“What? I’m twenty-eight,” he complained.
Jane laughed and opened the dinner menu. “People are going to mistake you for my son,” she kidded him.
The corners of his mouth turned downward and he pulled out his wallet. “You look younger than I do,” he grumbled as he showed the waiter his identification.
When their drinks arrived, Jane ordered salmon and wild rice while Darby chose beef and a baked potato.
“How’s your room?” he asked.
It was like every other room. “It’s fine.”
“Good.” He took a drink of his beer. “Any problems with the players?”
“No, they all pretty much avoid me.”
“They don’t want you here.”
“Yes, I know.” She took a sip of her martini. The sugar around the top of the glass, the floating lemon slice, and the perfect mix of Absolut Citron vodka and Triple Sec almost had her sighing like a seasoned alcoholic. But becoming an alcoholic was one thing that Jane didn’t have to worry about, for two reasons. Her hangovers were too painful to ever allow her to turn pro, and when she got tanked her judgment went out the window, sometimes along with her panties.
Jane and Darby’s conversation turned from hockey to other interests. She learned that he had graduated summa cum laude with an MBA from Harvard at the age of twenty-three. He mentioned his membership in Mensa three times, and that he owned a five-thousand-square-foot home on Mercer Island, a thirty-foot sailboat, and drove a cherry-red Porsche.
No doubt about it, Darby was a geek. Not that that was necessarily bad; besides being a fraud, she sometimes felt like a geek herself. To keep up her end of the conversation, she mentioned her undergraduate degrees in journalism and English. Darby didn’t seem all that impressed.
Their food arrived and he looked up from putting butter on his baked potato. “Am I going to end up in your Single Girl column?”
Jane paused in the act of placing her napkin on her lap. Most men feared showing up in the column. “Would you mind?”
His eyes lit up. “Hell, no.” He thought a moment. “But it has to be good. I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was a bad date.”
“I don’t think I can lie,” she lied. Half the stuff in her column was made up.
“I’d make it worth your while.”
If he wanted to wheel and deal, the least she could do was listen. “How?”
“I could tell the guys on the team that I don’t think you’re here to report on the size of their Johnsons or strange sexual habits,” he said, which immediately made her wonder exactly who had strange sexual habits. Maybe Vlad the Impaler. “And I could assure them you haven’t slept with Mr. Duffy to get this job.”
Complete horror dropped her jaw, and she raised a hand to her mouth. She’d figured that there might be some small minds in the newsroom who’d assumed she’d exchanged sexual favors with Leonard Callaway, because, after all, he was the managing editor and she was just that woman who wrote that silly column about being single in the city. She wasn’t a real journalist.
But it had never entered her head that anyone would think she’d slept with Virgil Duffy. Good God, the man was old enough to be her grandfather. Sure, he had a reputation for dogging younger women, and there had been a time in her life when her standards had hit a real low patch and she’d had sex with some men she’d rather forget about, but she’d never dated anyone forty years older than herself.
Darby laughed and dug into his beef. “I can see by the look on your face that the speculation isn’t true.”
“Of course not.” She reached for her martini and polished it off. The vodka and Triple Sec warmed a path to her stomach. “I’d never even met Mr. Duffy before that first day in the locker room.” The unfairness of it hit her and she signaled for another martini. Usually Jane hated to cry “no fair.” She believed that life wasn’t fair, and that crying about it only made things worse. She was a get-over-it-and-get-on-with-your-life type of girl, but in this case it really wasn’t fair because there was nothing she could do about it. If she made a fuss and denied it, she doubted anyone would believe her.
“If you write about me in your column, make me sound good, I’ll make things easier for you.”
She picked up her fork and took a bite of her wild rice. “What, are you having trouble finding a date?” She’d been joking, but by the brilliant blush to his cheek, she could tell she’d hit a nerve.
“When women first meet me, they think I’m a dork.”
“Hmm, I didn’t think so,” she lied, risking the bad karma.
He smiled, and the risk was worth it. “They never give me a chance.”
“Well, maybe if you didn’t talk about Mensa and about your advanced degrees, you’d have better luck.”
“Think so?”
“Yep.” She was halfway through her salmon when her second drink arrived.
“Maybe you could give me some pointers.”
Right, like she was an expert. “Maybe.”
His shrewd gaze bored into her as he took a bite of potato. “I could make it worth your while,” he said again.
“I’m getting nuisance calls. Make them stop.”
He didn’t appear surprised. “I’ll see what I can do about that.”
“Good, because it’s harassment.”
“Look at it more as initiation.”
Uh-huh. “There was a dead mouse outside my door last night.”
He took a swig of his beer. “It could have crawled there by itself.”
Sure. “I want an interview with Luc Martineau.”
“You’re not the only one. Luc is a very private guy.”
“Ask him.”
“I’m not the best person to ask him. He doesn’t like me.”
She raised her lemon drop to her lips. Luc didn’t like her either. “Why?”
“He knows I advised against trading for him. I was fairly adamant about it.”
That was a surprise. “Why?”
“Well, it’s old news, but he was injured when he was with Detroit. I’m not convinced a player his age can come back from major ACT surgery on both knees. At one time Martineau was good, maybe one of the best, but eleven million a year is a lot to gamble on a thirty-two-year-old man with bad knees. We traded a first-round draft pick, a heavy-hitting defender, and a pair of bookend wings. That left us weak on the right side. I’m not sure Martineau was worth it.”
“He’s having a good season,” she pointed out.
“So far. What happens if he’s reinjured? You can’t build a team around one player.”
Jane didn’t know a lot about hockey, and she wondered if Darby was right. Had the team been built around their elite goalie? And did Luc, who appeared so cool and calm, feel the tremendous pressure of what was expected of him?
It took a frantic call from Mrs. Jackson for Luc to learn that Marie hadn’t been to school since Luc had left Seattle. Mrs. Jackson told him she’d dropped Marie off every morning, and Marie had walked into the building. What he also discovered was that she’d then gone straight out the back.
When he’d asked Marie where she’d been spending her time, she’d answered, “The mall.” When he’d asked her why, she’d said, “Everyone at that school hates me. I don’t have any friends. They’re all stupid.”
“Come on, now,” he’d said, “you’ll make friends and then everything will be okay.”
She’d started to cry, and like always, he felt bad and totally inadequate. “I miss my mom. I want to go home.”
After he’d hung up with Marie and Mrs. Jackson, he’d called his personal manager, Howie Stiller. When Luc returned home Tuesday night, several brochures from private schools would be waiting for him in a FedEx mailer.
Now the music from the piano drifted to where Luc sat in the corner of the lobby bar. He lifted a bottle of Molson’s to his mouth and took a long drink. For Marie, going home wasn’t an option. Her home was with him now, but she obviously didn’t like living with him.