Too bad Scott was such a junkie, she thought as she tapped her fingers on the steering wheel along with the heavy beat. If she were alone, she’d bust out and sing along, but Mr. Bressler was already annoyed with her. And while Chelsea had near perfect recall of song lyrics and movie dialogue-kind of a hidden savant talent-she couldn’t carry a tune.

She glanced at the GPS and took exit 165A and merged onto James Street just as the trusty navigation system instructed. Within a few minutes, Chelsea pulled the Mercedes in front of the massive medical center.

Mark turned off the radio and pointed the handle of his cane toward the windshield. “Keep going. The clinic entrance is further down.”

“I’ll find the parking garage, then I’ll come find you.”

“I don’t need you to find me,” he said as the car pulled to a stop beside the curb. “I’ll have one of the nurses call you when I’m ready to be picked up.”

“Do you have my number?”

“No.” He unbuckled his seat belt and opened the door with his good hand. “Write it on something.”

Chelsea reached into the backseat and grabbed her purse. She pulled out an old business card and a pen. She wrote her new cell phone number on the back, then looked through the car at Mark. “My new number’s on the back,” she said as she handed it across to him.

The tips of his fingers bumped into hers as he took the card and glanced over it. He slid his legs out of the car and grabbed his cane. “Don’t wreck the car,” he said as he grabbed the top of the door frame and stood. He shoved the card into his back pocket and shut the door.

A taxi behind the Mercedes honked, and Chelsea eased her foot off the brake and headed toward the street. In her rearview mirror she caught a glimpse of Mark Bressler just before he entered the building. The bright morning sun shot glistening sparks off his aviators and shone in his dark hair. He paused to watch her-no doubt to make sure she didn’t “wreck the car”-before he moved within the deep shadows of the building.

She turned her attention to the road and figured she had a little over an hour to kill. She was in downtown Seattle. There had to be somewhere she could go to scrub her mind free of the past hour. She needed to find her happy place.

She touched the GPS screen and turned on the voice command mode. “Where to, Mark?” it asked. Clearly it didn’t know that it was supposed to ad-dress him as Mr. Bressler.

“Neiman Marcus,” she said. “I need Neiman Marcus.”

FOUR

Mark glanced at the Neiman Marcus bags in the backseat of his car and buckled his seat belt. For her first day on the job, she sure was making herself comfortable.

“Where to, Chelsea?”

He looked at her, then at his navigation system. “What the hell?”

His “assistant” gave the GPS an address in Belltown, then looked across at him and smiled. “I didn’t think you’d mind if I programmed my name into the voice recognition. It kept calling me Mark, which was just confusing because I am clearly not you.”

“Turn right. 3.6 miles till destination.”

He leaned forward, brought up the menu screen, and turned off the sound. “Confusing for who?”

“The GPS.”

“The GPS doesn’t get confused.” He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He’d been right about her. She was nuttier than squirrel shit, and she was driving his ninety-thousand-dollar car.

“How was your appointment?” she asked, all cheery.

“Great.” Mark opened his eyes and looked out the passenger window at St. James Cathedral. But the appointment hadn’t been great. He hadn’t received the news he’d been wanting to hear. The doctor had seemed pleased, but the tendons weren’t healing as fast as Mark hoped and he had to wear the splint for at least another month. Which meant he couldn’t transfer his cane to his right side for better balance. It also meant he had to take the splint off to button his shirt or pants, take a shower, or eat a meal. Although he’d always shot left, trying to sign his name left-handed was like writing with a pen stuck in his toes.

A dull ache radiated from deep in the marrow of his femur and spread to his hip. At the moment, it wasn’t bad. Nothing he couldn’t handle, but in a few hours it was likely to get worse. He hadn’t brought any medication with him because he didn’t like to be doped up in public. He didn’t want anyone to think he couldn’t handle a little pain. He was Mark Bressler. He’d played hockey with a fractured ankle and a broken thumb. He’d played through concussions and torn and bruised muscles. He could handle the pain. If he was lucky, it wouldn’t get real bad until he got back home, where he could park himself in front of his big TV and knock back a bottle of his favorite medication.

The car turned on Madison, and Mark glanced across at his assistant. Despite her big sunglasses, two-tone hair, and hideous shirt, she was cute. Like a kitten was cute, but Mark didn’t like cats. Cats were sneaky. One second a cat looked all soft and harmless. All big blue eyes and innocence. One second you were just looking at it thinking, Huh, that’s kind of a cute kitten, then it sank its teeth into your hand and ran away. A sort of stealth blitz that left a guy stunned and wondering what the hell just happened.

Behind the mirror lenses of his glasses, he lowered his gaze down the side of her neck and shoulder to her breasts. She sure wasn’t built like a little kitty cat, more like a porn star. She’d said she was an actress. All porn stars thought they were actresses too. He wondered how much she’d paid for her boobs.

He closed his eyes and groaned. What had his life come to? Looking at a nice pair of tits and wondering how much she paid for them? Who gave a shit! In another life, his other life, he’d be thinking about how he was going to get face-deep in her cleavage. His only thought about kittens would begin and end with how he was going to get her little kitty cat naked and riding his lap.

For most of his life, Mark had been good at two things: hockey and sex. He’d only set out to be good at shooting pucks, but a guy couldn’t exactly live his life hip-deep in rink bunnies and not get to know his way around a woman’s body. Now he couldn’t do one and didn’t have any interest in the other. He’d never been a guy whose dick defined his life, but sex sure had been a big part of his life. Except for when he’d been married. Christine had used sex as a reward. When she got what she wanted, he got laid.

Hell, he’d always thought he should be rewarded because he’d been faithful, which, given the amount of time he’d spent on the road with women throwing themselves at him, had been damn tough.

“This appointment shouldn’t take more than an hour,” his assistant said as she turned onto First Avenue and headed north. “I should have you at the Spitfire and your interview with Sports Illustrated right on time.”

He couldn’t recall ever agreeing to the interview in the first place, but he must have. When he’d talked to his sports agent about it, he must have been high on morphine or he never would have agreed to be interviewed when he wasn’t one hundred percent. Normally his agent, Ron Dorcey, wouldn’t have pushed it either, but with Mark’s name fading from the sports pages, and endorsement deals drying up faster than a puddle of water in the Mojave, Ron had arranged one of the last interviews likely to come Mark’s way.

He would have much preferred the interview take place next month or even next week when his head was a little clearer. When he’d had a chance to think about what he wanted to say in what would likely be one of the last articles written about him. He wasn’t prepared, and he wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to get himself interviewed today. In person.

Wait-he did know. Somehow he’d let a little bit of a woman bully him into doing it. He didn’t care that getting the interview over and done was easiest in the long run, not to mention the right thing to do. He’d let her push him around like he didn’t outweigh her by a good hundred pounds. Now she was driving his car like her name was on the pink slip.

Earlier, when she’d offered herself as his assistant instead of a health care worker, for one brief moment he’d thought, Why the hell not? No more waiting around for a car service might make him feel less dependent. But in reality he felt more dependent and less capable of taking care of himself. Health care workers wanted to manage his pain. Chelsea Ross clearly wanted to manage his life. He didn’t need her and he didn’t want her around.

Mark brushed his thumb along the cool metal cane. Back to the original plan. No more Mr. Nice Guy. By the time he returned home that afternoon, he’d have her ready to quit. The thought of her peeling out of his driveway brought a genuine smile to his face.

“I got a text from the Sports Illustrated reporter a few minutes ago and she’s set up in the VIP room,” Chelsea said as she and Mark moved toward the entrance of the Spitfire. The sounds of the city surrounded them, and the cool breeze blowing off the bay brushed her face as she glanced up at him out of the corner of her eye. She’d done a good job. She’d had him in and out of the John Louis Salon in time for his Sports Illustrated interview. That had to count for something. Had to show him that she was good at her job and that he needed her. “Her name is Donda Clark and she said the interview shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

He looked good too. The back of his dark hair barely brushed the collar of his T-shirt and the tops of his ears. He looked clean-cut. Handsome. Manly.

She’d been worried.

The John Louis Salon catered to an alternative clientele. Edgy. Emo. And Chelsea had worried that Mark would come out with guyliner and Pete Wentz or Flock of Seagulls hair.