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That night at the bar, the Mammoth players had instigated the fight, holding their own against four Ducks until their head coach strode up out of nowhere. At thirty-four, Mark Diego was the youngest, most popular NHL head coach in the country.
And possibly even more gorgeous than his brother Rick.
On the tape, Mark’s eyes narrowed in on the fight as he walked fearlessly into the fray, pulling his players out of the pile as though they weighed nothing. A fist flew near his face and he deflected it, leveling the sender of said fist a long, hard look.
The guy fell backwards trying to get away.
“That’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Lena murmured, watching the clip over Rainey’s shoulder.
Yeah. Yeah, it was. Rainey had seen Mark in action before, of course. He and Rick were close. And once upon a time, she’d been just as close, having grown up near the brothers. Back then, Mark had been tough, smart, and fiercely protective of those he cared about. He’d also had a wild streak a mile wide, and she’d seen him brawl plenty. It’d turned her on then, but it absolutely didn’t now. She was grown-up, mature.
Or so she told herself in the light of day.
On the screen, hands on hips, Mark said something, something quiet but that nevertheless had the heaving mass of aggression screeching to a halt.
“Oh, yeah. Come to momma,” Lena murmured. “Look at him, Rainey. Tall, dark, gorgeous. Fearless. I wouldn’t mind him exerting his authority on me.”
Rainey’s belly quivered, and not because she’d inhaled three pieces of pizza with the teens an hour ago. Mark was no longer a wild teenager, but a tightly controlled, complicated man. A stranger. How he “exerted his authority” was none of her business. “Lena, you’re dating his brother.” Just speaking about Mark had twisted open a wound in a small corner of her heart, a corner she didn’t visit very often.
“I’ve never gotten to see the glory that would be the Diego brothers in stereo.” Lena hadn’t grown up in Santa Rey. “Mark hasn’t come home since I’ve been with Rick. Being the youngest, baddest, sexiest head coach in all the NHL must be time-consuming.”
“Trust me, he’s not your type.”
“Because he’s rich and famous? Because he’s tough as hell and cool as ice?”
“Because he’s missing a vital organ.”
Lena gasped in horror. “He doesn’t have a d—”
“A heart! He’s missing a heart! Jeez, get your mind out of the gutter.”
Lena laughed. “How do you know he’s missing a heart?” Her eyes widened. “You have a past! Of course you have a past, you grew up here with Rick. Is it sordid? Tell me!”
Rainey sighed. “I was younger, so Mark always thought of me as a…”
“Forbidden fruit?” Lena asked hopefully.
“Pest,” Rainey corrected. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I do!”
Knowing Lena wouldn’t leave it alone, she caved. “Fine. I had a crush on him, and thought he was crushing back. Wrong. He didn’t even know how I felt about him, but before I figured that out, I managed to thoroughly humiliate myself. The end.”
“Oh, I’m going to need much more than that.”
Luckily Lena’s cell phone chose that very moment to ring. God bless AT&T. Lena glanced at the ID and grimaced. “I’ve got to go.” She pointed at Rainey. “This discussion is not over.”
“Yeah, yeah. Later.” Rainey waved her off. She purposely glanced away from her computer screen, but like a moth to a flame, she couldn’t fight the pull, and turned back.
Mark was shoving his players ahead of him, away from the run-down L.A. bar and towards a black SUV, single-handedly taking care of the situation.
That had been three days ago. The fight had been all over the news, and the commission was thinking about suspending the players involved. Supposedly the two head coaches had stepped in and offered a solution that would involve giving back to the fans who’d supported the two teams.
She looked into Mark’s implacable, uncompromising face on her laptop and the years fell away. She searched for the boy she’d once loved with all her sixteen-year-old heart, but couldn’t find a hint of him.
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER, they’d gone through a satisfying amount of cars, fattening the rec center’s empty coffers, and Rainey was ready to call it a day. She needed to help the teens clean up before the bus arrived. Many of them still had homework and other jobs to get to.
The parking lot was wet and soapy, with hoses crisscrossing the concrete, and buckets everywhere. With no more cars waiting, the teens were running around like wild banshees, feeling free to squirt and torture one another. Rainey blew her whistle to get their attention. “We’re done here,” she called out. “Thanks so much for all your help today. The faster we clean up, the faster we can—” She broke off as the county bus rolled up and opened its doors. Dammit. All but a handful of the kids needed to get on that bus. It was their only ride.
When the bus pulled away, Rainey stared at the messy lot and the two kids she had left.
“More pizza?” Todd asked her hopefully. He was a lanky sixteen-year-old who had either a tapeworm or a bottomless stomach.
Rainey turned and looked through the pizza boxes. Empty. She opened her bag and pulled out her forgotten lunch. “I’ve got a PB&J—”
“Sweet,” he said, and inhaled the sandwich in three bites. His gaze was locked on Sharee, a fellow high school junior, as she began rolling hoses. Sharee was all long, long mocha-colored limbs and grace. Another fire victim from the same neighborhood as Todd, she currently lived in a small trailer with her mother. When Sharee caught Todd staring, she leveled him with a haughty glare.
Todd merely grinned.
“Go help her,” Rainey told him. “She can’t do it all alone.”
“Sure, I’ll help her,” Todd said, and the next thing Rainey knew, he was stalking a screaming Sharee with a bucket full of soapy water.
Sharee grabbed a hose and wielded it at him like a gun. “Drop the bucket and no one gets hurts. And by no one, I mean you.”
Todd laughed at her and waved the bucket like a red flag in front of a bull.
“Okay, okay,” Rainey said, stepping between them. “It’s getting late.” She knew for a fact that Todd still had to go work at his family’s restaurant for several more hours. Sharee, on the cusp of not passing her classes, surely had a ton of homework. The girl also had a healing bruise high on one cheekbone and a set of matching bruises on both biceps, like someone had gripped her hard and shaken her.
Her father, Rainey guessed. Everyone knew Martin was a mean drunk but no one wanted to talk about it, least of all Sharee, who lived alone with her mother except for the nights her mother allowed the man into their trailer.
“He called me a scarecrow,” Sharee said, pointing at Todd. “Now his sorry ass is going to pay.”
“Language,” Rainey said.
“Okay, his sorry butt. His sorry butt is going to pay.”
“I said you have legs as long as a scarecrow,” Todd said from behind Rainey. “Not that you are a scarecrow.”
Sharee growled and lifted the hose.
“Stop!” Rainey said. “If you squirt him, you’re leaving yourself wide open for retaliation.”
“That’s right,” Todd said, nodding like a bobblehead. “Retaliation.”
Rainey turned to shut Todd up just as Sharee let it rip with the hose and nailed him.
Rainey gave up. They had worked their asses off and deserved to let off a little steam. She stepped aside to leave them to it, but stopped short as a big, shiny black truck pulled into the lot.
Which was when the entire contents of Todd’s bucket hit her. Sucking in a shocked gasp as the cold, soapy water rained over her, Rainey whipped around and stared at the sheepish teen, who was holding the offending empty bucket. “Oh, God,” he said. “I’m so sorry, but you stepped right in its path!”
“You’re in big trouble,” Sharee told him. “You got her hair wet. You know how long it must take her to get that hair right?”
Sharee was right about the hair. Rainey shoved it out of her face, readjusting the Ducks hat on her head. Her wavy brown hair frizzed whenever it rained, or if the air was humid, or if she so much as breathed wrong. She had no doubt it resembled a squirrel’s tail about now. “It’s okay. Just…clean up,” she said, watching as the black truck rolled to a stop.
“Look at that,” Todd said reverently, Rainey’s hair crisis forgotten. “That’s one sweet truck.”
Sneakers squishing, Rainy moved toward it. She could feel water running in rivulets down her body as the driver side window powered down. “I’m sorry,” she said politely, feeling like a drowned rat. “We’ve closed up shop. We—” She broke off. The driver was wearing a Mammoth hat and reflective Oakleys, rendering him all but unrecognizable to the general public. But she recognized him just fine, and her heart stopped on a dime.
The man she’d just been watching on the news.
Mark Diego.
He wore a white button-down that was striking against his dark skin and stretched across broad shoulders. The hand-painted sign behind her said: Car Wash—$10, but he pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket. She stared down at it, boggled.
“No worries on the wash,” he said in a low voice as smooth as aged whiskey, the same voice that had fueled her adolescent dreams.
He didn’t recognize her.
Of course he didn’t. She was wearing a ball cap, sunglasses, soap suds, and was drenched to the core, not to mention dressed like a complete slob. Unlike Mark, of course, who looked like sin-on-a-stick. Expensive sin-on-a-stick.
The bastard.
“I just need a place to park,” he said with the smile that she knew probably melted panties and temperamental athletes with equal aplomb. “I’m here to see Rick Diego.”
“You can park right where you are,” Rainey said.
He turned off the engine and got out of the truck, six feet two inches of tough, rugged, leanly muscled grace. Two other guys got out as well, and beside her, Todd nearly swallowed his tongue. “Casey Reynolds! James Vasquez! Oh man, you guys rock!”
Casey, the Mammoths’ right wing, was twenty-two and the youngest player on the team. He looked, walked and talked like the California surfer he was in his spare time. He wore loose basketball shorts, a T-shirt from some surf shop in the Caicos, and a backwards Mammoths’ hat.
James was the team’s left wing, and at twenty-four he was nearly as wild as Casey, but instead of looking like he belonged on a surfboard, James could have passed as a linebacker in the NFL. He was wearing baggy blue jeans and a snug silk shirt that emphasized and outlined his every muscle.
If she hadn’t known they were the two players who’d been in the big bar brawl, she could have guessed by Casey’s nasty black eye and the bruise and cut on James’s jaw. Still managing to look like million-dollar athletes, they smiled at Todd and shook his hand.
The kid looked like he might pass out.
Mark and his two players clearly had a longtime ease with each other, but just as clearly there was a hierarchy, with Mark at the top—and he hadn’t taken his carefully observant eyes off Rainey.
Crap.
She turned away, but he snagged her hand and pulled her very wet self back around. She thought about tugging free.
Or kicking him.
As if he could read her mind, his lips twitched. “Easy,” he murmured, and pulled off her sunglasses.
She narrowed her eyes against the sun and a wealth of unwelcome emotions as the very hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his sexy mouth.
“It’s a little hard to tell with the raccoon eyes,” he said. “But the bad ’tude’s a dead giveaway. Rainey Saunders. Look at you.”
The others were all still talking with a false sense of intimacy. Mark tapped the bill of Rainey’s Ducks hat, giving a slow shake of his head, like he couldn’t believe she’d be wearing anything other than the Mammoths’ colors.
And suddenly she felt like that silly, love-struck teenager all over again. Having four years on her, he’d been clueless about the crush. He might never have known at all if she hadn’t made a fool of herself and sneaked into his apartment to strip for him. It’d all gone straight to hell since he’d been on the receiving end of a blow job at the time. She’d compounded the error with several more that evening, which she didn’t want to think about. Ever. It’d all ended with her pride and confidence completely squashed.
Worse, the night had negated the years of friendship she and Mark had shared until then, all erased in one beat of stupidity.
Okay, several beats of stupidity.
She lifted her chin, which turned out to be a mistake because water had pooled on the bill and now dripped down her face. She blinked it away and tried to look cool—not easy under the best of circumstances, and this wasn’t anywhere close to best.
Mark pointed to her nose. “You have a smudge of dirt.”
Oh, good. Because she’d been under the illusion she was looking perfect. “Thought you liked dirty girls.” The minute she said it, she could have cut out her tongue. He’d been on GQ last month, artfully stretched out on some L.A. beach, draped in sand.
And four naked, gorgeous, equally sandy women.
She’d bought the damn issue, which really chapped her ass. Mark clearly knew it, and his smile broke free. She rubbed at her nose but apparently this only made things worse because his smile widened.
“Here,” he said, and ran a finger over the bridge of her nose himself.
Up this close and personal, it was hard to miss just how gorgeous he was.
Or how good he smelled.
Or how expensive he looked.
All of which was hugely irritating.
“Got it,” he said. “Not much I can do about the soap all over you. Let’s fix this too.” Then, before she could stop him, he tugged off her drenched hat, flashed an amused glance at what was surely some scary-ass hair, then replaced her hat with the one from his own head. The Mammoths, of course. He ran a hand over his own silky, dark hair, leaving it slightly tousled and perfectly sexy.
She snatched back her hat. “I like the Ducks. They’re my favorite team.”
At this, both of his players turned from Todd and stared at her. Rainey didn’t know if it was because of what she’d just said, or because no one dared sass their fearless leader. “No offense,” she said to them.
“None taken,” Casey said on a grin and held out his hand, introducing himself. James did the same.
Rainey instantly liked them both, and not just because they were famous, or cute as hell—which they were—but because they were quite harmless, as compared with their head coach. He wasn’t the least bit harmless. Rainey squirmed a little, probably due to the soapy water running down her body.
Or the way Mark was studying her with the same quiet intensity he used on the ice—which she knew because she watched his games. All of them.
“So how do you know Coach?” James asked her.
Rainey looked into Mark’s eyes. Well, not quite his eyes, since they were still behind the reflective Oakleys that probably cost more than her grocery bill for the month. “We go way back.”
Mark’s almost-smile made an appearance again. “Rainey went to school with my brother Rick.” He paused, clearly waiting for her to add something to the story.
