Heather Graham (22 page)

“Miss Hudson, Paul Crane cares a great deal about the stupid game. And I care even more, Katie, because I have a real thing against foul play—”

“Foul play! What the hell could be any different? You spend your life talking about ‘killing’ one another! What could be any different about—”

“I’ll tell you what could be different,” Kent interrupted icily, striding into the living room before forcing himself to stop a few feet away from her. “Normally, when the game is played, defensive tackles go for the quarterback. Normally. The offensive guards are supposed to guard the quarterback. Sometimes the quarterback gets blitzed anyway. A bunch of guys fall on him, and, yes, sometimes he gets hurt. But in a normal game the ball is the focus of the play. No one tries to ‘kill’ the quarterback once he’s gotten rid of the ball. The way it looks now, it isn’t going to matter one bit if Sam’s holding that ball or not. Crane isn’t going to play for possession of the ball—he’s going to play to get Sam out of the game.”

Katie watched him in silence for a minute. His hands were on his hips, so tense that the knuckles were white.

She wondered if she had dated a man who could really be so vicious as Kent purported Paul to be. Katie knew that he played rough, but he was a tackle … he was supposed to.

“Sam’s already hurt, Katie,” Kent said more quietly.

“And he shouldn’t be playing in the stupid game to begin with!” she retorted in exasperation.

“Don’t you understand anything?” he thundered suddenly. “Paul is on the take! He has to made sure his team wins that game!”

“Well, if you know that for sure, then tell someone!” Katie shouted back.

He threw up his arms and looked for a moment as if he intended to choke her—then turned on his heel with a disgusted grunt and returned to the kitchen.

He pulled something from the refrigerator and threw it on the counter with a thud. Then his eyes were on her again. “Go take a bath and put on some dry clothes. Eat something. Then you can go to sleep and pretend that I don’t exist.”

“Take a bath?” Katie started to laugh. “With you here? Not on your life.”

“I won’t interrupt you.”

“Right,” she said bitterly, “just like you won’t talk to me.”

He looked at her. The expression in his eyes had become a sardonic one. His gaze roamed over her in a long, head-to-toe assessment that was less than flattering.

“Miss Hudson, what makes you think I’m so overwhelmed with desire that I would come running into a bathroom to assault you?” He smiled without humor. “Speak of egos.”

What raked along her spine was an emotion so strong it left her feeling weak. She would explode; she felt that terrible urge to cry because it was all so stupid; she wanted to tear him to pieces.

“I think,” she managed to say very coolly, “that I have very little reason to trust anything about you, Mr. Hart. I don’t know what went on during that phone call, but I’ve never seen more despicable behavior afterward.”

“Oh?” He lifted a brow. “You seemed to be doing all right.” He smiled once again, only it wasn’t a smile at all. It was serious and controlled. “Your hands were all over me, sweetheart. I couldn’t see much sense in disappointing us both.”

Katie froze for a minute, then she returned his smile, sweetly. “Kent, I’ve always abhorred the violent side of football. I had good reason to do so. But when this game does come up, I hope you’re ‘killed’ all the way through.”

“Me?” he returned softly. “You know, I have a hard time figuring out why I come out being the bad guy here. I didn’t come up to New York to drag you out of your pristine office. You came to me—supposedly hating every minute of it but determined to get your story. Then I get on a plane and you’re there. You turn into such a sultry little kitten that you hit your mark right on the line. I invite you here because we both knew by that point that I couldn’t keep my hands off you. And everything’s great—just great. I’m so totally enamored, I come off like a little kid. I talk to you like I would to Sam—after all, you’re Hudson’s daughter, you understand everything I’m saying. I admit we have a weak defense. I even tell you how we plan to play the game. Quarter by quarter.”

“So what?” Katie hissed.

“So …” He gave her a bitter grimace and rounded the counter to face her again. “When I met you in the locker room, Katie, I was led to believe you were closing your eyes to the fact that I was a football player—for the sake of your career. Kathleen Hudson. Surely she would hate the game that cost her father his health and finally his life. And surely, understandably, she would have an anathema for football players. Except that I find out in the middle of very impassioned lovemaking that Miss Kathleen Hudson is about to announce her engagement to another football player—a man she’s been seeing for half a year. And not just any football player, somehow, just somehow, this guy turns up being our opposition for the biggest game of the season. Meanwhile, rumor is running rampant that the big betters in Vegas—some real big guys, with questionable underworld associations—have this guy in their pockets. He has to win the game. Has to! So here we have his lovely fiancée … cuddled up to me, listening avidly to every word I have to say. This same woman who disliked me rather personally because I supposedly ignored her father—while she returned my letters. She knows how and when Sam will be vulnerable, all sorts of wonderful information to run back to New York with. What am I supposed to believe? Should I have just lain back and racked my mind for any other helpful details to give you?”

Katie stared at him incredulously—hurt, horrified, and angry. And then, ridiculously, she began to laugh. “You think that I slept with you for football secrets? Oh, my God! The whole pack of you are a bunch of narrow-eyed jocks! I don’t give a damn who wins that game.”

“Dammit, Kathleen!” The food he’d placed on the counter went flying to the floor, and she was startled at the sheer violence of the action, meeting his eyes with her heart fluttering despite the inner knowledge that he would never really hurt her. “Then why didn’t you
TELL ME?”

“Tell you what?” she cried vehemently.

“About Paul, about the fact you were planning an engagement. That I was in bed worshiping—falling in love with—another man’s woman.”

She stared at him, mesmerized by his eyes and the tension and pain in his voice. She wanted to go to him, but something inside her prevented it. If he had been falling in love with her, he wouldn’t have listened to Sam. Kent would have trusted her enough to talk to her, not mock the very act of love between them and turn it into an act of fury and vengeance.

“I’m not engaged or anything of the like to Paul Crane,” Katie said tiredly. “I’ve dated him, yes. But then”—she hugged her arms about her chest and met his eyes with reproach—“you know just how far my affair with Paul could have gone. An affair with any man, for that matter. I think that has to be the absolute clincher in this whole thing, Kent. You knew there couldn’t have been any deep and passionate affair taking place. But Sam Loper calls up, and what Sam says is like the voice of God.”

“Then maybe you’d better let the papers—and Paul—know that. The facts coincided nicely, don’t you think?”

“I don’t have a hell of a lot of say about what someone chooses to print in a paper. And I don’t think it matters much, does it?” she asked him coldly. “I’ll be out of here tomorrow, running back to New York with all with this world-shaking information for Paul.”

“Is that what you’re going to do?” he asked in an unexpected whisper.

“It’s what you believe, isn’t it?” she challenged.

“I’d rather not believe it.”

She started to laugh again. “Isn’t it a bit late to be asking me for explanations?”

He turned around, and she lost sight of him as he dipped down to retrieve the things that had flown from the counter. When he rose, his back was to her. “It would be nice to know just what you were up to,” he said coldly.

“Up to …” Katie shook her head, then shivered suddenly. The snow was permeating her clothing; she felt damp and more miserable than she had ever been in her life. Less than an hour ago she had been warmed, touched, by him, glowing as she held tight to a dream. But all that had changed now. As she watched him, it was hard to believe. The man with the broad shoulders and fluid strength was not hers anymore. It was almost impossible to believe that he ever had been—equally impossible to forget how she had loved to love him, and be loved by him in turn. If she could just erase the last hour, the things that he had said …

It still wouldn’t do any good, Katie thought, a sour taste filling her mouth. He had talked to her now, but he’d offered no apology. He was demanding that she prove her innocence. Innocence! She’d done nothing at all except become a victim of circumstance.

“Okay, Kent,” she said at last, “I’m going to tell you the whole horrible truth. I never told you about Paul because it was really none of your business—we haven’t been at the confess-all stage for long, you know. Then, too, there just wasn’t anything to tell. I did date the man, having no idea that such a thing would brand me as a spy and public-enemy-number-one to the Saxons.”

She turned around—not so much because she had finished speaking but because tears were stinging her eyes. After what he had said she would never, never let him see her cry. He would never find her weaknesses.

“What are you doing now?” Kent called out harshly to her.

She spun around, resenting his authoritative tone. “What is this? Dante was my father, Kent. And Dante is gone.”

He started walking to her once again; she tensed, fully aware that his temper had eased as little as hers. He didn’t look at all like a man ready to offer a humble apology. Yet she feared him, not because of his anger but because of his eyes. They were as dark as the night, full of brooding tension, and she felt then that he was perhaps as torn as she—wondering where the black and white of truth and lies became gray. She didn’t want him near her because, for all her fury, she wanted to cradle herself against his chest and burst into tears of confusion and misery.

“Dante is gone,” he agreed with her quietly. “But I think we’re both walking on thin lines right now. You want to be left alone? Then, please, behave sensibly. I’d just as soon not be responsible for you coming down with a case of pneumonia, so you’ve got two choices. Take a hot bath and get dressed on your own … or I’ll see that you do.”

Katie stared at him, wishing she dared take a swing at his face. But she didn’t dare, and since she knew that he was in the same combustible turmoil as she, she didn’t doubt for one minute that he would carry out any soft-spoken threat. Or warning. Whichever it was.

“Do you treat your own daughter like this?” Katie asked him caustically.

“I don’t have to,” he told her briefly. “Anne has the sense to come in out of the cold.”

Katie looked at him slowly, crossing her arms over her chest. “Right,” she murmured, “she’s probably afraid you’ll knock her halfway through a goalpost if she doesn’t.”

“Someone,” he replied coolly, “should have knocked you halfway through a goalpost years ago.”

“Yes, that is your opinion, isn’t it?”

“Katie, your problem is that you think you can play by your own rules—separate rules—and no one else is supposed to mind.”

“Your problem,” she replied evenly, “is that you’ve come to believe that everything is a game.”

“Thank you, Miss Hudson. I’ll try to mend my ways. Now, are you going to take that bath, or do you need my assistance?”

“I’m going. I just want to remind you of one more thing. What I did or didn’t know about the game doesn’t mean anything in the long run. None of your meticulous game plans mean a thing. You know as well as I do that when you get on that field, things change. If things always went as planned, Cougar, there wouldn’t be any losers, would there?”

Katie left her question hanging in the air. She turned around and walked down the hall, shutting the bedroom door behind her. She turned on the light in the room, and the first sight that greeted her eyes was the bed, tousled and disheveled. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, wondering how and why she had ever gotten herself into this position.

Hating a man, loving him—and hating herself because she was foolish enough to love him still, no matter what had been said and done. What was the matter with her? Where was her pride? Hiding behind her hurt, she decided wryly. But it didn’t matter if her pride chose to lurk in her soul, as long as she could pretend that it was at the fore.

She closed her eyes against the pictures of the bed, but the memories of whispered moans, entangled limbs, and promises that could never be kept still haunted her.

She let her wet clothing fall to the floor as she filled the tub with water. Then she sank down, glad of the heat, glad that the water dulled the pain that gripped her heart.

Hart, heart … heartbreaker Hart. She should be laughing; she had never expected more.

She laid her head against the rim of the tub and closed her eyes. It was over. She still wanted to kill him, to pound the truth into him. She wanted him on his knees, telling her how wrong he was, how very, very sorry—how much he loved her, and how, because he loved her, he’d gotten carried away.

Foolish. He’d never said he loved her. He’d only said he wanted to sleep with her more than once. Big difference, Katie, she told herself bitterly. And he still believed she came here because Paul sent her to figure out the Saxon game plan.

Paul! Damn him. Was he running around telling everyone they were engaged? What a mess …

Katie tensed suddenly, wondering if it could be true. Was Paul on the take from big money? She shivered. Katie couldn’t believe it; she couldn’t believe that anyone—even a rough, burly tackle—would want to seriously injure another player. They got hurt all the time, yes, but seldom as badly as her father had been. And her father’s injury had been an accident; he had just been hit once too often in the wrong place.

She shivered again despite the heat of the water. She wanted to wash out Sam Loper’s mouth with a dozen different kinds of lye, but she didn’t want to see him hurt. Not again, not when his ribs couldn’t possibly mend fully before the game.