by Kate Meader
“Remy, I—” She let loose a breathy moan, likely because his thumb had glanced across that pouting bottom lip. He couldn’t help it. His hands didn’t care about her motives for bringing him here because his body couldn’t survive another second without knowing how that mouth tasted.
With his palm anchoring her head, he angled her up and sucked on that fleshy lip. She gave a little squeak, but she didn’t back off, so he took that as invitation and covered her mouth with his.
Dumbass hands, running the show, because now he was fucked. No woman should taste this incredible. Harper Chase’s mouth could tempt a man to forget everything that was good for him.
Her hands pressed against his chest, holding him at bay, yet somehow pulling him deeper into this madness. She kissed him back with all that passion he’d seen her put into their contract negotiations. A little angry, a whole lot desperate, both of them winners. Their tongues touched, then tangled in a manner that might be considered workplace inappropriate.
He was happily drowning in the hottest kiss of his life.
She broke away, eyes wild and blaring her confusion. “That—that’s not why I asked to speak with you.”
He licked his lips, needing one last taste of this Class A drug that was Harper. His heartbeat would take longer than his erection to subside. “No worries. I won’t tell anyone the real reason you acquired me.”
Her lust-dazed eyes focused in annoyance, and she slipped his grasp.
“I might have had something to do with it.”
“With what?”
“Stroger going off on you.”
Not expecting that. “And you know this because?”
She took a slug of the whiskey she’d poured earlier. “Before the game, I ran into him near the locker rooms. He was talking to Isobel, and I told him to leave her alone.”
“What was he saying to Isobel?”
“I don’t know. Apparently they worked on some charity thing during the Olympics, but seeing them together—well, he’s bad news. And I don’t want my sister to have anything to do with him.”
With any other woman, Remy might have suspected a distinct case of the green-eyed monster. Add the innately tricky relationship between sisters, and that female jealousy theory went for double. But Harper didn’t strike him as the jealous type, so seeing her all bent out of shape because of Stroger made him hella curious.
“Stroger used to play for the Rebels,” Remy said, accessing his memory bank for the details. “Five years ago?”
“Six. One and a half seasons, and then we traded him to LA.”
Recollection kicked in hard. “Not a great trade if I recall. Kind of unexpected.”
“Do you remember the details of every transaction in the league?”
“Just the ones that look funny.” Aw. Shit. He got it now. “Something happened with you and Stroger?” Tonight. Six years ago.
“I told him to stay away from Isobel, and then we traded the usual smack talk. He mentioned something about how the Rebels were down so bad there was no getting up and not even a . . .” Her voice petered out.
“Not even a what?”
“Not even an old has-been could bring us out of our slump.”
He’d heard worse. “And?”
“I might have mentioned that you were ten times the man he was.”
Remy’s heart reared like a wild beast in his chest. Not ten times the skater. Not ten times the player. Ten times the man. That could be interpreted in any number of ways, but if he were Stroger, he would have read it one way, and one way only.
Harper had used Remy to win points against a man she’d once been involved with.
“When you traded him out six years ago, you did that because you were . . .” His pulse had skyrocketed while his brain hurtled toward the shittiest conclusion imaginable. “Dating him?”
She darted a tongue over those luscious lips he’d just tasted. “Dating is a stretch.”
Oh, so much better. She’d been . . . fucking Stroger. Neither did she see fit to contradict this as the reason for Stroger getting canned.
Remy wasn’t given to emotional outbursts either on or off the ice. He was known for his laid-back, suthin’ way of approaching everything, even hockey. Some people thought he was too laid back and blamed his easy temperament for his failings in the final stretch. But the thought of Stroger touching Harper had him ready to do considerable violence.
“So you told your daddy to banish your ex. Must be nice to have that power, princess.”
She bristled, and cool ice-queen Harper returned, but not before a flash of something in her eyes alerted him that he might not understand fully what had happened between her and Stroger. Whatever occurred, it ended badly, with Harper hurting.
But this woman fixed her pain by screwing with a guy’s career. Never in his life would he have thought he’d feel a smidgeon of pity for a shithead like Billy Stroger. The message was clear: do not get in Harper Chase’s emotional crosshairs.
For a moment, her cool facade cracked, and she looked as vulnerable as she had in that split second before he kissed her. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay and apologize for setting him off. I never expected he’d go that far.”
“Don’t worry, Ms. Chase. All’s fair in love and hockey, right? But next time you want to use me in some grudge match you have with Stroger, give me a heads-up so I can protect my oh-so-pretty, Juggs-readin’, stripper-lovin’ face.”
Furious, and not just because he felt like an idiot for thinking his boss might have his back, he stalked to his seat.
NINE
You’re my princess.
For most little girls, hearing those words spoken by their father would have made them feel like the most special daughter in the world. But not Harper.
Sure, she’d bought it at first. Birth to age six, the precynicism years. She was the apple of Clifford’s eye, his precious bundle of joy after her mother had suffered so many miscarriages. Harper burst onto the scene, promptly breaking her mother’s womb in the process. (A fact former runway model Lorraine never failed to remind her daughter of every single day of Harper’s childhood.) Because of Harper, there would be no more children. No chance of sons.
But Clifford had her, Harper, his princess.
It should have been enough, but like Henry VIII, he decided his first wife was no longer living up to her end of the bargain—to produce male heirs—and it was time to move on to a new and shiny model.
You’re my princess, Harper—until something better comes along.
When Harper first heard about Isobel, she was too excited to be jealous. She’d always wanted a little sister, a live doll she could dress up, someone she could boss around, an ally who understood how hard it was to be Clifford Chase’s progeny. And when she saw week-old Isobel, with her too-big-for-her-little-body head and her dark, silky hair, Harper had fallen in love for the first—and only—time.
In the living room of her father’s new house near the Rebels’ stadium, Harper asked if she could touch her.
“Of course you can,” her father had boomed, his voice so loud that Harper worried he’d frighten the newborn. But Isobel didn’t even flinch. She was already that tough. Her eyes opened wide, big, blue, and impossibly heartbreaking, and she grasped Harper’s finger. Its strength shocked her, but what shocked her more was her father’s unconditional love for his new daughter. She hadn’t even done a thing to earn it yet!
“She’s strong,” Harper murmured, while her stepmother, Geraldine “call me Gerry!,” looked on indulgently. A former Olympic ice-skater, she had clearly been chosen for her perfect gene pool. At six and three quarters, Harper was old enough to recognize her father’s end game here.
“She’s going to be a champion,” her father affirmed. “When women go pro, she’ll be right there.” Even now, she remembered the desperate tinge
to his voice. He hadn’t yet achieved his ultimate reproductive goal—a son—but he’d remake this child in as close to that image as he could.
As if sensing her father’s lofty aspirations for her, Isobel gripped Harper’s finger tighter. I’ve already won, that grip said. I’m better, stronger, a million times more lovable.
The melodrama of a child, perhaps, but kids have a sixth sense about these things, don’t they? And while Isobel might have been Harper’s first love, that passion burned to a fiery death in the face of Clifford’s boundless adoration for his newborn baby girl. (Children, so fickle.) With first love, Harper also experienced bitter jealousy, and it consumed her in its totality.
Why, twenty-five years later, was Harper even thinking of this? Remy DuPre, that’s why. Must be nice to have that power, princess.
No one had called her that since she was a little girl. Neither time had she deserved it.
Trust the dumb jock to jump to conclusions about how she’d used him to win points with Billy Stroger. As if that piece of shit was worth Harper getting in a feminine snit about. Remy had no idea, just assumed the worst.
Let him. She didn’t need his good opinion. Neither did she need him to act like she had lured him to the plane’s galley for that hot, sexy kiss. Her intentions had been benign, only wanting to check on him after all those hits he took from Stroger during the game. Even Isobel had commented that it was more egregious than usual. But when Remy mentioned his burning dislike for Stroger, something had cracked open inside her.
Vindication.
It wasn’t your fault, Harper. Billy Stroger is an asshole to everyone!
Alone with Remy in that tight galley space, she had come this close to spilling every secret and fear. Stroger, the “playoffs or bust” stipulation, how in over her head she felt every minute of every day. It was so easy to melt into his arms, to forget her problems for a while, especially with that drugging kiss. Why couldn’t he be bad at that?
The cold light of day put a gloss of reality on it. To let him burrow further under her skin would be a huge mistake. He had caught her in a weakened moment and used his lips to reestablish his dominance in their war. There would be no more of that!
Bleary eyed after no sleep and her body still reeling from the DuPre Smooch Attack, Harper came into the kitchen just as Violet was walking out, wearing a pair of tiny shorts and an off-the-shoulder ripped tee.
“Hey, there.” Violet had lain low since their last home game four days ago. Before heading to Boston yesterday, Harper had knocked on the door of the coach house at the end of the path, but there had been no answer, just Stevie Nicks’s “Rhiannon” blasting at decibel levels not usually heard, or tolerated, in the tony enclave of Lake Forest. There wasn’t a whole lot Harper could do to force her sisterly devotion on her, short of banging down the door like a crazy person.
Violet held up a plastic bag of ground coffee, still on a slide for the exit. “Ran out, so took the liberty.”
“Sure!” Harper said a little too brightly. “Maybe you can stay for breakfast, and we could talk.” After her spat with Remy, she wanted company. She hadn’t realized how lonely this big old house was until people had moved into the hood.
Her sister looked like she’d rather have a root canal with a rusty screwdriver than talk, but she wasn’t completely without class, so she walked back to the kitchen island. Slowly.
Harper bit her lip. “Problem is, I lied.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I usually just do coffee for breakfast.”
Violet’s lips quirked ever so slightly. “Coffee’s fine.”
As Harper busied herself measuring out grounds for the coffeemaker—her Keurig was on the fritz—Violet took a seat at the island. This was nice. They could catch up, and maybe Harper could give Violet some big-sister advice and fashion tips, because Lord knew she needed it, just look at those shorts, and—
“How’s the sexy Cajun?”
Harper spilled the grounds she was about to pour into the filter.
She couldn’t say “who?” because that would be stupid, so she responded with, “You think DuPre’s sexy?” and prayed to the gods of nonchalance that Violet didn’t notice how her voice dropped a couple of octaves.
“Sure. All that lazy menace. Sleek like a cat. Could do with working on his reflexes, though, with how that asshole came at him last night.”
“You watched the game?”
Now it was Violet’s turn to take the awkward baton and run with it. “I need to learn what it’s all about so I can earn my inheritance,” she muttered.
Harper suspected that Violet knew a hell of a lot more about hockey than she let on.
Isobel walked in just then, dressed in Hello Kitty PJs and stifling a yawn. “Hey.” She noticed Violet. “You guys plotting against me?”
Violet smiled. “Sure are, and all dastardly plots require caffeine. If Harper could get around to making the coffee.”
“Oh, right.” Harper returned to the task that had been derailed by Violet’s mention of the sexy Cajun. Her words. Harper would never think . . . ah, who was she kidding? He was both sexy and Cajun, and she didn’t enjoy Violet’s leer.
“Curtis Deacon at the Sun-Times is still being a jerk,” Isobel said, tapping her phone. “We won last night, yet the grief continues.”
Violet leaned over to catch whatever was on Isobel’s phone screen. “Is that the guy who called us the Spice Girls?”
Harper rolled her eyes. “I’d take it if they kept the original names. I remember dressing up as Scary Spice when I was a kid, and I totally rocked it.” Instead Deacon had labeled them as Incompetent Spice, Middle-Child Spice, and Latina Spice. Hilarious.
Isobel snickered. “I should be Sporty Spice. I mean I’m actually good at freakin’ sports!”
They laughed, though it wasn’t all that funny. Wanting to take advantage of the us versus them vibes, Harper chose her next words carefully.
“I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should set aside a night each week to spend time together. Watch dumb movies, eat ice cream, drink wine.”
The others stared at her as if she’d grown two heads and one of them looked like a creepy clown’s.
“Or not.”
Isobel squinted at her. “You never seemed all that interested before.”
That smarted, but Isobel was right. All her life, Harper had refused to let her younger sister in when she wanted to be closer. Why should she have played nice with the girl responsible for her parents’ broken marriage and her mother’s descent into depression and alcoholism? Circumstances placed them on opposing sides, and Clifford as referee always made the calls in Isobel’s favor.
Harper recalled how her father had forced her to invite Isobel to her thirteenth birthday party. As if a seven-year-old could have fun at a party with big girls! On reflection, locking Isobel in the utility room was harsh, but it was the only way to ensure her father’s undivided attention. It wasn’t every day a girl became a teenager.
Shame at how she had acted all those years ago crept over her now. It was why, once she’d heard about Violet’s existence, she’d pushed for a relationship with the newest leaf on the Chase family tree. Too little too late, perhaps, but she wanted to give it a shot and steal her own chance at sisterly redemption.
“Things have changed, haven’t they? It seems strange to be practically living together and acting like strangers.”
Isobel looked unconvinced.
Violet spoke up. “So you want to do Awkward Girls’ Night In, emphasis on awkward?”
Harper turned away, feeling foolish for having tried. She watched the drip-drip of the coffee filling the glass pot, willing it to move faster.
“We’ll do it,” she heard behind her from Isobel, “if you do something for us.”
“What?”
“Tell us what’s going on
with you and Remy DuPre.”
“You two looked pretty cozy at Ford Callaghan’s birthday party,” Violet hummed in agreement.
Facing them, Harper opened her mouth to deny it. Closed it again.
“And last night on the plane,” Isobel said with a devilish gleam in her green eyes, “you both went to the galley, and Remy came out looking like his nuts had been stomped on by size five Choos.”
“I knew it.” Violet wagged a finger. “After all your apocalyptic warnings about getting involved with the players.”
“There is no involvement. We just rub each other the wrong way”—deliciously wrong—“and last night I screwed up.” By almost dragging him into an airplane bathroom to finish what that kiss started.
The girls waited, and realizing that partially fessing up to her sins might increase her stock in the good-sister market, Harper told them the shortened, abuse-free version of her run-in with Billy Stroger, how that likely contributed to his vendetta for Remy out on the ice, and how DuPre hadn’t quite appreciated her retelling of the tale.
She kept that spine-dissolving kiss with Remy to herself. I didn’t think it was relevant, Officer.
“So that’s why you’re so opposed to boning the players?” Violet asked. “Because you had a bad break-up with this Stroger guy?”
Today, children, we’re learning all about shame! Another round coursed through her, the memory of how low Stroger had made her feel an alternately hot and cold front in her chest. Not even 8 a.m., and this day sucked donkey balls.
She refused to elaborate. “We are the first women to own and run a professional sports team. The world is watching how we handle this. If we let our hormones get the better of us, what does that say? That we’re slaves to our desires—”
“So you admit you have the hots for DuPre?” Violet was like a dog with a bone.
“I admit nothing!” Complete with finger point. “He’s an employee who I happen to not get along with particularly well. But I don’t have to get along with him. I just have to ensure he plays to the best of his ability. The same with all the players. We can’t do anything that puts that in jeopardy. So no flirting, fraternization, or—or smirking! Okay, Violet?”