See Jane Score

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.

Chapter 1

The Shave: Rookie Initiation

The locker room was thick with trash talk as Luc “Lucky” Martineau tucked himself into his cup and strapped on his gear. Most of his teammates stood around Daniel Holstrom, the rookie Swede, giving Daniel his choice of initiations. He could either let the guys shave his hair into a Mohawk or take the whole team out to dinner. Since rookie dinners cost between ten and twelve thousand dollars, Luc figured the young winger was going to end up looking like a punker for a while.

Daniel’s wide blue eyes searched the locker room for a sign that the guys were kidding him. He found none. They’d all been rookies once, and every one of them had endured hazing of some sort. In Luc’s rookie season, the laces in his skates disappeared on more than one occasion, and the sheets in his hotel room were often shorted.

Luc grabbed his stick and headed into the tunnel. He passed some of the guys working with blowtorches on the blades of their sticks. Near the front of the tunnel Coach Larry Nystrom and General Manager Clark Gamache stood talking to a short woman dressed completely in black. Both men had their arms folded across their chests, and they scowled down at the woman as she spoke to them. Her dark hair was scraped to the back of her head and held in one of those scrunchie things like his sister wore.

Beyond mild curiosity, Luc paid her little attention and forgot her completely as he hit the ice for practice. He listened for the crisp shhh-shhh that he’d come to expect from spending an hour honing the edges of his skates. Through the cage of his mask, cool air brushed his cheeks and filled his lungs as he made several warm-up laps.

Like all goalies, he was a member of the team, yet set apart by the solitary nature of his job. There was no covering for men like Luc. When they let a puck in, lights flashed like a big neon fuck-up sign, and it took more than intense determination and guts to face the pipes game after game. It took a man who was competitive and arrogant enough to believe himself invincible.

The goalie coach, Don Boclair, pushed a basket of pucks onto the ice while Luc performed the same ritual he’d been performing for the past eleven years, be it game night or practice. He circled the net clockwise three times, then he skated counterclockwise once. He took his place between the pipes and whacked his goalie stick on the poles to his left and right. Then he crossed himself like a priest as he locked his gaze on Don, who was standing at the blue line, and for the next thirty minutes the coach skated around him, shooting like a sniper at all seven holes and firing from the point.

At the age of thirty-two, Luc felt good. Good about the game, and good about his physical condition. Relatively pain-free now, he took no drugs stronger than Advil. He was having the best season of his career, and heading into the conference finals, his body was in excellent condition. His professional life couldn’t be any better.

Too bad his personal life sucked.

The goalie coach fired a puck top shelf, and with a heavy thwack, Luc caught it in his glove. Through the thick padding, the half pound of vulcanized rubber stung his palm. He dropped to his knees on the ice as another puck flew for his five hole and slammed into his pads. He felt the familiar stitch of pain in his tendons and ligaments, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. Nothing he wouldn’t handle, and nothing he’d ever admit to feeling out loud.

There were those who’d written him off. Put a period on his career. Two years ago while playing for the Red Wings, he’d blown out both knees. After several major reconstructive surgeries, countless hours of rehab, a stint at Betty Ford to get off pain medication, and a trade to the Seattle Chinooks, Luc was back and playing better than ever.

This season he had something to prove. To himself. To those who’d crossed him off. He’d recaptured the qualities that had always made him one of the best. Luc had an uncanny puck sense and could see a play a second