Go Deep (9 page)

“Where are we going?”

“Get some wood for the burn barrel. Fire went out
overnight.”

The path led to a woodshed that was little more than a few
sheets of plywood topped with a slanted metal roof. Eagle opened the door and
reached inside.

“Hold out your arms.” He piled sticks of kindling onto her
outstretched arms, then emerged with a hefty pile of logs.

“Let’s go start the fire.”

She followed him back along the path, then onto the ice to
the burn barrel. A thick block of wood separated it from the surface of the
ice. Eagle lined the barrel with split logs, then motioned for her to dump the
kindling inside. She did so, then brushed twigs and debris off her fleece. He
lit a match and dropped it in. A second later flames jumped at the opening as
if trying to escape.

Beth took a step back. “What were you talking about before,
about Katia not trusting herself?”

Eagle’s black eyes didn’t move from the fire. “Why do you
want to know?”

“I just do. I’m married, you know.”

He seemed supremely uninterested in that piece of
information. “I’m only going to tell you if you tell me why you want to know.
That’s fair.”

Beth weighed her options. Why did she care about Katia’s
engagement? She didn’t even know her. But Eagle’s cryptic comment about trust
had snagged her attention. And Eagle looked like the kind of guy who wouldn’t
judge her. Who wouldn’t judge anything.

“Okay then. Something came up with my husband. He thinks I
don’t tell him everything. Maybe it’s a trust thing. So I was curious about
Katia. There, now it’s your turn.”

Eagle took a stick and poked around in the burn barrel. The
flames swirled around him as if he’d disturbed a hornet’s nest. “No one has to
get married. I doubt I ever will. Maybe, someday. But if I do, it’ll be because
me and my woman know how to be together in a way that makes us happy. It won’t
be because I’m playing a role in some movie called ‘I’m Married Now, Good for
Me’.”

Beth stared at him, at his bronze face brooding over the
barrel. The sun touched his hair with a hint of indigo in the black. He wore no
hat, but didn’t seem to feel the cold.

“What does that have to do with trust?”

“People don’t trust themselves. They don’t trust their own
natures. They try to hide who they are. They take that walk down the aisle like
it’s going to turn them into someone else. I don’t get it. What’s the point of
getting married, then hiding under the bed?”

Beth froze. Hiding under the bed. It described her to a T.

“Katia thought she had to be someone else if she wanted to
marry Lars, and she’s too honest to do that.”

Unlike me.
Beth filled in the blanks, even though
Eagle couldn’t possibly know anything about her marriage.
Unlike Katia,
I’m
not honest. I’m a liar.

“We had to show Katia she had it all backwards. If you’re
going to get married, you gotta bring it. Bring yourself. BYOB, like they say.
Bring your own boo-tay. Get what I’m saying?”

Bring your own boo-tay?
Was the man nuts? And yet it
made sense.

She gave a spurt of laughter. Imagine if her mother had met
Eagle. What two people could be more opposite? The thought made her giddy.

“Don’t hide under the bed,” she repeated.

“In the bed, in the closet, in your head.” He tapped her on
the side of her head. She grabbed his finger, surprising him. His eyes
sharpened.

“You said ‘we.’ ‘We’ showed Katia.”

“Yeah, so?”

She stood her ground under the sudden chill in his look.
Apparently Eagle didn’t like his freedom being curtailed, even if it was only
his finger she’d imprisoned. She released it.

“You helped them. Help me now,” she whispered.

Chapter Nine

The showcase match between the Fairbanks Renegades and the
Wild Nasties beat every record for longest hockey game in history. At least
that’s how it seemed to Gavin. His players chased the puck with their usual
dog-snarl tenacity. The Nasties were just as crazy as advertised. Two minutes
into the game, their forward was sent to the penalty box.

Score one for the Renegades.

The Charles Beck Ice Skating Rink went crazy. Wild tradition
held that noise must be made the entire time one of their players sat in the
penalty box. By the time the forward sprang loose, shooting out of the box like
a missile, Gavin’s ears were ringing. He kept checking the game clock, which he
swore had been rigged to move at half its normal speed. Why was every play
taking so long? Why were his players moving about as fast as snowmen?

No secret there. Beth had been gone when he’d woken up and
he hadn’t seen her since. Repeated searches of the audience told him she hadn’t
come to the game.

He’d scared her off.

Fear clenched deep in his gut along with the doughnuts he’d
forced down for breakfast. He’d pushed her too fast, too far. Last night had
been everything he’d wanted and more. In his wildest fantasies he’d never
dreamed she’d get as into it as she had. He’d hoped she’d be open, and that it
would take their lovemaking to a deeper level. But the way she’d responded, so
passionately, so wholeheartedly, blew his mind. And convinced him he’d done the
right thing.

But then he’d had to take it one step further, issue an
ultimatum. He swore as one of his players careened into the boards, leaving a
streak of blood behind. Not only had Dylan gotten himself a bloody nose, he’d
just let the puck get stolen away.

“Get it together!” Gavin yelled.

He was the one who ought to get it together. He was supposed
to be the big, tough hockey coach, the nerves-of-ice leader who kept a bunch of
rowdy guys in line. But right now he had butterflies in his stomach thanks to a
delicate, green-eyed dreamer of a woman.

A woman who had dressed herself in the erotic clothes he’d
picked out, who’d bent over at his command, exposed her tender body to his
voracious appetite. Even now he got hard remembering how she looked, her dainty
ass framed by the black strips of the thong, her tempting pink lips swelling
with arousal. Her small frame made her look fragile even though he knew she was
limber and quite strong. But for him, the delicacy of her build had added an
extra element of dark excitement to their session.

Was that wrong of him? For so long, he’d fought his urge to
dominate women in bed. He knew his strength, knew how easily he could really
hurt someone, and the horror of that possibility made him restrain himself.
When he’d met Beth, the old craving, the one he thought he’d buried, had hit
him hard. But she wasn’t like those college girls. She had an untouchable air
about her. Pumping gas, ordering lunch at the school cafeteria, waiting for a
stop sign to turn green—yes, he’d seen her do that—whatever she did, she never
lost that pure, faraway aura. He knew she wouldn’t use him the way the sorority
girls had.

At the same time, she made him hornier than they ever had.
His compulsion to dominate roared back, double, triple, a hundred times more.
Beth made him absolutely crazy with that fresh skin and innocent smile. He
wanted to bend her to his will, open her up, spread her wide, make her submit
to him. He’d wanted her to go wild, scream out her pleasure, collapse in his
arms, look into his eyes and know that he was her master.

A whistle blew. The referee skated to center ice and made
the “illegal hold” gesture. Bad call, said the hockey coach part of his brain.
Beth,
Beth
, yearned the other part, the part that craved her with every cell of
his body.
Don’t run from me. This is right. This is what we need. Don’t be
afraid. Trust me. Trust yourself.

* * * * *

The endless game finished in sudden-death overtime. The
Nasties won. The audience went wild, stomping their feet and hurling bags of
peanuts into the air. Gavin thought he saw a few cans of beer being tossed
around too, but that could happen anywhere. Anywhere hockey fans congregated,
that is. Crazy bastards, but he loved them.

“You did good, guys.” He slapped his gloomy players on the
back as they filed into the locker room with its familiar stench of boy-sweat
and dirty socks. “We took them all the way to sudden death. You played hard,
you gave it everything you got.”

“Left it all out on the ice, yeah, yeah,” grumbled Dylan as
he swabbed his bloodied nose.

Maybe he ought to get new material. “Well, you did. DNA and
all. I’m proud of all of you. And you know what?”

A lineup of eyes in various stages of health—some swollen,
some simply angry, some twitching—stared up at him. No one liked losing,
especially a match as close as this one.

“You’re done. The game is over. You played your hearts out
and look where we are. Wild, Alaska. During Wild Nights
.
Why all the
gloom and doom? Can I get a ‘hell, yeah’?”

“Hell, yeah,” mumbled a few of the less-injured players.

“Can I get a ‘watch out, Wild’?”

That perked them up a little more.

“How about a ‘let’s get the party started’?”

That one got a few more cheers. By the time he was done with
his pep talk, his players were tearing off their uniforms and diving for the
showers so they could get their party on.

Feeling old and exhausted, Gavin headed for the exit. Only
to stop dead at the sight of the woman standing in the dingy doorway.

Did he say woman? He meant goddess. A masked goddess in
head-to-toe white, one hand on her hip, the other playing with her own left
breast. A sleek catsuit slicked tight to every curve. It ended in a ruff of fur
around her neck, with more fur at her wrists. A white zipper split the suit
down the middle. It ended somewhere between her legs. The fabric clung to her
nipples and dented at her navel.

His dick went rocket-hard. Nuclear-hard.

A fur mask hid her face, but he knew who she was. He’d know
her light honeysuckle scent anywhere. Even in a den of stinky hockey players.

Speaking of which…

He turned to see if anyone else had noticed the vision in
the doorway. But he didn’t have to look to find out. The sound of awed silence
should have told him. Every player in the locker room gaped at her. He was
surprised drool wasn’t puddling on the floor. The players already in the shower
stepped out, naked and dripping, to see what bomb had dropped.

No bomb, just a bona fide bombshell.

Graceful as Catwoman, the vision in white—he was so frazzled
her name stayed on the edge of his brain—preened under the weight of all that
male attention. She took one step into the room. That’s when he noticed the
white stiletto boots she wore and the elbow-length gloves. He could swear the
temperature in the room went up by twenty degrees.

“Uh, B—” But before he could say her name, Beth put her
finger to his lips.

She shook her head in wordless warning. One of the white
feathers on her mask drifted into the air. Her hair was tied into a loose knot
at the top of her head. Maybe someone else would recognize it, if they were
paying attention to her scalp. Chances were, their focus was lower. Like on the
sinuous way her hips moved under that catsuit. Or the way the fabric molded her
straining nipples.

My God, her nipples.

Gavin became aware of a painful situation in his pants.
Namely that they were far too tight for the alarmingly huge erection that
pushed at his zipper. She knew, the she-devil. One step closer and her hand
trailed across his bulge with a gentle squeeze.

With a groan, he nearly doubled over. Was she going to
torment him in front of his players, was that her plan?

But no, she had something else on her mind. As if he were a
sunflower following the sun, he watched her saunter farther into the locker
room. Darren, the goalie, was first up. Of all the players, he’d been in the
worst mood when they’d left the ice. He’d allowed the winning goal, even though
he’d launched himself horizontally across the cage to stop the puck and it had
slipped past him by a matter of millimeters. He’d torn his mask off in disgust
and hammered it against the ice until chips flew.

All that was history now. He stood naked next to the bench,
his collection of game bruises on display along with a healthy erection of his
own. Gavin didn’t really want to see Darren, or any of his players, in a state
of arousal. But the hell if he could look away from Beth’s sexy stroll. What
did she have in mind? Should he stop her before she got too crazy?

But he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He’d told her to share her
fantasies. If she wanted to parade her sexy gorgeousness in front of his horny
players, she could. He tensed, watching her like a hawk. What if the guys
couldn’t restrain themselves? What if she did more than show herself off?

But as Beth the Goddess in White made her way through the
locker room, he relaxed. Well, every part of him except his enormous boner
relaxed. That poor thing seemed to have no limit on how engorged it could get.

With her graceful, sensual manner, Beth held the entire room
in the palm of her hand. No one made a move she didn’t want them to make. The
guys drank her in with their stares. Their bodies responded with fierce and
obvious adoration. Hard-ons pointed at her like needles to true north.

But no one tried to touch her. Instead, she touched herself,
ran her gloved hands teasingly over her own breasts, her slim waist, her own
vinyl-covered sex. She wanted them to watch her, to admire her, to ogle her, to
want her—but not to approach her. The color white made the message clear. Lust,
but don’t touch. And lust they did.

Spellbound, everyone watched her as she sauntered, slowly
and sensuously, in a complete circuit of the locker room. Sighs and groans
followed in her wake. Gavin saw one guy grab his dick and run for the bathroom.
He wondered if any of them were tempted to help each other relieve the
pressure. It was Wild Nights after all. Nothing counted. Even if it did, it
wouldn’t be the first time the players had gotten down and dirty with each
other. No one would be shocked.