Playing Dirty

by Taryn Leigh Taylor

  Cooper laughed. This kid was a real shark. “It’s only fair.”

  “Will you read me some of this?” He leaned forward and pulled the playoff edition of Hockey News from behind his pillow.

  A familiar anxiety tightened Cooper’s chest, and he forced himself to take a few deep breaths before he took the magazine, flipped through a couple of glossy pages.

  “You, uh, you sure you wouldn’t rather play ping-pong or air hockey or something?”

  Danny shook his head, and the droop of his shoulders was heartbreaking. “I get tired fast.”

  Cooper felt for the kid. It was exactly how he felt about trying to read right now. He did his best to let them both off the hook.

  “So do I have to find my own stats in here, or do you know who I am?”

  “Cooper Mead. Number 16. Defenseman. You shoot left. Traded from New York to Portland in a blockbuster deal for Viktor Alfredsson and three draft picks. You’re thirty-two, you grew up in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. You were drafted first round, thirtieth overall. Right now you’re tied for the top-scoring defenseman in the league with twenty-one goals.”

  “Wow. You weren’t kidding. That’s a helluva memory you’ve got there.”

  Danny’s eyes widened and he had to push his glasses up again. “You said hell.”

  “I did.”

  The confirmation earned him a frown.

  “You’re not supposed to swear.”

  “Says who?”

  The kid looked at Cooper like he was stupid. “Everyone.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you a secret. Sometimes everyone is wrong. I mean, I was supposed to wear a jersey to this thing, but if I had it would mean that I wasn’t late and then I wouldn’t have been lying low in the back corner, and then we never would have met.”

  “And I’d still have some crackers left.”

  Cooper knew when he was beat. “Touché, kid. But instead of reading a bunch of stats and arguing about who ate whose crackers, how about you and I talk? Ask me anything. Take advantage of the fact you’re sitting here with the best defenseman in the league—”

  “Third best defenseman in the league.”

  Cooper frowned at the assessment. “Man, you really do like stats, don’t you?”

  “I like how they can predict stuff. Stats are like seeing into the future.”

  Cooper tossed the magazine back on Danny’s bed.

  “Stats are bullsh—crap,” he said. “You know how I know?”

  “How?”

  “Because they say I’m the third best defenseman in the league.”

  Danny looked skeptical. “If you think you should be number one, then you need to improve your plus/minus.”

  “What I mean by that,” Cooper continued, undaunted by the sarcasm, “is that at any given moment in any given game, I might be the third best defenseman in the league. But sometimes I’m the best. Sometimes, I might be the tenth best. Because ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the stats are. What matters is what you do in the moment, you know?”

  Danny’s mouth twisted into a contemplative pucker as he thought about that for a moment. “You’re also a meme.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know when a photo goes viral and people write funny stuff on the picture?” Danny asked, pulling a cell phone out of nowhere, his tiny thumbs flying over the device with a speed Cooper found enviable.

  “I know what a meme is. What do you mean that I’m a meme?”

  “You’re all over the internet. You’re even trending on Twitter. Hashtag barfail. It’s pretty bad.” The kid’s dire tone rankled as he turned the screen around as evidence.

  “You think?” Cooper grabbed the phone, scrolling through endless shots of him holding that goddamn Black Widow, his face folded into a disgusted sneer, all captioned in the obnoxious white block letters that ruined people’s lives.

  THAT FACE WHEN YOU’RE CHEERS-ING 15 YRS IN THE LEAGUE WITH NO CHAMPIONSHIP.

  WHEN YOUR FUTURE’S SO BLEAK YOU DON’T GOTTA WEAR SHADES.

  Oh, man. This wasn’t good. Especially on the heels of Taggert’s “right kind of attention” chat. Probably explained at least half of the texts he was still ignoring. Golden, on the other hand, was likely drinking champagne. The T-shirt Cooper had worn to the bar was PWR Athletics and the logo was visible.

  Jared just didn’t understand that this trade to Portland was about so much more than preserving endorsement deals. It wasn’t about the money.

  This was about being a kid watching Hockey Night in Canada with his parents and realizing that if he put everything he had into it, he could be on that screen one day.

  Cooper had always dreamed of having a championship ring on his hand. The sad fact was, he was running out of time. His body wasn’t going to last forever. His slap shot was bound to fade. And after he was done playing hockey...well, he tried not to think about that too much. But he had a real chance this year, of living out his boyhood dream of playing in the big game, of hoisting hockey’s greatest trophy over his head, sweaty and battle-weary and triumphant.

  That was all he’d ever wanted, since he was ten years old. Danny’s age.

  This was the year he would make that dream a reality, and he wasn’t going to let anything distract him from that. Not bad publicity. Not rejection from a gorgeous bartender. Nothing.

  But first...

  “Danny, you ever watched a Rock’em Sock’em Hockey video before?”

  He shook his head and Cooper handed back his phone.

  “Pull that up on YouTube. I’m gonna blow your mind.”

  * * *

  TWO HOURS AND a whole lot of body checks and mid-ice collisions later, Cooper and Danny said their goodbyes, and Coop was back in the colorless hospital lobby, heading for the exit with Eric beside him. “Don’t suppose you want to grab some food?”

  “I would, man, but Rebecca and I—”

  “I get it.”

  “Next time though. Oh, shit.” Eric’s entire body seemed to freeze before he reached the sliding doors that led outside.

  Cooper stopped next to him, but he couldn’t tell what had caused Cubs’s standstill. There was a small congregation of Storm fans, wearing various logo-emblazoned apparel, from hats to shirts to jerseys. A couple of the guys from the team were still caught in the crowd, posing for pictures and autographing things. It was pretty much business as usual.

  “What?”

  Jacobs gave a dismissive shake of his blond head. “Nothing. Let’s go,” he said, resuming his pace toward the door. Cooper walked on, but when they went through the first set of the sliding doors, Eric crossed behind him so that he was on Cooper’s left side.

  “Mead, when we step outside, just know that I respect you, both as a hockey player and as a man, and I’m sorry for what I’m about to do, but I’m already late to meet Rebecca, and I don’t have time to deal with this right now.”

  His words coincided with their first step out of the hospital doors, and before Cooper knew what had happened, Jacobs had given him a firm shove to the right, and he bumped hard into someone who squealed. Cooper reached out automatically in an attempt to steady his victim.

  “Oh, my gawd! I can’t believe Cooper Mead just, like, literally knocked me off my feet.”

  “Uh. Yeah. Sorry about that.” After he knew the woman had regained her balance on her extra-high heels, Cooper let go of her waist, though she clung to him for a transparently long time before finally letting him go with an unnecessary squeeze of his biceps. “You okay?”

  He caught Jacobs’s eye—the prick was steadily making his way through the fan gauntlet and offered nothing but a mouthed “I owe you one,” and a weak shrug before he turned to smile for the next picture.

  “Janelle.”

  The voice pulle
d Cooper back to the situation at hand. That, and the fact that the situation was tracing the ridges of his biceps with her purple talons. “What?”

  “My name is Janelle.”

  “Right. You okay, Janelle?”

  “I’ll live. I don’t mind when things get a little rough.”

  Oh, man. Eric’s speech made complete sense now. Not that Coop didn’t recognize a clingy puck bunny when he saw one. He was a sacrifice, and now Eric was free to make his getaway and Coop was tangled in the kind of web that could be difficult to get out of. Jacobs was going to pay for this. Cooper would spare him no mercy next time they ran a checking drill at practice, that was for damn sure.

  “Ok. Well. Nice meeting you.” There’d been a time when he would have taken Janelle up on what she was offering. A time that wasn’t that long ago. A perk of the job, he used to say. But it wasn’t enough anymore.

  She stepped closer. “What, you ran into me, but you don’t even have time for an autograph?” she asked, tipping her head to the side and giving him flirty sad eyes.

  “Sure. What did you want me to sign?”

  He watched with perverse fascination as she uncapped the Sharpie that had materialized from who knew where—her little black dress was too tight to hide much—and held it out to him. He took it and she leaned forward, tugging the neckline of her dress down a bit farther, although there was already more than enough skin exposed to fit his entire hockey résumé.

  When he’d temporarily branded his name on her exposed cleavage, he capped the pen and handed it back, but it was another ten minutes of politely declining her various invitations to “hang out” before he managed to slip away. He posed for a few more pictures with some genuine hockey fans before he finally made it to his car.

  Cooper ran a weary hand down his face.

  He tried to remember when this had gotten old, having beautiful women throw themselves at him. In theory, it was still awesome. And yet...

  Coop pulled his keys from his pocket and unlocked the door before he folded his large frame into the leather interior of the Maserati.

  The truth was, he envied Eric. Luke. All the guys who had somewhere to be because someone special was waiting for them.

  Leaning forward, he pulled his phone out of his back pocket. The message light flashed incessantly, but he ignored it, tossing the phone onto the passenger seat.

  His first order of business was to find some dinner. Then he’d check his messages.

  6

  COOPER WAS TUCKED into a table in the back corner of the little Vietnamese place a couple of blocks from his condo. His doorman had recommended it and Cooper had been ordering takeout on a weekly basis since he’d moved in. The place was a little hole in the wall, with sparse decor and a built-in-the-sixties vibe, but their pho was hard proof that not all the good food was in New York.

  He popped in his wireless headphones, and had already erased his dozen or so voice mails by the time the elderly owner shuffled out and set his giant bowl of soup on the Formica tabletop. In addition to his teammates’ calls wondering why he was late, there were a couple of messages from Jared Golden, one praising the meme—all publicity was good publicity in Golden’s eyes—the other bemoaning the fact that, in all the coverage of the children’s hospital visit, Cooper hadn’t been featured in a single interview.

  Cooper dug into the soup with a set of plastic chopsticks. He was so hungry that he wolfed down half the noodles and a good portion of the exquisite broth before he finally came up for air. Those fish-shaped crackers had been hours ago.

  He grabbed his phone, intending to let his stomach adjust to the novelty of digesting food while he scrolled through the text messages. There were too many to read even if he hadn’t had dyslexia, so he vetted them by sender, deleting with abandon. But when he noticed that the contact photo of the spider emoji had double digits next to it—what was that? Twelve? Twenty-one?—curiosity got the better of him, and he thumbed through to the message screen. A bunch of blue text bubbles appeared, but Cooper’s eyes were immediately drawn to the video message, and he hit Play.

  An angry Lainey filled the screen, her black hair fanned out around her on a white pillow, her eyes stormy as she raised an eyebrow. “Should’ve answered your texts, Slick.”

  And then the most incredible thing happened.

  Cooper swallowed hard as the camera panned past her breasts, obviously braless beneath her white tank top, and he forgot to breathe as her hand snaked under the covers. He felt her contented sigh all the way to his core as the blankets began to move ever so slightly.

  “No fucking way.”

  The woman at the next table frowned at him, but he barely noticed.

  He wasn’t this lucky. The Ice Queen had not sent him a sex video. It was a joke. She was going to turn off the camera the second he was hot and bothered. But seconds kept passing, and she was still on the screen. Thanks to the superior sound quality of his ear buds, every sexy moan and shuddered breath made his body tighten, made the blood in his veins roar with lust. Then she raised the camera from the sheet back to her face, and she stared at him, eyes drowsy with desire, and it turned him inside out. It made him want to touch her. To get the fuck out of this restaurant and go back to his place so he could touch himself.

  But he didn’t. Because even though the sight of her made his body scream for release, he knew this video was a punishment, and he respected the hell out of that. The sounds she made, the way she bit her lip, her eyes drifting shut to savor the pleasure she was giving herself. Pleasure he should have been giving her, if he hadn’t been chock-full of painkillers and battling a monster headache.

  Everything about the video was perfect. It was even hotter that he couldn’t see what she was doing. In this era of 24/7, on-demand porn—name your fetish, we’ve got it all—there was something so titillating about seeing the results of the actions taking place under the comforter, but being left to imagine them for himself.

  Hell, he couldn’t stop imagining them.

  And then she bit her lip and moaned his name as she came apart, and his cock flexed painfully against his jeans, and he banged his fist against the table as he wrestled to stay in control of his body. He needed to get the hell out of here before he died of lust.

  After a couple of deep breaths to calm his raging hormones, he tossed a twenty on the table and made a beeline for his car.

  He folded himself into the bucket seat, pausing to drop his forehead against the steering wheel. When he thought of how he could have spent last night...

  He couldn’t believe he’d missed her booty texts for the most clichéd reason. “Not tonight, dear. I have a headache.” Jesus. He knew it was the truth and it still sounded lame. But he had big plans to make it up to her, to make it up to himself. Because if that was what happened when she was alone, well, just wait until he got his hands on her.

  Coop turned the key, gunning the engine as he pulled away from the curb.

  * * *

  COOPER WAS DAMN lucky he hadn’t gotten a speeding ticket on the way over. He’d punched it on all the straightaways and played fast and loose with a couple of yellow lights, but it was all worth it as he swung the sleek black sports car into a parking spot. He forced himself to keep a regular pace as he strode across the lot, but when the moment of truth came, Cooper paused at the glass door, staring at the peeling letters that at one time had heralded the name of the bar but at this point only proclaimed the “runken Sp rtsma.”

  His exhalation was longer than it should have been. The last time he’d seen Lainey, she’d been coolly dismissing him from her life. He ran a hand through his hair and tugged at the hem of his T-shirt.

  Ridiculous. Just walk the fuck in.

  And yet...something had changed. Hell, everything had changed. That goddamn video—he got hard just thinking about it, about her—
had fucked him up. The prospect of seeing her was...no big deal.

  He ran his palms down his jeans.

  Man up and walk in!

  Cooper pushed on the door and stepped inside. Lainey’s head snapped up, as if she knew it was him, and her gaze was like a kick to the gut. The bartender said something to her, and she turned away from him to load drinks onto her tray.

  For the first time, he noticed that the place was moderately busy. Instead of standing in the entrance like a moron, he slid into a seat at the nearest empty table. The Trail Blazers game was blaring on every screen, monopolizing everyone’s attention and obviously keeping Lainey busy. Which was a relief, because he needed a moment to compose himself before she took his order.

  His original plan, which he now realized had been some variation of shoving her up against the nearest wall and fucking her until she moaned his name the way she had in the video, wasn’t an option in their current surroundings. Maybe he could sneak behind the bar and pull her into the storage room full of kegs, and then—

  “Oh, my gawd! Cooper? What a coincidence!”

  Oh, no. Not the time, and definitely not the place for this.

  “Hi!” The woman’s toothy smile faltered slightly at his complete inability to form words.

  He understood why Eric had made him a sacrificial lamb now. This girl was no joke.

  “Janelle.” She pointed at her boob, where the black blob of his signature marked her skin. “Remember?”

  From an hour ago? Uh, yeah. He did. Which was why his stomach had filled with dread. “Yeah, good to see you again. Listen, I need to—”

  “I was totally hoping to see you again, too. Such a weird coincidence that we’d both end up here, right?” The way she said it led Cooper to believe it wasn’t a coincidence at all. Pictures of him in the bar were all over social media, both from his impromptu autograph session for the sports fans by the window, as well as his infamous meme. The jaded part of him wondered if she’d driven straight here from the hospital, hoping he’d show.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Actually, now’s not the best—”