The whistle blew.
The women began to skate forward, and immediately Chelsea snarled, displaying a bright pink mouth guard. She flung herself bodily at the woman next to her, knocking them both down. The girl with the star on her helmet—the jammer—jumped over their fallen bodies and skated ahead.
“Damn,” Diane said at his side. “Chesty’s not wasting any time tonight!”
He watched, mouth dry, as Chelsea pulled herself up off the track and began to skate back after the pack again, then rejoined them. For the rest of the jam, she flung herself into the pack with abandon, body-checking and skating in front of others to block them. She got pushed. She got knocked around. She went down. She caught an elbow to the face and shook it off.
Then the jammer tapped her hands on her hips, and the whistle blew.
“End of the jam,” Diane told him. “They scored four points. Good one.”
For the first half of the “bout,” he watched as Chelsea endured more hits than a football player, more falls than a beginner ice skater, and kept getting back up to throw herself into the game. She was brutal. Utterly brutal. She didn’t use her elbows, but she was downright cruel on the track, getting in other girls’ faces and yelling at them, pushing them aside for her own jammer, and doing whatever she could—at whatever cost—to get her jammer through.
And the audience both hated her and loved her at the same time. They booed her whenever she attacked someone a little too roughly, and it didn’t faze Chelsea at all. She just got right back into things.
As she picked herself up after skidding five feet and out of bounds, he swigged his beer, unable to take his gaze off of her. No wonder she was covered in bruises. Jesus. She also got penalties, too, and had to sit out, which apparently pissed her off even more. He noticed some of her teammates were giving her unhappy looks.
He grew concerned.
No one else was playing as hard as she was. Even Diane commented on how dirty Chelsea was playing tonight. When the second penalty flew and both Chelsea’s teammates and the opposing team gave her unhappy looks, he grew even more worried that she was in a bad frame of mind.
This wasn’t fun. She was making this . . . well, war.
By the time the halftime bell rang, she looked supremely pissed and sweaty. And as the Rag Queens gathered and moved off the track to head to their locker room and cheerleaders took the center of the floor, he got up from the bleachers.
He needed to talk to Chelsea.
This wasn’t just playing the game for the sheer hell of it. This was her taking out some serious rage on the other team. Even her own teammates were a little concerned, shooting her pissy looks.
Something was going on, and he needed to talk to his wife.
“Save my seat,” he told Diane. “I’ll be back.” And he hopped down from the bleachers and sprinted across the floor.
As he headed to the backstage area, he saw Rufus tailing behind the crowd of women on skates. He followed the bodyguard and when the man parked outside of a room, Sebastian waited.
Rufus narrowed his eyes at Sebastian, as if he knew what he was doing there and didn’t like it.
Well, that was too damn bad for him. He was here to get answers. “Is Chelsea in there?” He pointed at the door to the locker room.
Rufus just stared at him.
“Damn it, I know I hired you to be her bodyguard, but . . .” His voice trailed off as the door opened and several women skated out, mopping their brows and chatting. Amongst them was Chelsea, her ponytails damp with sweat. She didn’t see him and skated right past. “Chelsea,” he called.
She stopped and turned, a look of horror on her face. “Sebastian?” She glanced around and then skated toward him. The horror turned to anger. “Are you fucking following me? What the hell?”
“I wanted to know what was going on,” he told her, and found his voice was raising to match her tone. “Why would you keep this a secret?”
“Because I’m not going to quit and you can’t make me quit!”
He shook his head. “Why would I ask you to quit? I think it’s awesome.”
She looked a little dumbfounded at that. “You do?”
“Ooooo.” A girl skated up to them and began to circle them. “You got a hot date, Chelsea?”
“We’re not dating,” she said flatly.
For some reason, that pissed him off. “We’re married.”
The woman’s eyes went wide. “Holy shit.” She looked over at Chelsea, and when Chelsea didn’t deny it, the woman gasped and took a step backward. “I gotta tell the others.”
Chelsea groaned as the woman skated off. She put her hand on Sebastian’s arm and began to steer him away from the main traffic of the crowded hallway, full of skaters, fans, and everyone else. “Did you have to tell Gilmore? She’s such a blabbermouth.”
“Don’t you think you should have told them?” Why did that piss him off so much that she didn’t?
“Look, it’s nothing personal,” she said defensively. “Relationships and derby don’t mix. It requires a lot of practice hours and commitment, and more than one girl has had to break up with a guy because he wasn’t into her spending so much time on the track.”
“Have I struck you as the crazily possessive or overly clingy type?”
“Well no, but this isn’t a real relationship.”
Again, that kind of irritated him. And again, he dismissed it as irrational of him. Because hell, he was being irrational. But there was something about all of this that wasn’t sitting right, and it was striking a nerve. “No one knows that but you and me, and if you keep secrets, this is never going to work.”
“Oh, really? You’re one to talk, Bluebeard.” She nudged his shoulder with a pointed finger.
“Bluebeard?”
“Yeah, the secret room of creepiness? The one that you swear is nothing at all but you still won’t let me see it?”
“It’s just a study!”
“And Dexter was just a blood spatter analyst!”
“It’s nothing, I swear.” For some reason, the thought of showing her made his skin crawl. He never showed his art to anyone. No one ever understood it. No one ever got his obsessive need to draw and explore through art. No one in his family ever had, and he’d learned to hide it long ago.
“Well with that attitude, I think we’re heading for a divorce,” she said, glaring at him. It was the same glare she used on the track, and it startled him to see it. Game-Chelsea was a whole different woman than the one he knew.
“You want to talk about attitude, then?” he challenged, gesturing back at the auditorium where he could hear music playing as the halftime show continued. “How about the one-woman wrecking ball out there?”
Her hands went to her hips and she scoffed at him. “You don’t know shit about derby. You’re supposed to be aggressive.”
“There’s a difference between being aggressive and frightening your own teammates!”
She licked her lips, seeming uncertain for the first time. “I’m just a little off this week. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. You’re going after everyone out there like you have something to settle.”
“He’s right,” someone called out and skated past Chelsea, swatting her ass with a towel.
Chelsea scowled and moved closer to Sebastian. Her voice dropped to a low whisper so no one would hear them. “Look. Derby is my therapy. I get a lot of stuff out of my system on the floor out there.”
“What the hell can you possibly need to get out of your system that requires attacking so many other people?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “You don’t make sense, Chelsea. I know we’re friends and all, but damn if you aren’t confusing the hell out of me. You want to be platonic but crawl into my bed. You leave the lights on like a scared toddler and have a stage name like a stripper. You hide something that’s totally awesome like the derby, but you attack your teammates. I don’t understand what all this is adding up to—”