“There are quite a few guys with black eyes.”
“I think his name was Sam.”
“Sam Leclaire. He scored sixty-six goals this season. Ten of those—”
“Stop.” Chelsea held up one hand. “Spare me the stats.” She’d had to listen to him and Bo argue goals, points, and penalty minutes all the way home from Ozzie’s, and frankly, she’d wanted to shoot them both.
Jules laughed. “You remind me of Faith.”
“Who?”
“The owner of the Chinooks. When anyone starts talking stats, she goes all cross-eyed and zones out.”
Chelsea remembered now. The beautiful blond who’d been given a long, slow tongue kiss by the new captain, right in the middle of the Key, while an arena full of fans screamed and cheered them on. “Shouldn’t the owner of the team know about stats and stuff like that?” Chelsea tried another bite; this time she chewed slowly.
“She just inherited the team last April. Before that, she was like you and knew nothing about hockey. But she’s picked up the important stuff real fast.” He shrugged. “Now she has Ty to help her.”
“The captain?”
“Yeah. They’re in the Bahamas.”
“Doing what?”
Jules raised his green eyes from his cereal bowl and just looked at her.
“Oh.” She put the spoon down, unsure if her stomach could take more. “If she has Ty to help her out, are you worried about your job?”
He shook his head and shrugged again. “Not really. I think Ty’s going to take a job as a scout or have some role in player development, so she’ll still need an assistant. I’m going to talk to her about my role when she gets back.”
“When’s that?” Personally, she’d hate to think her job was up in the air. Well, any further in the air than it already was with Mark Bressler.
“Hopefully before the big celebration party.”
“There’s a celebration party?”
Jules sat back. “The cup celebration at the Four Seasons next month. The twenty-fourth maybe? It’s been put together in the past week, but I’m sure Bressler got an invitation. Or will shortly.”
Of course he hadn’t mentioned it.
“If you don’t get an invite, everyone is allowed one guest. You can go with Bo.”
Speaking of her sister, Bo moaned long and loud as she moved down the hall toward them.
“Damn you, Chelsea,” she croaked. “I haven’t been this hungover since the last time I visited you in L.A.” She shuffled to the table and sat down. “Did you make coffee?”
Chelsea shook her head and handed her sister the Coke.
“I did.” Jules got up and poured Bo a cup.
“We’re getting too old for this,” Bo said as she laid her head on the table.
Chelsea secretly agreed. They were both thirty, and at some point in anyone’s life, partying to excess lost its appeal. It just got pathetic, and before a girl knew it, she was one of those women who lived life on a bar stool. She tried another bite of her cereal and chewed carefully. Chelsea didn’t want to become one of those women with gravelly voices and overly processed hair. She didn’t want bad teeth and leathery skin. She didn’t want a boyfriend named Cooter who was doing ten to twenty for armed robbery.
Jules set the coffee in front of Bo, then returned to his place across the table. “You girls smell like the old Rainier brewery before they shut it down.”
Bo raised the coffee to her lips. “You’re not allowed to talk about beer for two days.”
“Okay.” Jules laughed. “Mini Pit.”
Last night, when Chelsea had told Bo that the hockey players called her Mini Pit, Jules had laughed until he’d choked. Neither twin had found it quite that funny, but to make Bo feel better, Chelsea had confessed that they called her Short Boss.
“Not today, Jules.” Bo set the coffee down. “Where’s your shirt?”
Jules grinned, raised his arms, and flexed like he was in a body-builder competition. “I thought you girls might enjoy the gun show.”
“Please,” Chelsea moaned. “We’re already sick.”
“I just vomited in my mouth,” her sister added.
Jules laughed and lowered his arm. “I’ll put the guns away until later.”
“God, I hate it when you’re all cheerful. Why aren’t you hungover?” Bo wanted to know.
“Because I was your designated driver. You don’t remember?”
“Barely.”
Chelsea wondered if her sister remembered making out with Jules. She wondered now if maybe she shouldn’t bring it up. Ever. There were times when not remembering was best. Like the time several years Ssevago when she’d streaked at a party in the Hollywood Hills. Chelsea had never been one to run like a gazelle, and it hadn’t been pretty. Too bad she hadn’t remembered that until the next morning. Sheesh, now that she thought of it, maybe she was impulsive. Especially when she drank.
“Do you remember singing ‘Kiss’?”
“The Prince song?” Chelsea asked. She didn’t recall singing Prince. Madonna and Celine Dion had been bad enough.
“Yeah. And you girls really got into ‘I Will Survive.’”
Apparently they’d had quite the song list. Why hadn’t anyone stopped them? They’d undoubtedly been horrid. Chelsea turned and looked at her sister. “Do you remember ‘I Will Survive’?”
“No. I hate that song. Why would I sing it?”
“You really got into it.” Jules added to their misery. “You two belted out that song like it was your own personal anthem or something.”
Bo whispered, “It’s probably a good thing that parts of last night are a total blank.”
“Yeah,” Chelsea agreed.
“Don’t tell me that you two have forgotten everything.” Jules picked up his spoon and continued eating. “You have to remember the threesome. Making it with hot twins has always been a personal fantasy of mine.” He looked up and grinned. “One that, I think it’s safe to say, I share with most men on the planet. I gave you girls some of my best moves, and I’ll be crushed if neither of you remember it.”
Bo rested her forehead in her hand. “Don’t make me kill you, Jules,” she said through a tortured sigh. “Not today. I’m just not in the mood to clean up the mess.”
After Jules left, the girls moved to the couch and settled in for a little R&R. Recuperation and reality television. A small cooler filled with Coke sat on the coffee table, and they kicked up their feet and tuned in to the brain rot that was New York Goes to Work.
Chelsea pointed at the reality star who’d made her first appearance on Flavor of Love. “She used to have such a cute body, but she ruined it with those big stripper implants.”
Bo nodded. “Sister Patterson should have smacked her upside the head. Why would any woman do that to themselves?”
It was a rhetorical question. “I can completely understand reduction though.” Chelsea decided to test the waters and see if her sister’s opinion had changed. “Boobs get in the way of everything.”
“Yeah, but have you seen the way they do the reduction?” Bo asked as New York shoveled pig manure. “It’s a form of mutilation.”
Chelsea guessed that answered the question. “It doesn’t look that bad. Not like it used to. The scar isn’t even very big.”
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking about that again? They carve out huge chunks of your flesh. Like a pumpki S Lin.”
Bo sounded just like their mother. There was no talking to her about it, so she let it go.
“Remember when we sent in an audition tape for The Real World?”
Chelsea laughed. They’d been nineteen and learned the MTV reality show was going to be shot in Hawaii. They’d wanted to go in the worst way. “Yeah. We thought for sure they’d pick us because we’re twins.”
“We were so sure we’d get chosen, we started picking out swimsuits.”
