On the Fly (31 page)

The horn blared again, signaling the
end of the game.

“
I’ll give it to her,”
Laura said after glancing at the scoreboard one more time. The
Storm had won. She slid the envelope into her own purse. “She’ll
like it, but probably not as much as she’d like the other
thing.”

“
How is Katie?” I asked. In
all the chaos yesterday with Maddie and then seeing Brenden get
hurt today, I hadn’t even thought about her until now. “She didn’t
look so hot when you left yesterday.”

Laura shook her head. “Not really any
better. We made an appointment with the doctor for later in the
week. With Christmas, we couldn’t get her in any
sooner.”

The crowd in the arena started to
trickle toward the exits. Over the loudspeaker, the announcer
listed off the three stars of the game, who each came out and gave
a final wave to the folks who were sticking around to see. Hunter
Fielding, the backup goaltender who’d become the starter because of
Nicky’s concussion, tossed a puck over the glass to a fan on his
way off the ice after being named the first star.

Tuck’s delighted squeal had me
spinning around in my seat to see what was happening. Nicky stood
in the entry to the suite in a suit and tie.

“
Hey, Ginger Ninja,” he
said, messing with Tuck’s hair. Then he turned his smile on me.
“Soupy asked me to bring you and the kids down so he wouldn’t have
to come up here. Too much walking.”

“
All right.” I got up and
grabbed my purse, then said my goodbyes to the girls. “Laura, let
me know what happens with Katie. And I want to know how the date
goes, Sara.”

“
I’ll give you more detail
than you can handle,” Sara promised.

“
See you tomorrow!” Dana
called after me as I headed out onto the concourse with Nicky and
the kids. Maddie held out her hand for me once I caught up to
them.

Tuck grabbed Nicky’s hand. “You can’t
walk on the red lines, Mr. Nicky.” He stopped and made a wild leap
over the next line he saw.

“
Why not?” Nicky
asked.

“
If you walk on the red
lines, the sharks will come out of the roof and eat your head and
Mommy will cry because you’ll bleed a lot.”

“
Oh, we’d better not step
on them, then. I didn’t know sharks could fly.”

“
Only in the hockey
place.”

They came to another red
line, and Nicky made a big show of stepping carefully over it. Tuck
jumped so far forward that he fell and had to stand up again. As
soon as he did, he gave Nicky a serious look. “You gotta
jump
so the trantosausus
doesn’t stomp you.”

“
Tyrannosaurus,” I
corrected him, mainly so that Nicky would have a clue what he was
saying. Interpreting kid-speak could be a challenge.

Nicky nodded, and Tuck said, “Right.
Trantosausus. That’s what I said.”

Maddie giggled.

After we’d gone past a few sections,
some of the fans we were passing recognized Nicky. He stopped and
signed a few autographs, and Tuck came back to me with his mouth
hanging open wide.

“
Mommy, is Mr. Nicky
famous
?”

Nicky laughed. “Not as famous as
Babs.” He posed for a picture with the fans and then held out his
hand for Tuck again, who’d suddenly turned shy and was hiding
behind my leg.

I’d never seen him like this before.
“Come on, silly. Don’t you have to help him jump over red lines
still?”

“
Oh, yeah!” That was all
the encouragement he needed.

After two more sections, complete with
four more red lines to leap over, we got to the elevator that would
take us down to ice level. The concrete flooring down there didn’t
have any more red lines for Tuck to jump, so he just walked along
normally.

Nicky led us into a different series
of rooms than I’d been in after the last game we’d attended, which
were filled with medical equipment and exam tables. Brenden was
sitting on one at the far end with his leg elevated, talking to
Jim. He had a walking boot on his foot, and a pair of crutches was
leaning against the wall next to him.

Jim turned when we came in and smiled.
“There they are. Why don’t you get out of here? Take them home and
have a good Christmas. We’ll talk when everyone comes back after
the holiday.”

“
Yeah. Right.” Brenden
wasn’t smiling. He looked as miserable as I’d ever seen
him.

“
Hey, how long’s your dad
in town?” Jim asked.

“
They’re staying until the
new year.”

“
Have him stop by and see
me sometime, okay? I’d like to catch up with him.”

Brenden nodded. “I’m sure he’s already
planning on it.”

“
Good, good.” Jim headed
for the door, telling me, “Make sure he keeps that ankle up and
ices it. I’ll see you in a few days.”

“
I’ll leave you, too,”
Nicky said. “
God Jul
.”

That was the first time I’d ever heard
him speak when he didn’t sound as American as apple pie.

“
Merry Christmas,” Tuck
shouted after them. Then he jumped up onto the bed beside Brenden.
“Mr. Soupy, did you know that Mr. Nicky is famous?”

Brenden chuckled, which was a positive
sight. “Someone told me he might be. I can’t remember
who…”

“
You gotta tell me this
stuff. That’s part of our deal. ’Kay?”

I narrowed my eyes at Brenden, but he
ignored me. He and Tuck had talked about some deal yesterday, too,
and I wanted to know what it was all about. He just winked at me.
It’d have to wait for later.

“
Okay.” Brenden reached for
the crutches and eased himself off the bed, wincing when he put
some weight on his left leg. “I’ll try to keep it in mind. Let’s
get out of here, though. Doc says I have to keep my ankle up. Why
don’t we pick up some take-out on the way home?” He winked at
Maddie and gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek.

Tuck leaped down and moved beside
Brenden, putting his hands on his hips. “Kissing Mommy isn’t in the
deal.”

“
It’s not? Maybe we need to
renegotiate.”

Tuck thought about that for a second.
“What’s renotiate?”

“
Renegotiate,” Brenden
repeated. “It means we come up with new terms. You tell me what you
need, and I tell you what I need.”

“
Okay.” Tuck pursed his
lips together and tapped his finger on them. “If you get to kiss
Mommy, I want pizza for dinner tonight.”

“
Now those are terms I can
live with,” Brenden said. That was the only warning I got before he
leaned down and gave me a toe-curling kiss.

When he pulled away, I couldn’t seem
to catch my breath.

“
I got a plan, Maddie,”
Tuck whispered. “We’re getting pizza for a week!”

Rachel brought over
a baggie of ice and helped me situate my leg on
her coffee table, putting a throw pillow beneath my ankle and the
ice on top of it.

Doc said I hadn’t broken anything this
time—X-rays were negative, so it was just a nasty ankle sprain with
a deep contusion over it where Bieksa had slashed me. It would keep
me out of games for a while, probably a few weeks, but hopefully
not too much longer than that. Any amount of time was longer than I
wanted, though.

Also, there was no telling if or when
Scotty would be willing to let me get back out there with the team.
I’d never seen him so pissed. It seemed like the stress of trying
to get this team to the playoffs two years in a row was catching up
to him, and I hadn’t helped that at all.

Right now, the Storm was sitting in
playoff positioning at least. But that could change anytime we
played or anytime one of the other teams in the playoff hunt
played, and at the moment we weren’t playing consistently. I needed
to fix that in my game. I needed to do what I’d told the guys in
Seattle to do—play for the team, not for myself. Lately, I’d just
been trying to keep my spot. That wasn’t enough to make sure the
Storm kept its spot.

Rachel glared at me. Her lips were in
the sexiest pout that helped turn my thoughts away, at least for
now, from all the problems I’d caused for myself and my team
tonight. “I had no intention of letting them eat pizza tonight, you
know,” she said.

I took her hand and tugged until she
sat down next to me. “I know. But Tuck and I made a deal.” I kissed
her again so I could make good use of that particular aspect of our
deal.

Maddie was in the chair near the
window reading her book with Pumpkin curled up on the back of it,
standing guard over his girl and keeping an eye on me. Tuck sat
cross-legged on the floor playing some video game or another on a
Nintendo DS that Babs had let him borrow. Neither of them bothered
to look up while I was kissing their mom.

“
That’s another thing,” she
said when I let her go. She laughed and hit me on the chest with
another throw pillow. “Why are you making deals with my kid that I
don’t know about?”

“
Hey!” I took the pillow
from her and shoved it behind my back where she couldn’t get it
again without really working for it. “This deal is working in your
favor. You get kisses.”

“
And my kids eat
pizza—after you let Tuck eat mac and cheese and brownies last
night.
And
he told
me it was a secret, supposedly on your orders.”

“
I wouldn’t go so far as to
say it was on my orders,” I hedged.

“
You didn’t contradict him,
though. I only figured it out when I tried to clean the mess off
his clothes.”

Someone knocked on the door, and Tuck
jumped to his feet. “Pizza!” He raced to the door, rushed back to
get the cash I was holding out for him, and made another mad dash
to get the promised pizza.

By the time he’d completed
the exchange with the delivery person, Maddie had set her book down
and gone to the kitchen for paper plates and napkins. I couldn’t
stop marveling over how well mannered these two kids were. I could
hardly blink without them saying
please
or
thank you
, calling people
Mr.
and
Miss
and
ma’am
and
sir
. Yeah, Tuck could be
a handful—and a messy one at that—but he was a polite messy
handful.

Rachel put slices on plates and passed
them to everyone—giving Tuck a stack of about a dozen napkins—and
sat down next to me again. “So this deal… When do I get to know
what it involves?”

“
What do you think, Tuck?
Should we tell her?”

He stuffed a huge piece of pizza in
his mouth. “It don’t gotta be a secret, I guess.” A gob of pizza
sauce fell out and splattered onto his shirt and plate. Good thing
he was sitting on the floor. I’d probably be in even bigger trouble
with Rachel if he made a mess of her furniture.

“
Well,” I said, setting my
plate on my lap, “last night while we were hanging out in the
waiting room, Tuck and I agreed we hadn’t done a very good job
taking care of Maddie yesterday.” Maddie turned as red as Rachel
always did when I embarrassed her, but I kept talking. “So we made
a deal that we would work as a team to take care of both Maddie and
you. He’ll take care of all the kid stuff, like letting Maddie wear
his cape last night to help her get better faster, and I’ll take
care of all the grown-up stuff, like making sure she’s got the
right protective gear on if she’s doing something where she might
get hurt.”