Fresh Ice (15 page)

Her mouth dropped open and she froze
in her seat. This was a huge mistake.

“I’m kidding,” he reassured her with a light touch on her shoulder.

She forced herself not to flinch and focused instead on the warmth from his hand seeping through her sweater. “Okay.” She smiled and tried to relax in the seat.

When he started the engine,
music blared from the speakers. He turned the volume down and pulled out of the parking lot.

“I really appreciate you doing this for me
,” she told him on the drive to the motel.

“It’s no problem.
I didn’t have any plans today anyway.”

In Sarah’s world, nothing ever came for free. Silently, she hoped she wouldn’t be expected to “pay
” Tony, TJ and Nathan back for the love seat with something physical. They seemed like nice people who didn’t operate that way, but Sarah had grown up in a place where sex was currency and beatings were a small price to pay for merely existing.

But then
Sarah was reminded of Miri and how she had helped her so freely not expecting anything in return except maybe friendship. Okay, so not everyone in the world operated like Dwight. Live and learn.

The closer they got to the motel, the more Sarah regretted her decision to take the
love seat home. She didn’t want anyone knowing where she lived especially someone as nice and handsome as Nathan. And successful. And charming…

Inevitably, he would judge her and only see her as
the scum she’d grown up with and was currently living amongst. It was a risk she’d have to take because it was too late to back out now. She just hoped her rowdy neighbors didn’t decide to have one of their drawn out fights while Nathan was there.

S
arah didn’t know why she cared so much about what Nathan thought about her. She’d never cared what people thought of her before. No, that wasn’t true. She had cared, but quickly learned that no matter what she did or how she acted, people would make their own judgments anyway.

“
Take a left here, right?” Nathan asked as he turned onto her street.

“Actually
…” She blushed to her toes and chewed on the inside of her cheek. Dang it, there was just no getting out of the lie she had told. “It’s over there.” She pointed to the right and at the run-down Half Moon Motel.

“
Huh.” He scratched his head. “For some reason I thought you lived over there.” He nodded to the still shabby but not so quite scary apartment building the next street over.

“
I…I, uh, didn’t exactly tell you the truth the other night. I’m sort of new to this whole
trust
thing.” As leery as she was about anyone knowing where she lived, she had to start trusting people again sometime. Despite the fact that she was starting new with a clean slate, years of abuse was hard to overcome overnight.

“
It’s okay, Sarah. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I just wanted to make sure you made it home safe.”

That
concept was new to her too. Someone besides Miri caring about her safety was as foreign to Sarah as the streets of Paris or speaking Japanese. She didn’t understand it, but she was learning.

“It’s room 201 upstairs.”

Nathan pulled into the parking lot and parked at the base of the stairs.

While Nathan laid down the tailgate of his truck, Sarah
ran upstairs and unlocked the door. Her hands shook so much she could barely get the stubborn key in the lock. Finally, the door sprang open and she hurried back down the stairs to help.

The love seat
was so small and light that Nathan probably could have carried it by himself but Sarah really wanted to help.

Nathan
easily lifted the bulk of the weight but let Sarah grab an end just to let her feel like she was helping. He turned his back to the stairs so she wouldn’t have to walk backwards and up they went.

“Sorry about the stairs,” she said, sounding like their existence was
entirely her fault.

“It’s no problem,” he reassured her.

And it really wasn’t for him. Nathan’s athleticism allowed him to climb the stairs easily regardless of the awkward piece of furniture.

Meanwhile, Sarah huffed and puffed two steps behind him.

At the top of the stairs, they shimmied the love seat through the door.

“Right here is fine
,” Sarah instructed him.

Nathan set his end down in the empty space
that looked like maybe a table had been there at some point.

When Sarah walked over to the bed to set her backpack down, Nathan used to opportunity to look the room over. Wow, this place was a real dump. The room was everything Sarah was not.
Dingy and dirty and ugly. Nathan had lived in some low budget places when he first started out in the minors but the Half Moon Motel took the rat infested cake.

The little love seat was so out of place, Nathan would have laughed it if weren’t so sad. He wished he could say it brightened up the room but it just made the place look
all the more depressing.

Sarah turned away from the bed to face him and smiled. “Thanks again
,” she said, more than a little out of breath.

“No problem.”

If he was thinking anything negative about the room, he didn’t say it and Sarah was grateful for that.

They stood for a minute, both looking at the love seat and neither knowing what to say.

Finally, Nathan cleared his throat and spoke. “I’d invite you to dinner or something but I’m leaving for Las Vegas tonight. Our first game is tomorrow.”

Her smile lit up the
drab room.

“Tha
t’s okay,” she said. “Good luck at your game.”

“Thanks.”

The people in the room next door started to fight. It wasn’t enough that they kept Sarah up most nights with their banging around but they just had to pick this exact moment in time to make their presence known. Something banged against the thin wall and Sarah jumped. “Sorry about the noise,” she said. “My neighbors always seem to find something new to fight about. They’ve been going at it all week long.”

“Yeah, I’ve shared a lot of walls
before and it sucks.”

But the thing was they weren’t fighting.
Something banged against the wall again—the bed?—and picked up a steady rhythm. Then the moaning began. Of all the times for them to make up. How embarrassing! The man grunted and the woman cried out for more. Wild sounds like something from the Discovery Channel came from the other side of the wall. Sarah pictured two Rhinoceros bumping ferociously into each other.

Sarah blushed at her poor choice of words
from two seconds ago. Yeah, they were really “going at it” now. She looked down at her shoes for fear of making eye contact with Nathan.

The woman shouted out her climax in what sounded more like a declaration of pain more than pleasure.

Sarah stifled a faux yawn. “I’m pretty tired so I wouldn’t be much company tonight anyway.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.
Nathan joggled the keys in his pocket. “Well, I’d better get going. I don’t want to miss my flight.”

“
Thanks again for the ride and for hauling that up here.”

“It was my pleasure.”
Nathan wanted to hug her goodbye or
something
, but she already looked uncomfortable enough so he just waved goodbye and walked to his truck.

As much as he tried to shake off the feeling,
Nathan’s brain was wired and his body at attention. He turned his truck in the direction of the gym and gunned the engine. There was still time before he had to be at the airport. Maybe a few hundred push-ups would get him feeling normal again.

Chapter Thirteen

Con to the Rescue

Before Nathan knew it, the Razors were in Las Vegas for their first game against the Greenbacks. Thanks to trades and free agency, the team that left the locker room was different every season. This year, the Razors organization had put together a fine team with lots of new, young talent. Every year, their goal was to make the playoffs and win the Gordie Prince Cup. Nathan liked his new team and he liked their chances.

What he didn’t like was the banter in the locker room before the game. Even though he wasn’t starting the game, he still needed to remain focused and he couldn’t do that with the guys yammering on about this, that and the other.

“I’ve got date with model tomorrow,” Sebby bragged, his Russian accent thick.

“Oh yeah?
What kind of modeling does she do?” Cody Lambert, the team captain asked.

“Yeah,”
Patrik Levine chimed in. “The kind
with
or
without
clothes?”

“She works at
Hooders,” Sebby told them.

“Hooter’s?!
” Patrik exclaimed. “The girls who work at Hooter’s are called waitresses, Seb. Not models.”

“Ha!”
Sebby stood and pointed to the ceiling and contorted his face. He pulled out his phone and passed it to Nathan. “Check out Miss October,” he instructed.

Nathan
glanced at the photo. Miss October was pretty with long black hair, almond eyes and legs that went for miles. He nodded and passed the phone to Patrik.

Patrik
practically drooled on the phone. “Oooh, exotic,” he cooed.

“I’m taking her to Club 21
,” Sebby announced.

“What, no dinner before drinks?”
Cody asked.

“Nah.
She serves food all day. She doesn’t want to go out to eat.”

The room erupted with laughter and became quiet just as quickly when Coach
Baker walked in. It was game time.

From
Nathan’s spot on the bench he had an unobstructed view of the game. The Greenbacks were playing well and Sebby didn’t look so good in the net. The Russian goaltender seemed sluggish and disoriented and that wasn’t like him at all. He managed to keep the puck out of the net during the first and second period but he still looked like shit doing it.

During intermission,
Sebby hobbled into the locker room and over to his stall. He sank down to his seat, his arms wrapped around his middle.

Nathan
sat down in his stall next to him. “You all right, Seb?”

“
Yeah, you look like shit, Sebby,” Patrik pointed out. “What’s going on out there?”

Seb
by winced, bent over and grabbed his side. “There’s pain,” he replied, his accent thicker than usual. In Russian, he rattled off what Nathan assumed were obscenities.

The
team’s athletic trainer rushed in and knelt at Sebby’s side. Coach Baker hovered nearby looking worried. The trainer helped Sebby take off his pads so he could pinpoint the problem. He felt around Sebby’s abdomen and Sebby groaned. “I think I throw up,” he moaned.

“Come on,
” The trainer told Sebby. “Let’s get you to the med room. I think it might be your appendix.”

Coach
Baker looked at Nathan and nodded. “You’re goin’ in for the third.”

Nathan nodded and took a deep breath. Keeping his emotions in check, he ran through the opposing players in his mind. Donner liked to shoot high right
, Gusteau had a wicked slapshot and Devereaux was known for screening goalies…

This was it.
The stakes were high. Then again, the stakes were always high in hockey. Nathan couldn’t afford to let his emotions get the best of him. No anger. No excitement. Just cool, calm and collected.

When the intermission was over,
Nathan adjusted his pads, grabbed his stick and led his team through the tunnel and out onto the ice.

* * *

Things were much clearer when Dwight woke up from his second sleeping-pill-laced, whiskey-induced-coma. The temple pounding headache was still there but he could get past it long enough to think.

If he were Sarah, what was the first thing he’d need to make an escape? That was easy.
Money. There was no way she’d have enough money on her own to skip town because he forced her to hand over every one of her paychecks. Even if someone had taken her in and helped her, she’d still need some dough.

When Dwight stormed into the kitchen, the grimy windows rattled in their frames. He stumbled up to the sink and pried open the sticky cupboard beneath. He reached in, dug in the back of the cupboard and felt around for the coffee can. A rat skittered away from his hand as he grabbed the tin and pulled it out.

“Goddammit!” The wad of cash was gone. The baggie of drugs was still there and he rolled it around in his fingers. Of course she’d take the money and leave behind the good stuff. She was as stupid as they came. He liked her that way, though. Not a thought of her own in that pretty little head of hers. It wouldn’t be so pretty when he was through with her.

He dropped the tin on the floor where it rolled to a stop against the refrigerator grate.