CHAPTER 6
Bo shot through the goal crease and slammed the puck into the net.
“Morning!”
That voice cut through his focus, and without breaking his stride, Bo changed direction and skated over to the rink entrance. He stopped hard, ice spraying out from his skates, and stood in front of the wolfdog.
He stared down at her and she stared up at him. She kept smiling even when he didn’t. Finally he asked, “What time did we agree on?”
“Seven,” she replied with a cheery note that put his teeth on edge.
“And what time is it?”
“Uh . . .” She dug into her jeans and pulled out a cell phone. The fact that she still had on that damn, useless watch made his head want to explode. How did one function—as an adult anyway—without a goddamn watch?
Grinning so that he could see all those perfectly aligned teeth, she said, “Six forty-five!”
“And what time did we agree on?”
She blinked and her smile faded. After a moment, “Seven.”
“Is it seven?”
“No.” When he only continued to stare at her, she softly asked, “Want to meet me at the track at seven?”
He continued to stare at her until she nodded and said, “Okay.”
She walked out and Bo went back to work.
Fifteen minutes later, Bo walked into the small arena. Blayne, looking comfortable in dark blue leggings, sweatshirt, and skates, turned to face him. He expected her to be mad at him or, even worse, for her to get that wounded look he often got from people when he was blatantly direct. But having to deal with either of those scenarios was a price Bo was always willing to pay to ensure that the people in his life understood how he worked from the beginning. This way, there were no surprises later. It was called “boundaries,” and he read about it in a book.
Yet when Blayne saw him, she grinned and held up a Starbucks cup. “Coffee,” she said when he got close. “I got you the house brand because I had no idea what you would like. And they had cinnamon twists, so I got you a few of those.”
He took the coffee, watching her close. Where was it? The anger? The resentment? Was she plotting something?
Blayne held the bag of sweets out for him and Bo took them. “Thank you,” he said, still suspicious even as he sipped his perfectly brewed coffee.
“You’re welcome.” And there went that grin again. Big and brighter than the damn sun. “And I get it. Seven means seven. Eight means eight, et cetera, et cetera. Got it and I’m on it. It won’t happen again.” She said all that without a trace of bitterness or annoyance, dazzling Bo with her understanding more than she’d dazzled him with those legs.
“So.” She put her hands on her hips. “What do you want me to do first?”
Marry me? Wait. No, no. Incorrect response. It’ll just weird her out and make her run again. Normal. Be normal. You can do this. You’re not just a great skater. You’re a normal great skater.
When Bo knew he had his shit together, he said, “Let’s work on your focus first. And, um, should I ask what happened to your face?” She had a bunch of cuts on her cheeks. Gouges. Like something small had pawed at her.
“Nope!” she chirped, pulling off her sweatshirt. She wore a worn blue T-shirt underneath with B&G PLUMBING scrawled across it. With sweatshirt in hand, Blayne skated over to the bleachers, stopped, shook her head, skated over to another section of bleachers, stopped, looked at the sweatshirt, turned around, and skated over to the railing. “I should leave it here,” she explained. “In case I get chilly.”
It occurred to Bo he’d just lost two minutes of his life watching her try to figure out where to place a damn sweatshirt. Two minutes that he’d never get back.
“Woo-hoo!” she called out once she hit the track. “Let’s go!”
She was skating backward as she urged him to join her with both hands.
He pointed behind her. “Watch the—”
“Ow!”
“—pole.”
Christ, what had he gotten himself into?
Christ almighty, what had she gotten herself into?
Twenty minutes in and she wanted to smash the man’s head against a wall. She wanted to go back in time and kick the shit out of Genghis Khan before turning on his brothers, Larry and Moe. Okay. That wasn’t their names but she could barely remember Genghis’s name on a good day, how the hell was she supposed to remember his brothers’? But whatever the Khan kin’s names may be, Blayne wanted to hurt them all for cursing her world with this . . . this . . . Visigoth!
Even worse, she knew he didn’t even take what she did seriously. He insisted on calling it a chick sport. If he were a sexist pig across the board, Blayne could overlook it as a mere flaw in his upbringing. But, she soon discovered, Novikov had a very high degree of respect for female athletes. . . as long as they were athletes and not just “hot chicks in cute outfits, roughing each other up. All you guys need is some hot oil or mud and you’d have a real moneymaker on your hands.”
And yet, even while he didn’t respect her sport as a sport, he still worked her like he was getting her ready for the Olympics.
After thirty minutes, she wanted nothing more but to lie on her side and pant. She doubted the hybrid would let her get away with that, though.
Shooting around the track, Blayne got stopped again in a way that she was finding extremely annoying—he grabbed her by the head with that big hand of his and held her in place.
He shoved her back with one good push, and Blayne fought not to fall on her ass at that speed. When someone shoved her like that, they were usually pissed. He wasn’t.
“I need to see something,” he said, still nursing that cup of coffee. He’d finished off the cinnamon twists in less than five minutes while she was warming up. “Come at me as hard as you can.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, looking him over. He didn’t have any of his protective gear on, somehow managing to change into sweatpants and T-shirt and still make it down to the track exactly at seven. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she told him honestly.
The laughter that followed, however, made her think she did want to hurt him. She wanted to hurt him a lot. When he realized she wasn’t laughing with him—or, in this case, laughing at herself since he was obviously laughing at her—Novikov blinked and said, “Oh. You’re not kidding.”
“No. I’m not kidding.”
“Oh. Oh! Um . . . I’ll be fine. Hit me with your best shot.”
“Like Pat Benatar?” she joked, but when he only stared at her, she said, “Forget it.”
Blayne sized up the behemoth in front of her and decided to move back a few more feet so she could get a really fast start. She got into position and took one more scrutinizing look. It was a skill her father had taught her. To size up weakness. Whether the weakness of a person or a building or whatever. Of course, Blayne often used this skill for good, finding out someone’s weakness and then working to help them overcome it. Her father, however, used it to destroy.
Lowering her body, Blayne took a breath, tightened her fists, and took off. She lost some speed on the turn but picked it up as she cut inside. As Blayne approached Novikov, she sized him up one more time as he stood there casually, sipping his coffee and watching her move around the track. Based on that last assessing look, she slightly adjusted her position and slammed into him with everything she had.
And, yeah, she knocked herself out cold, but it was totally worth it when the behemoth went down with her.
Bo had been hit by four-hundred-plus-pound guys since he joined his high school team. He’d had guys who literally wanted him dead slam into him with the force of a rampaging herd of cattle. A few had managed to take him down. A couple had managed to ring his bell. But none, absolutely none, had managed to catch him off guard.
She’d been coming at him one way and, as he sipped his coffee and let his mind readjust his schedule for the day to allow for this hour of non-personal-training, she’d abruptly changed direction, hitting him on his weaker right side—and dumping him right on his ass.
The remainder of his coffee sprayed across the track, the back of his head hit the ground hard, and Bo suddenly remembered what it was like to see the world from this position.
It took him a moment to shake himself out of that stupor that comes with shock. And he wished he could dismiss it as merely a “lucky shot.” But he knew intent when he saw it. She’d wanted to knock him on his ass and she had. A tiny wolfdog had done what guys who had trained for years had been unable to do.
Worried she’d really hurt herself in the process, Bo released the empty cup he was still holding and brought his hands up to grip Blayne’s shoulders.
“Blayne? Blayne, can you hear me?”
She groaned and he let out a relieved sigh. She placed her hands on his chest and slowly levered herself up. What he found most disturbing, though, was that when she did, he heard what could only be called a series of snapping noises that did nothing but kind of weird him out.
Blayne gritted her teeth as the noises continued and let out a breath when they stopped. She shook her head, glanced around.
“Blayne?” Big brown eyes focused on him. “Are you okay?”
“Uh-huh.” Her head tilted to the side. “Why are you on the floor?”
“Because this is where you put me.”
“Where I . . .” She shook her head again. “What?”
“You dropped me like a ton of bricks, Blayne.”
“Me? I . . . I did this?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you serious? Or are you just being nice?”
“Nice?” he asked. “Is that a real word or did you just make that up? I’m not familiar with this word . . . nice. Is it French?”
She sat up straight, her hands covering her mouth. “Oh, my . . . oh, my God!”
She scrambled off him and got to her feet, shooting around the track with her arms high in the air. And, not surprising since she was from Philly, she began singing the “Rocky” theme, but she didn’t know the words so it pretty much consisted of, “Something, something now! Getting something, something now!”
He should be livid or, at the very least, morbidly embarrassed. He wasn’t. He couldn’t remember ever making someone so happy before, and it had to be the most pleasant experience he’d had in a very long time.
Bo sat up and watched her. “Blayne?”
“Something high now!”
“Blayne, watch out for the—”
“Ow!”
“—pole.”