She’d never told Troy—or anyone—what had happened between her and Mac and she still couldn’t. Hurting her sister hadn’t been her finest moment.
“Okay, admittedly, Mac is not the poster boy for love and commitment so I kind of get your antipathy to him since you have such a huge issue with infidelity,” Troy said after taking a sip of his coffee.
“Doesn’t everyone?” Rory demanded. “Have issues with it?”
“No. And if they do, they don’t take it to the nth degree like you do. Hell, Rorks, I recall you not accepting a date from a perfectly nice guy because you said he had a ‘cheating face.’”
Rory ignored his air quotes and lifted her nose in the air. “Okay, maybe that was wrong of me.”
“Wrong of you? It was properly ridiculous.”
Troy tapped the folder before he attacked his eggs. “Tell me how this came about.”
Rory filled him in and Troy listened, fascinated.
“So, they want you, widely regarded as the best sports rehab physio in the area, to work on Mac. Why didn’t they just approach the clinic directly and hire you that way?”
She’d asked Kade the same question. “They are going to keep the extent of Mac’s injury a secret from the public and the fans. They’ll admit that he’s pulled a muscle or something minor but they don’t want it getting out that his injury is as bad as it is.”
“Why the secrecy?”
“Sorry, I can’t tell you that.” Troy, to his credit, didn’t push. “Kade asked me to take a leave of absence from the clinic to treat Mac.”
Troy’s eyebrows lifted. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“And you said yes, no, hell, no?”
“Thanks to the fact that I am a workaholic, I have nearly two and a half months of vacation due to me that I have to either use or lose.”
Troy just looked at her, waiting for her to continue.
“Kade offered me twenty grand for six weeks and another thirty if I get Mac back into condition by the time the season starts in two months.”
“Fifty K?” Troy’s mouth fell open. After a moment of amazed silence he spoke again. “With that sort of money you could open your own practice like you’ve been dreaming of doing.”
And, more important, she could employ him. Rory nodded. “Yeah. I want to set up a clinic that isn’t a conveyor belt of only treating the patient’s pain—”
“No need to go on, I’ve been listening to you ramble on about your clinic for years.” Troy’s smile was full of love. “And Kade’s offer will allow you to establish this clinic without having to take a loan or use the money you were saving for a house.”
“Essentially.”
“It sounds like a no-brainer, Rorks,” Troy said quietly.
Rory sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. It did, didn’t it? “Except for two rather major points.”
“Which are?”
“First, I am stupidly, crazily attracted to Mac. Nobody makes my blood move like he does.” She glared at Troy. “Don’t you dare laugh! How am I supposed to treat him when all I want to do is crawl all over him?”
Troy hooted, vastly amused.
“Second, and more important, I don’t think I can fix him, Troy, and especially not in two months.” Troy stopped laughing and stared at her.
“I don’t think he’s got a hope in hell.”
“Except that you are forgetting one thing...” Troy cocked his head at her and slowly smiled. “When Mac McCaskill decides he wants something, he’ll move hell and high water to get it. Everyone knows that if Mac says he is going to do something, he’ll get it done. He doesn’t know what failure means.”
Yet he’d failed Shay and, in a roundabout way, failed her. He wasn’t anywhere as perfect as Troy thought him to be.
* * *
The next morning Rory knocked on Mac’s door and stuck her head inside after he told her to come in.
“I’m in the bathroom, I’ll be with you in a sec,” Mac called, so Rory sat down in the visitors’ chair, her bag at her feet. Inside the folder that she placed on her knees was a signed contract to be Mac’s physiotherapist for the next two months.
A little over two months...nine or so weeks. Rory felt panic bubble in her throat and she rubbed her hands over her face. She wasn’t sure if she was scared, excited or horrified. A clinic, the last piece of a down payment for a house, a job for Troy, she reminded herself.
If she continued to save as she’d been doing, it would take another two years to gather what they were prepared to pay her in two months. This was a once-in-a-lifetime deal and she would be a moron to turn to it down. As she’d explained to Troy, there was just one little problem—she had to work with Mac, around Mac, on Mac. The chemistry between them hadn’t changed. She was as attracted to him as she had been at nineteen, possibly even more. Young Mac had been charismatic and sexy and charming but Mac-ten-years-on was a potent mix of power, strength and determination that turned her to jelly. Kade might be the Mavericks’ CEO, and Quinn was no pushover, but yesterday in this same room, Mac, despite his pain, was their undisputed leader. He had, thanks to his mental strength, pushed through pain and taken charge of the meeting.
Mac was determined and had a will to win that was second to none. He was also a rule breaker and a risk taker and utterly bullheaded.
Exactly the type of man she always avoided. They were fun and interesting and compelling, but they broke hearts left, right and center. Sometimes, as was the case with her father, they broke the same hearts over and over again.
She was too smart to let that happen to her.
Mac hated to take orders, but if she had any hope of fixing his arm, then he had to listen to her, do as she said when she said it. That would be a challenge. Mac, alpha male, was overly confident about his own abilities. She’d seen him in action; if he wanted to run a six-minute mile, he did it. If he wanted to improve the speed on his slap shot, he spent hours and hours on the ice until he was satisfied. If Mac wanted to fix his arm, he would work on it relentlessly. Except that muscles and injuries needed time to heal and, especially since his injury was so serious, he had to be careful. If he pushed the recovery process he could suffer irreversible damage and his career would be over. Permanently.
Yet if he wasn’t healed in two months, the Mavericks, as Vancouver knew them, would be gone, and while she might have a brand-new shiny clinic, she might not have any clients if she couldn’t fix the great Mac McCaskill.
Rock, meet hard place.
“Rory.”
Rory snapped her head up to see Mac standing in the doorway of the bathroom, wearing nothing more than a pair of designer denims and a deep scowl. His hair was wet and he’d wrapped a plastic bag around his arm to keep it dry. He hadn’t managed the buttons on his jeans and through the open flaps she could see the white fabric of his, thank goodness, underwear. His chest was damp and a continent wide, lightly covered in brown hair in a perfect T that tapered into a fine trail of hair that crossed those fabulous washboard abs.
Sexy, almost-naked man in open blue jeans, Rory thought... I could so jump you right now.
Mac tried to button his jeans with one hand and swore creatively. Very creatively, Rory thought. She’d never before heard that combination of words strung together.
“Sorry,” Mac muttered when he lifted aggravated eyes to meet hers. “But I am so damn frustrated I could punch something.”