“It’s not much.”
He was wrong. So wrong. She closed her hand around the shards of light, but she could not contain the love she felt clear down to the very center of her soul. As she watched him unzip his jacket and toss it on her sofa, she knew she should tell him about the Honey Pie column. She should warn him and put a good spin on it. But if she told him, she could lose him. Here. Tonight.
She couldn’t tell him. If she did, he’d probably end their relationship, and she couldn’t afford for anyone to have that kind of information about her. So she kept quiet. Kept it inside, where it ate at her conscience, while she tried to convince herself that perhaps he’d be okay with the article.
She hadn’t taken a look at the column since she’d sent it off. Maybe it wasn’t as obvious as she remembered. She wrapped her arms around his neck. She wanted to tell him she was sorry and that she loved him. “Thank you,” she said, “I really love it.” Then she took him to her bedroom and apologized the only way she could.
When the first week of March came and went and Luc hadn’t seen the Honey Pie column, she began to relax. In Los Angeles, she told him she couldn’t have sex because she was crampy and had PMS. He’d arrived at her room after practice, carrying a bucket of ice in one hand, a heating pad and Peanut M &Ms in the other.
“I got the trainer to give me this,” he said as he handed her the heating pad. “And I brought the kind of candy you like.”
The night he’d seen her in her cow PJs, she’d been eating Peanut M &M’s. He’d remembered. She started to cry.
“What the hell’s the matter?” he asked as he wrapped the ice in a towel.
“I just get weepy,” she answered, but it was more. A lot more. Together they sat back against the headboard of her bed, and he placed a pillow beneath his left knee.
“Your knee is bothering you,” she said unnecessarily and helped him place the ice around it.
He downed several Advils. “Just the left one this time, and just a little.”
Probably more than a little, since he brought ice with him. During her interview with him in his apartment, he’d told her that his old injury didn’t bother him. Now he trusted her enough to let her see what she’d wondered about since she’d met him. His knees did in fact bother him sometimes. She sat beside him and took his hand.
“What?” he asked.
She looked across her shoulder at him. “Nothing.”
“I know that look, Jane. It’s not nothing.”
She tried to stop her cheesy smile and utterly failed. “Does anyone else know that this knee is bothering you?”
“No.” His gaze took in her mouth and then moved up to her eyes. “And you aren’t going to tell anyone, are you?”
She laid her cheek on his shoulder. “Your secret is safe with me, Luc. I would never tell anyone.”
“I know, or I wouldn’t be here.” He put his hand on the side of her face and brought the top of her head to his lips. He kissed her hair, and she settled against him. Maybe everything between her and Luc would work out. He trusted her, and while that pricked her guilt, it also gave her hope for the first time since she’d entered into this relationship with him.
Maybe it didn’t have to end. Maybe Ken didn’t always choose Barbie. Maybe in the end he’d choose her.
Luc popped the last of his pretzel into his mouth and leaned back into the Naugahyde chair. Across the table the Hitman dug into a plate of chicken wings, and Luc lifted his gaze from the captain to the empty entrance of the hotel bar.
Outside the hotel, the Phoenix sun was high in the sky and it was seventy-eight degrees. Some of the guys had hit the links, others milled about, and Jane was up in her room writing her Single Girl column. She’d told him she’d meet him in the bar when she was through. That had been over an hour ago, and he was tempted to storm her room. But he didn’t because he didn’t think she’d appreciate it, and despite his impatience, he respected that she had to work.
“Did you hear about the Kovalchuck suspension?” Hitman asked as he wiped his fingers on a napkin.
“What’d he get?”
“Five games.”
“It was a fairly cheap shot,” Fish added from his chair beside the team captain. “But I’ve seen worse.”
Daniel Holstrom and Grizzell joined them, and the conversation turned to some of the worst hits in the NHL, with the Chinooks enforcer, Rob Sutter, leading the pack. Manchester and Lynch pushed their chairs to the table and the talk turned from hockey to who would kick whose ass in a fight, Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Luc would put his money on Bruce Lee, but he had other things on his mind and didn’t enter into the debate. His gaze drifted to the empty doorway once again.
The only time Jane wasn’t on his mind was when he was in the net. Somehow, when he’d taken her to bed, she’d crawled inside his head. Sometimes it felt as if she’d crawled into the rest of him too, and he was surprised that he liked her there.
He couldn’t say if he was in love with her. The until-death-do-you-part kind of love. The kind that lasted and settled into the comfortable sort of love he wanted. The kind his mother had never found and that his father never waited around for. He only knew that he wanted to be with her, and when he wasn’t, he thought about her. He trusted her enough to let her into his life and the life of his sister. He had faith in her that his trust wasn’t misplaced.
He liked watching her and talking to her and just being with her. He liked the twists and turns of her mind, and he liked that he could be himself around her. He liked her sense of humor, and he liked having sex with her. No, he loved having sex with her. He loved kissing her, touching her, and being inside of her, looking down into her flushed face. When he was inside of her, he was already scheming ways to get there again. She was the only woman he’d ever been with for whom that was true.
He loved to listen to her little moans, and he loved the way she touched him. He loved when she took control and he was at her mercy. Jane knew what to do with her hands and mouth, and he loved that about her.
But did he love her? The forever kind? Maybe, and he was surprised that it didn’t freak him out.
“Luc?”
He removed his gaze from the entrance and looked at the guys. Most of them stood behind the Stromster, looking at a magazine he had open on the table.
“What?”
Daniel held up a copy of Him magazine. He was learning to read English again.
“Have you seen this?” Grizzell asked.
“No.”
Daniel handed it to him, opened to the Swede’s favorite choice of educational material. “Read,” he said.
The guys were looking at him as if they expected something. So he turned his attention to the magazine and read:
The Life of Honey Pie
One of my favorite places in the world is the observation deck of the Seattle Space Needle at night. It’s like sitting on top of the world. And anyone who knows me, knows I like it on top. I’d just had dinner in the restaurant below, leaving my date, a real dud, sitting at the table awaiting my return from the ladies’ room. I was wearing my little red halter dress, with the gold clasp at the back of my neck and the little gold chain that hung halfway down my spine. I’d worn my five-inch heels, and I was in the mood for more than Pacific swordfish. The date was gorgeous, like all my men. But he’d refused to play beneath the table, and I was turned on and bored. A dangerous thing for the men of Seattle.
Luc paused in his reading to glance at the doorway as two women walked, in. He didn’t need more than a quick glance to know they were rink bunnies. Uninterested, he returned to his reading.
The elevator to my left opened, and a man wearing a black tuxedo stepped out. My gaze ran up the four buttons of his jacket to his blue eyes. His gaze slid to my perfect breasts barely covered in the red halter. The corners of his mouth rose in an appreciative smile, and suddenly my night got a lot more interesting.
I recognized him right away. He played hockey. A goalie with fast h
ands, and reportedly a very dirty mind. I liked that in a man. He starred in a million or so female fantasies across the country. A time or two, he’d starred in mine.
“Hello,” he said. “Nice night for watching the stars.”
“Watching is a favorite of mine.” His name was Lucky, which I thought appropriate since, if his smile was any indication, I was about to get lucky.
Luc stopped and looked up at the guys. “Jesus,” he said. “This can’t be me.” But he had a bad feeling that it was.
I placed my hands on one of the trivia boxes that talked about how many times a year the Needle got struck by lightning, and I leaned forward. The back of my dress slid up up my long tan legs, dangerously close to paradise. I looked up at him out of the corner of my eye and smiled. His gaze was stuck in my cleavage, and I tried to work up some guilt over what I was going to do to him. But guilt and I had parted company about twenty years ago, and all I felt was a flutter in my chest and an ache between my legs. “What about you? Do you like to watch?”
“I’m more of a doer.” He reached toward me and pushed a lock of my hair out of my face. “It makes it more interesting that way.”
“I like doers, being that I like to be done in a lot of different positions.” I licked my red lips. “Does that interest you?”
His blue eyes got all sleepy as he slid his hand up my back and his fingers brushed my spine, spreading fire across my flesh. “What’s your name?”
“Honey Pie.”
“I like that,” he said as he stepped behind me. Then he slipped his hands around my stomach and spoke next to my ear. “How freaky do you get, Miss Honey Pie?”
I leaned back and pressed my round behind into what felt like at least nine inches of good wood. He moved his talented hands to my breasts and cupped me through the thin material of my halter.
I closed my eyes and arched my back. He didn‘t know it, but he was so dead. “The last man I was with hasn’t recovered.” That had been two days ago, and Lou was still in a coma after I’d left him inside the service elevator at the Four Seasons.
“What did you do to him?”
“I blew his mind… among other things.”
My nipples were hard against his hot palms and I was so turned on, a busload of Japanese tourists wouldn’t have stopped me from doing this hockey player with the big hard jock. “You’re making me crazy with your red lips and little red dress.” He bit the side of my neck, and asked in a husky whisper, “Are you cold, or turned on?”
Luc’s gaze stopped on the last line, and he backed up and read it one more time.
“Are you cold, or turned on?”
“What the hell?” he whispered as he continued.
I was hot and definitely turned on.
“You make me want to suck a bruise on you just so I can kiss it better.”
“Where?” I asked as I took his hand and slid it between my legs. “Here?” He cupped me through my dress and red lace thong.
Stunned, Luc dropped the magazine and sat back. He felt as if he’d been hit in the head with a smoking puck. This absolutely could not be happening. He was imagining things that did not exist.
“Do you know Honey Pie?” Bressler asked, letting Luc know he wasn’t imagining things.
“No.” But there was something familiar about it. Something real personal.
“You’re famous now,” the captain joked. “Read on. You’ve been put into a coma by Honey Pie.”
The rest of the guys laughed, but Luc didn’t find it at all amusing. No, he found it disturbing.
“Why’d she pick you this time?” Fish wanted to know. “She must have seen you play and wanted to get a look at your paraphernalia.”
“Maybe she’s someone who’s seen the paraphernalia,” Lynch added.
Anger welled up in his chest, but he battled it back and said, “I can guarantee she hasn’t seen the paraphernalia.” Anger would only get in the way. He knew that much from experience. He needed a clear head to think. He felt like he was looking at one of those ringer puzzles with a big picture on it-a picture of his life-but all the pieces were mixed up. And if he could just get it all in the right order, everything would become clear.
“I’d think it was cool if Honey Pie screwed me into a coma,” someone said.
“She isn’t real,” Lynch told everyone.
“She has to be real,” Scott Manchester argued. “Someone is writing the columns.”
The conversation quickly turned to speculation over where Honey Pie might have seen Luc. They all agreed she lived in Seattle, but they differed on gender. They wondered if Honey Pie had actually met Luc, and if she was actually a man. The general consensus was that if she wasn’t a man, she thought like one.
Luc didn’t give a flying fuck if Honey Pie was a man or a woman. He’d spent the last two years trying to live down that kind of shit. And here it was again. Fueling the fire he’d been trying to extinguish. Only this time it was worse than ever before.
“It’s all made up,” someone said. But it didn’t feel at all made up to Luc. It was all so eerily familiar it raised the hair on the back of his neck. The red dress. The part about hard nipples. About being cold or turned on. The red thong panties. Sucking a bruise.
A piece of the puzzle slid into place. It was Jane. Someone had been eavesdropping on him and Jane, but that was impossible. You make me want to suck a bruise on you just so I can kiss it better-Luc remembered saying that as he’d touched her soft skin. The night she’d worn the red dress, he’d wanted to leave a mark on her. His mark. Had they been followed? In his mind, he moved a few more pieces of the puzzle, but he still didn’t get a clear picture.
“Hey, boys. What are you all doing?”
Luc glanced up from the glossy pages of the magazine to Jane’s green eyes. He would have to tell her. She’d freak out.
“Sharky,” the guys greeted her.
The corners of her lips tilted up slightly as she looked at him. Then her gaze fell on the open magazine and her little smile froze.
“Have you ever heard of The Life of Honey Pie?” Sutter asked her.
Jane’s gaze locked with Luc’s. “Yes. I have.”
“Honey Pie wrote about Luc.”
Color drained from her already pale complexion. “Are you sure it’s you?”
“Positive.”
“I’m sorry, Luc.”
Luc rose from his chair. She understood what it meant. To him. She understood even what the rest of the guys didn’t. Now, when anything was written about him, the Honey Pie article would be mentioned, just one more excuse to dissect his private life. To dig into the stuff that just didn’t matter. He moved to her and looked into her eyes. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, then shook her head.
Without thinking about it, Luc took her arm and they walked from the bar. They crossed the lobby and entered the elevator. “I’m so sorry, Luc,” she said just above a whisper.
“It’s not your fault, Jane.” He punched the number to her floor, then glanced over at her. She stood in the corner of the elevator. Her eyes were huge and filling with water and she suddenly looked very small. By the time they got to her hotel room, tears were falling down her cheeks. He hadn’t even told her of his bizarre suspicions and she was already crying.
“Jane,” he began as soon the door shut behind him. “I know this will sound crazy…” He paused to sort it all out in his head. “There are some things in that Honey Pie piece-of-shit article that are just too close to be a coincidence. Things that were written about you and me that actually happened. I don’t know how she knew so much. It’s like someone was watching us and taking notes.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed and stuck her hands between her knees. She didn’t say anything, and he continued to try and explain what he didn’t understand. “Your red dress, for one. She described your red dress with the chain down the back.”
“Oh, God.”
He sat down beside her and put his arm around her
shoulders. The things the writer of the article knew about him were disturbing. Jane was already so upset, he didn’t go into any more detail because he didn’t want to scare her more than necessary. “I can’t believe this is starting up again. I’ve been careful to get away from this sort of crap.” He gave her a squeeze. Thoughts tumbled in his head but made no sense “I feel crazy. Paranoid. A little insane. Maybe I should hire a PI to get to the bottom of this.”
She jumped up as if her pants had caught fire and walked to the chair by the window. She chewed on her bottom lip and gazed somewhere over the top of his head. “You’re not flattered?”
“Hell, no! I feel like some total stranger has been watching me. Us. Sneaking around, hiding in the shadows.”
“We would have noticed someone following us.”
“You’re probably right, but I don’t know how else to explain the things in that magazine. I know how crazy it sounds.” And it did sound crazy. Even to him, and he’d read it. “Maybe one of the guys…” He shook his head as he thought out loud. “I don’t like to think that one of the guys had something to do with this, but who else?” He shrugged. “Maybe I’ve lost my mind.”
She looked at him for several long moments, then said in a rush, “I wrote it.”
“What?”
“I write the Honey Pie serial.”
“What?”
She took a deep breath and said, “I’m Honey Pie.”
“Right.”
“I am,” she said through her tears.
“Why are you saying this?”
“Damn it! I can’t believe I’m going to have to prove it to you. I never even wanted you to find out about it.” She wiped her cheeks and folded her arms across her chest. “Who else would know that you asked me if I was cold or turned on? We were alone in my apartment.”
And then, one by one, the pieces of the puzzle slid into place. The things that only he and Jane knew. The note he’d seen stuck in her day planner reminding her of some “Honey Pie” decision she had to make. Jane was Honey Pie. She couldn’t be. “No.”
See Jane Score Page 23
