asked lamely, hoping the response would take long enough for her to gather up a few of her scattered wits.
“Defense,” he replied, grinning. “Keeping the puck out of your own net.”
Oh, yeah. She knew that. “Can the problems—both sets of them—be fixed?”
His smile disappeared. “It would be a long, hard haul.”
That was the second time in two days she’d heard the expression. “Seems to be a standard description of the game,” she observed.
“Accurate, too.”
He cleared his throat and took a deep breath in the same way she did when she was getting ready to say something necessary but unpleasant. Not wanting to hear it, she deliberately cut him off. “But these boys aren’t new to hockey. They’ve been playing the game all of their lives. They have the grit to change, don’t they?”
He slid her a sideways glance and sighed. “Some do, some probably won’t,” he answered, going back to his study of the water tower. “They each have to weigh the coach’s expectations against their own and figure out if they want to give the coach what he needs. Some will hang up the skates and others will lace them tighter.”
“Is there any way to know who’s going to do which?” Please God, she silently added, let the hanger-uppers be the expensive ones.
“The Glory Boys are going to be your toughest sell. They have the biggest egos, and they tend to view themselves as God’s gift to hockey.”
Ah, a definition. She knew which ones he was talking about. She called them The Swaggerers. Glory Boys was more descriptive. And much easier to say. “It’s occurred to me,” she admitted, “that anyone playing hockey in Wichita, Kansas, isn’t God’s gift to anyone or anything.”
“You might want to remind them of that,” he said coolly as he looked into the distance. “Especially when they threaten to take their razzle-dazzle to a more appreciative team. If they do, offer to help them pack their bags. You’ll be better off without them. Nothing poisons a locker room faster than an out-of-control ego.”
If he saw her nod of agreement, it didn’t give him pause. “Your Grinders will be the next hardest. They don’t have any self-confidence. They’ve got to take some shots thinking they can actually score the goals. And the Goons are going to have to be put on leashes. You played an entire twelve minutes at full strength tonight. Your penalty killing unit was exhausted before the end of the first period and your power play unit never went out.”
More stuff to look up. More things to think about and figure out. But since she had such incredible expertise at her fingertips… Well, figuratively anyway… “Why hasn’t Carl fixed these things?”
“Good question,” he conceded with a slow nod. “Have you asked him?”
“I’ve asked him why we don’t win. He told me it was because they were no-talent bums who don’t want to win. Tom did all the recruiting, in case you’re wondering.”
“He did back in my day, too.” He turned his entire body to face her and unfolded his arms to stuff his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “And in case you’re wondering, there’s decent talent on the team. It’s just not put together in the right combinations and pointed in the right direction. As for wanting to win…. They have to think they can. Believing is nine-tenths of winning.” He smiled. “Don’t you know about the Miracle on Ice?”
“1980,” she supplied. “Lake Placid. The American kids beat the mighty Russians. I was eighteen and cheered my ass off in the family room. And for the record—I’d never watched a hockey game before that. I didn’t know squat except that those boys were wonderful. And exciting. And worth cheering for.”
“Nothing’s ever been as exciting as that game. Nothing ever will be.” He hesitated, then shrugged one shoulder. “Well, except for maybe being on the team that wins the Stanley Cup. They say there’s nothing like that feeling.”
She hadn’t been able to look at the pictures in the magazine article Tom had saved, but she had read the story. And done a bit of Net surfing afterwards. The Tampa Bay Lightning had been in the running for Lord Stanley’s cup the year Logan Dupree had been injured. The sportswriters had all predicted that losing him would end the Bolt’s chances. And they’d been proven right. As a player, Logan Dupree had lost his chance to have his name placed on the Holy Grail of hockey. Talking about the cup with him would be right up there with asking Mrs. Lincoln about the play.
But she’d read an article on the history of Lord Stanley’s little trophy and knew that players weren’t the only ones whose names went on it; the coaches’ did, too. His chances weren’t completely over. Odds were that if he could see problems, he could fix them, too. “You’d make a good coach.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
She winced, realizing how self-serving her comment must have looked to him. “I wasn’t talking about the Warriors,” she assured him. “And how do you know you wouldn’t be any good? Have you ever tried it?”
“Yeah,” he retorted dryly. “We went winless the entire season.”
“Tom didn’t have any clippings of that adventure,” she said, suspicious. “When exactly did you do this coaching? Where?”
“Long Island. Ten years ago,” he supplied crisply. He smiled and leaned back against the car again. “My girlfriend at the time had a seven-year-old. I was trying to earn points with her.”
A kids’ team? “Man,” she drawled, trying not to laugh, “if you can’t coach a bunch of Mites to a win…. I’m afraid that I have to withdraw my job offer. No hard feelings, okay?”
He gave her a smile that could have powered the East Coast for a week. “I’ll live. Where are we going for dinner?”
Dinner? Who cared about food when she was being dazzled by perfectly even teeth and crinkly cornered, twinkling eyes? “Hero’s in Old Town,” she answered, really sorry that she hadn’t met him years ago. “It’s just a ways up the left side of that street straight across from the Eagle building on Douglas. Just head downtown, you’ll see the cars packed in there. You can’t miss it.”
“How about if I follow you?”
How about if he gave her time to recover from that smile of his? “It’s going to be a bit before I head that way. I always wait and talk to the boys as they go to the bus. If they come out to see that I’ve bolted on them, they’re going to feel lower than they already do.”
“Then I’ll wait with you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know, but women out on the roads alone at night isn’t a good idea. Not that you couldn’t handle anything that might happen, but still…”
Cat nodded and stared at the water tower. When was the last time a man had inconvenienced himself for her? Willingly?
She was back to high school and still searching when he said, “If we’ve run out of things to talk about, it’s going to be a very long dinner.”
Cat smiled. Since she couldn’t see him being pleased about any nomination for Knight
