by Avery Flynn
Trish stepped out of her bedroom wearing another mind numbing dress—this one was a clingy bright yellow number showing just a hint of cleavage with tiny buttons running from the neckline to her waist, before stopping at the top of a swishy short skirt that swayed with every step and rode up her thighs as she drove downtown. The damn thing was hypnotizing. Luckily, it wasn’t a long walk between the car and the restaurant she chose. If it were, Stryker would have ended up walking into a lamp post or something equally embarrassing.
On the way, she called a friend—a guy named Randy—and asked him to have a table waiting for her. Goldy’s Breakfast Bistro, Stryker’s favorite breakfast place on Earth, was as notorious for the wait as it was for the food. She told Randy that he owed her and she was collecting the debt.
Stryker wondered what the dude owed her for, but was smart enough not to ask. When he followed her past the line of people waiting, she held her phone out as if she’d just received a text. A guy Stryker figured was Randy pointed her to an open table but not before he gave her a nasty look. Trish smiled sweetly at him before sitting and taking the menu he offered. “Thanks, Randy. Consider yourself paid in full.”
“Fine, just don’t let Wanda know and we’re all good.”
Stryker didn’t say anything, he just browsed the menu. He didn’t need to since he knew exactly what he wanted, but checked to see if there were any additions since the last time he’d been there.
Trish had gone from embarrassingly hungover to all-business mode in a little over an hour. It was pretty annoying, especially since his last hangover lasted two days.
They ordered before Randy even left the table, and Trish spent the time between the first pour of Goldy’s coffee and the delivery of their meals giving a him a brief overview of what his week of hell entailed. The first thing she mentioned was a float party down the Boise River.
A smile spread over his face when he thought about Trish in a bathing suit floating beside him in an inner tube. That might not be too bad. He would have suggested it if he’d thought of it first. Unfortunately, thanks to Karma and her crazy obsession with the media, he and Trish would spend the few hours floating the Boise River surrounded by a hundred other people he had no interest in seeing in a bathing suit.
The next day they had a hockey clinic with the local peewee teams at the CenturyLink Arena where the Steelheads played. That would be fun, and then he had an afternoon visit to the children’s wing of St. Alphonsus Hospital.
Visiting sick kids was one of the hardest things Stryker did—and he did it often. Talk about heart-rending. As horrible as it was to see so many children so sick that they were stuck in a hospital, he was constantly amazed by their courage and strength. He had to admit it felt pretty good to put a smile on their faces and, for a little while at least, help them forget the reality of their illnesses or injuries. He even forgot they were sick sometimes and just enjoyed hanging out and playing—especially when he brought enough equipment to play Nerf Hockey in the halls.
Playing hockey in wheel chairs was a challenge and he’d been known to roll around on a gurney a time or two. It always went over big with the kids, some of the staff—not so much. For the most part, as long as they didn’t get too rambunctious, the staff was fine with it, but there were some times one or two of the staff forgot what it was like to be a kid—no less a sick kid.
Stryker took out his phone and texted his agent, asking her to call St. Al’s, get a rough estimate of how many kids they had there, and make arrangements to have the appropriate number of Nerf Hockey sets overnighted along with enough Rajun Cajun t-shirts, and pucks for the kids at the hospital and in the hockey clinic. His agent was a sucker for kids too—especially sick ones, and since hunting down Nerf Hockey sets and sending t-shirts and pucks was pretty much the only high-maintenance thing he asked of her, his favorite client status was pretty much ensured.
Trish had seemed overly anxious since he brought her coffee earlier—he chalked it up to embarrassment for getting wasted the night before, something he knew had to be an aberration. Knowing the Trish he’d spent three and a half years being schooled by—literally—he’d bet his signing bonus that hers was the first hangover she’d experienced since her teen years.
“You have three interviews scheduled today, two with local stations, and then there’s Jessie with ESPN. All of them are to take place at Humpin’ Hannah’s, so there’s no running to the studios to worry about. We do have one problem though.”
“Just one?” Could she be serious? He looked at his half-eaten orders of salmon hash and a potato frittata smothered in hollandaise and his stomach lurched to the wrong side of settled. She’d waited until they were halfway through their meals to talk about the interviews. He’d known it was coming—he just wished she’d waited until after he’d finished eating. Yes, he’d ordered two meals, but that wasn’t why he was on the brink of tossing up everything he’d already gorged. It had everything to do with the thought of three interviews. Hell, the beignets New Orleans was so famous for couldn’t come out ahead in a faceoff with Goldy’s Salmon Hash. Goldy’s was the Gordie Howe of breakfast joints. “What’s the one problem?”
“We’re on YouTube.” Trish made a grab for her neck, as if she were trying to massage the tension out of her muscles.
Stryker’s internal stress meter hit the red zone. This was definitely not the way he wanted to prepare for the interviews. He thought about all the things they could have filmed. That scene at Guido’s? The two of them making out with her sitting on his lap. Or maybe they filmed the kiss against her car. He leaned forward to whisper, or maybe just to get a whiff of her scent—he’d noticed it had a soothing effect on his nerves and just the opposite effect on his libido. “What exactly is on YouTube?”
Trish’s perfect dark brows rose and she took a deep breath like she was bracing for the worst.
Every muscle in his body went from on guard to locked and loaded, just waiting for detonation. The small restaurant closed in on him and the volume of chatter seemed to increase exponentially. He watched as a blush crept up her chest and bloomed on her face like a sunburn.
“Everything that happened last night at Humpin’ Hannah’s from the moment we walked in. Karma jumping on you, me going to the bar, our…” she stopped and seemed to measure her words, “…disagreement. It was so loud, they weren’t able to pick us up on audio, but they have the entire thing on video.”
He grabbed the edge of the table and squeezed it, wishing it was the yahoo who videotaped them’s neck.
“It’s gone viral and the comments are horrendous.”
He took a look at what was left of his breakfast and pushed the plate away. “Are you okay?”
“Me?” She looked stunned that he’d asked. “I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about. You have three back-to-back interviews scheduled today and you know they’re going to want to talk about it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize someone was recording us. Thank God they weren’t able to pick up our conversation.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Twice. I couldn’t hear anything, and they weren’t too close, so I don’t think anyone will know what we were discussing.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face and took a deep breath, then another, and another trying to get his temper under control. When he opened his eyes, she watched him, like she wondered if he were about to explode. “Okay.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. I thought you’d be mad.”
He was mad as hell, but he had no way of knowing which asshole was responsible for the video. Trish fidgeted with her silverware and he realized her hands were shaking. “Did you think I’d be mad at you?”
She shrugged and, when she realized he was looking at her shaking hands, she placed them in her lap.
“You said you had no idea we’d been taped. It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s mine. I should
have been more careful. I knew The Cup win would put me into the spotlight, but until now, I’ve always managed to fly under the radar. Karma changed all that. I should have been prepared for something like this.”
“What are you going to say when they ask you about it in the interviews?”
“I’ll tell them it’s none of their damn business.”
She graced him with her very prim and proper eyebrow raise. “Yeah, that will go over well.”
He leaned even closer, and her eyes widened just before she licked her lips. “They can’t make me answer a question I don’t want to answer.”
She looked at him the way she always had at school when he refused to do things her way. It was a look he’d been well acquainted with in college—she meant business.
“Stryker, in case you’ve forgotten, Karma is counting on you to do these interviews and not be belligerent. You’re supposed to help her business, not harm it. You’re going to have to say something.”
He pulled out his phone and it took him less than a minute to find the video. He reached over, dragged her chair closer to his, and held the phone so they could watch it together.
Only a blind man could miss the emotion on Trish’s face—one he hadn’t seen at the time. To all the viewers, Trish was an open book. He watched them walk through the door with his arm around her and whispered something in her ear. He remembered trying to warn her about Karma. Her expression went from happy to confused. Then he pushed her away for her own protection when he saw Karma running for him.
When Karma jumped on him, Trish’s expression ran at light speed from shock, to hurt, to anger, making a left turn at jealousy, and finally landing on the planet Irked.
When Karma started kissing him, Trish had built up a hell of a head of steam and took off for the bar, leaving him to deal with Karma on his own.
He knew he’d been trying to extricate himself from Karma’s grasp without hurting her, but from the angle the video was taken, and the crowd surge, his actions could be easily misconstrued, which was obviously what Trish had done.
Trish’s face had been on fire, much the way it was at the moment. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one with an expressive face. The look on his when he spotted Trish talking to Jessie James had been pretty scary. He stormed toward them, stopped, and took a moment to calm down before stepping behind Trish and placed his hands on her shoulders. The intimacy of the act stunned him. His own expression had gone blank when he turned to speak to the reporter, and then turned his back on her to shield Trish from Jessie, whom he thought of as the enemy.
Trish went from confused to pissed in less time than he thought possible. A drunk Trish was clearly quick to anger and she had no qualms about getting right up in his grill and poking him in the chest repeatedly.
He groaned as he watched his own reaction. At first he looked about ready to bust out laughing right before his mind merged onto the sexual superhighway. He wrapped his arm around her and walked her out of the bar.
He congratulated himself for not picking her up and throwing her over his shoulder which was exactly what he’d been contemplating in vivid detail. He clicked his screen off, swallowed hard, and turned to find Trish staring at him. Oh yeah, she’d seen it too.
He pulled her closer and bent to whisper in her ear in case someone else was taping this. “Damn you are off the charts hot when you’re in full temper. All I could think of was getting your fine ass out of there and having my way with you. Too bad you were drunk.” His lips slid over her ear lobe and felt the shiver she couldn’t hide.
“I was not drunk.”
“The hell you weren’t. You had the equivalent of four drinks in a half an hour. What do you weigh, a buck twenty? Cher, you were definitely over the legal limit. Don’t forget it was me who undressed you and put you to bed.”
Yeah, he went there. If he had to spend the night holding her and suffering the world’s worst case of blue balls, the least she could experience was a little embarrassment. It wasn’t equal suffering, but shit, he wasn’t a sadist. “And I can attest to the fact that you woke up with a hell of a hangover, wearing nothing but my jersey and a little orange thong. Tell me, did you by it especially to go with that dress or do you just have a thing for the color?”
“I was not hungover, I was fine until I heard I was a trending YouTube Star.”
“And you’re a terrible liar.”
She didn’t argue the point, and he noticed, she didn’t mention the thong either, but the look on her face told him he’d lit the lamp on that one. It was almost as much fun as scoring a real goal on the ice.
“What are you going to say about this viral video?” She pointed to the phone he still held.
“I don’t know.” He sat back and slid his fingers under her hair and traced her skin above the fabric of her dress at the base of her neck, wondering if she wore yellow panties today. “I guess I could just tell them the truth, that Karma and I are old friends and you didn’t like the way she greeted me. I’ll tell them that your jealous, possessive side came out.”
“I’m neither jealous nor possessive.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” He wrapped his arm around her, tugging her closer and whispered into her ear again. “You looked like you wanted to rip Karma off me.”
“You’re seriously delusional.”
“I wish you had. It would have saved me a lot of time and trouble—the girl climbed me like a freakin’ monkey. I can’t say as I blame you. If some guy pulled you into his arms and kissed you, he’d be on life support right now. But then again, I would have put a stop to it before it ever went that far. Which begs the question, if it bothered you so much, which, since I’ve seen the video, I know it did, why did you walk away?”
“Because you and I are not in a relationship.”
“Oh really, then what would you call whatever this is between us?”
She opened her mouth to say something and then changed her mind and shut it.
He loved that he had her on the boards. Welcome to my world, Cher. “Do you usually go around making out with every man you encounter and spend the night stuck to his side like Velcro?”
She straightened and the puritanical Little Miss Mayflower came out to play. His dick noticed and rose to the occasion.
“No, I most certainly do not.”
“I’m happy to hear that. So, we’re what? Dating?”
“In order for us to date, you’d have to ask me out and I’d have to accept. Neither of which has happened.”
“So, we’re sleeping together and making out with each other but not dating. Okay, fine. Tell me this, do you date more than one guy at a time? Because that would be a deal breaker for me.”
“Exclusivity denotes relationship status. Since we are neither dating nor in a relationship, there’s nothing more to discuss.”
“Yet.” He let that hang like a saucer before it landed on the conversational ice next to her stick. “Let’s, for the sake of argument, say we started dating. Would you date other guys while you were dating me?”
“I guess that would depend on if another guy asked me out. Being that I’m supposed to be your handler while you’re in Boise, I doubt I’d have time to meet someone else, not to mention finding the opportunity to go out on a date, so no, probably not.”
“Okay, so we’ll have dinner—tonight. Sounds good. I guess we’ll see how it goes from there. Now tell me, what exactly did you say to that reporter friend of yours?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I did hear you. I just can’t believe what I heard. They might call you The Enforcer on the ice but pulling this crap off the ice won’t fly—not with me anyway.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I asked you out, you said yourself you wouldn’t have time to see anyone else this week, and well, we’ll see how it goes from there. What’s the problem? Did you expect me to go into that interview with your friend Jessie James without knowing what you told her?”
&n
bsp; She gave him the you’re-too-stupid-to-live look he was so not fond of. He’d seen it many times before, but never from her.
“Firstly, you didn’t ask me out—you made a pronouncement. Secondly, I didn’t say anything to Jessie—well, except that we aren’t in a relationship. And if that’s how you ask me out, that’s not going to change.”
He would have thought that her snooty, oh-so-intellectually superior comeback would piss him off, but amazingly, it didn’t. It did just the opposite, it turned him on. Maybe he had some kind of new-found naughty librarian fetish. “I don’t ask women out. I figured you’d, you know, let me slide this time. Can’t you cut me a break?”
She didn’t look like she was in the mood to cut him a break or anything else for that matter. This was why he always wheeled away from relationships, but for some reason, even though everything in him said this thing between them was too damn scary for his own sanity, he couldn’t let it go. He didn’t want to.
He grabbed ahold of her hand, which was still in her lap, presently shredding a napkin and leaned in to whisper in her ear, his lips so close, he could practically taste her. “Cher, I took it easy on you last night—after all, you were skunked and I don’t take advantage of inebriated women, but now the gloves are off. If you have a problem with you and me dating, you’d better tell me now. I spent an entire night holding you since you made me your personal pillow. I watched you sleep with that hot body wrapped in nothing but the jersey I dressed you in before you curled up against my side and threw your leg over me. I spent hours hard enough to pound rock salt, and thinking of all the things I wanted to do to you as soon as you were sober, so forgive me if I’m a little off my game this morning.”
Yes, he went there. He said screw it and just told her where he stood without pussyfooting around the topic. He figured he was better off just letting it rip and dealing with the fallout later. And from the way her breath hitched, her eyes dilated, and the tip of her tongue kept poking out of the mouth he’d spent all night thinking about, she was as interested in revisiting the bedroom as he was. “So, what did you say?”
