Can't Buy Me Love

by Molly O'Keefe

  Luc came to, in large part because of the smell.

  The closest smell to home he had. Sweat. Bengay. Rubber. He was in a locker room.

  But beneath the sweat and disinfectant was an underlying note of strawberry.

  His eyelids popped open and then immediately slammed shut, his eyeballs screaming in pain, blasted by white-hot light.

  “Luc?”

  It was Tara Jean. The strawberry smell washed over his face and he could feel her, just above him. God, his head hurt or he’d be worried about what was going on, what had happened. Not to say he wasn’t, but the pain sort of made everything else a distant second on the worry scale.

  “Luc.” Again, the sweet wash of strawberry, made sweeter by the warmth of her hand on his. She curled her fingers around his and he held on, happy to have a lifeline in the sea of pain. “Can you hear me?”

  He opened his mouth, but speaking seemed a ridiculous idea. So he nodded and winced.

  “You need a doctor—”

  His eyes flew open and his fingers clamped down on hers. He didn’t know what was going on, what had happened, but he knew doctors were not a good idea. “No doctors.”

  She leaned over him, blocking out the white-hot light. Lights, actually. His vision cleared, her face in focus.

  “Hi,” he said, happy to have her here, over him. He glanced down and could practically see her belly button through the gaping neck of her shirt. “You have pretty boobs.”

  “Oh my lord,” she muttered, clapping a hand to that wide-open neckline, blocking his view of her lace bra and the flesh rising out of it. “You must be feeling better.”

  “What … what happened?”

  “You got knocked out.”

  For a moment he was blank, almost weightless with that calm before the storm, but then his stomach twisted and anger chugged in his veins and a terrible sense of inevitability nearly crushed him.

  “Tyler.”

  “He says he didn’t even hit you that hard. You just went down. But he feels terrible. He’s outside, practically pulling out his hair.”

  “Good,” Luc murmured. “Maybe he’ll second-guess a cheap shot next time.”

  “Are you …” She paused. Her fingers touched his head, his hair, and it was so sweet, like being touched by sunlight on a cold day. “You okay?”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Long enough; I called an ambulance.”

  He curled upward and realized he was on a small cot in a closet-sized supply room just off the showers.

  “No ambulance.”

  “But—”

  “No ambulance!” he yelled and immediately regretted it. His head pounded. He’d been knocked out, just like Doc said he could be.

  If he got in an ambulance, he’d go to a hospital, see a doctor who would want a CT scan. And he wouldn’t be able to hide the damage. The parasites would catch wind and it would all be over. His career. His life.

  Tara’s hand slid down his back and he shook off her touch.

  “Luc?”

  “Leave me the fuck alone.” She straightened, staring down at him as if he’d grown a second head.

  “No.”

  “Now isn’t the time to be stubborn.”

  “I could say the same.”

  He twisted, ignoring the pain, the flashes at the edge of his vision. “Get. Out.”

  Her face mutinous, she sat. “You’ve been knocked out, Luc. I’m not leaving you alone. You’re freaking me out.”

  Join the club, he thought, join the freaking-out club. His shoulders curled over his knees. “What’s going on, Luc?”

  “I can’t go to the hospital.”

  “A doctor—”

  He lifted his chin to take great gulps of air, hoping that would calm him down, center him in the maelstrom of ugly despair growing in his chest.

  “Talk to me, Luc.”

  He couldn’t, he couldn’t let these words out of his mouth. He bit them back, swallowed them into his stomach where they bubbled and rolled back up his throat, knocking at his teeth, looking for a way out.

  “Luc,” she breathed, “it’s just us in this room. You can talk to me.”

  “I get knocked out a lot,” he spat, punishing her because she was here and there was so much rage in his chest. “And now, I’ve got some scar tissue on my frontal lobe.”

  “Oh my God—”

  “Just about everyone in professional contact sports has it.”

  “That doesn’t make it less scary.”

  “It’s part of the job,”

  “Well, that’s a shitty job.”

  “It’s my life.”

  Oh, God, his skin was too tight, he couldn’t hold in what was happening in his chest. The hurricane of grief and anger that bore down on him. He stood, weaved for a moment, and Tara reached out a hand to help him. But he swatted it away. It felt good, really good, a valve release on the pressure, so he picked up the bar of soap on the small sink to his left and hurled it at the wall. It splattered, leaving blue goo everywhere.

  “Holy shit, Luc, what is going on?” Tara asked.

  He kicked the small plastic shelf holding medical supplies and it splintered, flew apart, Ace bandages everywhere. He picked up the case and heaved it against the wall.

  Blood pounded behind his eyes, his heart hammered in his chest, and there was no outlet for what he felt. He turned and met Tara Jean’s eyes, but she didn’t flinch. Didn’t back away.

  “You want to talk, or throw more stuff?”

  He didn’t answer, couldn’t, and she pointed to the water bottles in the corner of the room. His heart burning, he hurled them against the door frame with numb hands. Water sprayed the ceiling, across Tara’s shirt.

  She sat back down and pulled out her nail file. “Go on. Get it out, Luc.”

  He broke a hockey stick, kicked the rolling desk chair, and kicked it again when it rolled back into him. Heaved a phone against the wall, broke the small table the phone sat on, and still he stood there, wanting to tear down the world.

  “Poor Luc, he’s got a headache,” she sighed into the quiet.

  “My career is over!” he howled, coming to stand over her. Her blue eyes met his, unflinching. “I can’t pass another physical and my contract is up in a year. Billy’s been traded, every single fighter and thug in the league is gunning for me, and I go down with a tap on the jaw. What kind of career is that? I’ll be a laughingstock. A laughingstock with brain damage. Oh my God, can you imagine what my father will say?”

  “Your father?”

  He blinked. Blinked again. Swallowed the lump of emotion that felt like grief in his throat. Slowly, the fog fell from his eyes, leaving him alone with a thirty-year-old anger that embarrassed him.

  “Oh Christ,” he muttered.

  “Tell me you’re not ruining your future because you’re still trying to prove something to your father.”

  His back hit the wall and he slid down to sit on the floor, cradling his poor aching head in his hands.

  “Go away,” he sighed, hating that anyone would see him like this, but especially her, who’d rejected him at every turn for reasons as fucked up as he was.

  Of course she didn’t go away. She crouched in front of him, her hands on his elbows. He wished he had the strength to shrug off her touch, but his strength had packed up and left with his anger.

  “You told me your father determined your worth, remember? But then you found hockey—”

  “I remember,” he sighed, lifting his head to look at her.

  “You let hockey determine your worth,” she said. “You’ve let it define who you are, just like your father did.”

  He rubbed a hand over his face and then left it over his eyes, wanting to block her out. Wanting to block out the truth.

  “You are more than what your father thought of you.”

  “I know—”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t seem to. Because a thirty-seven-year-old man who has done as much as you have, who ha
s succeeded in a way most people never even dream of, shouldn’t worry about what his dead asshole of a father would think of him.”

  He wanted to snarl, to tell her that he didn’t give a shit what his father thought of him. That he stopped caring long, long ago.

  But he was tired of the lies. Tired of pretending that he was better than caring about the old man’s opinion. Because he wasn’t. He was still that teenager with the speech that had never been delivered.

  “How do I stop?” he asked, naked and vulnerable, torn to pieces in a smashed-up locker room, looking for help from any quarter.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Practice?”

  He laughed, tired and sore down to his soul. His eyes burned and his chest ached as though there were thirty years of plans and work, of blood, sweat, and tears, going up in a bonfire inside him.

  “Who am I without hockey?” he whispered to the floor, because he hated who he was right now. Hated his reflection in her beautiful eyes.

  “You know what I see when I look at you?” she whispered, and he closed his eyes in pain. She cupped his face, ran her fingers over his cheeks, his lips, but still he didn’t look at her.

  “I see what you show the world,” she said. “I see the Ice Man, and the hard work. I see the intelligence and the leadership. But I also see the man who works with those little kids. The man who takes care of his family—”

  Her voice broke and he opened his eyes to see her eyes were damp.

  “Tara,” he breathed, his hands cupping her shoulders. “Don’t do this to yourself—”

  “No, let me finish,” she said. “I see a man with a vision that most people don’t have. Compassion that most people don’t have. I see a man with the resources and the heart to do whatever he wants.”

  “Look at you.” He ruffled her dampened eyelashes. “Crying over a broken-down hockey player.”

  “I’m not crying,” she protested and they both smiled, the moment encapsulating them, blocking out the world, and it was beautiful. Perfect. This woman with her defenses down, with every scrape and scar revealed, was for him.

  It would be so easy to love her.

  “I have not been liked … much,” she whispered. “And that you would try …” She shook her head. “You are a special man, Luc Baker. And hockey is the least of what you can do.”

  He cupped her shoulder, the heat and softness of her skin burning through his nerves. He wished she would kiss him, and then she did. Soft and tender, her lips, so perfect and sweet, were a benediction. She saw his faults, the weakness in himself he despaired of, and still she kissed him. She opened her mouth, her sweetness pouring out, enveloping him in something he hadn’t felt in a long time.

  Hope. Hope that his future might be brighter than his past.

  “Someone here need an ambulance?” a voice said, and Tara pulled away and stood, running her hands down her skirt. Behind her in the doorway was a paramedic, the white sheets of a gurney behind him.

  Luc lifted himself up off the floor. “I don’t need an ambulance.”

  “You’ve had a head injury,” the paramedic insisted. “You need to come in and get checked out. You could be bleeding internally.”

  Doubt was an avalanche, his desire to linger in ignorance, to pretend that he could be all right at least for the year, but then Tara Jean’s hand was there, shoring him up. Pointing him in the right direction.

  “I’ll drive him,” she said. To the hospital. The doctors. The inevitable CT scan. The slow unraveling of his life as he knew it.

  Sealing his fate, he nodded.

  chapter

  24

  Victoria sighed and picked up her purse from beside the seat in the hospital waiting room, where she’d been camped out for the better part of the day.

  “They’re going to keep him overnight,” she said to Celeste, who was flipping through a two-year-old Vogue and looking as fresh and elegant as if she hadn’t been sitting around a hospital for five hours. Victoria was a wrinkled paper sack. That smelled bad.

  “I … ah … better get home.”

  Celeste sniffed and Victoria stiffened, reading all sorts of judgment in that sniff. The most judging sniff ever.

  “I don’t want to leave Jacob alone with just Ruby.” She knew she sounded like a bitch, but she was sick of falling down in a dead faint every time the queen looked down her royal nose.

  “Right.” Celeste abruptly put down the magazine. “Let’s go.”

  “You could stick around,” Victoria said. “Tara Jean’s still here—”

  “Nope. I’ll go with you.”

  Great, Victoria thought. Just great.

  The silence out to the car was the kind that used to make her babble. It used to make her sick with nerves, but now it just made her angry.

  “Victoria,” Celeste said, once they were in the truck and heading away from the hospital. The older woman ran her long model fingers over the dash of Luc’s truck. “I have to ask, what … what are your plans?”

  “Plans?” She merged across two lanes of traffic to get to the exit.

  “For your future.”

  Victoria stepped on the gas, blowing past the speed limit. She could not get home fast enough. If she didn’t answer, if she stared out the window and ignored Celeste and the questions she just had to ask, maybe Celeste would get the point. Or perhaps she’d disappear.

  “I’m worried … about Jacob’s future,” Celeste said.

  Every single instinct in her screamed to kick Celeste out of the car. To pull over to the side of the road and claw at her perfect skin.

  Instead, she cleared her throat. “Well, you don’t need to be. The million dollars—”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  She shrugged. “Remarry, I suppose—”

  “Marriage?” Celeste didn’t even bother to hide her incredulousness. Her utter laughing disbelief. “That’s your solution.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because men aren’t a solution, Victoria. They are never, ever a solution.”

  “Perhaps not for you—”

  “Not for anyone. Ever. You can’t tell me you were happy. That you actually think another man will make you happier.”

  “Oh my goodness, Celeste, what does happy have to do with anything?”

  “Everything, I think.”

  “Well, most of us aren’t lucky enough to be you.”

  The silence seethed and she forced herself not to apologize. Not to open her mouth and banish all this discomfort with an act of contrition she didn’t mean.

  She was tired of that. Building every bridge between injured parties with her own two hands. Her own blood, sweat, and tears. For Christ’s sake—she was pretty injured too. Who was trying to make her feel better? Celeste shrugged. “Do you want to work? Have a job?”

  “All I know how to do is shop, go out for lunch, get facials, and redecorate,” she said. “Can you find a job in there other than wife?”

  “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:

  ICE MAN BAKER SUFFERS BRAIN INJURY

  “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.