Page 6 of Power Play | AllFreeNovel

The results loaded fast. I had the phone a foot off my face with the dark room behind it, and the glass had warmed against my fingers to the temperature of my own hand. The professional information came first. He was a defenseman, number forty-four, from Winnipeg, taken by Phoenix in the expansion draft ahead of the Sidewinders’ inaugural season. He was listed at six-foot-three and two hundred and twenty-five pounds, numbers that meant one size on a stats page and another size entirely in a photograph, and the photographs settled that question immediately. In person he’d be bigger again, and judging by the photos, that wasn’t a bad thing to picture.

He was twenty-six.

I read the number twice, because the first pass slid right off me.

The year I started teaching, he was twelve. By the time I moved in with David, Canada would have served him a beer and Arizona wouldn’t. Ten years was a small number until it was the gap between a woman who had spent her thirties on David and a man who hadn’t started his.

Then I scrolled down to the full page of photographs and quit doing math.

He was built on a different scale than the men I’d spent six years around. There were hundreds of images, and I got through more of them than a professional woman considering a position taking care of a man’s daughter had any business getting through, and I wasn’t about to highlight which ones. Holy shit. He’s hot.

He had dark hair, a dark beard, and dark eyes that met every camera with no expression at all, which did more to me than a smile would have. He was broad through the shoulders and thick through the arms and legs, with thighs that pulled the seams of his practice pants tight and a neck almost as wide as his jaw. He’d made his peace with taking up space a long time ago and hadn’t thought about it since. He was just there, large and contained.

One of the photos was from the weight room at the facility. He was pulling a t-shirt off over his head, caught halfway, a strip of stomach showing above his waistband and a line of dark hair running down into it, and a noise came out of me, alone in a beige apartment, in a register I would deny under oath.

I dropped the phone onto the cushion beside me and turned my face up to the ceiling. My mouth had dried right out. I put the back of my wrist against my own cheek and the cheek was hot.

He was a man who could pick me up with one arm and carry on with his conversation. I wasn’t a small woman and I hadn’t been picked up since I was eleven, and I lay back against the couch cushion and thought about it for longer than I would have admitted to Maren, or a priest.

I’m thirty-six. I’m not doing this. He’s just a man. A very hot and sexy professional athlete man. With a manly man beard. God I love a beard. Whew. Okay, stop. Stop! It’s a job. Taking care of a little one.

I picked the phone back up.

I wasn’t going to make it weird. I needed a job and he needed a nanny, and both of those facts existed completely apart from the shape of his shoulders in a practice jersey. Then I got into the highlight clips, and a few in, the hit wasn’t what I was watching. It was his hands on the stick, big and loose, and I was wondering in a strictly professional capacity what they’d be like on the back of a woman’s neck.

I closed the tab.

The personal information was nearly nonexistent. He had no social media I could find, and there was no word anywhere about his house or his hobbies or his feelings on trading a Winnipeg winter for a Phoenix one. One line in a Sidewinders season preview said he was a single father, one clause buried in a paragraph about the defensive line, no follow-up. The writer had put it there and moved on. Either Eli Kovac had made it clear what was available on the subject, or the writer had recognized a closed door.

I respected a closed door, and I respected it more on a man who could have traded on his face and plainly didn’t feel he owed anybody an explanation.

There was one photo that wasn’t from a game or a press event. It was from a family skate last season, low resolution and candid, taken on a phone from up in the seats at a good angle. The building’s lights washed the ice under the two of them white, no shadow anywhere on it, and the seats behind them were dark and mostly empty. He was in his jersey and skates and jeans, enormous anyway, and his daughter was in a Sidewinders jersey that fell past her knees, and he was holding both her hands while she skated. Her knees were bent right and her chin was up. She’d been on ice before. She’d also plainly decided this was a day her dad did all the work. He was bent nearly in half to reach her, his frame arranged around hers.

His face was turned down toward her, away from the camera. I didn’t need to see it. The crowd could have emptied the building and the arena lights could have cut out, and I didn’t think he’d have raised his head.

I pinched it bigger and her face broke into squares, and I pinched it back down. I sat with the photo until the apartment came back in around me, the AC and the faint street noise. I hadn’t touched my wine since I found it. Her chin and her knees told me the same thing. She was a kid who expected to be caught. It wasn’t him that stayed with me. It was her.

It was him a little.