Power Play (Crimson Romance) Read online

  Abruptly, her narrative broke off. She was coming to the part of the story that she loved best, and that her mind had recently begun to gloss over. The memories of those sweet first days were not the kind of recollections she wanted any longer. It stung her that they could still resurface and with such force.

  “And then?” her companion prompted. He sounded an echo of her own thoughts.

  And then what, Lila? And then, he gave you the happiest days of your life.

  “In grade eleven,” she said, “he was traded to a junior hockey team up in northern Ontario. He had to move away from his parents, his friends, his school. Everything had to change.”

  “I know about that,” Jack said. “I was traded a couple times in juniors.”

  Lila paid this information no attention.

  “He could only come back about once a month, and during the end of the school year and into the summers. When he did finally come back, it was hard to fit in. His friends had changed, the schoolwork was different. His parents were going through their separation around that time. Cahal was trying to keep them all together by playing as best as he could, studying for hours every night so that his playing would not affect his grades.”

  Jack grimaced. “But he found time for you, didn’t he? In the middle of all that playing and studying, he managed to keep in touch with you, right?”

  Lila was thinking of that first letter from him after he had gone up north. It had been five pages long and she still had it, preserved between the pages of a childhood book.

  In between the lines of that letter, he had told her how much he had loved her. There had been no talk of love, of course. Not at sixteen or even at seventeen, but they had both known during those years. There had been a tacit agreement that Lila would not date any of the Toronto boys who asked her out and that Cahal would not look too hard at the girls at his new high school.

  Their summers had been almost devoted to one another. They saw every new movie and listened to every new CD. They had held hands and kissed and groped a little in the back of his car. In those last three years of high school, Lila did not remember a single argument between the two of them.

  “We wrote each other,” Lila answered. “And he came home as often as he could. By the time we were seventeen, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Then, of course, he was drafted.”

  “Third overall draft choice,” said Jack, who had been drafted one hundred and thirty-fourth.

  “He went to Chicago and I stayed here. I wanted to go to university and get my degree, that had been my grandparents’ dream. Then, I finished my bachelor’s degree in English — ”

  “And the superstar Chicago goaltender came back to marry you,” her companion finished. His hands were tight on the steering wheel. “How simple.”

  Looking back, it had been simple. Cahal had made it so. The first contract he had signed as a professional hockey player had made him a millionaire. He bought modest houses and cars for his parents, then divorced from each other, and bought himself a flashier German sports car. He had been content to rent an apartment in Chicago at that time. Together, they had bought their first house and he had wanted it to be his first home as well so he had waited for her.

  “He paid for my university studies,” Lila said. She had never told anyone that before and she said it now as if confessing a sin.

  Jack turned to look at her and she met his gaze.

  “My grandparents might have managed to pay for university,” she said, “but on their income that would have meant putting a mortgage on the house and that house was all that they really had. They would have done it, too, but when Cahal offered the money it was like a godsend.”

  “So you took it.” There was a note of honest shock in Jack’s voice. She knew that this revelation jarred with his idea of her, the idea she had constructed for him of herself as a firmly independent woman. The truth was that her means had always come from Cahal.

  “Rather than shackling my elderly grandparents with a mortgage? Yes, I took the money. If he had offered it differently, if his parents had objected even in the slightest, perhaps I would not have done it. But I did, because Cahal acted like it was the simplest thing in the world. He had the money and I did not. Rather than take out a mortgage on the house, which still meant that I would have had to work part-time and during the summers, I took the money. Not borrowed it. Took it.”

  “But you paid him back, didn’t you?” Jack’s voice was tight, as if it were being stretched on the rack.

  Lila was angry. “I didn’t marry him as a kind of repayment, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No? But it must have been a lot of money. Twenty or thirty thousand at least.”

  “It was almost a selfish act on his part,” Lila heard herself justifying. “If I had had to work during the summers, that would have meant seeing almost nothing of one another during those years. Paying for my tuition meant that he could have all of my time during the summer time or whenever he was in town.”

  Somehow that still made it sound as if Cahal had purchased her. It had been nothing of the sort. It had been natural, almost inevitable, at the time. Cahal had been as proud of her studying as her grandparents. Maybe more so. His career had made it so that he couldn’t attend university.

  “Well, you kept a home for him for six years,” Jack acceded. “It’s not as if you owe him for whatever he might have spent on your studies. A few thousand dollars is hardly a drain for a man who makes, what, six or seven million a year. More than that now, I guess.”

  Lila knew exactly how much Cahal Wallace made; it was set out in the divorce papers. And it was substantially more than six million. She imagined Jack was pretending not to know the exact figure. Cahal’s salary in Chicago had been publicized.

  Whatever the figure, Jack was right. Her tuition had hardly been a drain on his resources, even so many years ago. The drain, if any, was in the form of Cahal’s alcoholic mother and his father who now had three young children from his second marriage. Both older Wallaces had sacrificed in their early years to provide their son with the best of opportunities. In later years, they had come to remind Cahal of this fact at increasingly frequent intervals.

  She said nothing of this to Jack because it was none of his business. Cahal’s personal life was just that, personal. The truth about her tuition and her degree was her own secret to tell. The truth about her marriage was another secret and someday, though she could not picture the occasion, she would feel comfortable enough with someone to share it. Someday.

  Chapter Two

  Lila was tired by the end of the day, though she had done nothing of any merit. She had eaten lunch with Jack, making strained conversation and trying to avoid the gazes of the other diners. She came home and watched television for a while, had been depressed by the news, and finally settled down to reread one of her old books.

  She knew very well the reason for her fatigue and it had everything to do with her husband. Her ex-husband, though Cahal no doubt would have denied that label.

  How odd it was that he should be behaving in such a way now after all the time that had passed since the separation. Acting as if she were pig-headedly pursuing a divorce for the sake of capriciousness, as if she did not have very good reasons.

  Perhaps, Lila reasoned, Cahal had simply been putting on a show for his new teammates. It appeased masculine pride to make a show of possessiveness and that was certainly what he had done. He had marked her as his own, even knowing that another man had a better claim to her nowadays.

  But did Jack have any better a claim?

  She had known Cahal most of her life and Jack only for a few months. Cahal had sometimes understood her better than she herself while Jack seemed to be in perpetual confusion regarding her motivations.

  Admittedly, she had chosen Jack to be a contrast to her first husband and he was in everything except his career. Even that was not so terrible seeing as Jack worked most of the time in Toronto, just as she did. Chicago had been pl
easant but it had never been her home.

  The irony was that Cahal now lived in Toronto as well. In light of that fact, the arguments they had had in Chicago seemed stupid and pointless. Even then … well, Lila was willing to admit the arguments might have been pointless even at the time. As Cahal had told her a thousand times over, he could not help where he lived. That was simply a function of his job. Countless other careers possessed the same drawbacks.

  But it hadn’t been just the locale Lila had resented. She had shied away from the celebrity Cahal’s talents brought him, the legions of fans who recognized him even in the most faraway places. She hated knowing that he was not just being kind to the fans but that he was happy to sign autographs, to listen to their opinions on the team’s chances, to pose for a photograph. He accepted it as a part of his job, as integral as the time on the ice, and he had grown used to the notoriety.

  Lila had hated, too, the things he had been unable to change. Cahal could have snubbed the autograph seekers but he was unable to keep his face out of the newspaper when he played hockey games three or four times a week.

  She had resented the danger inherent in his playing hockey, the inevitable minor injuries that might one day become career-ending. The muscle strains, the groin pulls, the more routine stiffness or soreness. Occasionally during the playoffs, he might not sleep through the night because of pain.

  She had resented never being able to hold down a job because any work she might find would have conflicted with his own unusual hours. Resented being away from her friends so that she was denied even that small way to spend her time. Instead, she joined the Wives and Girlfriends’ club in Chicago, joining other players’ wives and partners in organizing charity and social events. She would rather have been around when her grandparents had died, would have rather spent that time by their sides.

  There was no point in blaming Cahal. He could have insisted that she marry him right after high school, refusing to put her through university, refusing to allow her those four precious years with her grandparents while she had attended school. Those four years had been years he had spent alone in Chicago.

  In the privacy of her small apartment, Lila’s nutmeg-colored eyes darkened.

  No, she did not imagine that Cahal had been alone all of those years. Along with fans, there were always hockey groupies, young women who were eager to get closer to their favorite player in whatever way they could. Young and handsome and a rising star to boot, Cahal must have had his pick of young beauties while Lila remained innocent, waiting for him in Toronto.

  The color came to her pale cheeks as she remembered just how innocent she had been on their wedding night and how surprised that Cahal seemed to know exactly what to do to bring them both pleasure. At the time, like a silly fool, she had thought that such things came instinctively to men. She had not imagined that while she had wanted to save herself for him alone, her new husband might have acquired some experience along the way.

  No, Lila told herself, she would not allow her thoughts to take her back to those times. For months she had brooded on the past, searching her memory for any prior signs of her husband’s true nature.

  In retrospect, she had found it only too easy to find significant clues. Only, after such a long time, she no longer knew if she could trust her memories to be accurate or trust herself not to blur those recollections with her own anger and hurt.

  Well, she could not stop herself from having been angry and hurt by Cahal. There was nothing she could do about the past. But there was no way that she would be hurt again. Not by Cahal and not by any man.

  • • •

  Monday nights were the usual time for meetings of the Toronto Wives and Girlfriends’ club. A reluctant Lila had been urged by her new boyfriend to join two months before. Now she found it a pleasant way to occupy her time.

  The other women were cheerful and interesting, and the charity events they planned were useful rather than being decorative social affairs. Last year, Lila learned, the Wives had raised almost half a million dollars for a local children’s organization. This year they were planning the same sort of outcome for an earthquake relief fund.

  This Monday, however, Lila felt a faint shimmer of apprehension as she arrived at the home of Catherine and Edward Monahan.

  Although the meeting times of the Wives were set, the location often varied according to the women’s whims and inclinations. Sometimes the rotation occurred every week, with a different woman hosting the club each Monday. Other times one woman would host for weeks on end, taking the pressure off the other families.

  At first Lila had felt like an interloper. The majority of the women were actually wives of the players, not merely girlfriends. Lila had wondered whether her status as Jack’s girlfriend would give her a diminished role in the club. She had not wondered for long.

  The women had been inviting and welcoming. They could well afford to be. Some of the wives had been in Toronto for a dozen or more years. Most had been there for at least a couple of years. Of the three girlfriends who attended, two had been going steady with their boyfriends for several years and the other for at least a year.

  Lila’s apprehension was that she was now going to be cast in a role she had avoided discussing — that of Cahal Wallace’s wife. But tonight was also the first time she was going to attend a Wives meeting without seeing the face of Jessica Gerard, the wife of Toronto’s previous goaltender. Jessica had been well liked and respected amongst the Wives. This was the first time that one of the Wives had left for the sake of another’s estranged husband.

  • • •

  She could feel the tension the moment she stepped into Cathy Monahan’s decorated home. Her hostess’s smile was polite in the extreme but it was patently false, an exaggerated attempt at friendliness.

  This was worse than Lila had anticipated, worse even than she had feared.

  Cathy Monahan led Lila toward the living room where she saw that she was among the last to arrive. There were already more than a dozen women in the room, comprising most of the membership of the Toronto Wives and Girlfriends.

  Most of the women were dressed more casually than Lila, wearing the slacks, pullovers and blouses that branded them as mothers of small children. Nadia Ivanov had been a gymnast before she had married and Cathy Monahan had been a model but other than that, none of the women worked or desired to do so. Being the wife of a hockey player and mother to children of an often-absent father was a demanding occupation.

  Lila felt out of place in her tailored work clothes. There was never any time to change after work.

  Ignoring the strain that she felt, Lila greeted the other women, trying not to show any of her discomfort in her posture or her tone.

  Unfortunately, the other women had known her for too many weeks to be deterred by a straight backbone or mild tones.

  “Ethan told me that you’ve seen our new goalie,” one of the women remarked almost immediately after pleasantries had been exchanged. Ethan was her husband. “What’s he like, Lila? It’s so hard for a man to tell you what you want to know.”

  Lila held her breath. Was it possible that they did not know? Could the tension that she had perceived be attributed merely to the fact of Jessica Gerard’s husband being traded away from the team?

  “I’ve seen his picture on television,” Nadia offered, “but that didn’t give me any impression of the man.”

  Lila’s hostess turned cornflower blue eyes upon her. “Yes, Lila, tell us what our newest arrival is like. Eddie told me that you had spoken to him yesterday at practice.”

  “Forget that,” Nadia said. “What does the man look like in the flesh? He is absolutely gorgeous on TV.”

  There were enthusiastic murmurs of agreement this time, even from women who had attractive husbands of their own waiting at home.

  “Well,” Lila said, wanting to defer any further prompting, “he’s about six foot four, blond, gray eyes, with broad shoulders and a long dimple in one of his cheeks wh
ich is hard to see unless he laughs. He has a deep voice, sort of hoarse and raspy.”

  Another woman immediately interjected. “You can do better than that, Lila, being his wife and all. I don’t care how he plays on the ice. What’s he like in bed?”

  Lila went silent. Since none of the other women had ever lived in Chicago or mentioned Cahal, she hadn’t realized that they knew about her marriage. After all, the Wives knew her by her grandparents’ name of Ramlall.

  Now she saw how naïve she had been. Of course the other women didn’t have to know Cahal personally to have read the sport pages or seen her picture on the Internet.

  Before she could speak, the doorbell chimed again and Cathy Monahan ran to answer it.

  Cathy brought back a woman Lila did not know, a slender blonde. At first Lila assumed it to be one of the Wives who had not attended the meetings for the past few months, who had perhaps been away or having a baby, but the way the conversations all halted when Cathy returned told her that this was not a woman with whom the other Wives were acquainted.

  “Ladies,” Cathy announced, her excitement suppressed, “may I present Victoria Brantford, Cahal Wallace’s significant other.”

  Lila’s first reaction was one of total shock, but that soon gave way to a feeling of all-encompassing relief. She was spared the need to explain her relationship to Cahal, just as she would be in the future spared the questions that would inevitably result from their having had a relationship together. It would be Victoria Brantford who would receive all of the questions, who would have to appease the curiosity about the newest Toronto player.

  Victoria was soon settled into a chair by the door where Lila couldn’t see her. Even before Cathy could begin the necessary introductions, the new arrival was peppered with questions. How was she doing after the flight over from Chicago? How did she feel about the trade? Had she ever been to Canada before?