Rachel Gibson - See Jane Score

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 fright.” 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.

Luc folded the paper and stuck it beneath one arm. He unbuttoned his blazer as Ms. Alcott stepped from the revolving door to his left. The Texas sun bathed her in bright morning light, and a slight breeze played with the ends of her ponytail. She wore a black skirt down to her knees, a black blazer, and turtleneck. Her shoes were flat, and she carried that big briefcase of hers and a to-go coffee. She added to the visual assault by wearing an ugly pair of sunglasses on the bridge of her nose. They were round and green like a fly. Damn, but she was into looking sexless.

“Interesting game last night.” She set her briefcase on the ground between them and looked up into his face.

“You liked that?”

“Like I said, it was interesting. What was the team’s motto? ‘If you can’t beat ’em, beat ‘em up?’”

“Something like that,” he said with a laugh. “What’s with all the gray and black you always wear?”

She glanced down at herself. “I look good in black.”

“No, sweetheart, you look like the archangel of doom.”

She took a sip of her coffee and said totally urbanely, as if he hadn’t hit a nerve, “I could live the rest of my life without fashion commentary according to Lucky Luc.”