See Jane Score

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 hockey. 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.