ It was like they kept expecting me to grab a stick and go after a puck all night.”
I laughed, trying to picture it in my head. “And somehow, it never worked out.”
Finn grinned. “For some reason, I never really followed up on the dates. So, I guess, maybe there are some women out there who had their dreams of being a hockey girlfriend totally devastated.”
“Maybe they found someone,” I suggested. “There’s got to be plenty of guys in the minor leagues who would love that kind of attention.”
“There are,” Finn confirmed. “Lots of guys who just want to be big stars.” He shook his head. “I never—well, I guess I can’t say I never really cared about being famous. But it wasn’t the ultimate goal, either.”
“What was?”
I had forgotten all about the notebook full of questions, about everything but my hot chocolate and the gorgeous man sitting across from me. It was the most honest, most direct interview I’d ever conducted, and based on other interviews I’d read, I had to think that Finn was more at ease talking to me than he’d been with any other journalist.
“I just wanted to keep playing,” Finn said. “I had this coach in high school—Coach Jacobs—who figured me out before I even knew I wanted to play. He got me out on the ice, told me what to do, and before I knew it, I was on the team.”
“So you didn’t even know you wanted to do this for a career?”
Finn grinned, shaking his head. “I was just monkeying around on the ice with some friends,” he explained. “Coach Jacobs asked me if I thought I could get a puck into a net—offered me ten bucks if I could do it—and then…” he shrugged. “He got me interested. He honed my skills and helped put me forward for college scholarships.”
“And I guess the rest is history,” I said, wondering. What would Finn’s life been like if his high school coach hadn’t seen something in him? Would I have ever even met him?
“More or less,” Finn agreed. “I still talk to Coach Jacobs now and then—he’s about to retire—and get his feedback on my games.”
I laughed at that. “Even with a pro coach riding you?”
Finn nodded. “Coach Simmons is great, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But sometimes I need a dose of reality from someone who knows not just my good habits, but the bad ones, too.”
“You have bad habits?” I raised an eyebrow at that.
“Of course I do!”
Finn rolled his eyes, setting his mug down on the coffee table to refill it. He gestured for my mug as well, and I leaned in to hand it to him. He poured us both another cupful and sat back.
“I’m terrible at cooking—the league gave me a personal chef because if I was left to my own devices I’d eat nothing but frozen stuff. I do my own laundry, but as far as any real cleaning goes…” he shrugged. “I mean, at Maclaren, we had chores, but it wasn’t like keeping a house clean, you know?”
“So I’m assuming you have a housekeeper,” I said, gesturing around the neat apartment.
“Oh, totally,” Finn said, chuckling. “Before I invited you over, I made an emergency call to the cleaning service I use.”
“So you can’t cook and you can’t clean,” I said, ticking the points off on my fingers. “You are going to be one heck of a project for whichever woman finally claims you as her own.”
Finn laughed, nodding his head in agreement. “But at least I can promise her—if I ever find her—that she won’t have to worry about either of those things herself, if she doesn’t want to,” he said.
“That’s a good counter-argument,” I told him. “So Maclaren is sort of your home, I guess?”
“The staff there are as close as anything else I’ve got to family, outside the team,” Finn said, nodding. “I go back every year on my birthday and distribute presents to the kids, actually.”
“Really?”
“This guy—Uncle Rodney—used to do it when I was a kid there,” Finn explained. “I can’t remember what his full name was; he was some wealthy Minneapolis guy, a banker or something. Every year he’d come and give out presents. The house mother, Paige, always made him a cake and we’d sing “Happy Birthday” before he handed out the gifts to us.”
Finn smiled, and I could see the genuine pleasure in his face at the memory. “It was one of the kindest things I’ve ever known anyone to do, and I always promised myself that if I ever got that kind of money, I’d do the same.”
“Why doesn’t anyone know about this?” I asked, shaking my head in disbelief. “All the stuff you do, the Thanksgiving dinner a couple weeks ago, the Make-A-Wish stuff, all of that makes the news but not this?”
Finn looked at me a little sharply. “Heather wanted to get it out there,” he said, making a face. “I told her that if she so much as breathed a word about it to anyone in the press, I’d fire her.”
He paused. “I just want a few things in my life that are kept personal and private, you know? I don’t want to go back to Maclaren one day and see a bunch of reporters taking pictures of the poor, pitiful orphans, or read a bunch of tripe in papers about what a great guy I am, giving these kids a bit of fun on ‘my day.’” He shook his head. “Some things need to stay pure, and the only way they can is if no one talks about them.”
I held his gaze for a minute. “And you trust me—a reporter—not to mention it in my article?”
Finn smiled. “Probably pretty stupid of me, but yeah, I trust you,” he said. “I feel like you get it.”
I thought about that for a moment, and then I nodded. “I do,” I told him. “You have my word: I’m not going to put this in the article.”
“I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of talking,” Finn said then, looking at me speculatively. “Tell me something about yourself, Amy. Why aren’t you dating anyone right now?”
“How do you know I’m not?”
I raised an eyebrow, then remembered I’d told him as much when we’d been huddled together for warmth in the hotel. Finn looked at me pointedly and I smiled.
“Okay fine,” I said. “It just seems like…no one I’ve dated has ever really taken my job seriously.”
“What makes you say that?”
I shrugged. “The guys I date always seems to assume that as soon as things get serious, I’m going to be the one to abandon my career,” I said flatly. “Or they figure that what I do is pointless.”
“I know a few guys who think like that,” Finn said, “but if you take my job, for example, it’s not like there’s some kind of higher calling in being a pro-athlete. I enjoy playing the game; I do it well enough that people want to pay me for it, and I want to be a good role model because I know kids look up to me, but a lot of guys in sports don’t really see it that way. They figure if a kid is going to look up to someone whose only claim to greatness is a game, the kid needs to learn better.” He made a face.
“But that’s not how you feel?”
Finn shook his head. “If people are looking up to me, I don’t want to let them down,” he said. “I know I’m not perfect, and I can’t ever be, but I want to be a good guy.”
“Well, you’re pretty successful at that,” I pointed out, and Finn rose from his s
eat.
“We’re out of hot chocolate,” he said, pointing to the empty thermos and our equally empty mugs. I hadn’t even realized I’d finished mine; I’d been too engrossed in our conversation.
“I guess that’s the signal that the interview is over.”
I felt disappointed—not just because I hadn’t managed to get something that I could use in the article, but because I’d actually been enjoying myself.
“Then maybe you should turn the recorder off,” Finn suggested.
I caught something in his bright eyes, and fumbled with the remote for the recorder, before finally managing to shut it off.
“How much of this are you going to be able to use?” he asked, and I shrugged, smiling ruefully.
Baby Maker - A Secret Baby Sports Star Romance Page 5
