“I’m sixteen,” she argued. “I don’t need to drink milk.”

“Do you want to be short and stumpy?” he asked her.

Marie’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not short and stumpy.”

“Not now, but look at your aunt Louise.”

Evidently, Aunt Louise must have been an osteoporosis nightmare, because without further argument Marie picked up her glass and drank her milk. Luc then turned his attention to Jane. He looked at her full glass and then at her.

“I’m already short and stumpy,” she said.

“You’re not stumpy-yet. But if you get any shorter, you’ll only be waist-high.” Then a beautiful smile curved his lips, and without a word, he reached for her glass and downed her milk.

He was such a bad man.

The night before they were to leave for a ten-day grind, he came to her apartment. When he knocked on her door, she was in the middle of her latest Honey Pie story, and not having a lot of success. Mostly because she was thinking of Luc and trying very hard not to write him into the story again. She shut her laptop and let him in.

A heavy rain had wet his hair and the shoulders of his jacket. He dug into the pocket and pulled out a white box about the size of her hand. “I saw this and thought of you,” he said.

She had no idea what to expect when she lifted the lid off the little box. She really wasn’t used to men giving her gifts, except perhaps cheap lingerie. Which she’d always figured was more for them than for her.

Inside the box, nestled on white tissue paper, was a crystal shark. Neither edible nor crotchless, it was the most thoughtful present any man had ever given her. And it touched her more than he would ever know.

“I love it,” she said and held it up to the light. Multicolored prisms shot across the front of Luc’s jacket and the hollow of his throat.

“It’s not much.”

He was wrong. So wrong. She closed her hand around the shards of light, but she could not contain the love she felt clear down to the very center of her soul. As she watched him unzip his jacket and toss it on her sofa, she knew she should tell him about the Honey Pie column. She should warn him and put a good spin on it. But if she told him, she could lose him. Here. Tonight.

She couldn’t tell him. If she did, he’d probably end their relationship, and she couldn’t afford for anyone to have that kind of information about her. So she kept quiet. Kept it inside, where it ate at her conscience, while she tried to convince herself that perhaps he’d be okay with the article.

She hadn’t taken a look at the column since she’d sent it off. Maybe it wasn’t as obvious as she remembered. She wrapped her arms around his neck. She wanted to tell him she was sorry and that she loved him. “Thank you,” she said, “I really love it.” Then she took him to her bedroom and apologized the only way she could.

When the first week of March came and went and Luc hadn’t seen the Honey Pie column, she began to relax. In Los Angeles, she told him she couldn’t have sex because she was crampy and had PMS. He’d arrived at her room after practice, carrying a bucket of ice in one hand, a heating pad and Peanut M &Ms in the other.

“I got the trainer to give me this,” he said as he handed her the heating pad. “And I brought the kind of candy you like.”

The night he’d seen her in her cow PJs, she’d been eating Peanut M &M’s. He’d remembered. She started to cry.

“What the hell’s the matter?” he asked as he wrapped the ice in a towel.

“I just get weepy,” she answered, but it was more. A lot more. Together they sat back against the headboard of her bed, and he placed a pillow beneath his left knee.

“Your knee is bothering you,” she said unnecessarily and helped him place the ice around it.

He downed several Advils. “Just the left one this time, and just a little.”

Probably more than a little, since he brought ice with him. During her interview with him in his apartment, he’d told her that his old injury didn’t bother him. Now he trusted her enough to let her see what she’d wondered about since she’d met him. His knees did in fact bother him sometimes. She sat beside him and took his hand.

“What?” he asked.

She looked across her shoulder at him. “Nothing.”

“I know that look, Jane. It’s not nothing.”

She tried to stop her cheesy smile and utterly failed. “Does anyone else know that this knee is bothering you?”

“No.” His gaze took in her mouth and then moved up to her eyes. “And you aren’t going to tell anyone, are you?”

She laid her cheek on his shoulder. “Your secret is safe with me, Luc. I would never tell anyone.”

“I know, or I wouldn’t be here.” He put his hand on the side of her face and brought the top of her head to his lips. He kissed her hair, and she settled against him. Maybe everything between her and Luc would work out. He trusted her, and while that pricked her guilt, it also gave her hope for the first time since she’d entered into this relationship with him.

Maybe it didn’t have to end. Maybe Ken didn’t always choose Barbie. Maybe in the end he’d choose her.


Luc popped the last of his pretzel into his mouth and leaned back into the Naugahyde chair. Across the table the Hitman dug into a plate of chicken wings, and Luc lifted his gaze from the captain to the empty entrance of the hotel bar.

Outside the hotel, the Phoenix sun was high in the sky and it was seventy-eight degrees. Some of the guys had hit the links, others milled about, and Jane was up in her room writing her Single Girl column. She’d told him she’d meet him in the bar when she was through. That had been over an hour ago, and he was tempted to storm her room. But he didn’t because he didn’t think she’d appreciate it, and despite his impatience, he respected that she had to work.

“Did you hear about the Kovalchuck suspension?” Hitman asked as he wiped his fingers on a napkin.

“What’d he get?”

“Five games.”

“It was a fairly cheap shot,” Fish added from his chair beside the team captain. “But I’ve seen worse.”

Daniel Holstrom and Grizzell joined them, and the conversation turned to some of the worst hits in the NHL, with the Chinooks enforcer, Rob Sutter, leading the pack. Manchester and Lynch pushed their chairs to the table and the talk turned from hockey to who would kick whose ass in a fight, Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Luc would put his money on Bruce Lee, but he had other things on his mind and didn’t enter into the debate. His gaze drifted to the empty doorway once again.

The only time Jane wasn’t on his mind was when he was in the net. Somehow, when he’d taken her to bed, she’d crawled inside his head. Sometimes it felt as if she’d crawled into the rest of him too, and he was surprised that he liked her there.

He couldn’t say if he was in love with her. The until-death-do-you-part kind of love. The kind that lasted and settled into the comfortable sort of love he wanted. The kind his mother had never found and that his father never waited around for. He only knew that he wanted to be with her, and when he wasn’t, he thought about her. He trusted her enough to let her into his life and the life of his sister. He had faith in her that his trust wasn’t misplaced.

He liked watching her and talking to her and just being with her. He liked the twists and turns of her mind, and he liked that he could be himself around her. He liked her sense of humor, and he liked having sex with her. No, he loved having sex with her. He loved kissing her, touching her, and being inside of her, looking down into her flushed face. When he was inside of her, he was already scheming ways to get there again. She was the only woman he’d ever been with for whom that was true.

He loved to listen to her little moans, and he loved the way she touched him. He loved when she took control and he was at her mercy. Jane knew what to do with her hands and mouth, and he loved that about her.

But did he love her? The forever kind? Maybe, and he was surprised that it didn’t freak him out.

“Luc?”

He removed his gaze from the entrance and looked at the guys. Most of them stood behind the Stromster, looking at a magazine he had open on the table.

“What?”

Daniel held up a copy of Him magazine. He was learning to read English again.

“Have you seen this?” Grizzell asked.

“No.”

Daniel handed it to him, opened to the Swede’s favorite choice of educational material. “Read,” he said.

The guys were looking at him as if they expected something. So he turned his attention to the magazine and read:


The Life of Honey Pie


One of my favorite places in the world is the observation deck of the Seattle Space Needle at night. It’s like sitting on top of the world. And anyone who knows me, knows I like it on top. I’d just had dinner in the restaurant below, leaving my date, a real dud, sitting at the table awaiting my return from the ladies’ room. I was wearing my little red halter dress, with the gold clasp at the back of my neck and the little gold chain that hung halfway down my spine. I’d worn my five-inch heels, and I was in the mood for more than Pacific swordfish. The date was gorgeous, like all my men. But he’d refused to play beneath the table, and I was turned on and bored. A dangerous thing for the men of Seattle.


Luc paused in his reading to glance at the doorway as two women walked, in. He didn’t need more than a quick glance to know they were rink bunnies. Uninterested, he returned to his reading.


The elevator to my left opened, and a man wearing a black tuxedo stepped out. My gaze ran up the four buttons of his jacket to his blue eyes. His gaze slid to my perfect breasts barely covered in the red halter. The corners of his mouth rose in an appreciative smile, and suddenly my night got a lot more interesting.