“What are you planning to do tomorrow?” her sister asked and changed the subject.

“I’m not sure.” Chelsea recognized the maneuver and let her. “I’ve never worked for someone who doesn’t have a list as long as my arm and expects the impossible. Mark said something about wanting to move out of Medina. So maybe I’ll start looking at real estate options for him. His house is too damn big for one guy anyway.”

“Most of the athletes around here live downtown, or on Mercer, or in Newport Hills.” She pushed the cart toward the butcher block. “At least I think a lot of the Seahawks and Chinooks still live in Newport. That’s how it became known as Jock Rock.”

Chelsea made a mental note to check real estate listings in those areas. “What movie are we going to watch tonight?”

“How about something with aliens?” Bo suggested and grabbed a package of hamburger.

Chelsea reached for a produce baggy above the chicken. “Something not cheesy, like Independence Day? Maybe a little cheesy, like Men in Black? Or heavy on the cheese, like Critters?”

“Heavy, like Mars Attacks!”

“Good call. A little black comedy and with a dash of political satire, all wrapped up in B-movie parody. Gotta love Tim Burton.”

“You aren’t going to quote dialog throughout the whole movie are you?” Bo sighed. “I just want to kill you when you do that.”

Chelsea grabbed a package of legs and thighs. In L.A., she and her friends had recited lines during movies. It had been part of the fun. At least for them. “You mean like, ‘Little people, why can’t we all just get along?’”

SIX

Though it wasn’t easy, Chelsea controlled herself during Mars Attacks! and didn’t recite dialog. Afterward, she grabbed her laptop and climbed into bed. She placed the computer in front of her crossed knees and turned it on. A picture of Christian Bale, all duded up in 3:10 to Yuma, popped up on her desktop. She’d never met Christian Bale but she admired any actor who could play Jesus in one movie and Batman in the next and do both roles justice. Sure, he had a bit of an anger problem. So did Russell Crowe, but that didn’t make either of them bad actors. Although she did have to admit that if Christian didn’t learn to control himself like Russell had, she’d have to find someone else to love from afar.

She plugged in her Verizon PC card and logged onto the Internet. She purposely didn’t click on her bookmarks. She didn’t want to know any of the Hollywood gossip or read what producer was looking to fill what roles in what movie. When she returned to L.A., she’d contact her agency and tell them she was back and to send out her portfolio again.

Everyone in her family thought she had stars in her eyes. Maybe she did, but her feet were firmly rooted in reality. She knew that in Hollywood, landing a role after the age of thirty was about as easy as landing a man. But that didn’t mean that her only option was to slide her feet into Crocs, get a cat, and give up.

While she searched properties in the Seattle area and bookmarked the homes and condos she thought Mark might be interested in seeing, she thought about her life in L.A. Parts of it had been exciting and really fun and she missed hanging out with friends. But there was a dark side too. The horror stories of sex and drugs were too numerous to count. Young actors arriving in town, dreaming of making it big, only to be used and discarded like garbage. The desperation at casting calls was truly sickening, and she didn’t miss scrambling for bit roles and walk-on parts. She didn’t miss standing around movie sets for twelve hours, dressed as a serving wench with her breasts hanging out for a period film. She’d liked working on horror films. She liked being part of a cast. She liked playing a part and becoming another person for a few hours. It was fun and exciting. She looked forward to getting back to L.A. and getting the chance to score roles other than the slutty bimbo.

First, though, she had to stick it out for three months with a crabby hockey player.

She clicked on a few more sites and found several very promising real es-tate options. She bookmarked them also, then she decided to Google Mark himself. One of her brows lifted in surprise as she looked at over a million results and a dozen fan sites dedicated to “the Hitman.”

“Geez.” It wasn’t like he was Brad Pitt.

On his official Web site, she watched video clips of him scoring goals, skating with his stick held above his head, or dropping his gloves and throwing punches. In interviews, he laughed and joked and talked about how much winning the Stanley Cup would mean to him and the rest of the Chinooks. Each site was filled with various still photos of him, looking all rough and sweaty while he shot the puck. The photos ranged from him having blood on his face to looking clean-cut and smiling in his head shots.

She clicked on a link and she watched a Gatorade commercial of him dressed in nothing but a pair of hockey shorts hanging low on his hips. On her computer screen, he slowly tipped his head back, brought the bright green bottle to his lips, and downed the sports drink. A color-enhanced, neon-green drop leaked from the corner of his mouth and slid down his jaw and the side of his throat. Dark hair covered his big chest, and Bo had been right. The man had an eight-pack. What her sister hadn’t mentioned was the dark happy trail that ran down the center of his smooth, flat belly and circled his navel before diving beneath those shorts. Oh baby. Chelsea had worked in Hollywood and she’d seen a lot of hard male bodies. Mark’s was one of the most impressive she’d seen outside of a body-building contest on Venice Beach.

She read his goals and point averages, not that she had a real clue what any of that meant, but even Wikipedia said it was impressive, so she supposed it was. She found a fan site with a photo of him tearing down the ice, and she clicked on a link titled “Bressler quotes.”

Her gaze skimmed a few quotes about playing hockey before stopping on “I don’t celebrate coming in second place.” She didn’t know him well, but she could imagine him saying something like that. When asked what it was like to be the captain of the Chinooks, he’d answered, “I’m just one of the guys. On the bus or airplane, I just sit in the back, play cards, and try to take the guys’ money.” The quote that surprised her the most was, “As a kid, I knew I wanted to play professional hockey. My father worked a lot to afford my skates, and Grandmother always told me I could be anything I wanted to be. I believed her and here I am. I owe a lot to them both.” Most people thanked their parents, but his grandmother? That was different and unexpected. A smile curved one side of her lips. Mentioning his father and grandmother almost made him human. In fact, in all the pictures and video clips he appeared more human than the guy she knew. There was just something different about him now. Something more than the different way he walked and the way he used his right hand. Something dark. Hard.

On another Web site, the owner had put up three different photographs of Mark’s mangled Hummer. This time both Chelsea’s brows lifted in surprise as she looked at the twisted wreckage. The man truly was lucky to be alive. A fourth photo of him being wheeled from the hospital appeared on a second page. The picture was somewhat blurry, but there was no mistaking those dark eyes glowering from his face.

There.

That was him. That was the guy she worked for. The hard, dark, gloomy man.

She knew that head injuries could change a man or woman’s personality. She wondered if it had changed his. If it had, she wondered if he’d ever get those laughing, joking pieces of his life back. Not that it really mattered to her. She was only sticking around for three months until she got that ten grand.

On the official Chinooks’ site, the organization had put up a guest book for fans who wanted to express their best wishes for Mark’s recovery. More than seven thousand people had signed in to the book to wish him well. Some of the notes were very nice, and she wondered if Mark even knew that so many people had taken the time to write. She wondered if he cared.

Before she closed her laptop and turned off the bedroom light for the night, she Googled plastic surgeons in the Seattle area. She paid attention to where they’d gone to school and how many years they’d been in practice. Mostly though, she looked at before and after pictures of breast reductions. She wasn’t a jealous person, but envy stabbed her soul as she studied the photos. For many different reasons, she wanted so badly to be reduced from her double-D cups to a C. She wanted to run and jump without pain. Not that she would, but it would be nice to have the option. She wanted to be taken as seriously as average-sized women. In Hollywood, she’d been hired to fill out the costume, not so much for her acting ability. And in L.A., everyone automatically assumed she had implants, which had always kind of irritated her.

She’d like to have sex without her heavy breasts bouncing around. As she was now, she preferred to have sex with a bra on. It was more comfortable, but not all the men she’d been with liked it.

She’d been a double D since the tenth grade. It had been humiliating and painful, and probably the reason Bo had such a difficult time finding men she trusted. Even now, sometimes men and women took one look at her and Bo and assumed they were nymphomaniacs. It still baffled her to this day. She didn’t know what having large breasts had to do with sexual promiscuity. The truth was that because of the size of her breasts, she was more uptight about sex than other women she knew.

One of the biggest reasons she wanted a reduction was that she’d like peo-ple to talk to her face, not her chest. She’d like, just once, to meet a man who didn’t stare at her breasts. A man like Mark Bressler.