Читать книгу Under His Spell - Kristin Hardy, Kristin Hardy - Страница 10

Chapter Four

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Lainie said, puffing as she struggled to raise her toes, already pointing at the ceiling, even higher in rhythmic bursts. “Nobody should work this hard at six in the morning.”

“Just think of all the good it’s doing you.” Caro lay on the mat next to her, doing the exercises as though they cost no effort at all.

“I’d rather be running any day. Tell me why I’m doing this again?”

“To strengthen your core.”

“I think my core’s as strong as it needs to be.”

“If it were, you wouldn’t be puffing,” Caro said serenely.

“I’ll tell you what my core needs,” Lainie said, rolling to her side to do the plank. “Coffee and scones at George’s.”

Caro turned to stare at her before getting into position. “Work out and then go pack the calories right back on? Isn’t that contrary to the whole point?”

“What do you mean? Coffee and scones are the whole point. This is just what we do to earn our right to them.”

“I feel sure there’s something really off about that statement, but I can’t quite figure out what,” Caro said.

“Come on, guys, no talking,” the instructor reprimanded them gently from the front of the class. “Concentrate on your core.”

“See?” Lainie whispered. “Scones.”

“Isn’t this the guy who was kissing your hand outside the hotel yesterday?” Caro looked up from her newspaper.

Lainie froze, a bite of scone halfway to her mouth. “Kissing my hand?” she repeated faintly.

They sat at the window counter in Cool Beans. Caro held up the sports page. On the bottom, in living color, J.J. stared out at her with his crooked grin. Local Champ Down as Season Looms, read the headline.

Lainie cleared her throat. “You, um, saw that?”

“It was kind of hard to miss.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

Caro gave a Mona Lisa smile. “I was biding my time. It was the fourth grader from the gift shop, right? Funny, we don’t often get Olympic medalists dropping by.”

“Oh, he’s just…” Lainie flapped her hands.

Caro raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“Someone I grew up with.”

“That didn’t look like the move of a childhood friend.”

“I never used the word friend,” Lainie said darkly.

Caro’s mouth curved. “Now, this is getting interesting.”

“It’s not interesting. There’s nothing going on.”

“It sure didn’t look like nothing.”

“I ran into him at a family event over the weekend. Lucky me, he decided to stop by and bug me.” Lainie took a drink of her latte and set the cup squarely down on the picture of J.J.’s face.

“Looks like he did a pretty effective job,” Caro observed.

“Oh, that’s the one talent he’s got.”

“Judging by the hand-kiss thing, I’d say he’s got a few more.”

Lainie sucked in a breath of annoyance. “Yeah, well, he’s not going to use them on me.”

“You so sure of that?”

“Positive.”

Caro stirred her cappuccino. “What’s the problem, is he a jerk?”

Both less and more. “J. J. Cooper cares about three things—skiing, parties and women, and not necessarily in that order. He has the biggest ego on three continents and the attention span of a gnat.”

“Big breeders, those gnats.”

Lainie finished her coffee and thumped down the cup a little too loudly. “He’s just yanking my chain. He’s stuck here for a while instead of being Mr. Continental and he’s bored. Showing up here gives him something to do.”

“So are you going out?”

“Not in this or any other universe.” Lainie finished the last bite of scone with a decisive munch and screwed up the napkin.

Caro took a meditative sip of her coffee. “Why not?”

“The same reason I don’t hit myself on the head with a hammer. It’s dumb, it’s unhealthy and I know for a fact it’s going to be painful before I ever start.”

“So you’ve got a thing for him.” Caro nodded wisely.

“I do not have a thing for him,” Lainie retorted, stung. “And Speed Racer is dreaming if he thinks for one minute that I’m going to be the one to take him off the hook while he’s stuck here.”

Caro nodded. “Understandable.”

“Because I am so not.”

“You’ve got me convinced,” she said mildly.

“He’s not my type. He never has been.”

“Don’t forget to invite me to the wedding.”

Lainie gave her a narrow-eyed stare. “Does the phrase ‘when hell freezes over’ mean anything to you?”

“Winter’s coming,” Caro said genially.

It looked, J.J. thought, like a medieval torture rack, an open-sided, metal-framed cube built of steel bars as tall as a man. Levers and steel weight plates and leather belts dangled on the inside. “You’re weren’t part of the Spanish Inquisition in a previous life, were you?” He turned to the short, muscle-bound man in sweats who stood outside the cage.

Manny Turturro grinned at J.J. from a face misshapen from a decade in the boxing ring. “Me? I’m the milk of human kindness.”

“The milk of human kindness,” J.J. repeated. Actually, to his eye, Manny looked more like a human fireplug with a smile. “So how does this work?”

“I use the lever to raise the weights, then lower them so that all the pressure is on you. Your job is to use your legs and abs to stay in place for a count of ten, then I pull the weights off. The idea is not motion but maintaining peak muscle contraction.”

“And it’s not going to be a problem with my shoulder?”

Turturro shook his head. “The weight’s going onto your trapezius. I checked it all out with your sports med doc and he was fine with it. How’s the shoulder feel, anyway?”

J.J. moved his arm around a bit. “Good. A little twinge if I try to move too fast, but otherwise it’s fine.” Not fine enough to let him get on the slopes, though, which was why he was at Turturro’s. Manny Turturro’s methods may have been unorthodox, at best, but the iconoclastic trainer had brought countless elite athletes to the peaks of their professions with a few months of work at his training compound north of Boston.

“I can pretty much guarantee it won’t be pleasant, but you want to be ready for the slopes, we’ll get you ready for the slopes.”

J.J. grinned and stepped into the metal cage. “Okay, let’s do it.”

Unpleasant, he quickly discovered, was a mild word for it. Agonizing, maybe, or excruciating. And Manny just kept grinning at him like a demented gnome and calling for another set.

“Come on, Cooper, show me what you got.” He levered up the weights without breaking a sweat.

“Anybody ever tell you you’re a sadist, Manny?” J.J. said through gritted teeth as his quads trembled with effort.

“Hey, all you have to do is convince yourself you’re having fun. Just ignore all this. Think about something pleasant. Take your mind off it.”

Something pleasant? And that quickly, Lainie popped to mind. Stop it. He’d been tempted, oh, so tempted, to stop in Salem again the previous day, and even that morning. Unfortunately he’d been running late—figuring out he hadn’t needed to leave at the crack of dawn to make his appointment had made sleeping in far too tempting. As it was, he’d still gotten up earlier than he’d have liked, and if he had to spend more days in the car than he was out of it anymore, he was going to start clawing his face off.

Time to think about Plan B.

“Come on, Cooper, another set.”

He glowered at Manny. “I’ll give you another set.”

“If distracting yourself doesn’t work, then visualize. Isn’t that what you fancy athletes do? Close your eyes, feel the weight and imagine it’s the g-forces from going around a gate.”

Fine idea in the abstract, except that when he closed his eyes, the image in his head was Lainie, staring at him, stunned, as he kissed her hand. J.J. sank down into another rep, pushing aside the pain of fatigue. He liked seeing Lainie stunned, her control and assurance gone. He liked knowing that for a moment all she thought of was him.

So maybe he should get in her way a little more, see where it all went. He had the time; she wasn’t attached the last time he’d heard. Maybe they ought to run it around the block, see how it did. Of course, she might take some convincing.

He smiled broadly. Then again, the convincing might be the fun part. After all, he’d never set out to charm a woman yet without succeeding.

“There you go, imagine yourself winning,” Manny said.

“It works—you know as well as I do. You get a goal, then concentrate on it and make it happen. It’s as simple as that. Give me one more.”

J.J. swiped away the sweat that was starting to drip into his eyes and tried to ignore the trembling of his legs. Think about something pleasant. Like the feel of Lainie folded against his chest at the Jack and Jill party. Like the way she’d feel, warm and naked against him in bed.

“There we go, that’s what I’m talking about,” Manny said.

“Focus, concentrate on what you want.”

And J.J., in the midst of another rep, concentrated.

The mountains were where he felt best, he thought as he stood on the terminal slope of the Mount Jefferson ski run with Gabe. Something about being there always felt right. Not that he didn’t love the beach and the city, or that he couldn’t find a sort of quiet beauty in the desert. They weren’t the same, though.

Up among the peaks, he somehow felt more alive, as though he could breathe more deeply, stand taller, become more than what he was. Whether it was because skiing was in his blood or whether he’d become a skier because of his love for the mountains, it was the place that was right for him.

They stared down at the sweep of turf that spread out below them. To their left, the sculpted curve of the new half pipe was already lightly grassed over. Across the valley, the Hotel Mount Jefferson gleamed white in the morning sun.

Gabe turned to stare thoughtfully at the point where the new downhill run tapered into the main slope. “You did a hell of a job.”