“That’s all you see?”
“No—we always have at least a day of sightseeing. Nate’s fun. I’ve been to the Great Wall of China. Another time he booked us a sushi-eating tour of Tokyo. I’ve never been so full in my life.”
He chuckled, his eyes closed against the sun’s rays. He hoped Lauren had had a lot of fun on Nate’s dime, and a big, exciting life these past two years. He ached just to hear how much he’d missed.
I haven’t trusted anyone since, she’d said the other night. It killed him to know he’d done that to her.
“Aren’t you supposed to be upstairs resting?” she asked.
“I’m resting. Look at me rest.” He held perfectly still. But then he opened one eye to see if she was looking.
Nope.
Figures.
“Hey, Lo?” he asked. “You need me to rub any sunscreen on your back?” He didn’t mind sounding like a lovesick teenager if she’d keep talking to him.
“Thanks but no thanks.”
“Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
She rolled her eyes in his direction. “Go nap, Michael. Your team needs you to be perky.”
“I’m perky already.”
She let out a little snort. “Right. Then can you watch my stuff for a second so that I can buy an iced tea?”
“I’ll get it for you.” He sat up.
She popped out of her chair first, though, and grabbed a wallet out of her shoulder bag. “Be right back.”
Her long, bare legs sashayed away, and he groaned to himself. Her hair swung back and forth as she moved, giving him glimpses of smooth shoulders. If he went upstairs to nap right now, the image of Lauren’s perfect backside would probably torture him.
He heard a small thud and looked down. Lauren’s shoulder bag had tipped over, the contents threatening to spill onto the pavement. He nudged a sunglasses case and a pen back into the bag. Just as he was righting her bag, a prescription pill bottle rolled into view. He read the name of the drug off the label before he could think better of it. Clomifene. What the heck was that?
Right there in the Florida sunshine, a chill crept over him. It wasn’t long ago that he’d lived in a home overflowing with pharmacy bottles. After Shelly’s death, he’d filled a small shopping bag with them, dropping off the last of them at the pharmacy for disposal. In fact, Mike and the pharmacist in his Long Island town were on a first-name basis by the time Shelly died.
What the hell was Clomifene for?
Easy, he cautioned himself. It could be nothing.
When Lauren reappeared at the other end of the pool a minute later, he scrutinized her again. But this time he wasn’t ogling her very appealing body. He was looking for signs of trouble.
“What?” she said with a frown when she reached her chair.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. He put his head back and closed his eyes again.
Lauren settled herself beside him. Before long he heard the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard.
He turned the name of the drug over in his mind, trying to decide what it could be. Lauren hadn’t taken any medication when they were together. He tried to think of something a healthy woman might take, and came up dry.
Maybe it’s an antidepressant, his guilty mind offered up.
Now he was never falling asleep.
He slipped his Katt Phone out of his pocket and searched the name of the drug. It came up right away. And the Wikipedia description was both a huge relief and completely confusing.
Clomifene is one of the most widely prescribed fertility drugs in the world.
His chin snapped toward Lauren. And his gaze zapped right to her very flat, very beautiful belly. “Lauren?”
“Yeah?”
He opened his mouth and then shut it again. It was really none of his goddamn business. None at all. It didn’t matter if he was burning up with surprise and curiosity.
“Oh my God, what?” she asked, staring at him. Then her phone rang. She snapped her laptop shut and reached into her bag where it lay on the ground, yanking out her own Katt Phone. “Nate? I’m by the pool.” There was a silence, and Mike fought against his interest to study the pill bottle again. It was probably visible.
No. He wasn’t going to look.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. “It’s hard to concentrate out here, anyway.” She gave him a sideways glance. “See you in five.”
“Sorry,” he said when she hung up. “I know you’re busy.”
“Go take a rest, Mike.” She flung her things into the bag without looking at him. Then she pulled a sleeveless knit dress over her head, and his traitorous eyes followed its path down her sleek body. “See you at the rink tonight.”
Then she was gone, leaving him sitting there, Googling the heck out of a fertility drug and trying to decide what it might mean.
SEVENTEEN
Six hours later, Beacon had only one thing on his mind: a black, six-ounce rubber disc. You don’t get twelve years as a starting NHL goalie unless you can concentrate when it counts.
It was the middle of a hard-fought second period and the score was still zip-zip. Brooklyn was skating hard against Tampa, defending their zone and taking shots, too. They just hadn’t quite gotten lucky enough to score.
Tampa was frustrated, too. Beacon could tell they were working harder than they’d expected to. Their star forward was Danny Skews—a wiry dude with an angry snarl. Beacon had never liked the guy. Tonight his face was even redder than usual. Beacon thought he looked ready to crack under the weight of his own frustration.
That’s cool, he told himself. A rattled offensive player was easier to read. Their opponents got a hold of the puck, and play moved down the ice toward Beacon. He stayed loose, watching the whole zone at once. That was his job—to see every possible outcome of the play, and to be ready to backstop everyone else’s errors. Skews passed to his wing, who passed it back.
Then something beautiful happened. O’Doul got into Skews’s blind spot, and none of the Tampa players gave their man the heads-up. It shouldn’t have worked, but O’Doul leaned in at just the right split second and blocked the next pass, getting his stick on the puck just long enough to redirect it back to Trevi.
Skews got stripped while twenty thousand people watched.
The guy’s response was to trip O’Doul, who went down grinning. And then it got even better, because Skews got called for the trip. That’s when his composure snapped. “Fuck you!” he screamed at the ref, while O’Doul openly laughed.
“C’mon.” The ref pointed toward the sin bin.
“That was a clean check,” Skews argued.
“Really? You want to fight it? We can make it four minutes,” the ref offered.
“Fuck you,” Skews spat again. “Bunch of little fucking faggots, all of you.” He turned toward the penalty box.
“Classy,” Trevi muttered as he skated past.