Blindsided Read online

  And he’d felt like a louse for even thinking about stepping out on her. Which was beyond stupid. They hadn’t made any commitments to each other past it being a short-term, no-strings-attached relationship. She had asked him to keep his distance from Kyle and he had. He’d played by the rules. Every single one of them.

  But Cat had apparently decided that their affair was done…. Night after night, she’d had some excuse or another. Kyle had homework. There was a meeting on the damned auction. Or Millie needed to be driven somewhere for some geriatric social event of the fricking century.

  He opened the locker door just so he could slam it shut again. Dumped. He opened it and slammed it again. He’d never in his life been dumped. She hadn’t even had the decency to tell him straight to his face. And what was worse—the worst!— was that he was letting it bother him! Jesus, he was the catch of the fricking day. There were hundreds of women out there who’d jump at the chance to go to bed with him. And he was going to go find himself one. Today.

  He’d shower and shave, get dressed and head to Old Town to start the serious bar circuit. And this time he wasn’t going to measure any of them against Catherine Talbott. He was going to pick the first one who batted her eyelashes at him and haul her out and get on with his life.

  Cat stood at her office window and watched the players head for their cars. Actually, they were kinda staggering along, barely able to move. Practice must have been a tough one, she decided. She’d have thought that after the back-to-back victories in Tulsa, Logan would have taken it easy on them. They were playing so much better these days. Last week they’d won every single game on their road trip. Last weekend they’d trounced the Austin Ice Bats fifteen-three in an interdivision contest. Even the radio commentators had noticed how much better the Warriors were. They’d laughed on air about the Ice Bats goalie not having the time for push-ups anymore. Right before they’d gotten all excited about there being a real chance for the team to make the play-offs.

  But apparently Logan thought the boys needed pushing. Maybe she’d just head over to the ice and ask him about it. As an opener for conversation, it would be a decent one. She couldn’t very well walk up to him and ask him if he’d like to get a motel room for Saturday night. It might be honest, but a lot of water had passed under their bridge in the last couple of weeks. In the first few, rare nights the team had been in town, she’d been glad that she’d had plans and couldn’t meet Logan for a quickie. She’d needed time to get her confidence back.

  Last week… He’d been in town for one night out of the seven. And he hadn’t been happy about a papier-mâché volcano being more important than sex. And she hadn’t, either, by that point. She’d been perfectly willing say to hell with the emotional baggage that might come with wanting to be held and kissed and taken to the moon. But she couldn’t tell him that with Kyle standing there with flour paste up to his elbows and listening to her every word.

  But Logan was back in town now and wouldn’t leave for another week. After tomorrow night’s auction, her schedule was mercifully free of planning meetings. They were heading into Thanksgiving break and Kyle wouldn’t have homework over the long weekend. She was going to have some free time and she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather spend a few hours with. Or anything else she’d rather do. Hopefully, he’d gotten over being twerked about the volcano deal.

  If not… Well, she’d think of something.

  Cat headed out of her office. Lakisha looked up from her desk. “Before you go anywhere…” She laid a pen on a stack of papers. “Your signature, please. Times four.”

  Cat flipped to the last page of the top packet, scribbled her name on the line above her typed name while asking, “What am I signing?”

  “The first two are partial season contracts for Joey Kincaid and Michael Petrowski.”

  Cat froze and looked up to meet Lakisha’s gaze. “Who?”

  “They’re Junior A players from Des Moines.”

  Logan was bringing in a couple of rookies? He hadn’t discussed this with her. The roster was full. If two new ones came on, then— She shoved the top two packets off the stack and snatched up the bottom two.

  “The others are releases for—”

  “Tiny and Matt,” she said, dropping them back on the desk. She stood there, vaguely aware that Lakisha was talking. She was the owner, dammit. She was the one who got to say yes or no to trades. She was the one who was going to have to look the players in the eye and hand them their severance check. Matt, with his missing teeth and charming, “Hey, Mizz Talbott.” Tiny, the gentle giant who couldn’t fight worth a damn but who always, always tried to defend his smaller teammates.

  God! She’d agreed to the two weeks because she’d thought that Logan would never go through with it. Never in a million years. The trip to Des Moines had been a serious scouting trip, not just an excuse to go away for a weekend together. And he hadn’t said one damned word to her the whole time. Not one. He’d been planning all along to let the boys go, to bring in new ones. The two weeks probation hadn’t been for real. They’d been nothing more than a smokescreen. A little worthless, empty promise to throw the dimwit so she’d leave him alone to do what he wanted.

  Furious, she threw the papers down on Lakisha’s desk and stormed out the door. If she hadn’t been so blindsided by ridiculous emotions and impossibilities in Des Moines, she’d have figured it out then. But, nooo. She’d been so wrapped up in Logan, in being a panting puck bunny, she’d just gone along and never looked past any of that.

  And in the two weeks since she hadn’t gotten her head one bit clearer. She hadn’t learned a damn thing from Ben’s bailing on her. She was still every bit as dumb, blind and unsus pecting as she’d been the day she’d stood at the airport ticket counter and been told that her husband had given her ticket to another woman and the plane was long gone. She’d thought her illusions and trust had been smashed to smithereens that day. Apparently not. Apparently she was pathologically, terminally, to-the-bone pathetically nice.

  Nic was on his cell phone, standing with a couple of the boys, as she blew through the doors of the rink. They all stepped back and pointed to locker room number one. She didn’t waste a single moment. And she didn’t knock either.

  Logan was standing in front of an open locker, wearing a pair of khaki trousers, a towel around his neck and nothing else. The look in his eyes as she came in spoke volumes. He wanted a fight, she’d give him one he’d remember for the rest of his life.

  “You never intended to give Matt and Tiny a real chance, did you?”

  “We had an agreement,” he said coldly, turning his back on her and reaching into the locker for a shirt. “It’s been over two weeks since Crockett’s arrival. It hasn’t made the difference you hoped it would. I told you right up front that’s the way it would go. And I was right. A deal’s a deal. I held up my end, and now it’s time for you to hold up yours.”

  He’d held up his end? Ooooooh! She fisted her hands at her sides. “And what are Tiny and Matt supposed to do now?”

  “It’s not my problem.” He tossed away the towel and pulled the shirt over his head. “They’re grown men, they’ll figure it out for themselves.”

  “Well, I can’t just throw people away because they didn’t live up to some grand and impossible ideal. What happens to these boys is my problem!”

  “You’re the owner of the team,” he shot back. “Not their mother. This is a business, not some well-paying six-month camp for hockey orphans. You fired Carl Spady for nonper formance and didn’t bat a fricking eye while you did it. This is the same damned thing.”

  “Except I didn’t like Carl. I didn’t care what happened to him. He was an ass. I do care about these boys.”

  “Great,” he said sarcastically. “So you’re a good person with a generous heart. But you’re also a businesswoman. And the first lesson of Business 101 is that business has to come before the personal.”

  Oh, yeah it did and she’d forgotten that litt
le tidbit in Des Moines. It was front and center now, though. “We’re in the black. We’re doing fine, thank you very much.”

  His eyes flashed with cold fire. “The hell you are! You’re eking by and you damn well know it. Every hockey team from Dunk Water Falls to Madison Square Garden is a break-even operation until the last day of the season. Every single one of them. The profit is in the play-offs. It’s the hype and hoopla and the hope for bragging rights that make the fans delirious enough to throw wads of money at you. It’s the gravy. You gotta have it.

  “Without that money you start the next season at zero. You don’t have the bucks it takes to buy the talent that you will get you to the pot of gold the next time out. You run your team like a charity and you’re going to go nowhere. Your boys are going to go nowhere.”

  God save her from the blind stupidity of male ambition. “Maybe going somewhere isn’t the point.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “For the game! For the joy in playing. Remember the joy part of this?”

  “There’s no joy in getting the hell beat out of you every time you step on the ice. No joy when every muscle and joint in your body aches and you can only hope to get somewhere before anyone sees you cry. No joy in living in hotel rooms and out of suitcases for the best part of your life. There’s no joy in drinking to make the pain bearable. No fricking joy in being absolutely disposable and always sliding on the edge of unemployed.”

  “Then why the hell spend your life doing something that makes you so miserable? Huh? Tell me why!”

  “For the money,” he snarled. “For the beer and the easy women.”

  Easy women? Oh. Oh. She’d kill him if she even tried to deal with that one. “In case you haven’t noticed, there are easier ways to make money.”

  The veins on the side of his neck darkened and throbbed. “Not when all you know how to do is play hockey! Not when it’s all that anyone and everyone has ever expected of you!”

  “Maybe it’s time you got a life of your own. Ever thought of that?”

  “Maybe you should stay in your office and let me do what I know how! If you can’t do that, you hire yourself another coach because I’m done fighting you every damned step of the fricking way!”

  “Fine!” she declared, turning on her heel and grabbing the door handle.

  “Fine!” He slammed the locker door closed.

  She whirled back. “Just for the record… You can forget doing anything together Saturday night!”

  His jaw dropped for a second. But that was all the longer the anger was checked. “You can forget the whole damned thing for all I care!”

  “You got it!”

  The door weighed nothing in her hand as she flung it wide and charged out into the rink. Nic sat on the bleachers a little bit away. The boys were gathered in a knot by the score-keeper’s box. She swept past them all, not caring that they were bug-eyed. Let them watch. It wasn’t every day that they got to see the up-in-flames death of a fricking Pollyanna. They’d have one hell of a story to tell their grandchildren some day.

  The door to the office stayed on the hinges, but just barely. Lakisha blinked and rolled her chair back a bit as Cat came across the threshold. She backed it up a little bit farther as Cat headed to the front of her desk.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” Cat declared as she snatched up the pen.

  “If he comes in to apologize, do you want to hear it?”

  She scrawled her signature on the second acquisition contract. “Hell will freeze before it ever crosses his mind.”

  “Maybe when you cool down—”

  “Not in a million years.” She signed the release papers, threw down the pen and stormed off toward her own office.

  “I’ll be hiding here at my desk,” Lakisha called after her.

  Cat spun back. “You can hide later. Take those contracts to Logan right now. And feel free to shove them down his throat if the urge strikes. Tell him I hope he’s fricking happy!”

  Lakisha’s eyes were wide and her lips were puckered into an O as she slowly picked up the documents. Cat didn’t bother to wait and watch. She went into her office and reached out to slam the door behind her.

  No door. She stood there as a memory drifted through the haze of her anger. John Ingram had torn it off the hinges the day she’d fired him. She hadn’t had the money to replace it so she’d just taken it all the way off and stashed it in the team storage room.

  Damn, she really wanted a door to fling shut. She wanted the walls to shake and the windows to rattle. She wanted to grab Logan Dupree by the front of his shirt and…and… And what? The steam drained out of her. What did she want from Logan? An apology? For caring about whether or not she had the money for a new office door? For knowing way more than she did about the game and what it took to win? For the fact that she’d broken the rules and fallen in love with him?

  She crossed to her chair and dropped down into it. She stared at the stack of Tom’s napkins on the credenza. God, what had he been thinking when he’d left her the team? Logan had been right that very first time they’d met; she didn’t have the grit to do this. He was right about everything. Nothing he’d just said had been off the mark. Not one thing. She was the one who owed an apology.

  She turned to look out into the parking lot. Logan’s car was already gone. Cat closed her eyes and sagged back. God, in the blinding heat of her anger, had she accepted his resignation? Was he on his way back to Florida? If he was… Tears welled up and spilled over her cheeks.

  “Cat?”

  Lakisha. In the doorway as usual. Cat brushed her palms roughly over her face and sat up. “I hope you really didn’t shove them down his throat.”

  “He’d already gone by the time I got over there. Nic took them and said he’d track Logan down.”

  Cat nodded.

  “Nic said to tell you not to drown yourself in a carton of Ben & Jerry’s just yet.”

  Cat suppressed the bubble of teary laughter. “It’ll take more than that to get it done.”

  “Well, life goes on. So does the auction from hell. Delbert at the Petroleum Club called while you were gone. If you’re up to it, he needs to be called back.”

  Cat reached for the phone. “While I take care of Delbert’s crisis du jour, get Charles Hollings’s number for me, please.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, guess,” she said, punching the speed dial button. “Hey, Delbert. If you tell me there’s a strike in the kitchen, I’m going to slit my wrists. Right after I slit yours.”

  Logan chugged to the bottom of his third beer and watched Nic come across the living room, papers in one hand and two beer bottles in the other. The papers landed on the coffee table beside his feet in the same instant Nic dropped into the matching leather chair.

  “They’re signed,” he said, twisting off a bottle cap. “You won. Congrats.”

  He hadn’t won a damned thing. And there was no mistaking how Nic felt about it. “Not one more fricking word.”

  “Don’t know that there’s anything to say.”

  No, he and Cat had pretty much said it all. And there was no taking any of it back. “Shit.”

  “Well, there is that.”

  Nic drank. Logan set his empty bottle on the table and snagged the extra one Nic had brought. He opened it and took a good swig. It didn’t taste nearly as good as the first three bottles had. Probably because he was beginning to feel the buzz already. He’d become such a lightweight. He worked his thumbnail under the edge of the label. “For two cents, I’d pack up and head back to the boat.”

  “Oh, yeah, leave me with the mess. Some friend.”

  Logan exhaled and shook his head. “I’m not going. I finish what I start. You know that.”

  “And the personal deal with Cat… Is it finished?”

  He lifted his bottle in salute. “Deader than a warm puck on soft ice.”

  “Was it her idea or yours?”

  He took another drin
k. “It was mutual.”

  “Better than being dumped, I guess.”

  He didn’t need to be reminded about that dandy little slap shot from Cat. If he’d hadn’t had a full head of steam up for nothing, things wouldn’t have gone anywhere near like they had. And as much as he didn’t need to be reminded, he wanted to talk about it even less. “Don’t you have somewhere else to go? Something else to do?”

  “No, not really.” Nic leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Look, I—”

  “Don’t start, man. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, tough shit. You blew it today. Cat’s the best damned thing that’s ever happened to you and you blew it. Instead of letting her have some time to decide she was willing to take the risk, you shoved her away.”

  “How would you know?”

  “The walls are only a foot thick. We heard every word. Hell, they probably heard you in Tulsa.”

  Aw, damn. And he’d thought this couldn’t get any worse. He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “She pissed me off.”

  “Yeah,” Nic countered dryly, “and you were trying so hard to be the king of peace. You owe Cat an apology.”

  He thought back. Yeah, he’d been angry, but he hadn’t said one thing that could be considered even slightly less than honest. He shook his head. “Nuh-uh. It was time she faced up to reality. This is a hard game and a tough business. There’s no place in it for soft hearts and pink fricking sprinkles.”

  “Well,” Nic drawled, “I guess you showed her what you’re made of, huh? Feel good for it?”

  Anger flared. “Go to hell.”

  Nic tipped the mouth of his bottle at him. “Already there and watching the show.” He took a drink and then added, “It’s a lousy one, by the way.”