Czytaj książkę: «Power Play»

One

Sera disliked smooth operators, bad in-laws and unwelcome surprises.

Unfortunately, Jordan was all three, and his sudden appearance in her offices on a sunny spring day in Massachusetts meant she’d better start preparing herself for the unthinkable.

“You!”

The exclamation was out of Sera’s mouth before she could stop it. It had been just another day at Astra Therapeutics until Mr. Hotshot-NHL, Underwear-Ad-Hottie Jordan Serenghetti had crashed the party like an errant puck arcing through the air.

Jordan smiled lazily. “Yes, me.”

Arms folded, he lounged against the treatment table, as if striking sexy poses was second nature to him—even when propped up by crutches, as he was now. Clad in a casual long-sleeved olive T-shirt and jeans, he emanated charisma. The shirt outlined the hard muscles of his arms, and the jeans hugged lean hips. Not that she was noticing. Not in that way.

Sera was wary of men who were too good to be true—as if everything came easy to them. Nowadays, Jordan Serenghetti would be at the top of her list. He was smoother than a skate blade hydroplaning over ice. With dark, ruffled hair clipped short, moss-green eyes, and a sculpted face with a chiseled jaw, he could score anywhere.

Sera had seen him in underwear ads, showing off his package on supersized billboards and fueling thousands of dreams. But she’d learned the hard way to deal in reality, not fantasy.

“What are you doing here?” she blurted, even though she had a sinking feeling she knew. She’d been told her next appointment was waiting for her in room 6, but she’d had no idea it was Jordan.

She’d heard he’d suffered a sports-related injury, but figured he was in good hands with the New England Razors hockey-team staff. She so was not going to worry about him, even if her second-worst mistake was now related to her by the marriage of her cousin to Jordan’s brother. In the annals of her bad history with men, Jordan ranked number two, even if it had become clear to her that he didn’t remember their chance encounter in the past.

She eyed his wrapped left knee. She wasn’t used to seeing Jordan Serenghetti vulnerable...

“Now, that’s a refreshing change from the usual greeting. Too often I get enthusiastic fans yelling my name.” He shrugged. “You’re an antidote to the monotony, Angel.”

Sera sighed. Fans? Women screaming his name was more like it. Terribly misguided, deluded women. “Don’t call me Angel.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who named you for a heavenly being.”

She’d never had occasion to rue her name so much. Serafina served as a topic of easy cocktail-party conversation, but the nickname Angel irked her, especially when uttered by Jordan. So what if she was named for the seraphim?

“Your type of angel is supposed to be heavenly and fiery,” Jordan went on, unperturbed. “Someone had a kismet moment when they named you. Beautiful and hot-tempered.”

Serafina rolled her eyes, refusing to be swayed by the way beautiful rolled off Jordan’s tongue. “Am I supposed to be impressed by your grasp of biblical trivia...or backhanded compliments?” Then she scowled at the thought that her response had just proven his point. She dropped her clipboard on the counter. “So you’re here for a physical-therapy session...”

“Yup.”

She quelled her irritation. “And I’m supposed to think it’s mere chance that you were assigned to me?”

Jordan held up his hands, a smile teasing his lips. “No, I’m not going to lie about that part.”

“Oh, good.”

“I want the best—”

Sera was sure Jordan was used to the best in women. No doubt eager females were waiting for him when he exited the New England Razors’ locker room.

“—and you’ve already got a great reputation. The clinic manager couldn’t stop singing your praises.”

With a pro athlete of Jordan’s caliber, Sera was sure Bernice had given him his choice of staff. And the clinic’s manager probably thought she was doing Sera a favor...

Sera thought back to her conversation earlier in the week with Bernice. We’re trying to land a contract with the New England Razors. Their management is looking to outsource some therapy work and supplement the team’s staff. They’re auditioning three outfits, including us. If we land this deal, it could open the door to work with other sports teams in the area.

Ugh. At the time, she’d dismissed her chances of encountering Jordan, even though he played for the Razors. The gods couldn’t be so cruel. Apparently, however, gods laughed at angels. Jordan had been sent—or volunteered—to test the quality of the clinic’s services. With her. She should have known the minute she stepped into this room, but she’d been in deep denial.

“You asked for me?” Sera said slowly.

Jordan nodded and then cracked a grin. “The fact that, when I booked my appointment for today, your receptionist couldn’t stop extolling your cooking skills just sealed the deal for me.”

“She mentioned my cooking?”

“And baking,” he added. “Apparently, the homemade dishes that you sometimes bring in for the staff earn you brownie points. So you were clearly the right choice.”

“Let me remind you of something...we don’t like each other.”

“Correction,” Jordan said, lips quirking. “You don’t like me. I have no problem with attractive and passionate women. You, on the other hand, have issues—”

“Right.” She narrowed her eyes.

“You should feel safe around me,” Jordan said easily. “We’re practically related.”

Right. Jordan’s older brother Cole had recently married Sera’s cousin Marisa Danieli. Jordan loved to joke about the couple’s long and winding path to the altar. At one point, Marisa’s former fiancé had been dating Cole’s ex-girlfriend, and Jordan had kidded that his brother and Marisa were engaged by proxy. It did not, however, mean that she and Jordan were related in any meaningful sense of the word.

Up to now, Sera had done her best to ignore the fact that she and Jordan were technically cousins-in-law. Marisa and Cole had had a surprise wedding, so she’d been spared having to be the maid of honor to Jordan’s best man.

“I’ll drive you into the ground, Serenghetti,” she harrumphed, changing tactics. “You’ll sweat like you’ve never worked before.”

It was only a half-idle threat. She expected a lot from her patients. She was good, she was understanding, but she was tough.

Jordan’s smile stayed in place. “I wouldn’t expect any less.”

“Are you always so sunny?” she grumbled. “Do the clouds ever come out in Serenghetti Land?”

He laughed. “I like to rile you, Perini. I may not have clouds, but I can rock your world with thunder and lightning.”

There it was again. The sexually tinged double meaning. And then a traitorous voice whispered, You already have. Once. The fact that he didn’t remember just made it all the more galling. “You don’t want to get involved with me.” Again. “I’m not a woman you can conveniently walk away from.” This time. “I’m your sister-in-law’s cousin.”

He arched a brow. “Is that all that’s stopping you?”

She threw up her hands—because no way was she going to remind Jordan about the past. Their past. And with her bad luck, in the future she and Jordan would be named as godparents to the next Danieli-Serenghetti offspring. As it was, they’d dodged that bullet the first time around since Jordan’s brother Rick and his wife Chiara had done the honors. It seemed Cole was going down the line by order of birth in naming godparents from among his siblings.

Jordan shrugged and then glanced around. “At least we’ll have the memory of a few good physical-therapy sessions.”

“All you’ll be remembering fondly is the pain,” she practically snarled.

“I’m a good listener if you ever want to...you know, talk instead of spar.”

She swept him a suspicious look—unsure if he was joking or not. Better not to take chances. “As if I’d open up to a player like you,” she scoffed. “Forget it.”

“Not even when you’re off duty?” he teased. “It could be therapeutic.”

“When I need to unwind, I’ll book a vacation to the Caribbean.”

“Let me know when you’re going. I’ll reserve a seat.”

Argh. “It’s a vacation—as in, I don’t want to be irritated!”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Irritated isn’t your natural state?”

“No!”

* * *

“So where do we go from here?” he said. “You’re irritated...”

As he said the words, Jordan watched Serafina with bemusement and not a little lust. With blond hair swinging past her shoulders and amber eyes, she was a knockout. He’d been around plenty of beautiful women, but Sera’s personality shone like an inner light. Of course, she directed snark at him, but he enjoyed tangling with her.

She was a puzzle he was interested in solving. Because if he’d ever met a woman with a boulder-sized chip on her shoulder, it was Sera Perini.

“Listen, I’ll make you a deal,” he joked. “I’ll try to behave if you stick around and help me out.”

“You will behave,” she said firmly. “And your coupon is valid for today’s session only. After that, the sale is over.”

His eyes crinkled. “Hard bargainer.”

“You have no idea.”

“But I guess I’m going to find out.”

“True, but first you need to sit on the treatment table so we can take a look at that knee.” She paused. “Let me help you.”

“No need.”

Even though they were now related by marriage and had seen each other at the occasional family gathering, they’d never come close to touching. Not a pat, not a brush of the arm, and certainly not a peck on the cheek. Nada. It was as if by tacit agreement boundaries had been drawn, because they were more like warring in-laws than the friendly kind. And maybe because they understood that, it was dangerous to cross some unspoken line.

Now, bracing his arms, he hopped up onto the table using his good leg.

“Nice stunt,” she commented drily.

He tossed her a jaunty grin. “More where that came from.”

With a last warning look, she turned her attention to the paperwork he’d brought with him to the appointment and had dropped on the counter before she’d walked in.

He took the opportunity to study her again. Today, she wore nondescript, body-concealing light blue scrubs. When she’d sometimes waitressed at the Puck & Shoot, the popular local sports bar, she’d usually kept her hair pulled back in a ponytail or with a headband and had had a black apron tied around her waist. But thanks to the fact that they were now related by marriage, he’d seen her in other getups: body-skimming dresses, tight-fitting exercise attire... She had an hourglass figure that was fuller on top, so everything flattered her. More than once he’d caught himself fantasizing about what it would be like to run his hands over her curves and skim his palms over her endless legs.

Yet he didn’t know what to make of her. He was attracted as hell, but she was an in-law...and she didn’t like him. Still, the urge to tease her was as natural and unavoidable as breathing, and as irresistible as the impulse to win a hockey championship. And on top of it, he needed her physical-therapy skills. Already the companies behind his endorsement deals were getting nervous because he’d been off the ice. For the umpteenth time, he pushed aside the thought that his career could be over. He’d work like hell in therapy to make sure that possibility would never become a reality. Sure he’d made some savvy business investments with his earnings, but his plans depended on continuing to play.

With a grimace, Jordan turned and stretched out his legs in front of him on the treatment table.

Sera looked up, seemingly satisfied with what she’d gleaned from his intake papers. “So how did the ACL tear occur?”

“A game three weeks ago against the New York Islanders. I heard a pop.” He shrugged. “I knew what it was. Cole’s been through this before.”

His older brother had suffered a couple of knee injuries that had ended his professional hockey career. These days, Cole was the head of Serenghetti Construction, having taken over after their father’s stroke had forced Serg Serenghetti to adopt a less active lifestyle.

“You’re lucky it happened at the end of the hockey season, and the Razors didn’t advance in the playoffs this year.”

“I’ve never thought of getting knocked out in the playoffs as a lucky break,” he quipped. “Especially when I wasn’t there to help.”

“It’s a tear, not a break,” she parried. “So who performed the ACL surgery on your knee?”

“Dr. Nabov at Welsdale Medical Center, and it was last week. In-patient for a day. They insisted I stay overnight. I guess they didn’t want to take any chances with my recovery. Hockey fans, you know.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Sera flipped through his paperwork again. “Did you sign autographs while you were there?”

He cracked a smile and folded his arms over his chest. “A few.”

“I assume the nursing staff went wild.”

He knew sarcasm when he heard it and couldn’t resist teasing back. “Nah, they’ve seen it all.”

“You’ve been icing the knee?”

“Yeah. The staff at the hospital told me what to do postsurgery.”

“Until you could get yourself into more expert hands?”

He flashed a grin. “You. Right.”

She might totally be his type if she wasn’t so thorny...and since she was related to him by marriage, a casual fling was out of the question. Still, there were layers there, and he enjoyed trying to peel them back.

Sera set aside his paperwork and approached him, her expression all business. “Okay, I’m going to unwrap your knee.”

For all her prickliness up to now, her touch was light as she removed his bandages. When the bandage was off, they both studied his knee.

“Good news.”

“Great.”

“No signs of infection and very little bleeding.” She pressed on his knee as he remained in a sitting position on the table but leaned back propped up by his arms.

“Am I hurting you?” she asked, not looking up.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Manly.”

“We hockey players are built tough.”

“We’ll see.” She continued to press and manipulate his knee.

“I’m your first. Otherwise you’d know.”

“I’ve never been curious about how tough hockey players are.”

“You’re mentally disciplined.”

“We physical therapists are built tough.”

Jordan smiled. “Built pretty, too.”

“Behave.”

“Right.”

Then she reached over to the counter for an instrument. “I’m going to take some baseline measurements so we know where you are.”

“Great.” He waited as she straightened his knee a little, measured, and then bent his leg and measured again.

After putting the measuring instrument aside, she said, “Okay, not a bad starting point considering your knee has been wrapped since surgery. Our goal today is to improve your quad function and the mobility of the patella, among other things.”

“What’s a patella?”

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Your kneecap.”

“Of course.”

“Let me know if I’m causing you too much pain.”

Her tone was surprisingly solicitous, so he joked, “Isn’t that what you promised? Pain?”

“Only the intended and expected variety.”

He was a high-level athlete—he was used to pain and then some. “How many ACL tears have you treated?”

“A few. I’ll let you know at the end if you were my best patient.”

He stifled a laugh because she’d deftly appealed to his competitive instincts. He wondered if she used the same technique to cajole all her patients. Probably some played sports—since a torn ACL wasn’t too unusual an athletic injury—even if she’d never treated a professional hockey player like himself before. “Will you dock me points for irreverence?”

“Do you really want to find out?” Methodically, she taped two wires to his thigh. “I’m going to set you up with some muscle stim right now. This will get you started.”

In his opinion, they’d gotten started with the electricity when she’d walked in the room. But he sensed that he’d teased her enough, and she wasn’t going to take any more nonsense, so he kept mum for the next few minutes and just followed her directions.

After the muscle stim, she taught him how to do patellar glides. He followed her instructions about how to move his knee to gain more flexibility. They followed that up with quad sets and heel slides, which she told him to do at home, too.

Overall, he found none of it too arduous. But at the end of half an hour, she announced that his ability to bend his knee had gone from around ten degrees to eighty.

He grinned. “I’m your best?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Superman. Your knee was wrapped in bandages that interfered with motion until now, so you were bound to make some significant improvement.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“You’re impossible.”

“No, I’m very possible if you’ll consider your options. Now, insufferable, that’s another thing...”

Sera seemed to grit her teeth. “You’ll need weekly appointments.”

“How long will my therapy last?”

“Depends on how it goes.” Her expression was challenging—as if she’d been referring to his behavior, good or bad, as well as his recuperation. “Usually three to four months.”

“Nothing long-term, then?”

She nodded. “What you’re used to.”

A fling. The words drifted unspoken between them. She’d met his double entendre and raised him. Ouch.