by Cindi Madsen
Suddenly I couldn’t wait to go try on boring outfits and make myself look as dowdy as possible. Take that, beauty pageant training.
Chapter Seven
Whitney
Lyla vetoed the cute plaid editor pants at Express, as well as a bright red pair I tried on, but gave in to the tweed. I’d added them to the pile of boring black and gray slacks, all a size larger than I would usually buy. At least the tweed made me feel like I was taking a fashion risk, even if a conservative one.
When I’d come out in the white button down, she’d instructed me to do up one more button, because apparently even the hint of skin and cleavage meant that no hockey player would take me as seriously. She’d also insisted on the jacket, which, while not very fashion forward, did provide protection against the chilly air in the hockey arena.
My boring black shoes made an equally boring thump as I followed Lyla down the concrete steps. No clacking, no noise to turn a few heads. Just muffled thwak, thwak, thwaks.
“Here we are,” Lyla said, settling into one of the plastic maroon seats.
I sat next to her and readjusted the dark, too-chunky and too-wide frames that were a total no-no for my heart-shaped face. My mama had told me a hundred times—you need to balance the width of your face and hide the fact that your forehead is so much wider than your chin.
It’s why the harsh bun, without even a hint of fringe, didn’t work well for me, either. Suddenly I was all forehead. Blech. Instead of making a hair appointment, I was letting it go for a while, the darker blond roots taking over, my highlights dull from months of washing and styling.
“You still look hot,” Lyla said, apparently reading my mind. “Just business secretary hot.”
“Why, Lyla Wilder, are you coming on to me? What would Beck think?”
Pink flared in her cheeks, but she laughed. “He’d be into it. He once told me all guys are pervs, you just have to find the nicer pervs. And as nice as my perv is, this conversation would make his head explode.”
I laughed, too. Lyla had come a long way when it came to accepting her sex appeal and gaining confidence, and I was glad we could joke so easily about it. Of course, now I was the one suffering from lack of confidence. I sighed and picked at a thread on my pants. “I feel like Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality, but in reverse. Maybe I should practice my speech for when this whole thing’s over.” I adopted my best pageant voice. “That would be harsher treatment for hockey players who break the rules, Stan… And world peace.”
Two creases formed between Lyla’s eyebrows as she looked at me, her confusion clear.
“It was a twist on a quote from the movie—she says what society needs is harsher treatment for criminals.” When Lyla’s expression remained blank, I shook my head. “Never mind.”
Funny enough, my mama had me watch it so I’d see how fun beauty pageants were. While I’d made some friends, between school and pageant preparations and the travel involved, there hadn’t been a lot of time to bond. After a while, my main emotion was resentment at Mama for pointing out every one of my flaws and pushing so hard. I’d just about gotten over it when she left Daddy and me.
Okay, I definitely don’t want to be thinking about this. But seriously, she’d freak if she saw my make-under. The woman wore lacy nightgowns to bed, no matter how cold. When I’d bought flannel pajama pants, she’d balked, and the “shapeless” hoodie I paired them with offended her even more.
At least Daddy was proud—I’d almost held off on telling him about my job in case I messed it up, but in the end, it’d spilled out, and I think he was as excited as I was.
The music filling the arena grew louder, and hockey players burst onto the ice to warm up.
As they did, I decided to pull up my research notes on the iPad mini I’d worked all summer for. No one handed me a brand new, all-the-bells-and-whistles iPad, the way the college did for athletes when they showed up for their first day of class.
That wasn’t even close to their biggest perk, either. They got to register for classes early, and according to the Delta Cost Project, universities in NCAA Division I sports spent three to six times as much on educating athletes as regular students.
Did those athletes then use their education? For most of them, that’d be a big no. They continued on with playing sports, and the ones who tried to enter the career field often hadn’t retained enough of the information from their classes to be successful in the area they’d supposedly studied.
I opened up the app I was using to keep my articles organized. It didn’t write notes as well as it claimed, stylus or not, so I had my notebook for that.
I’d found a site with college athletics revenues and expenses, and I’d been blown away by the jaw-dropping amounts. The better the teams, the more money the athletics department earned for the school, so of course they were going to do pretty much whatever it took to recruit top players and then keep those players happy.
“How are you going to write about the game if you’re buried in your notes the entire time?” Lyla asked.
I peered onto the ice as they started announcing the players. I switched my stack of notes around, shuffling my notebook and the paper with the players’ positions and stats to the top.
Admittedly, seeing the guys all decked out in their gear made my pulse accelerate a bit. As they skated after the puck, fighting each other for control, I even leaned forward in my seat to watch all that testosterone play out. Number Nineteen tore down the ice, and I couldn’t help but admire the way he moved. I bet that he was of the rugged sexiness variety, even with the helmet off.
I ran my finger down my list until I landed on nineteen, and slid it right to his name. Hudson Decker. Left winger—whatever that meant. I’d planned on learning the positions better, but I’d already crammed in so many rules about the game, and with my other research about NCAA rules and school spending, my brain simply stopped taking in new hockey-related information for a bit.
Something tickled my mind, but I couldn’t figure out what. It’s not like I knew the guy, and I’d never heard the term “winger” in my life. Unless I’d read it after my brain had given up on the study session I’d forced it through. It was probably just my hormones, and I should shut them right down.
But there was no harm in gleaning a bit of info, right? After all, it was in my job description.
“The left wing dude,” I said, my gaze still on him as I tilted my head closer to Lyla. “What’s he like?”
He swung back his stick and shot. The crowd erupted when it sailed into the goal. A red light flashed and his teammates barreled into him to celebrate.
Once the crowd settled back down, Lyla turned to me. “Hudson Decker? I don’t really know him, but he’s kind of the bad boy of the team. Drinks a lot, spends a lot of time in the penalty box. But he, Beck, and Kowalski…” She glanced down at her lap as if she were looking for something, then her head shot back up and she snapped her fingers. “Dane—that’s Kowalski’s first name. I think Hudson is the only one who uses it, though. Anyway, the three of them read each other well and they have tons of assists. They’re who score most of the points.”
Between the name and the hockey terms I got a little lost.
“Oh, and Hudson’s high scoring doesn’t apply to just hockey, if you know what I mean. From what I’ve seen, he’s the king of the hit it and quit it. I’ve never seen him with the same girl twice.”
My gut sank. Of course that was the guy I was checking out. “Damn lack of playdar,” I muttered, and Lyla squeezed my hand. During our girls’ night, I’d lamented the fact that I was missing it.
“We’ll get it tuned yet,” she said. “Just keep at it.”
“This is exactly why I’ve sworn off dating and sex.”
The older woman in front of us turned and scowled. Oops. Considering the noise of the game, I was surprised she could even hear me. But thinking about how long it was going to be before I got to have sex again made me want to scowl, too.
; Better focus on my research again. Where was I…?
Oh, yes. The unequal distribution of college funds. I opened up the second article I’d made notes on and skimmed through it again. This one talked about how the smaller sports that didn’t get recognition—like, oh, all of the women’s sports programs—were in danger, to the point they might be cut. Meanwhile, the attention-grabbing teams—such as the one playing on the ice at this very moment—paid their coaches hefty salaries, starting in the half a million range. Every year their budgets grew, which actually made it seem like they didn’t have a budget. They insisted they needed more money because they weren’t making a profit, when it was their own damn fault for paying too much for coaching staff and perks.
Okay, that last part might be more my opinion than fact as of yet, but I was working on gathering more evidence to support my theory. While a significant amount of the athletics department’s funds came from donations, it was a fact that the student body and the university paid more and more of the expenses every year, which meant the non-athletes were literally paying for the athletes to get special treatment.
So they were treated like kings while the rest of us studied our asses off and tried to convince ourselves that we weren’t sick of ramen noodles.
The unfairness of it all fed into my determination. This story had serious potential.
The crowd around me cheered and I glanced up, getting momentarily distracted by Number Nineteen once again. He’d just stolen the puck, and I watched as he shoved off a defender, dodged another one, and moved toward the goal, each long stride eating up the ice.
How can he skate that fast all game? He must have killer endurance. My mind accidentally drifted to how nicely his quick moves and all that power and endurance might transfer to other areas…
Stop it right there. This is how it always starts. You get distracted by hotness and forget all the ways guys screw you over.
I wasn’t doing that anymore, though, so as the people around me cheered for Hudson’s second goal of the night, I forced my focus back to my notes and my plan to write the kind of killer exposé that’d put my name front-and-center on the journalism map.
Chapter Eight
Hudson
This week had sucked, and while I’d been hitting the weights and cardio hard, I’d also been drinking too much and not sleeping enough. I’d paid for it every day at practice, but the adrenaline of the game pushed me past all that, washing away everything that didn’t matter.
I slammed one of the Harvard boys up against the ice so Dane could steal the puck away and break for our goal. Dane passed the puck to Beck, and he hit it home, scoring another point—this game was a total cakewalk.
I shot the Harvard boys an extra big grin through my mouth guard and one skated up in my face. He was the same jackass who’d been holding the whole game—not that the refs called it.
Dane zoomed in between us and put his hands on my chest. “Bro, these guys barely qualify for competition, but we’re going to need you for the next game. Don’t get into a pointless fight right now.”
I wished they’d let us hash it out, like back in the day, when Dane and I played neighborhood hockey with very little rules, but the NCAA strictly prohibited fights. Lately they’d been enforcing it extra hard, handing out several game suspensions.
“These pussies would cry about it, too,” Dane said, nice and loud. The ref neared, and we all scattered.
The next chance I got, I shoved into the jackass, satisfaction going through me when he wobbled and struggled to regain control. That’ll teach you to hold me the whole damn game.
When the whistle blew, I made a halfhearted attempt to look clueless about what I’d done wrong, but the ref threw me in the penalty box for two minutes.
Coach would probably be mad, but I’d kept it clean enough to keep from being called for fighting, despite the desire to knock the guy on his ass. Plus we were far enough ahead that I wasn’t worried my team would fall behind while being a man short.
After serving my time in the box and then a spin on the bench, I headed back onto the ice for the last minute and a half of the game. Once Beck passed me the puck, I skated around my defender and made another goal.
If the Harvard boys hadn’t been such babies, I might’ve felt bad about beating them so badly. As it was, I couldn’t help gloating a bit, and I wasn’t the only one. The air of victory hung in the locker room, along with the scent of twenty sweat-drenched guys. As a collective group we didn’t smell great, but we sure knew how to play hockey.
The door swung open, and along with the usual suspects who came into the locker room after the game, a blonde entered the melee, looking completely lost.
A female in the locker room—well, one dressed like that, who hadn’t snuck in—was a rare enough thing that most of the guys turned to stare. She lifted her chin and headed toward Beck.
I stripped off my jersey and tossed it into the laundry bin a few feet away, retrieved my spare water bottle, and drank about half of it in one gulp. Then I dumped the other half over my head and ran a hand through my hair.
Dane poked his head around my locker door. “Apparently that’s the new sportswriter for the Heights. If they were going to send in a female reporter, couldn’t they find a hotter one?”
Ox spared a quick glance at the girl, but didn’t comment as he started shoving gear in his locker.
I cast another look at the female in question. She dressed like the professor who was currently making my life hell, but there was something intriguing about her.
She pushed up her thick glasses and then wrapped her fingers around her pen so tightly I thought she might snap it in half. “She needs loosening up a bit, but I bet there’s a hot, freaky girl underneath, just waiting to get out.”
“Oh yeah?” Dane said, gripping the edge of his locker door. “Who’s going to unleash her? You?”
I glanced at her again. She reached down and scratched at her knee, which made the jacket rise up in the back. It was no wonder her legs were itchy—that fabric looked scratchy as hell, but I couldn’t help but notice the way her pants hugged her ass when she bent over.
Definitely something intriguing…
I reached up to work the straps free on my pads. “I think I might be just the person to show her how to have a good time.”
Dane laughed—a little too hard. “Maybe if you weren’t too busy acting like a brooding vampire lately.”
I smacked the back of his head and he laughed again.
“He does have a point,” Ryder said.
“You, too, Ox? You guys should know better than to bet against me when it comes to the ladies.”
The three of us fell silent as the girl walked over to us, her movements stiff. There was something almost familiar about her features, but I couldn’t place them. She might’ve been in one of my classes before—maybe she could help me out of my current failing sitch, and I could kill two birds with one stone.
Only, when our eyes met, something deep inside my gut stirred. Her lips parted as her eyebrows drifted up, but then her jaw clenched, erasing whatever other emotion had almost taken hold. There was something else there in her features, too—a hint of panic, maybe?
I’d show my boys how easy it was to charm the girl. “Hey, sweetheart,” I said, flashing her a big grin. “I’m Hudson Decker.”
She eyed my extended hand, disdain clear on her features. “Listen up, Hudson Decker. I don’t answer to ‘sweetheart.’ My name is Whitney Porter—if you need to write it down, go ahead, I can wait. But then I’m going to ask you a few questions, and I expect the same professional courtesy you’d give a male reporter. Got it?”
Holy shit, she looked like a timid mouse but had the attitude of a pit bull set on my destruction. What had I ever done to her?
Dane and Ox snickered, getting a big ol’ kick out of it.
“So, ready to try again?” she asked.
I should walk away—I didn’t need to do interviews for the college p
aper. But then I looked into those fiery blue eyes, and I couldn’t quite convince myself to move, even though I swore she was trying to fry me where I stood.
“Go ahead and ask your questions, then,” I said with a shrug, like I couldn’t care less either way. Which was pretty close to the truth.
“So you play…?” Her gaze dipped to the paper in her hand.
“Left winger.”
“Right. During the game I was paying more attention to numbers,” she said. Then a flicker of doubt crossed her face, a tiny crack in her composure that I wanted to force wide open.
“Well, if you want my number, I’d happily give it to you.”
Her jaw went rigid again, the crack sealed up, and every inch of her radiated a don’t-fuck-with-me vibe. Man, this was more fun than I’d had in weeks—sad, but that was the truth, and I wanted to keep playing.
I pointed at my chest even though all I had on were my pads and plain white T-shirt now. “Nineteen. That’s my number.”
She gave me a tight smile. “Let’s talk other numbers. You guys beat Harvard by twelve points, their one goal barely saving them from a total shut out. How’d it feel to win by such a huge margin?”
“Awesome.”
“Awesome.” She scribbled it down in her notebook. “Very impressive verbal skills, Number Nineteen. I think I’m going to go see if any of your teammates have a better grasp of the English language.”
The slack jaws of the guys closest to me made it clear they’d heard the insult. I finished removing my pads while she circled the room. When she was on the other side, Dane straddled the bench, facing me.
“Refresh my memory,” he said, and I knew whatever came next was going to make me want to punch him. “Was it you who said you could get that girl to loosen up?”
“I think he said something about showing her how to have a good time,” Ryder added from my other side. “He just didn’t know it’d be at his expense.”
“Whatever. I could get that girl.”
“Bro, you tried,” Dane said, giving me a falsely sympathetic look. “You failed. First the TA in your class, and now this? Maybe you’re losing your touch.”