Ty stood. “Hello, Mrs. Duffy.”

“Hello, Mr. Savage,” she said above the noise and music in the pub. Her gaze rested on him for several moments before she turned her attention to the other men rising to their feet. “Hello, gentlemen. Do you mind if we join you?”

Ty simply shrugged as he took his seat once more. The other five guys tripped all over themselves to assure her they’d love to have her take a seat, which Ty knew for a fact was complete bullshit.

“What did you do with yourself all day, Mrs. Duffy?” Blake asked in an effort to engage the owner.

“Well, I hit downtown San Jose and ran up my credit cards.” She took a seat next to Ty and reached for the menu. “I shopped till I dropped. I found the most wonderful sweater at BCBG. It’s fuchsia.” Two slim fingers, with those shiny red nails, slid down the menu. “And the coolest leather coat at Gucci. It’s scarlet. Normally I would never wear such bright colors. They’re just too bold and scream ‘look at me.’ Like waving and jumping up and down in a crowd to get attention.” Her fingers stopped near the bottom of the menu. “And I haven’t bought leather…well, except shoes and bags, in years. But…” She shrugged. “I’ve decided to live dangerously. Which would explain the sheer madness of the thigh-high boots and the matching lambskin hobo. The last thing I need is another hobo.” She looked up at the men staring back at her with varying degrees of stunned faces.

“I’ll have the grilled salmon and a Guinness,” she told the waitress who’d approached during her babbling onslaught. Ty didn’t know if she was nervous or drunk or both.

Jules ordered a steak and a Harp’s from his seat across the table. “The poor bellman had to cart all that stuff up to your room.”

“I tipped him well.” She handed the menu to the waitress. “But it wasn’t until I spread everything out in the room that I realized that there might not be enough space in the jet’s cargo hold for all my bags.”

“Oh. Ah,” Johan Karlsson managed to utter.

She looked at them all, green eyes shining, and flashed a beautiful smile with her straight white teeth and full red lips. Ty could almost hear their collective gulps. “You-all don’t mind if we leave some of your equipment behind. Do you?”

“Like what?” Sam asked as he raised his beer. “We don’t travel with unnecessary baggage.” He took a drink, then added, “Unless you count Jules over there. Pound for pound, he takes up a lot of wasted space.”

“Pound for pound,” Jules jumped in, “your ego takes up a lot of wasted space.”

Faith tilted her head and seemed to consider it. “No, I need Jules. But you-all don’t need that many sticks.” She looked at each of them in turn. “I figure one apiece is good. Am I right?”

There was a collected inhalation of horrified breath. Everyone knew that a man’s stick was sacred, honed for hours until the curve was just right. Not even for a former Playmate of the Year who just happened to be the owner of the team would these players willingly leave them behind. Pads and helmets? Yeah. Their sticks, no way.

The hockey players at the table cast uncertain glances at Ty as if they expected the captain to step in and do something. Like maybe give her a glove rub.

Faith laughed. “I was just kidding, you guys.” She waved away their concerns, flashing the huge rock she still wore on her left finger. “If there isn’t enough room, I’ll have the hotel ship everything.”

Ty almost smiled. No one could bullshit and get the uninitiated going like a hockey player. As a bullshitter, Mrs. Duffy wasn’t great, but she wasn’t bad for a rookie.

“Jules and I watched the Sharks practice,” she said as her beer arrived. “We were up in the skybox with binoculars. It was all very undercover hush-hush secret-agent stuff.” She took a drink and licked the foam off her top lip. “They seem to have a lot of speed, but I’m not convinced they can shoot the puck as well as we can.”

Ty felt his brows rise up his forehead.

“I think we have them beat on offense,” she added as she leaned back and folded her arms beneath her breasts. “We’re better delivering tape to tape and capitalizing on turnovers.”

Sam looked at Ty as if an alien had just landed at their table. A sexy-as-hell alien who talked about hockey and sounded like maybe she knew what she was talking about. Just a few weeks ago, she’d wanted to sign Terrible Ted. He wondered if she even had a clue what she’d just said.

“Ah, yeah,” Sam managed. “We were just talking about how we need to beat them offensively and hammer their goalie.”

Above the smell of food and beer, Ty caught the scent of her perfume. He recognized it from the other night at the photo shoot.

“I don’t know a lot about their goalie.” She raised one hand and toyed with the top button of her sweater. “But I’ve read that he isn’t consistent.”

“Don’t believe what you read,” Ty told her. She looked across her shoulder at him and her green eyes stared into his. “That’s where a lot of people make mistakes.”

“Believing what they read?”

“Yeah.”

“I read that you’re persona non grata in Canada. Is that true?”

“Pretty much.”

“I also read that you think the Stanley Cup will come down to who wants it more.”

“Where did you read that?”

“

Hockey News.”

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“I’m paraphrasing.” She lowered her voice a fraction and added, “You actually said it will come down to who has the biggest sac.”

That sounded more like him. “Which is different from wanting it enough.” He took a drink of his beer then set it back on the table. He didn’t want to talk about his sac. Not with her. Not when his sac had noticed the way she smelled and the way her breasts filled out that sweater.

“How is it different?”

He looked into her big green eyes surrounded by thick black lashes. “It just is.” Her cheeks were smooth, perfect. He lowered his gaze to her full mouth and chin down to the hollow of her delicate throat just above the top button on her sweater. He wanted to do things to her. Hot, sweaty things that would make their skin stick together. Wild things that would get him into a lot of trouble.

“How’s it different?” she pushed.

“Angel of Harlem” poured from the pub’s sound system and he wondered how to answer. If she were a man, he wouldn’t even hesitate. If she were a man, he wouldn’t have a hard-on. “You can want something, Mrs. Duffy, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. Sometimes wanting isn’t enough.” And because she pushed, he added,

“Sometimes it comes down to what you’ve got left in your gut and the size of your sac.”

She chuckled as if she wasn’t the least bit shocked. “The article didn’t mention the importance of sac size, Mr. Savage.”

“Size is always important. Massive sac is almost as important as massive skill.” And because they were sharing what she’d read about him, he leaned toward her a bit and said just above a whisper, “I read about you too. I read you hate hot dogs and love crème brûlée.”

Her brows lowered in confusion. “How did you…? Ah.” Her confusion cleared and she smiled. “That’s true. Where’d you get the magazine?”

“One of the guys.”

“Of course.” She turned her face toward him and, to anyone looking, it appeared as if they were speaking closely to be heard over the music. Her mouth just inches from his, she said, “So, I assume it’s been passed around.”

“I got it a couple of weeks ago.”

“What took so long?”

“Sam wasn’t finished looking at it.”

She reached for her beer and laughed, not the least embarrassed. “Those were taken a long time ago.”

Not that long ago. He thought of her with that long string of pearls.

“You’re thinking about those pictures, aren’t you?” she asked from behind her glass.

He didn’t answer.

She smiled. “Only seems fair.”

“How’s that?”

“Because completely against my will, and no matter what else I try to shove into my head, I can’t stop thinking about ‘massive sac.’ It’s very disturbing.”

He chuckled and she looked at him as if he’d sprouted a horn from the middle of his forehead. “What?”

“I didn’t think you ever laughed.”

Of course he laughed.

“Hey, Mrs. Duffy,” Sam called from down the table. “Do you know The Girls Next Door?”

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” Jules admonished like a preacher, and Ty had to admit that the assistant probably had a point. Which made the conversation he’d just had with her completely off the scale of appropriate.

Faith smiled. “It’s okay, Jules. I met Holly and Bridget at the mansion. There were other girls there too. But Kendra didn’t live there at the time.”

“What’s Hef like?”

“He’s nice.” Her salmon arrived and she placed her napkin on her lap.

He was also old. Like Virgil. What was it with her and old men? Oh yeah. Money.

“He’s also a very a smart businessman,” she continued.

“Did you go to a lot of parties?”

“As Playmate of the Year, I hosted several. That’s how I met Virgil.” She squeezed lemon on her fish and picked up her fork. “He and Hef were good friends.”

“Do you still get invited?”

“Occasionally, but the last few years Virgil really couldn’t travel very often. So we didn’t go.”

For some inexplicable reason, the thought of Virgil’s old hands on her smooth, young body made Ty feel uneasy. Why he should give a shit, he didn’t know. Maybe it was the Guinness. He was used to Canadian brew, and rich beer always hit him hard after a few.

“Maybe you can get us all an invite to the mansion,” Sam persisted.

She looked up and smiled. “Win the Stanley Cup, and I’ll see what I can do.”

The heels of Faith’s red pumps clicked across the lobby as she made her way to the bank of elevators. She’d just left Jules and Darby Hogue at the pub, talking hockey and acquisition. It was a little after ten, and Ty and the other hockey players had cleared out of the pub by nine. She didn’t know where they’d gone. They hadn’t said, but it was Saturday night, and she suspected they’d joined their other teammates at various bars around town.