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To be fair to him, she didn’t exactly look the same. While she was still gangly, she’d grown into her face, so to speak, and had gotten a hint at curves, if still a far cry from an hourglass shape. Her nose had been altered by the surgery she’d had at sixteen to fix the damage taking a hockey stick to it had done while she was still growing. Her skin had cleared up and she’d grown her hair out down past her chest. Having spent her later teen years professionally modeling, she definitely walked and carried herself with more grace and assurance.
Yet, she didn’t lookthatdifferent. It got under her skin that he had no clue who she was. Seeing him now was like a pebble in her shoe, rubbing and chaffing and irritating, reminding her too much of what she had tried so desperately to leave behind in the past.
His eyes widened. His jaw dropped. “Get the fuck out. You’reEddie? The forward with the speed and the bad attitude?”
With her free hand, she ran his fingers through her damp hair, trying to shove the strands off her face. “Yes. But I never had a bad attitude,” she protested. “I was just aggressive. I liked to win.”
Sullivan had been a lazy player. She hadn’t really enjoyed playing hockey with him, she had just liked to admire his manly form (manly to her thirteen-year-old eyes anyway). She had actually preferred to play with Jesse Lambert, Sullivan’s best friend, who was now a pro hockey player. Jesse had challenged her, which had been way more fun than screaming at Sullivan repeatedly to pass the puck.
“Oh, I may not have recognized you as an adult, but I certainly remember how competitive you were as a kid. Which is how you wound up with a broken nose,” he said.
That made her bristle. “That was your fault! You couldn’t have skated slower if you’d been trying!”
He grinned.
She realized he’d baited her. She fell silent, flustered.
He eyed her. “I can’t even tell you broke your nose. I’m impressed by your healing abilities. That day when there was blood all over the ice and your eyes were turning black and blue right in front of me, I thought you were going to have a crunched nose for life.”
There was a visual. She shuddered to think what she’d looked like, sobbing in pain and embarrassment, knowing the injury was the perfect excuse her mother needed to make her quit playing.
“I did feel terrible, you know,” he added. “I’m sorry if I never said that I was sorry. It was a total accident.”
There it was again. The poking pebble sensation. She wasn’t thrilled to be reminded of how insecure she had felt about her nose in those awkward teen years. “I had plastic surgery to straighten it,” she said, tightly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I obviously need to get dressed.”
“You don’t have to get dressed on my account,” he said with a grin. “Be yourself, I don’t mind.”
Of course he wouldn’t mind. Edwina rolled her eyes, refusing to feel even remotely flattered that Sullivan was flirting. He would clearly flirt with just about anyone, if gossip could be believed. “My father mixed up his dates. You can come back next week after I return to New York and then you can stay as long as you like.”
She took the handle of his suitcase and rolled it out further onto the small landing at the top of the stairs. She gestured for him to leave, her heart racing abnormally fast.
Her phone dinged in her hand. She fought the urge to glance at the screen and plastered a polite smile on her face. “Great to see you again, Sullivan.”
Sullivan eyedthe woman standing in front of him in nothing but a towel and tried to wrap his head around the reality that this was the Eddie Hunt he’d known in childhood. Off the ice, Eddie had been quiet, maybe even shy, and not someone he’d taken much notice of. But on the ice? She’d been a fierce competitor with fantastic skating skills. In middle school, she’d actually been taller than most of the boys and could see down the ice to her advantage. He’d been jealous of that during the couple of years before he’d sprouted up, when he’d been seriously worried that he might never grow.
He hadn’t meant to sound so astonished, but Eddie back then had been a teammate, just one of the guys.
But Eddie now?
Holy shit.
She was a total smoke show.
She also wanted him to leave.
He was having a hard time dragging himself away, because he was more than a little curious as to who she was now and where she’d been all these years.
“You moved after what, eighth grade?” he asked. “So you’re still in New York? Things must have turned out well for you.”
They certainly had with her appearance. He actually found her hypnotizing to look at, with that long wet hair clinging to her fair skin and her lithe body. She had high cheekbones, thick eyebrows, full pink lips, and a little gap between her front teeth that kept her from being completely perfect.
Her nose actually was perfect. He didn’t remember what it looked like before he’d smashed it, but her surgeon was a damn genius.
Then they were her eyes. They were a deep, rich, lustrous amber color. Soulful. A kaleidoscope of intelligence and depth and compassion. The eyes of a poet.
Unless she was annoyed, like when he had refused to pass the puck to her on the ice at the age of twelve.
Or when he had tried to give her instructions on how to parallel park.
