Playing To Win

“No way. Get your own man, which I hope you do soon. You’re in desperate need of some hunky distraction in your life,” Paige advised, heading for the door. “At the very least, this job will be great for that.”

Holly rolled her eyes in a silent goodbye as she grabbed the handset of her phone, recognizing Jay’s number on call display. Paige didn’t like him very much, but Holly and Jay had hit it off immediately in broadcasting school.

When the Storm offered to let her pick her own cameraman, she’d eagerly snatched Jay away from filming weddings and local stories. It was a relief not to have to fake sports stupidity with at least one person.

“Hey. The footage looks great.” Embarrassing as it might be for her personally, she had to admit that Jay had edited her interviews with Luke and the rest of the team into a professional-looking comedic montage that could now be viewed by the world at portlandstorm.com.

“I’m glad you think so, because the boss man agrees.”

“What?”

“That’s why I’m calling. Check your texts.”

“Or you could just tell me since we’re, you know, on the phone,” she pointed out.

“Okay, smart-ass. It seems your big-haired alter ego can do no wrong. Hits on the Storm’s website have increased twenty percent since your interview was posted last night. Usually after a loss, website traffic goes down. They’ve decided to give us an extra assignment.”

“Oh, God.” Holly cringed. She couldn’t help it. A twenty percent uptick? That did not bode well for Operation: Journalistic Integrity. She’d be stuck asking about favorite childhood breakfast cereals for the rest of her career while important stories, like Luke Maguire’s scoring drought that had now entered its twelfth game, went unmentioned.

On the upside, at least the team captain was so annoyed with her about the play-off beard thing that she could focus her insipid questions on the rest of the players. “What do they want us to film?”

“Some fluffy pregame interviews with the guys, tomorrow after their morning skate. The brass plans to air them as teasers between periods to help drive up website traffic. We’re starting with the big three, then we’ll try to fit in as much of the rest of the team as we can manage.”

The big three: goaltender Jean-Claude LaCroix, centerman Eric Jacobs, and, because sometimes life sucked with a vengeance, captain and left-winger Luke Maguire. Holly couldn’t bring herself to speak through the impending sense of doom.

* * *

THWACK.

Luke’s slap shot missed the net completely.

God—thwack—damn—thwack—mother—thwack—fuc—

“Mags!”

Luke looked up from the line of pucks he was systematically assaulting to see Jean-Claude LaCroix—J.C. to his teammates—standing in the players’ box. He was dressed in a navy T-shirt that mimicked the Storm’s home jersey, this year’s standard issue for doing press.

With another muttered curse, Luke skated over to the bench.

“I just finished with the reporter, and Eric’s in the hot seat right now. Someone can cover for you with her if you want to grab a shower, but to avoid the wrath of the higher-ups, I’d suggest you get a move on.”

Luke pulled off one of his gloves so he could remove his helmet and set them both on the boards. “Yeah, I’ll be there in a minute.”

“You okay, man?”

He ran a hand over his sweaty hair. “Sure. What could be wrong?”

J.C. gave him a look. “You’re the one who snapped two sticks in practice and is still out here pounding the boards. You tell me.”

Luke appreciated his friend’s tact. It wasn’t like his problem wasn’t obvious.

He couldn’t hit the net.

It had been twelve games since he’d scored a goal—the longest dry spell of his hockey career. But no matter how hard he practiced, how much extra time he logged out here working on his shot, when he was in the game, he froze up. And people were noticing. He’d read the grumblings in the paper, heard the callouts on television. Hell, people were even tweeting him to say he sucked. If he didn’t get his act together soon, he’d be headed for some obligatory couch time with the sports psychologist. And that meant talking about Ethan, a fate he tried to avoid at all costs.

“It’s nothing.” Luke brushed it off, hoping his buddy would let it go.

J.C. shook his head, rejecting the lie. Luke should have known he would. They’d been playing hockey together on and off since they were fourteen years old. At this point, his goaltender could read him just as well off the ice as on.

“It’s not nothing, man. Don’t overthink it. Besides, scoring isn’t the only way to help the team.”

“Easy for you to say. Your save percentage was .916 this season. You’re doing your part, but we won’t win if we don’t put pucks in the other guys’ net.” Luke’s shoulders tightened under the weight of expectation—from management, the fans, his teammates... “I haven’t scored in over a month. What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Just relax and play the game.”

Luke rolled his eyes at the Zen advice. “This is the reason people hate goalies, you know? You’re all a bunch of pretentious assholes.”

J.C. just grinned. “I’ll see you up there, okay?”

With a nod, Luke grabbed his helmet and glove and headed to the dressing room to shower and change, hoping he could clear his head before he faced Holly Evans. His brain conjured the memory of the curvy blonde in the siren-red outfit. Yet another complication he didn’t need right now. Because last night, he’d done something stupid.

With a self-directed curse, he’d opened a new browser window and typed “The Women’s Hockey Network” into the search field on YouTube.

And there she was, Holly Evans, all big blond hair and big brown eyes and big, beautiful breasts. In fact, she was damn near perfect...until she got to the Hockey Hunk of the Month segment.

He wanted to be pissed.

Instead, he was oddly flattered.

Sure, he wasn’t wild about the fact she’d used that damned shirtless picture of him from last month’s Sports Illustrated, but after his on-ice struggles over the last month, he found his battered self-esteem had sort of appreciated the boost from those pouty, shiny lips of hers.

She’d even managed to make the award about more than his pectorals, citing his work with his pet charity, Kids on Wheels, and explaining its focus on providing wheelchairs and wheelchair-friendly sports programs for kids in need. Hell, she’d even brought up his role as a goodwill ambassador for ice sledge hockey, a cause near and dear to his heart.

If he wasn’t so firmly anti-reporter, he might have approved of the way she’d so beautifully shifted the focus from the nonsensical to something that actually mattered. But in the end, what mattered most was winning, and ogling the pretty reporter wasn’t going to help him put the puck in the net.

Now, Luke stood outside the dressing room, temporarily set aside this morning so that she could make a mockery of the sport he loved, willing himself to man up and walk in.

He scratched his chin self-consciously, wishing to hell that he’d shaved this morning. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of assuming his decision not to shave had anything to do with her. If he’d been given any kind of heads-up about being locked in a room with Little Miss Play-off Beard today, he definitely would’ve given a big middle finger to all the doubts she and his teammates had planted about their loss. But there’d been no warning until just before practice. No doubt about it, karma was a stone-cold bitch.

With a deep breath, he stepped through the door to find his linemate was just finishing up his interview.

“That was great, Eric.” Holly’s voice, warm and sexy, called to mind the drizzle of honey on cream. Luke subconsciously turned toward it.

Goddamn, the woman was gorgeous. She was rocking the painted-on suit again, but this time the color was the same teal as the stripes and the cresting wave on the Storm jersey. (A color which, according to the Women’s Hockey Network color chart, indicated a driven personality whose inner turmoil was often masked by an outward appearance of calm.)

She was sporting mile-high heels, a barely there skirt, plenty of cleavage and that big, tousled hair that probably felt like a helmet of straw in real life, but always managed to look kinda sexy on TV. And yet, now that she wasn’t just a caricature on his computer screen, but a living, breathing woman, smiling and putting the notoriously shy Eric Jacobs at ease as they finished up their interview, he found himself wondering what she’d look like in jeans and a T-shirt.

The thought irritated him. He just wanted to get this whole thing over with so he could concentrate on the important stuff. Like winning hockey games. He made himself take a step forward. “So I guess that means I’m up?”