See Jane Score
Rachel Gibson
This is Jane
A little subdued. A little stubborn. A little tired of going out on blind dates with men who drive vans with sofas in the back, Jane Alcott is living the Single Girl existence in the big city. She is also leading a double life. By day, she's a reporter covering the raucous Seattle Chinooks hockey team – especially their notorious goalie Luc Martineau. By night, she's a writer, secretly creating the scandalous adventures of "Honey Pie"… the magazine series that has all the men talking.
See Jane Spar
Luc has made his feelings about parasite reporters – and Jane – perfectly clear. But if he thinks he's going to make her life miserable, he'd better think again.
See Jane Attract
For as long as he can remember, Luc has been single-minded about his career. The last thing he needs is a smart-mouthed, pain-in-the-backside reporter digging into his past and getting in his way. But once the little reporter sheds her black and gray clothes in favor of a sexy red dress, Luc sees that there is more to Jane than originally meets the eye.
Maybe it's time to take a risk. Maybe it's time to live out fantasies. Maybe it's time to… see Jane score.
Rachel Gibson
See Jane Score
The second book in the Chinooks Hockey Team series, 2003
With much gratitude
to the men and women
who play the coolest game on ice.
And, of course, to the Messiah.
Prologue
The Life of Honey Pie
Of all the smoky bars in Seattle, he had to walk into the Loose Screw, the dive where I worked five nights a week pulling beer and choking on secondhand smoke. A careless lock of black hair fell across his forehead as he tossed a pack of Camels and a Zippo onto the bar.
“Give me a Henry’s,” he said, his voice as rough as velveteen, “and put a hustle on it, babe. I don’t have all day.”
I’ve always been a sucker for dark men with bad attitudes. One look and I knew this man was as dark and as bad as a thunderstorm. “Bottle or draft?” I asked.
He lit a cigarette and looked at me through a cloud of smoke. His heavenly blue eyes were packed with sin as his gaze lowered to the front of my tank top. One corner of his mouth kicked up in appreciation of my thirty-four D’s. “Bottle,” he answered.
I grabbed a Henry’s from the cooler, popped the cap, and slid it across the bar. “Three-fifty.”
He grasped the bottle in one big hand and raised it to his lips, those eyes watching me as he took several long pulls. Foam rose to the top when he lowered it, and he licked a drop of beer from his bottom lip. I felt it in the backs of my knees.
“What’s your name?” he asked and reached into the back pocket of his worn Levi’s to pull out his wallet.
“Honey,” I answered. “Honey Pie.”
The other corner of his full mouth lifted as he handed me a five. “Are you a stripper?”
I get that a lot. “That depends.”
“On what?”
I handed him his change and let the tips of my fingers brush his warm palm. A shiver tickled the pulse at my wrist and I smiled. I let my eyes wander up his big arms and chest to his wide shoulders. Anyone who knew me knew I had very few rules when it came to men. I liked them big and bad, and they had to have clean teeth and hands. That was about it. Oh, yeah, I preferred a dirty little mind, although it wasn’t absolutely necessary, since my mind has always been dirty enough for two. Even as a kid, my mind had revolved around sex. While other girls’ Barbies played school, my Barbie played doctor. The kind where Dr. Barbie checked out Ken’s package, then humped him into a sweaty coma.
Now, at the age of twenty-eight, while other women took up golf or ceramics, men were my hobby and I collected them like cheap Elvis memorabilia. As I looked into the sexy blue eyes of Mr. Bad Attitude, I checked my rapid pulse and the ache between my thighs and figured I just might collect him too. I just might take him home. Or in the back of my car, or a stall in the ladies’ bathroom.
“On what you have in mind,” I finally answered, then folded my arms on the bar and leaned forward, giving him a nice view of my perfect breasts.
He lifted his gaze from my cleavage, his eyes hot and hungry. Then he flipped open his wallet and showed me his badge. “I’m looking for Eddie Cordova. I hear you know him.”
Just my luck. A cop. “Yeah, I know Eddie.” I’d dated him once, if you could call what we did dating. The last time I’d seen Eddie, he’d been comatose in the bathroom at Jimmy Woo’s. I’d had to step on his wrist to get him to let go of my ankle.
“Do you know where I can find him?”
Eddie was a small-time thief, and worse, he’d been a lousy lay, and I didn’t feel a twinge of guilt when I said, “I might.” Yeah, I might help this guy out, and the way he was looking at me, I could tell he wanted more than…
The telephone next to Jane Alcott’s computer rang, pulling her attention away from the screen and out of the latest installment of The Life of Honey Pie.
“Damn,” she swore. She pushed her fingers beneath her glasses and scrubbed her tired eyes. From between her fingers she glanced at the caller ID and picked up.
“Jane,” the managing editor at the Seattle Times, Leonard Callaway, began without bothering to say hello, “Virgil Duffy is talking to the coaches and general manager tonight. The job is officially yours.”
Virgil Duffy’s corporation was a member of the Fortune 500 and he was the owner of the Seattle Chinooks hockey team. “When do I start?” Jane asked and rose to her feet. She reached for her coffee and spilled a drop on her old flannel pajamas as she brought the cup to her lips.
“The first.”
January first gave her only two weeks to prepare. Two days ago, Jane had been approached by Leonard and asked if she was interested in covering for sports-beat reporter Chris Evans while he underwent treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The prognosis for Chris was good, but his leave of absence left the paper in need of someone to cover the Seattle Chinooks hockey team. Jane never dreamed that someone would be her.
Among other things, she was a feature writer for the Seattle Times and was known for her monthly Single Girl in the City columns. She didn’t know a thing about hockey.
“You’ll hit the road with them on the second,” Leonard continued. “Virgil wants to smooth over the details with the coaches, then he’ll introduce you to the team the Monday before you leave.”
When she’d first been offered the job last week, she’d been shocked and more than a little puzzled. Surely Mr. Duffy would want another sports reporter to cover the games. But as it turned out, the offer had been the team owner’s idea.
“What will the coaches think?” She set the mug on her desk, next to an open day planner with various colors of sticky notes stuck all over it.
“Doesn’t really matter. Ever since John Kowalsky and Hugh Miner retired, that arena hasn’t seen a capacity crowd. Duffy needs to pay for that hotshot goalie he bought last year. Virgil loves hockey, but he’s a businessman first and foremost. He’ll do what it takes to get the fans in those seats. Which is why he thought of you in the first place. He wants to attract more female fans to the game.”
What Leonard Callaway didn’t say was that Duffy had thought of her because he thought she wrote fluff for women. Which was okay with Jane; fluff helped pay her bills and was wildly popular with women who read the Seattle Times. But fluff didn’t pay all the bills. Not even close. Porn payed most of them. And the porn serials, The Life of Honey Pie, she wrote for Him magazine were wildly popular with males.
As Leonard talked about Duffy and his hockey team, Jane picked up a pen and wrote on a pink sticky note: Buy books on h
ockey. She tore the note from the top of the block, flipped a page, and stuck it in her day planner beneath several other strips of paper.
“… and you have to remember you’re dealing with hockey players. You know they can be real superstitious. If the Chinooks start losing games, you’ll get blamed and sent packing.”
Great. Her job was in the hands of superstitious jocks. She tore an old note marked Honey deadline from the planner and tossed it in the trash.
After a few more minutes of conversation, she hung up the telephone and picked up her coffee. Like most Seattlites, she couldn’t help but know the names and some of the faces of the hockey players. The season was long and hockey was mentioned on King-5 News most nights, but she’d actually only met one of the Chinooks, the goal-tender Leonard had mentioned, Luc Martineau.
She’d been introduced to the man with the thirty-three-million-dollar contract at a Press Club party just after his trade to the Chinooks last summer. He’d stood in the middle of the room looking healthy and fit, like a king holding court. Considering Luc’s legendary reputation both on and off the ice, he was shorter than Jane had imagined. About five-eleven, but he was pure muscle. His dark blond hair covered his ears and the collar of his shirt, slightly windblown and finger-combed.
He had a small white scar on his left cheekbone and another on his chin. Neither did a thing to detract from the sheer impact of him. In fact they made him appear so bad there hadn’t been a woman in the room who didn’t wonder just how bad the bad boy got.
Between the lapels of his subdued charcoal suit, he’d worn a silky red tie. A gold Rolex had circled his wrist, and an overblown blonde had been bonded to his side like a suction cup.
The man clearly liked to accessorize.
Jane and the goalie had exchanged hellos and a handshake. His blue eyes had hardly fallen on her before he’d moved on with the blonde. In less than a second, she’d been found lacking and dismissed. But she was used to it. Men like Luc usually didn’t pay much attention to women like Jane. Barely an inch over five feet, with dark brown hair, green eyes, and an A-cup. They didn’t stick around to hear if she had anything interesting to say.
If the other Chinooks dismissed her as quickly as Luc Martineau had, she was in for an aggravating few months, but traveling with the team was too good an opportunity to pass up. She would write her articles about the sport from a woman’s point of view. She would report on the highlights of the game as expected, but she would pay more attention to what happened in the locker room. Not penis size or sexual hang-ups-she didn’t care about that stuff. She wanted to know if women still encountered discrimination in the twenty-first century.
Jane returned to the chair in front of her laptop and got back to work on the Honey Pie installment that was due to her editor tomorrow and would appear in the magazine in February. While a lot of men considered her Single Girl column fluff and didn’t admit to reading it, a lot of those same men did read and love Jane’s Honey Pie serial. No one but Eddie Goldman, the magazine’s editor, and her best friend since the third grade, Caroline Mason, knew that she wrote the lucrative monthly articles. And she wanted it to stay that way.
Honey was Jane’s alter ego. Gorgeous. Uninhibited. Every man’s dream. A hedonist who left men in sweaty comas throughout Seattle, wrung out and incapable of speech, yet somehow able to beg for more. Honey had a huge fan club, and there were also half a dozen fan sites on the Internet devoted to her. Some of them were sad, others funny. On one of the sites, there was speculation that the author of Honey Pie was actually a man.
Jane liked that rumor best. A smile touched her lips as she read the last line she’d written before Leonard had called. Then she got back to the business of making men beg.
Chapter 1
The Shave: Rookie Initiation
The locker room was thick with trash talk as Luc “Lucky” Martineau tucked himself into his cup and strapped on his gear. Most of his teammates stood around Daniel Holstrom, the rookie Swede, giving Daniel his choice of initiations. He could either let the guys shave his hair into a Mohawk or take the whole team out to dinner. Since rookie dinners cost between ten and twelve thousand dollars, Luc figured the young winger was going to end up looking like a punker for a while.
Daniel’s wide blue eyes searched the locker room for a sign that the guys were kidding him. He found none. They’d all been rookies once, and every one of them had endured hazing of some sort. In Luc’s rookie season, the laces in his skates disappeared on more than one occasion, and the sheets in his hotel room were often shorted.
Luc grabbed his stick and headed into the tunnel. He passed some of the guys working with blowtorches on the blades of their sticks. Near the front of the tunnel Coach Larry Nystrom and General Manager Clark Gamache stood talking to a short woman dressed completely in black. Both men had their arms folded across their chests, and they scowled down at the woman as she spoke to them. Her dark hair was scraped to the back of her head and held in one of those scrunchie things like his sister wore.
Beyond mild curiosity, Luc paid her little attention and forgot her completely as he hit the ice for practice. He listened for the crisp shhh-shhh that he’d come to expect from spending an hour honing the edges of his skates. Through the cage of his mask, cool air brushed his cheeks and filled his lungs as he made several warm-up laps.
Like all goalies, he was a member of the team, yet set apart by the solitary nature of his job. There was no covering for men like Luc. When they let a puck in, lights flashed like a big neon fuck-up sign, and it took more than intense determination and guts to face the pipes game after game. It took a man who was competitive and arrogant enough to believe himself invincible.
The goalie coach, Don Boclair, pushed a basket of pucks onto the ice while Luc performed the same ritual he’d been performing for the past eleven years, be it game night or practice. He circled the net clockwise three times, then he skated counterclockwise once. He took his place between the pipes and whacked his goalie stick on the poles to his left and right. Then he crossed himself like a priest as he locked his gaze on Don, who was standing at the blue line, and for the next thirty minutes the coach skated around him, shooting like a sniper at all seven holes and firing from the point.
At the age of thirty-two, Luc felt good. Good about the game, and good about his physical condition. Relatively pain-free now, he took no drugs stronger than Advil. He was having the best season of his career, and heading into the conference finals, his body was in excellent condition. His professional life couldn’t be any better.
Too bad his personal life sucked.
The goalie coach fired a puck top shelf, and with a heavy thwack, Luc caught it in his glove. Through the thick padding, the half pound of vulcanized rubber stung his palm. He dropped to his knees on the ice as another puck flew for his five hole and slammed into his pads. He felt the familiar stitch of pain in his tendons and ligaments, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. Nothing he wouldn’t handle, and nothing he’d ever admit to feeling out loud.
There were those who’d written him off. Put a period on his career. Two years ago while playing for the Red Wings, he’d blown out both knees. After several major reconstructive surgeries, countless hours of rehab, a stint at Betty Ford to get off pain medication, and a trade to the Seattle Chinooks, Luc was back and playing better than ever.
This season he had something to prove. To himself. To those who’d crossed him off. He’d recaptured the qualities that had always made him one of the best. Luc had an uncanny puck sense and could see a play a second before it happened, and if he couldn’t stop it with his quick hands, he always had brute strength and a mean hook in reserve.
After he finished practice, Luc changed into shorts and a T-shirt and moved to the training room. He did forty-five minutes on the exercise bike before switching to the free weights. For an hour and a half, he worked his arms, chest, and abdomen. The muscles of his legs and back burned and sweat rolled down his temples as he b
reathed through the pain.
He took a long shower, wrapped a towel around his waist, then headed to the locker room. The rest of the guys were there, sprawled out on chairs and benches, listening to something Gamache was saying. Virgil Duffy was in the middle of the room too, and began talking about ticket sales. Luc figured ticket sales weren’t his job. His concern was to make saves and win games. So far, he was doing his job.
Luc leaned one bare shoulder into the doorframe. He crossed his arms over his chest, and his gaze lowered to the short woman he’d seen earlier. She stood next to Duffy, and Luc studied her. She was one of those natural women who didn’t wear a touch of makeup. The two slashes of her black brows were the only color on her pale face. Her black jacket and pants were shapeless, hiding even a hint of curves. On one shoulder hung a leather briefcase, and in her hand she held a to-go cup of Starbucks.
She wasn’t ugly-just plain. Some men liked those natural kind of women. Not Luc. He liked women who wore red lipstick, smelled like powder, and shaved their legs. He liked women who made an effort to look good. This woman clearly made no effort at all.
“I’m sure you’re all aware that reporter Chris Evans has taken a medical leave of absence. In his place, Jane Alcott will be covering our home games,” the owner explained. “And traveling on the road with us for the rest of the season.”
The players sat in stunned silence. No one said a word, but Luc knew what they were thinking. The same thing he was thinking, that he’d rather get puck-shot than have a reporter, let alone a woman, traveling with the team.
The players looked at the team captain, Mark “the Hitman” Bressler, then they turned their attention to the coaches, who also sat in stony silence. Waiting for someone to say something. To rescue them from the short, dark-haired nightmare about to be foisted on them.
See Jane Score Page 1