“I know Pavel.”

“You’ve only been in town for two weeks!”

“It only takes an instant to feel chemistry.” Her mother sat on the edge of the bed and Pebbles jumped up beside her. “It’s this…” She snapped her fingers. “It’s a spark that you either feel for a man or you don’t.”

“But you don’t always have to act on it,” she said as Pebbles jumped inside the hatbox, spun around in a few circles, then made herself cozy.

“If you keep that kind of passion suppressed, it explodes and you do something rash. Before you know it, you’re naked and cuffed to the headboard of some guy named Dirk with a ruler tattooed on his penis.”

Faith held up a hand for her mother to stop. “How about we adopt the military ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. I won’t ask and you don’t tell.” She really didn’t want to hear about her mother’s exploding passion. Although after last night, when she’d kind of “exploded” in the hallway at the Marriott, she really couldn’t cast stones from her glass house. But in fairness to herself, she hadn’t exploded like that in a very long time. The last time she could recall had been with an old boyfriend on his Harley. Or at least they’d tried to have sex on his Harley. It hadn’t really worked out.

“I don’t understand you,” Valerie said.

“I know. And I don’t understand you. I don’t understand how you can keep repeating the same mistakes with men. When I was fifteen, I stopped counting the men that came and went in our lives.”

“I know I made mistakes.” Valerie sighed as if her mistakes were no big deal. “What parent hasn’t made a few mistakes?”

A few? Valerie had been married seven times and engaged at least a dozen.

Faith reached inside the hatbox and had to dig beneath Pebbles’s long fur for her jewelry roll. The little dog growled and bared its tiny white teeth. “You bite me, and I’ll drop-kick you off the balcony,” she warned.

“Don’t listen to her, Pebs,” Valerie said as she reached over and scratched the dog’s head. “She’s just jealous.”

“Of a dog!”

“Not you. Her. It’s called sibling rivalry. She views you as a sister competing for my attention. I read about it in a book.”

Since Valerie didn’t read books, Faith suspected she was making it up. She wrapped her hand around the jewelry bag and pulled it from beneath the dog.

“I don’t think Pebbles likes you lecturing Mama.”

Mama. Faith almost gagged. “I’m not lecturing you. I just think you need to respect yourself more.”

“I respect myself.” Her mother tied the belt and smoothed the silk over her legs. “You’re not the morality police, Faith. You married an old man for his money. You can hardly lecture me on morality.”

In the beginning of her marriage, that was certainly true. “You can only feel secure with yourself if there’s a man in your life.” She unrolled the silk bag and spilled her diamonds into her palm. “I find my security with money. Neither of us can claim the moral high ground.”

“Money is a poor substitute for love.”

“I had both with Virgil.”

Her mother sighed and rolled her eyes.

“It was a good marriage.”

“It was a passionless, sexless marriage to a man old enough to be your grandfather.”

She moved into the big walk-in closet stuffed with clothes in varying shades of beige, white, and black. “You’ll never understand my relationship with Virgil. He gave me a great life,” she said as she punched the numbers to the safe and popped it open.

“He gave you money in exchange for five years of your life. Five years of your youth that you can never get back,” Valerie called after her, and Faith refrained from reminding Valerie that Virgil had given her money as well. Enough that she didn’t have to work. “You can’t have a great life without passion,” her mother added.

Faith swung the safe door open and pulled out one blue velvet tray filled with Tiffany and Cartier earrings. Passion didn’t buy your child shoes when the soles wore out or put food in your child’s stomach. It didn’t keep the repo man from hooking your mother’s car to his wrecker and hauling it away from your single wide while the rest of the kids in the trailer court pointed and laughed because at least they were better off than you.

Faith looked down at the glittering stones of all shapes and colors. Passion did not take away the sick feeling in your stomach that you were one paycheck away from living in an alley behind a Dumpster at the Hard Rock.

“Those don’t keep you warm at night.”

She looked at her mother standing a few feet away. At the deep lines in the corners of her green eyes and her Farrah hair, messed up by a man’s hands. Faith slept beneath a comforter filled with the down of Hungarian white geese to keep her warm at night. She didn’t need a man for that.

She placed her diamonds on the blue velvet tray. She didn’t need a man for warmth or money. Passion was overrated and never really lasted anyway. Her mother was certainly an example of that.

Faith had everything she needed. She didn’t need a man for anything. And yeah, she knew what people would say about that. That she’d used her body instead of her mind to get what she wanted.

So what? She didn’t care. All that mattered was that it all belonged to her and no one could take it away.

Chapter 10

Monday afternoon, as Faith sat in a meeting with the coach, Darby Hogue, and the scouts from the player development department, her nerves twisted her stomach into knots. A television was set up and they watched clip after clip of free agents and minor-league prospects. Even though all trades and acquisitions were put on hold until the end of the season, the player development department still worked at finding new talent, and Jules had thought it important that she attend the meeting. While the men in the room discussed the prospect on the screen, she felt as nervous as a sinner in church, wondering if Ty would breeze through the door, looking hot and cool at the same time. She wondered if any of the men in the room knew that she’d assaulted the captain of the hockey team with her lips. She was fairly certain Ty wasn’t the kind of man to kiss and tell. That he wouldn’t want something like that to get around either, but she didn’t know well enough to be certain he wouldn’t talk about her with one of the guys. Who might in turn tell other people.

Yes, he’d kissed her first, but she was the one who’d grabbed ahold with both hands and hadn’t wanted it to end. Not like that. Not until they were both naked.

“Can I get you anything, Mrs. Duffy?” the coach’s assistant asked as he popped in another tape.

A Xanax. She smiled and shook her head. “No. Thank you.” Her hands lay loosely in her lap, appearing relaxed and composed as her nerves pinged through her veins and zapped her every time someone walked past Coach Nystrom’s door, but Ty never showed and no one mentioned the unfortunate episode in San Jose.

That night, the Chinooks won their second of three against the Sharks. Faith chose to attend a benefit instead and skipped the game. She and Virgil had bought tickets to the thousand-dollar-a-plate event the previous summer. She decided to go by herself and participate in the silent auction to raise money for Doctors Without Borders.

She dressed in her black Donna Karan sheath and hung a string of opera-length pearls around her neck. When she walked into the ballroom at the Four Seasons, she spotted several women she knew from the Gloria Thornwell Society. They turned their faces as if they didn’t know her. The glittering chandeliers shined down on the Seattle elite as she grabbed a glass of Moët from a passing tray. Toward the front of the room, Landon and his wife stood in a circle of Virgil’s close friends congratulating each other for one sort of acquisition or another. She raised the champagne to her lips and her gaze slid to the members of the Seattle Symphony, playing on a raised dais. She knew a lot of these people. Now, as she moved to the table displaying the silent auction items, she caught the gazes of the few trophy wives she’d associated with for five years. In their eyes she saw pity and fear as they turned away, afraid to make eye contact with their fate.

“Hello, Faith.”

She looked across her shoulder at the wife of Bruce Parsons, Jennifer Parsons, a trophy wife only slightly older than herself.

“Hi, Jennifer. You braved the crowd, I see.”

Jennifer smiled tightly. “How are you doing?”

“A little better. I still miss Virgil.”

They talked for a few short minutes, and in the end promised phone calls that would never be placed and lunch that would never happen.

When the dinner bell rang, she found herself at a table with Virgil’s empty seat beside her. Sadness at his absence settled next to her heart. He’d been a strong stabilizing influence in her life and she missed him. Now that he was gone, she had to be strong by herself.

Across the table, Landon and his wife, Ester, ignored her completely while silently transmitting their contempt in venomous waves. If Virgil were alive, he’d have expected her to paste a smile on her face and force them all to be civil. But frankly, she was tired of forcing polite behavior from Landon and Ester when they were in polite society. To some of the people in the room, she would always be a woman who took her clothes off for money. But there’d been some freedom in that life which had nothing to do with being naked and everything to do with not caring what people thought. There were only a few rungs lower on the social scale than a stripper.

While she ate a five-course meal that started with a braised short rib and red cabbage salad, she made small talk with those around her. By the time the fourth course was cleared from the table, she realized that she really just didn’t care anymore. Not about Landon and his wife, and not about people who would never accept her now that Virgil was gone. Since the funeral, her life had been different. In just one short month, it had drastically changed.