“Have dinner with me tonight and we can talk about it.”

She stared across the aisle at him. For a second she wondered if he was one of those short guys who just naturally assumed she’d go out with him because she was short too. Her last boyfriend had been five-seven and had had the mother of all Napoleon complexes, which had butted heads with her own Napoleon complex. The very last thing she needed was a short guy asking her out. Especially a short guy who was also Chinooks management. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want the players to think you and I are involved.”

“I have dinner with male sports reporters all the time. Chris Evans, in fact.”

It wasn’t the same. She had to be completely beyond gossip. More professional than men. Even though women had been allowed in the locker room for almost three decades now, speculation over women sleeping with their sources was still an issue. She didn’t think her credibility or acceptance with the players could sink lower, but she really didn’t want to find out.

“I just thought you might be tired of eating alone,” Darby added.

She was tired of eating alone. She was tired of staring at the walls of a hotel room or the inside of the team’s jet. Maybe someplace very public would be okay. “Just business?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why don’t we meet in the hotel restaurant?” she proposed.

“Seven sound okay?”

“Seven is perfect.” She dug around in the front pocket of her briefcase and pulled out the itinerary. “Where are we staying tonight?”

“LAX Doubletree,” Darby answered. “The hotel shakes every time one of those airbuses takes off.”

“Marvelous.”

“Welcome to the glamorous life of an athlete,” he said and leaned his head back.

Jane had pretty much already figured out that a four-game grind was just that: a grind. Although she’d already studied it dozens of times, her gaze scanned the itinerary. LA, then San Jose. Just a little over halfway into the road trip and she was looking forward to going home. She wanted to sleep in her own bed, drive her own car instead of ride a bus, and even open her own refrigerator instead of a hotel minibar. The Chinooks had four more days on the road before they returned to Seattle for a four-game, eight-day stretch. Then it was off again for Denver and Minnesota. More hotels and meals by herself.

Maybe having dinner with Darby Hogue was not such a bad idea. It could be enlightening and break the monotony.

At seven o’clock, Jane stepped off the elevators and made her way to the Seasons Restaurant. She’d left her hair down and it fell in soft curls to her shoulders. She wore her black wool pants and gray sweater. The sweater opened on the side of her neck and had flared sleeves, and until Luc had made that comment about her looking like the archangel of doom, she’d really liked it.

Now she wondered if there was some hidden reason beyond her fear of clashing colors that made her gravitate to dark colors. Was she depressed and didn’t know it, as Caroline had suggested? Have some undiagnosed mental disorder? Was she really an archangel of doom, or was Caroline delusional and Luc an arrogant A-hole? She liked to think the latter.

Darby waited for her at the entrance of the restaurant, looking very young in a pair of khakis, red and orange Hawaiian print shirt, and a new dose of gel in his hair. They were shown to a table near the windows and Jane ordered a lemon-drop martini to chase away her fatigue, if only for a few hours. Darby ordered a Beck’s and was asked for his ID.

“What? I’m twenty-eight,” he complained.

Jane laughed and opened the dinner menu. “People are going to mistake you for my son,” she kidded him.

The corners of his mouth turned downward and he pulled out his wallet. “You look younger than I do,” he grumbled as he showed the waiter his identification.

When their drinks arrived, Jane ordered salmon and wild rice while Darby chose beef and a baked potato.

“How’s your room?” he asked.

It was like every other room. “It’s fine.”

“Good.” He took a drink of his beer. “Any problems with the players?”

“No, they all pretty much avoid me.”

“They don’t want you here.”

“Yes, I know.” She took a sip of her martini. The sugar around the top of the glass, the floating lemon slice, and the perfect mix of Absolut Citron vodka and Triple Sec almost had her sighing like a seasoned alcoholic. But becoming an alcoholic was one thing that Jane didn’t have to worry about, for two reasons. Her hangovers were too painful to ever allow her to turn pro, and when she got tanked her judgment went out the window, sometimes along with her panties.

Jane and Darby’s conversation turned from hockey to other interests. She learned that he had graduated summa cum laude with an MBA from Harvard at the age of twenty-three. He mentioned his membership in Mensa three times, and that he owned a five-thousand-square-foot home on Mercer Island, a thirty-foot sailboat, and drove a cherry-red Porsche.

No doubt about it, Darby was a geek. Not that that was necessarily bad; besides being a fraud, she sometimes felt like a geek herself. To keep up her end of the conversation, she mentioned her undergraduate degrees in journalism and English. Darby didn’t seem all that impressed.

Their food arrived and he looked up from putting butter on his baked potato. “Am I going to end up in your Single Girl column?”

Jane paused in the act of placing her napkin on her lap. Most men feared showing up in the column. “Would you mind?”

His eyes lit up. “Hell, no.” He thought a moment. “But it has to be good. I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was a bad date.”

“I don’t think I can lie,” she lied. Half the stuff in her column was made up.

“I’d make it worth your while.”

If he wanted to wheel and deal, the least she could do was listen. “How?”

“I could tell the guys on the team that I don’t think you’re here to report on the size of their Johnsons or strange sexual habits,” he said, which immediately made her wonder exactly who had strange sexual habits. Maybe Vlad the Impaler. “And I could assure them you haven’t slept with Mr. Duffy to get this job.”

Complete horror dropped her jaw, and she raised a hand to her mouth. She’d figured that there might be some small minds in the newsroom who’d assumed she’d exchanged sexual favors with Leonard Callaway, because, after all, he was the managing editor and she was just that woman who wrote that silly column about being single in the city. She wasn’t a real journalist.

But it had never entered her head that anyone would think she’d slept with Virgil Duffy. Good God, the man was old enough to be her grandfather. Sure, he had a reputation for dogging younger women, and there had been a time in her life when her standards had hit a real low patch and she’d had sex with some men she’d rather forget about, but she’d never dated anyone forty years older than herself.

Darby laughed and dug into his beef. “I can see by the look on your face that the speculation isn’t true.”

“Of course not.” She reached for her martini and polished it off. The vodka and Triple Sec warmed a path to her stomach. “I’d never even met Mr. Duffy before that first day in the locker room.” The unfairness of it hit her and she signaled for another martini. Usually Jane hated to cry “no fair.” She believed that life wasn’t fair, and that crying about it only made things worse. She was a get-over-it-and-get-on-with-your-life type of girl, but in this case it really wasn’t fair because there was nothing she could do about it. If she made a fuss and denied it, she doubted anyone would believe her.

“If you write about me in your column, make me sound good, I’ll make things easier for you.”

She picked up her fork and took a bite of her wild rice. “What, are you having trouble finding a date?” She’d been joking, but by the brilliant blush to his cheek, she could tell she’d hit a nerve.

“When women first meet me, they think I’m a dork.”

“Hmm, I didn’t think so,” she lied, risking the bad karma.

He smiled, and the risk was worth it. “They never give me a chance.”

“Well, maybe if you didn’t talk about Mensa and about your advanced degrees, you’d have better luck.”

“Think so?”

“Yep.” She was halfway through her salmon when her second drink arrived.

“Maybe you could give me some pointers.”

Right, like she was an expert. “Maybe.”

His shrewd gaze bored into her as he took a bite of potato. “I could make it worth your while,” he said again.

“I’m getting nuisance calls. Make them stop.”

He didn’t appear surprised. “I’ll see what I can do about that.”

“Good, because it’s harassment.”

“Look at it more as initiation.”

Uh-huh. “There was a dead mouse outside my door last night.”

He took a swig of his beer. “It could have crawled there by itself.”

Sure. “I want an interview with Luc Martineau.”

“You’re not the only one. Luc is a very private guy.”

“Ask him.”

“I’m not the best person to ask him. He doesn’t like me.”

She raised her lemon drop to her lips. Luc didn’t like her either. “Why?”

“He knows I advised against trading for him. I was fairly adamant about it.”

That was a surprise. “Why?”

“Well, it’s old news, but he was injured when he was with Detroit. I’m not convinced a player his age can come back from major ACT surgery on both knees. At one time Martineau was good, maybe one of the best, but eleven million a year is a lot to gamble on a thirty-two-year-old man with bad knees. We traded a first-round draft pick, a heavy-hitting defender, and a pair of bookend wings. That left us weak on the right side. I’m not sure Martineau was worth it.”