The night before Virgil Duffy's funeral, a storm pounded the
Puget Sound. But by the next morning, the gray clouds were
gone, leaving in their place a view of Elliott Bay and the
spectacular skyline of downtown Seattle.
Sunlight
cut across the grounds of his Bainbridge estate and in
through the towering windows. Among the guests honoring him
at his wake, there were those who wondered if he was up in
heaven controlling the notoriously gray April weather. They
wondered if he'd been able to control his young wife, but
mostly they wondered what she was going to do with the pile
of money and NHL hockey team she'd just inherited.
Tyson Savage wondered that himself. The voices pouring from
the formal living room drowned out the sound of his Hugo
Boss dress shoes as he moved across the parquet flooring of
the entry way. He had a really bad feeling that the Widow
Duffy was going to screw up his chance at the cup. The bad
feeling bit the back of his neck and had him adjusting the
tight knot of his tie.
Ty walked through the
double doors and into a large room that reeked of polished
wood and old money. He spotted several of his teammates,
spit and polished and looking slightly uncomfortable amongst
the Seattle elite. Defenseman Sam Leclaire sported a black
eye from last week's game against the Avalanche that had
resulted in a five-minute penalty. Not that Ty held a
muck-up in the corner against a guy. He also had a
reputation for throwing the gloves, but unlike Sam, he
wasn't a hothead. With only three days to go before the
first playoffs game, the bruises were bound to get a hell of
a lot worse.
Ty stopped just inside the door, and
his gaze moved across the room and landed on Virgil's widow
standing within the sunlight spilling through the windows.
Even if the sun hadn't been shining in her long blonde hair,
Mrs. Duffy still would have stood out amongst the mourners
surrounding her. She wore a black dress with sleeves that
reached just below her elbows and a hem that touched just
above her knees. It was just a plain dress that looked
anything but plain as it poured over her incredible body.
Ty had never met Mrs. Duffy. A few hours earlier,
at St. James Church, was the first time he'd seen her in
person. He'd heard about her though. Everyone had heard
about the billionaire and the playmate. He'd heard that
several years before the Widow had snagged herself a rich,
old man, she'd been working a stripper pole in Vegas.
According to the gossip, one night while she'd been rocking
her acrylic heels, Hugh Hefner himself had walked into the
club and spotted her onstage. He'd put her in his magazine,
and twelve months later, he'd made her his playmate of the
year. Ty hadn't heard how she'd met Virgil, but how the two
had met didn't matter. The old man dying and leaving his
team to a gold digger did. One whole hell of a lot.
The talk in the locker room at the Key Arena was that
Virgil had had a massive heart attack while trying to please
his young wife in the sack. The rumor was that the old man
had blown out a heart valve and died with a big ol' grin on
his face. The mortician hadn't been able to remove it, and
the old man had gone into the cremation oven wearing a
hard-on and a smile.
Ty didn't care about rumors,
and he didn't care what people did or whom they did it with.
If it was good, bad, or somewhere in between. Until now.
He'd just signed his contract with the Seattle Chinooks
organization three months ago, partly because of the money
the old man had offered him, but mostly for the captaincy
and a shot at Lord Stanley's cup. Both he and Virgil wanted
that cup, but for different reasons. Virgil had wanted to
prove something to his rich friends. Ty wanted to prove
something to the world: he was better than his dad, the
great Pavel Savage. The cup was the one thing that had
eluded them both, but Ty was the only one who still had a
shot at it. Or at least he'd had a good shot until Duffy
croaked right before the playoffs and left the team to a
tall, blonde playmate. Suddenly Ty's chance at the biggest
trophy in the NHL was in the hands of a trophy wife.
"Hey, Saint," Daniel Holstrom called out as he
approached.
Ty had been given the nickname "Saint"
his rookie year, when after a night of especially wild
partying, he'd played like shit the next day. When the coach
benched him, Ty had claimed he had a flu bug. "You're like
your father," the coach had said, with a disgusted shake of
his head. "A damned saint." Ty had been trying and sometimes
failing to live down the reputation ever since.
He
looked across the shoulder of his navy blazer and into the
eyes of his teammate. "How's it goin'?"
"Good.
Have you given your condolences yet to Mrs. Duffy?"
"Not yet."
"Do you think Virgil really died
while doing his wife? He was what? Ninety?"
"Eighty-one."
"Can a guy still get it up at
eighty-one?" Daniel shook his head. "Sam thinks she's so hot
she could raise the dead, but frankly I doubt that even she
can work miracles on old equipment." He paused a moment to
study the young widow as if he couldn't quite make up his
mind. "She is smokin' hot."
"Virgil probably had
pharmaceutical help, eh?" Ty's own father was in his late
fifties and was still getting it on like a teenager, or so
he said. Viagra had given a lot of men back their sex lives.
"That's true. Isn't Hefner in his eighties and
still having sex?"