“Just a sec,” she called out, feeling foolish. She moved to the closet and pulled out a terrycloth bathrobe. She tied the belt around her waist, then opened the door.

His gaze rose to the towel wrapped around her head, lowered to her mouth, then, in no great hurry, slipped to the tips of her bare toes. “Looks like I caught you just out of the shower again.”

“Yes. You did.”

He slid his gaze back up her legs and robe and looked at her without expression. He either was uninterested or doing a really good job of appearing uninterested. “Do you have a minute?”

“Sure.” She stepped aside and let him in. “What do you need?”

His long strides took him to the center of the room and he turned to face her. “When I saw you this morning, you seemed uncomfortable. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable around me, Jane.” He took a long deep breath and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “So I think maybe I should apologize.”

“Apologize for…?” But she knew and she wished he wouldn’t.

“For kissing you last night. I’m still not sure how it happened.” He looked over her head as if the answer were written on the wall. “If you hadn’t cut your hair and been looking so good, I don’t think it would have happened.”

“Wait.” She held up one hand like a traffic cop. “Are you blaming my hair?” she asked, just to make sure she was hearing him right. Hoping she wasn’t.

“Probably had more to do with that dress. That dress was designed with ulterior motives.”

He’d kissed her, and she’d fallen so deep into infatuation that she wasn’t sure it even was infatuation anymore. Now here he was, blaming her hair and her dress as if she’d purposely tricked him. As if he wouldn’t have kissed her if he hadn’t been tricked. Knowing how he felt hurt more than it should have. He was a jerk, no doubt about it, but she was a fool. The latter was the hardest to take.

Pain and anger tangled into a knot around her heart, but she was determined not to let it show. “It just was an ordinary red dress.”

“It didn’t have a back and had only two strips of material up the front.” Luc rocked back on his heels and lowered his gaze from the towel wrapped around Jane’s head, down the front of her robe to her bare toes again. Since last night, he’d been thinking about that kiss in her apartment, and he wasn’t certain what had driven him to kiss her. The dress. The lips. Curiosity. All of those. “And the little gold chain hanging down your back was there for only one reason.”

“What? To hypnotize you?”

She was being sarcastic, but she wasn’t that far off. “Maybe not hypnotize, but it’s there so any man seeing it will think about unhooking it.”

She raised one brow and looked at him as if he were an idiot. He sort of felt like an idiot. “I’m telling you the truth. All the guys last night were thinking of unhooking your dress.” None of the guys had mentioned it to Luc, but he figured that if he’d been thinking it, they had too.

“Is this your idea of an apology or your way of rationalizing what happened?” She grabbed the towel from her head and tossed it on her bed.

“It’s a fact.”

She combed her fingers through her hair. “It’s delusional.”

If she were a guy, she’d see the logic in it.

“And it’s stupid.” Her wet curls tangled about her fingers as she pushed them back from her face. “It puts the blame on me, and I didn’t walk into your apartment last night and kiss you. You kissed me.”

“You didn’t protest.” He didn’t know what had shocked him more. Him kissing her, or her response. He never would have guessed that so much passion could be contained in so little a package.

She let out a long sigh as if she were bored. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

He laughed even as he wanted to cross the room and press his mouth to hers. To slip his hand inside that robe and cup her breast, even as he knew it was a hell of a bad idea. Luc leaned a hip into the desk as he lowered his gaze from her mouth and thought about how her mouth had tasted last night. He glanced somewhere safe, down at Jane’s laptop. “The way you kissed, I thought you were trying to climb inside me.” An open day planner sat beside the laptop. Several Post-Its were stuck on the inside. A couple of the notes had to do with hockey trivia and questions she wanted to ask for her sports columns.

“There you go, being delusional again.”

On one pink note the words, Feb. 16/Single Girl deadline, were printed. While another read, Honey Pie/make decision by Wednesday at the latest. Honey Pie? Did Jane read Honey Pie? The nympho who humped men into comas? He just couldn’t picture her reading porn. “You were so hot for it,” he said in a slow and deliberate drawl as he looked back up at her, “I could have had you naked in no time.”

“You’re not only conceited beyond belief, and delusional, you’re… you’re deranged!” she sputtered.

“Probably,” he admitted as he walked past her on his way to the door. He felt deranged.

“Wait a minute. When do I get the interview you promised me?”

With his hand on the doorknob, he turned and looked at her. “Not now,” he said.

“When?” she pushed.

“Sometime.”

“Sometime tomorrow?” She raised her arms and brushed her hair behind her ears.

“I’ll let you know.”

“You can’t back out on me now.”

He didn’t plan to. He just wasn’t going to do it now. Here. In a hotel room with a king-sized bed and a woman wearing a bathrobe begging him to prove just how deranged he was. “Yeah, says who?”

Her brows lowered and she pinned him with her gaze. “Me.”

He laughed again. He couldn’t help it. She looked like she was gearing up to kick his ass.

“You gave me your word.”

For a split second he thought about shutting her up with his mouth. Kissing her until she turned soft and melted into him again. Until she fed him that little moan of hers that had urged him on last night, to take it further. To touch her where his mind had been taking him since that first morning on the team jet when he’d looked back and seen her.

“When, Luc?”

Instead of giving in to the urge, he opened the door and said over his shoulder, “When you get a bra, Jane.”

Luc unzipped his jacket the rest of the way as he walked down the hall. A repeat of last night couldn’t happen again. The instant he’d kissed her, he’d gone from zero to hard in under a second, and that hadn’t happened to him in a very long time. If Marie hadn’t been waiting in the car, he didn’t know if he would have stopped. He liked to think he would have. He liked to think he was mature and experienced enough to stop before he did anything he’d regret, anything colossally stupid, but he wasn’t sure. He’d kissed a lot of women in his thirty-two years. A lot of women had kissed him too, but never like Jane. He didn’t know what it was about her, and he really didn’t want to take the time to figure it out. She already spent too much time in his head.

The very last thing he needed in his life right now was a woman. Any woman. Especially that woman. The reporter traveling with the team. Sharky, their good-luck charm.

There was only one solution to his Jane problem. He’d have to avoid her as much as possible. Not as simple as it sounded, granted. Not when she traveled with the team, covered every game, and had to call him a “big dumb dodo” for luck.

Over the course of his career, Luc had developed the kind of intensity that held up under the pressures of overtime and point-blank shooters. During the next few days, he planned to use that intensity to keep his focus on winning. He needed to concentrate on his game and do what needed to be done.

That night against Colorado, he shut down twenty-eight of thirty goal attempts and the Chinooks boarded the jet with a three-two victory over their biggest contenders for the Stanley Cup. As soon as the BAC-111 evened out, the glow of Jane’s laptop illuminated the space three rows up. Luc hadn’t needed the light to tell him where she sat-he knew. But just because he knew didn’t mean he had to do anything about it. During the flight from Denver to Philadelphia, he noticed some of the guys talking to her. Daniel said something that made her laugh, and Luc wondered what the young Swede told her that could possibly be so damn funny. Luc grabbed a pillow and sacked out for the rest of the trip.

Avoiding Jane turned out to be easier than anticipated, but not thinking about her proved impossible. It seemed the more determined he was to avoid her, the more he thought about her. The more he tried not to think about her, the more he wondered what she was doing and who she was doing it with. Probably that “wild man” Darby Hogue.

He only saw Jane once in Philadelphia, but the second she entered the locker room at the First Union Center, he noticed her red lips. And he knew she’d worn lipstick on purpose just to drive him insane. She gave her good-luck speech, then walked toward him where he sat in front of an open stall.

“Good luck, you big dumb dodo,” she said, then she lowered her voice to just above a whisper. “And for your information, I have several bras.”

As Luc watched her breeze from the room, he worried that her full red lips had fucked up his concentration. For a few tense moments, his focus was on Jane’s mouth and imaginary black lace bras. He closed his eyes and cleared his head, and by sheer force of will, he got it back ten minutes before he hit the ice.

That night, the Chinooks shut out the Flyers, but not before the boys from Philly laid on the lumber and sent Sutter to the hospital with a concussion. Rob was still on the injured list when the Chinooks landed in New York to take on the Rangers. In the locker room before the game, Luc waited for Jane to wish him luck before he said, “If you own several bras, you might try wearing one.”