See Jane Score

Chapter 5

Ringing the Berries: When the Puck Hits a Player’s Cup

Jane leaned back against her seat, pushed up her glasses, and studied the laptop resting on her tray table. She read what she’d written so far:

Seattle Checkmates Kings

The Seattle Chinooks crowned all six Los Angeles power-play chances and Goalie Luc Martineau blocked twenty-three shots on goal in a 3-1 victory over the Los Angeles Kings. The Kings put a goal on the board in the last few seconds of the game when a freak shot glanced off Seattle player Jack Lynch’s glove and flipped into the Chinooks’ net.

On the ice, the Chinooks play a fast, fearless game, aggravating the opposition with skill and brute strength.

Inside the locker room they seem to love to aggravate journalists by dropping their pants. I know of at least one reporter who would love to put “the big hurt” on them.

She reached forward and deleted the last paragraph. It had only been six days, she reminded herself. The players were leery and superstitious. They felt she had been forced on them, and they were right: She had been. Now it was time for them to get over it so she could do her job.

She glanced at the snoring players sacked out in the team jet. How could she earn their trust or their respect if they wouldn’t speak to her? How to resolve this issue so her job and her life were easier?

The answer came in the form of Darby Hogue. The night they arrived in San Jose, he phoned her room to tell her that some of the players were getting together at a bar somewhere downtown.

“Why don’t you come with?” he said.

“With you?”

“Yeah, and maybe wear something girly. That way the players might forget you’re a reporter.”

She hadn’t packed anything girly, and even if she had, she didn’t want the players to see her as a girly girl. While she needed them to know she respected them and their privacy, they needed to respect her as they would any professional journalist. “Give me about fifteen minutes and I’ll meet you in the lobby,” she said, figuring interaction with the players away from the game might help and couldn’t hurt.

Jane dressed in stretch wool pants that had two rows of buttons up the front like a sailor, a merino sweater set, and boots. All in black. She liked black.

She moved into the bathroom and gathered her hair at the back of her head. She didn’t like it hanging in her face, and she didn’t want Luc to think his opinion mattered. She looked in the mirror and dropped her hand to the counter. Her hair fell to her shoulders in dark shiny waves and curls.

He’d walked her to her hotel room. He’d thought she was sick or drunk, and he’d walked her back to make sure she got there safely. His one act of unexpected kindness affected her more than it should, especially since he’d only walked her to her door so he could thoroughly enjoy himself at a nudie bar. Or to yank her chain. That one simple gesture slid within her chest and warmed her heart, no matter if she wanted to be warmed or not. And she didn’t.

Even if she were stupid enough to fall for a man like Luc, with all of the emotional and professional ramifications, he would never fall for a woman like Jane. And it wasn’t because she thought herself unattractive or uninteresting. She didn’t. No, she was a realist. Ken hooked up with Barbie. Brad married Jennifer and Mick dated supermodels. That was life. Real life, and she’d never been one to purposefully set herself up for heartache. She never wanted to be the one left behind when the relationship was over. She always got out first. It hurt less that way. Maybe Caroline was right about her. She thought about it a moment and shook her head. Caroline watched too much Dr. Phil.

Jane reached for the brush once more and pulled her hair back. She smeared Chap Stick on her lips, grabbed her purse, and met Darby in the lobby. Upon seeing him, she almost ran the other way. Jane knew that she herself was not a fashion goddess, and she didn’t try. Darby, on the other hand, wasn’t a fashion god, but he did try. Only the results were unfortunate.

This evening he wore black leather pants and a silk shirt with red flames and purple skulls on it. Leather pants on any man but Lenny Kravitz was a huge mistake, but she doubted even Lenny could pull off the shirt. Looking at him, Jane understood why the Chinooks might question Darby’s sexual orientation.

They took a taxi from the hotel to Big Buddy’s, a little bar more on the outskirts of the downtown area. The sun was just setting on a cloudless night, and the wind carried a hint of rain and dust. A crisp breeze brushed Jane’s cheeks as she and Darby exited the taxi. A faded sign above the door read, “Voted Best Ribs.” She almost tripped on the uneven sidewalk and wondered why the Chinooks had chosen such a dive.

Inside the building, several television sets hung suspended in the corners, while behind the bar a red and blue Budweiser sign glowed. A string of lights left over from Christmas was still taped to the mirror. It smelled of smoke and booze, barbeque sauce and roasted meat. If Jane hadn’t already eaten, her stomach would have growled.

Jane knew that by being seen with Darby, she ran the risk of adding fuel to the rumor that they were lovers, but she also figured that there was nothing she could do about it. And she wondered which was worse, being seen as the lover of a man who dressed like a pimp, or as the mistress of Virgil Duffy, a man old enough to be her grandfather.

Pinball machines pinged and flashed and she recognized two Chinooks playing air hockey in the corner. About five Seattle players sat at the bar, watching the Rangers battle it out with the Devils. Another half dozen sat at a table with a pitcher of beer, empty tubs of coleslaw, and Fred Flintstone-sized piles of stripped rib bones.

“Hey, guys,” Darby called out. At the sound of his voice, they turned their attention toward Darby and Jane. The hockey players looked like cavemen after feasting on a woolly mammoth, all full and content and sluggish, but they didn’t look too happy to see Darby, and even less happy to see her.

“Jane and I felt like a beer,” he continued as if he didn’t notice. He pulled out a chair for her, and she sat next to Bruce Fish and across from the rookie with the blond Mohawk. Darby sat to her left at the head of the table. The red flames and purple skulls on his shirt were subdued somewhat by the dim lighting.

A waitress with a tight Big Buddy’s T-shirt set two cocktail napkins on the table and took Darby’s order. As soon as he uttered the word Corona, he was instantly carded. A scowl drew his red brows together as he flashed his identification.

“That’s fake,” someone down the table said. “He’s only twelve.”

“I’m older than you, Peluso,” Darby grumbled and shoved his driver’s license back into his wallet.

The waitress turned her attention to Jane.

“Bet she orders a margarita,” Fishy said out of the corner of his mouth.

“Or one of those wine spritzers,” someone else added.

“Something fruity.”

Jane looked up into the shadowy face of the waitress. “Do you have Bombay Sapphire gin?”

“Sure do.”

“Fabulous. I’d like a dirty martini with three olives, please.” She glanced at the stunned faces around her and smiled. “A girl’s gotta get her daily allowance of green veggies.”

Bruce Fish laughed. “Maybe you should order a Bloody Mary for the celery.”

Jane grimaced and shook her head. “I don’t like tomato juice.” She looked across the table at Daniel Holstrom. The lights from the bar cast a reddish pink glow in his white-blond Mohawk. She wondered if the young rookie was twenty-one yet. She had her doubts.

Two more waitresses in Big Buddy’s T-shirts appeared and cleared and cleaned the table. Jane half expected flirting and a proposition or two- jocks were notorious for rude behavior toward women-but nothing happened besides a few polite thank yous. Conversation took place over and around Jane and involved nothing more important or more pressing than the latest movie they’d seen and the weather. She wondered if they were trying to bore her to death. She suspected that might be the case, and she could honestly say the most interesting thing going on was the flash of lights on Daniel’s scalp.

Bruce must have noticed her attention to the Swede’s head because he asked, “What do you think of The Stromster’s hair?”

She thought she detected a blush on Daniel’s cheeks to match the pink tint of his hair. “I like a man who is so secure in his own masculinity that he can dare to be different.”

“He didn’t have much of a choice,” Darby explained as his beer and Jane’s martini arrived. “He’s new to the team this year, and anyone new has to go through initiation.”

The Stromster nodded as if this made perfect sense.

“My first year,” Darby continued, “they emptied their dirty laundry in my car.”

The guys around the table laughed, deep ha-ha-ha-has.

“My first season was with the Rangers and they shaved my head and buried my cup in the ice machine,” Peter Peluso confessed.

Bruce sucked in his breath, and she suspected he might have put a protective hand over his crotch if she hadn’t been sitting next to him. “That’s harsh,” he said. “My rookie season was spent in Toronto, and I got thrown outside in my underwear a lot. Talk about colder than a well digger’s ass.” He shivered to prove his point.

“Wow,” Jane said and took a sip of her drink. “Now I feel lucky that you boys just left me a dead mouse and call me all night.”

Several pairs of guilty eyes looked at her, then slid away.

“How’s Taylor Lee?” she asked Fishy, deciding to let them all off the hook-for now. Just as she suspected he would, he launched into his daughter’s most recent accomplishments, which began with toilet training and ended with a repeat of the telephone conversation he’d had with his two-year-old earlier that evening.

Since she’d met Bruce that first morning, she’d done a little reading on him. She’d discovered that he was going through a real messy divorce, and she wasn’t all that surprised. Now that she’d live a small sample of their lives, she imagined it would be difficult to keep a family together while on the road so much. Especially given the rink bunnies that hung out in the lobby bars.

At first Jane hadn’t noticed them, but it hadn’t taken her long to pick up on who they were, and now she spotted them easily. They dressed in tight clothes, their bodies on display, and they all had that man-eater look in their eyes.

“Anyone want to play darts?” Rob Sutter asked as he approached the table.

Before anyone could speak, Jane was on her feet. “I do,” she said, and by the scowl on the Hammer’s face, it was clear he’d meant anyone but her.

“Just don’t expect me to let you win,” he said.

Hustling darts had helped Jane put herself through college. She didn’t expect anyone to let her win. She made her eyes go wide as she reached for her drink. “Aren’t you going to go easy on me because I’m a girl?”

“I don’t give quarter to girls.”

With her free hand, she took the extra set of darts and headed across the bar. The top of her head didn’t even reach his shoulder. The Hammer didn’t know it, but he was about to get the big hurt he so richly deserved. “Will you at least tell me the rules?”

He quickly explained how to play 501, which, of course, she already knew. But she asked questions like she’d never played before, and he was magnanimous enough to let her go first.

“Thanks,” she said as she put her martini on a nearby table and took her place at the taped toe line. Nailed to the wall a little over seven feet away, the board was lit from above. She rolled the shaft of the cheap house dart between her fingers, testing the weight. She preferred a ninety-eight percent tungsten dart with an aluminum shaft and Ribtex flights. Like the set she owned. The difference between the brass darts she held in her hands and the darts resting in their custom-made box at home was the difference between a Ford Taurus and a Ferrari.

She leaned way over the line, held the dart wrong, and glanced down the shaft as if she were sighting in a rifle. At the last second before release, she stopped. “Don’t you guys usually bet or something?”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to take your money.” He looked at her and smiled as if he’d thought up something really funny. “But we could play for drinks. Whoever loses has to buy all the guys a beer.”

She contrived to look worried. “Oh. Hmm. Well, I’ve only got a fifty. Do you think that will cover it?”

“That ought to be enough,” he said, with all the arrogance of a man assured of his own success. And for the next half hour, Jane let him think he was winning too. Some of the other players gathered around to watch and heckle, but once she was behind by two hundred points and Rob was beginning to feel sorry for her, she got to work and beat him in four turns at the board. Darts were serious business, and she took serious pleasure in trouncing the Hammer.

“Where did you learn to play like that?” he asked.

“Beginner’s luck.” She downed the last of her drink. “Who’s next?”

“I’ll take you on.” Luc Martineau stepped out of the darkness and took the darts from Rob. The light from the bar chased varying degrees of shadows across his broad shoulders and the side of his face. Raindrops shone in his hair and the scent of the cool night breeze clung to him.

“Watch out, Luc, she’s a hustler,” Rob warned.

“Is that right?” One corner of Luc’s mouth lifted. “Are you a hustler, Ace?”

“Just because I beat the Hammer, I’m automatically a hustler?”

“No. You let poor Rob think he was winning and then you coldcocked him. That makes you a hustler.”

She tried not to smile, but she failed. “Are you scared?”

“Not hardly.” He shook his head and a short lock of dark blond hair fell across his forehead. “Ready to play?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re a really bad sport.”

“Me?” He placed a big hand on the front of his ribbed navy sweater, drawing her attention to his wide chest.

“I’ve seen you whack the goalposts when a puck gets by you.”

“I’m competitive.” His hand fell to his side. “Not a bad sport.”

“Right.” She tilted her head and looked into his eyes, the light blue barely discernible within the dark bar. “Do you think you can stand to lose?”

“I don’t plan to lose.” He motioned toward the tape line. “Ladies first.”

When it came to darts, she took no prisoners and was both competitive and a bad sport. If he wanted her to go first, she wasn’t going to argue. “How much money are you willing to bet?”

“I’ll put my fifty against your fifty.”

“You’re on.” Jane doubled on with her first throw and scored sixty points by the time she was through.

Luc’s first throw bounced back and he didn’t double on until his third dart. “That sucked.” With his brows drawn together, he walked to the board and retrieved the darts. Standing within the pool of light, he studied the tips and flights. “These are dull,” he said, then looked across his shoulder at her. “Let me see yours.”

She doubted hers were sharper and moved next to him. He took them from her open palm and, with his head bent over hers, tested the points with this thumb. “Yours aren’t as dull as mine.”

He was so close, if she leaned forward just a little, her forehead would touch his. “Fine,” she said, managing to sound halfway normal, as if the clean scent of him didn’t make her breath catch in her throat. “Pick whichever three you want, and I’ll take the others.”

“No. We’ll use the same darts.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “That way, when I beat you, you can’t cry.”

She looked into his eyes, so close to hers, and her heart thumped in her chest. “I’m not the one who threw a bounce-back on the very first throw, then blamed the darts.” And while her heart was thumping, he appeared totally unaffected. She took a step back and put distance between him and her silly reaction. “Now, are you going to talk all night, Martineau, or are we going to get busy so I can kick your butt?”

“You’re cocky for such a short little thing,” he said and slapped the three darts he’d deemed the sharpest into her hand. “I think you have one of those short-girl syndromes,” he added, then joined some of his teammates who’d moved to the table several feet away.

She shrugged as if to say, Yeah, so? and walked to the line. With her weight perfectly balanced on both feet, her wrist loose and relaxed, she shot a double, a triple, and a single bull. Luc strode to the toe line as she retrieved the darts from the board. “You’re right,” she said as she walked toward him, “these are much better.” She placed all three in his outstretched hand. “Thanks.”

His hand closed over hers, pressing the darts into her palm. “Where did you learn to shoot like that?”

“At a little bar near the University of Washington.” The heat of his hand warmed hers. “I worked there nights to put myself through school.” She tried to pull away, but his grasp tightened and the shafts dug into her flesh.

“Isn’t Hooters around there?” He finally let go of her hand and she took a step back.

“No, it’s across the lake from the university,” she answered, even though she figured he knew exactly where Hooters was located. His car could probably get there on its own. He was just trying to rattle her.

It wasn’t working until he took a step toward her and said next to her ear, “Were you a Hooters girl?”

Despite the heat creeping up her neck, she managed a cool and collected, if not quite a Honey Pie, response. “I think it’s pretty safe to say I’m not Hooters material.”

He lowered his voice, his warm breath touching her cheek as he asked, “Why’s that?”

“We both know why.”

He stepped back and looked at her mouth before slowly raising his gaze to her eyes. “Tank top the wrong color?”

“No.”

“You don’t like the shorts?”

“I’m not the kind of girl they’re looking for.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I know for a fact they hire short girls. I’ve seen them in there.” He paused a moment, then added, “Of course, that was in Singapore.”

They both knew they weren’t talking about her height. “You’re trying to rattle me so you’ll win, aren’t you?”

Tiny creases appeared in the corners of his blue eyes. “Is it working?”

“No,” she lied and moved to the sideline where the Chinooks stood. “Did you come through with those beers, Rob?”

He patted her on the top of her head. “Sure did, Sharky.”

Sharky? Well, she’d earned a nickname, and it was better than what she was sure they called her when she wasn’t around. And he’d patted her head as if she were a dog. Progress, she thought as she watched Luc raise his hand, snap it forward, and bury the dart in the bull’s-eye.

“Luc hates to lose more than anyone I’ve known,” Bruce told her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t beat him,” Peter warned. “It might snakebite his game.”

“Forget it, guys.” She shook her head as Luc buried the second dart in the out area and swore like a hockey player. “I’m not going to let anyone win.”

“Losing might make him play with a real mad-on at the Compac Center tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, remember when he lost at bowling by one pin and the next night he duked it out with Roy?” Darby reminded everyone.

“That probably had more to do with Luc and Patrick’s trash-talking than a bowling score.”

“Goalie grudge match.”

“They played old-time hockey that night.”

“Whatever the reason, they mixed it up at center ice, and man, it was beautiful.”

“When was that?” Jane wanted to know.

“Last month.”

Last month, and he still had more than half the season to go. For several long moments, Luc stood at the toe line, staring the board down as if he were in a contest of wills. A trail of light poured across the cheap red carpet and lit up his leather shoes and black pants to his knees. Then, as if he were launching a missile, he buried the dart deep in the double twenty for a total of sixty-five points. The scowl pulling at his brow as he strode to her and handed her the darts told her he wasn’t satisfied with trailing behind by seventy-five points.

“If they gave points for burying the dart through the board, you’d stand a chance of winning,” she said. “Next time you might want to use finesse rather than muscle.”

“I’m not a finesse kind of guy.”

No kidding. She moved into position, and just as she was about to release the dart, Luc spoke from the sidelines. “How do you get your hair pulled back that tight?” The other Chinooks laughed as if Luc were real funny.

She lowered her arm and looked over at him. “This isn’t hockey. There’s no trash-talking in darts.”

He flashed her a smile. “There is now.”

Fine. She’d still beat him. While he continued to heckle from the sidelines, her three throws equaled an even fifty. Her lowest score so far. “You’re behind by a hundred and sixteen,” she reminded him.

“Not for long,” he boasted, then walked up to the toe line and threw a double bull and a single twenty.

Dang. Time for a little trash talk of her own. “Hey, Martineau, is that a pumpkin on your shoulders or is that your vacuous head?”

He glanced at her. “Is that the best you can do?”

The rest of the Chinooks seemed equally unimpressed.

Darby leaned toward her and whispered, “That was kind of lame.”

“What the hell is vacuous?” Rob asked.

Darby answered for her. “It means empty or hollow.”

“Why didn’t you just say that, Sharky?”

“Yeah, you can’t trash-talk using words like that.”

Jane frowned and folded her arms across her chest. Vacuous was a perfectly good word. “You guys don’t like it because it doesn’t start with an F.”

Luc threw his third dart and scored a total of eighty points. Time to quit playing around and get serious. She walked to the line, raised her arm, and waited for the heckling to begin. But Luc remained silent, unnerving her more than his insults. She managed to shoot a triple twenty, but when she took aim again, Luc said, “Do you ever wear anything besides black and gray?”

“Of course,” she said without looking at him.

“That’s right.” Then, just as she was about to shoot again, he added, “Your cow pajamas are blue.”

“How do you know about her cow pajamas?” one of the guys asked.

Mr. Information failed to answer and she looked over at him, surrounded by his teammates, his hands on his hips and a smile on his lips.

“The other night I left my room to buy some M &M’s,” she told them. “I thought you guys would all be in bed, so I wore my PJs. Luc snuck up on me.”

“I didn’t sneak.”

“Sure.” She lined up her shot and threw a double ten. Then he waited until the exact moment she released her third dart to say, “She wears lesbian glasses.” She missed the board completely. That hadn’t happened in years.

“I don’t either!” Only after she denied it did she fear she may have objected a bit too vehemently.

Luc laughed. “They’re horrible little black squares like all those NOW girls wear.”

The rest of the Chinooks laughed too, and even Darby said, “Oh, yeah, lesbian, all right.”

Jane pulled the darts from the board. “They’re not. They’re perfectly heterosexual.” Geez, what was she talking about? Heterosexual eyeglasses? These guys were all making her crazy. She took a calming breath and handed the darts to Luc. She would not let these dumb jocks rattle her. “I am not gay. Although there is certainly nothing wrong with it. If I were gay, I’d be out and proud.”

“That would explain the shoes,” Rob joined in.

Jane looked down at her boots. “What’s wrong with my Docs?”

For the first time that night, the Stromster decided to speak. “Maahhn shuz,” he said.

“Man shoes?” She looked into his young face. “Since I defended your Mohawk earlier, I expected better of you, Daniel.” His gaze slid away and he took sudden interest in something across the room.

Luc moved to the line and scored forty-eight points. When it was her turn again, all the guys on the sidelines took turns heckling her. The conversation turned severely politically incorrect when they decided that the reason she wore dark colors had to be because she was depressed about being gay.

“I’m not gay,” she insisted. She was an only child and hadn’t been raised around boys, except her father, of course, but he didn’t count. Her father was a serious man who never joked at all. She had no experience with this sort of teasing.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Luc reassured her. “If I were a girl, I’d be a lesbian too.”

Jane figured she had two choices. Get upset and indignant, or relax. She was a journalist, a professional woman. She wasn’t traveling with the team to become buddies, and certainly not to be teased like they were all back in high school. But the professional approach hadn’t worked so far, and she had to admit that she liked the teasing better than being ignored. Besides, these guys probably razzed male reporters also. “Luc, you’re already a prima donna,” she said.

Luc chuckled and she finally got a laugh out of the others. For the rest of the game, she tried to give as good as she got, but these guys were much better at it than she and had had years of practice. In the end, she beat Luc by almost two hundred points, but she lost in the war of words.

Somehow, during all the teasing and trash-talking, she’d moved up a few notches in their esteem. She probably could have done without their opinions on her clothes, shoes, and hair, but at least they weren’t talking about the weather, giving her one-word answers, or ignoring her altogether. Yes, this was definitely progress.

After the game tomorrow night, they might actually speak to her. She didn’t expect for them all to become good pals, but perhaps now they wouldn’t give her such a hard time in the locker room. Perhaps they’d give her an interview and a break and keep their jockstraps up as she walked by.

Behind the wire cage of his mask, Luc watched me puck drop and spin on its side. Bressler muscled the puck out of the play-off circle, and the battle between Seattle and San Jose began.

Luc crossed himself for luck, but ten minutes into the first frame, his luck completely deserted him. Sharks right winger Teemu Selanne chipped the puck and it bounced into the net. It was an easy goal. One Luc should have stopped, and it seemed to trigger a complete blowout. Not only for Luc, but the entire team.

When the first period ended, two Chinooks players required stitches, and Luc had given up four goals. At two minutes into the second frame, Grizzell got brutally cross-checked at center ice. He went down hard and didn’t get back up. He had to be carried from the ice, and ten minutes later Luc misplaced a puck in his glove hand and the fifth Sharks goal went up on the board. Coach Nystrom gave the signal, yanked Luc from the net, and replaced him with the second-string goalie.

The skate from the pipes to the bench is the longest of any netminder’s life. Every goalie who ever played the game had an off night, but for Luc Martineau, it was more than that. He’d been through it too many times during his last season with Detroit not to feel it looming overhead now like an executioner’s ax. He’d lost focus out there, felt out of sync. Instead of seeing the play before it happened, he was one second behind it. Was this it? The first bad game in a downhill slide? A fluke or a trend? The beginning of the end?

Apprehension and a real fear he didn’t even want to admit feeling squeezed his chest and bit the back of his neck. He felt it as he sat on the bench, watching the rest of the game from the pines.

“Everyone has an off night,” Coach Nystrom told him in the locker room. “Roy got pulled last month. Don’t worry about it, Luc.”

“None of us played worth a shit tonight,” Sutter told him.

“We should have played better in front of you,” Bressler added. “When you’re in the goal, we sometimes forget to step in the crease and protect you.”

Luc didn’t let himself off quite so easy. He’d never been one to blame others and was ultimately responsible for his own play.

As the jet took off from San Francisco, he sat in the dark cabin reliving his past, and not the good stuff. The horrible hit to his knees, the surgeries and months of physical rehabilitation. His addiction to painkillers, and the horrible body aches and nausea that rolled through him if he didn’t feed it. And ultimately his inability to play the game he loved.

Failure whispered in his ear as he headed home, telling him he’d lost his edge. The glow of Jane Alcott’s laptop screen and the click-click of her keyboard assured him that everyone else would know it too. In the sports section of the paper, he would read her report of that night’s disaster.

At the airport in Seattle, Luc headed to long-term parking and caught a glimpse of Jane cramming her stuff into a Honda Prelude. She looked up as he passed, but neither of them spoke. She looked like she didn’t need his help with her suitcase, and he didn’t have anything to say to the archangel of gloom and doom.

A sprinkling of rain wet the windshield of his Land Cruiser as he made the forty-minute drive into downtown Seattle. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been so glad to be home.

Moonlight spilled through the eight-foot windows in the living room as he moved through his dark apartment. The light above the stove had been left on, illuminating the FedEx envelope on the counter. He walked into his bedroom and flipped on the light. He left the door partway open and tossed his duffel on the floor by his bed. Shrugging out of his blazer, he hung it next to his garment bag in his closet. He’d unpack tomorrow.

Right now he was tired and relieved to be home, and he wanted nothing more than to fall face first into bed.

He loosened the knot of his tie as Marie knocked on his door, pushing it open the rest of the way. She wore a pair of flannel drawstring pajama bottoms and a Britney Spears T-shirt. She looked about ten years old.

“Guess what, Luc?”

“Hey, there.” He glanced at his watch. It was past midnight; whatever she wanted, she obviously didn’t feel could wait until morning. He wondered if she’d managed to get kicked out of school since he’d spoken to her last. He was almost afraid to ask. “What’s up?”

Her big blue eyes lit up and she smiled. “I got asked to the dance.”

“What dance?”

“The dance at my school.”

He pulled the knot of his tie, and thought of the FedEx envelope sitting in the kitchen. He’d deal with it tomorrow. “When is it?”

“A few weeks.”

She might not be living with him in a few weeks. But she didn’t need to know that now. “Who asked you?”

Her eyes lit up even more and she moved farther into the room. “Zack Anderson. He’s a senior.”

Shit.

“He’s in a band! He’s got a lip ring and his nose and eyebrows are pierced. He has a tattoo. He’s sooooo hot!”

Double shit. Luc had nothing against a tattoo. But piercings? Christ. “What’s the name of his band?”

“The Slow Screws.”

Great.

“I need to get a dress. And shoes.” Marie sat on the edge of his bed and shoved her hands between her knees. “Mrs. Jackson said she’d take me.” She looked up, her eyes pleading. “But she’s old.”

“Marie, I’m a guy. I don’t know anything about buying prom dresses.”

“But you have lots of girlfriends. You know what looks good.”

On women. Not on girls. Not on his sister. Not to go to a prom she probably wouldn’t be here to attend anyway. And even if she was, not with Zack of the Loose Screws. The guy with the lip ring and pierced nose.

“I’ve never been on a date,” she confessed.

His hands fell to his sides and he looked at her closely. At her brows that were too thick and hair that looked a bit on the dry side. Damn, she needed a mother. A woman to help her. Not him.

“What do boys like girls to wear?” she asked.

As little as possible, he thought. “Long sleeves. We think long sleeves and high necks are hot. And long dresses with big puffy skirts so we can’t get very close.”

She laughed. “That’s not true.”

“I swear to God it is, Marie,” he said and pulled the tie from around his neck and tossed it on the bedside table. “We don’t like anything that shows too much skin. We like anything a nun would wear.”

“Now I know you’re lying.”

She laughed again and he thought it was a shame he didn’t know her better. She was his only sibling and he didn’t know her at all. And there was a possibility that he wouldn’t know her either. A part of him wished things could be different. Wished that he was home more, and that he knew what she needed.

“After school tomorrow, I’ll give you my credit card.” He sat next to her and untied his shoes. “Get what you need and I’ll take a look when you bring it home.”

She stood, her shoulders hunched, a frown pulling at her bottom lip. “Okay,” she said and walked from the room.

Jesus, he’d made her mad again. But she really didn’t expect him to shop for a prom dress with her, did she? Like he was her girlfriend? How could she be mad at him for that? He didn’t even like to shop with girls his own age.