On Thin Ice Page 7

  He climbed into the bathtub behind the white curtain and pressed up against the enclosure under the showerhead. It was just the frosting on his cupcake that the damn thing had a leak. Throughout the next several tense moments, maddening drops of water plopped with the regularity of a metronome onto his forehead and then slowly rolled down to drip off the tip of his nose.

  Sasha and another woman entered her hotel room. Mick could hear their feminine voices as they walked straight past the bathroom.

  “It’s here somewhere,” he heard Sasha say as drawers rattled open. “I know it is. The last time I wore it was . . . ah! Here it is.” There was a muffled thump. “What do you think . . . will it work?”

  “Oh, Sasha,” the other voice breathed. “It looks perfect.”

  “I want to see it with your dress. What do you say we take it down to your room so you can show me?”

  Yes, yes, yes, Mick silently urged. Do that. Go to her room. Go.

  “I’ve gotta pee first,” the other voice said. “Mind if I use your bathroom?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Mick flattened himself against the wall. He heard the rustle of clothing and the sounds of her doing her business, and he didn’t breathe again until the toilet flushed. The water ran in the basin and then stopped, and he figured she was finally about through. Get out of here, he silently urged. Get. The hell. Out of here.

  And he thought she had, but suddenly her voice was just on the other side of the shower curtain. “Oh, you’ve got a bathtub,” she exclaimed and he watched in dismay as female fingers wrapped around the edge of the curtain and started to move it back. “My room only has a shower.”

  Then Sasha was in the room, too. “You prefer baths?” The other woman must have nodded, because Sasha continued, “You oughtta speak to Mick Vinicor about it. I bet he could make sure you get a tub in your future rooms.”

  “Ohh, Mick,” the other woman murmured. “God, is he a babe, or what?” she demanded and her hand dropped away from the curtain. Mick heard her footsteps on the tile floor as she walked away. “How’d you like to climb into that guy’s pants?”

  And just when he would have liked them to stay in the room, so he could hear Sasha’s reply, they walked out in a burst of laughter, slamming the hallway door closed behind them.

  Eking out a thin breath, he waited a moment and then eased himself out of the tub. Noting the placement of the towel, he pulled it off the shower rod, rubbed his head dry and placed it back where he’d found it. Quickly completing his inspection of Sasha’s toiletries and cosmetics, he checked inside the toilet tank, felt around behind it, and then walked back into the bedroom. He stood in the middle of the room, looking around.

  Well, this didn’t make a damn bit of sense. A messy explosion of lingerie from a half-opened drawer caught his eye and he crossed the room. Picking up a minuscule pair of leopard-skin print satin panties from where they’d fallen on the carpet, he stood pulling them through his fist, thinking about the result of his search as he stared down with unseeing eyes at the rest of the jumbled lingerie, scarves, and costume jewelry that spilled out of the drawer.

  Usually, the only people who came up this clean when their room was tossed turned out to be . . . innocent. But hell, he knew that wasn’t the case.

  No, either she used the hotel safe or there was a key somewhere, most likely one that she kept on her, which would open a safety deposit box. Or a locker. Or something. He just had to get closer to her.

  And he would, dammit.

  Absentmindedly tucking the minuscule panties into his hip pocket, he looked around to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind that might alert her. Then he let himself out of her hotel room.

  FIVE

  All of a sudden Sasha couldn’t seem to turn around without tripping all over Mick Vinicor. He was everywhere she went.

  How he had managed to get himself included in every damn social situation going these days was beyond her, but the man definitely got around. If she joined the ever-fluctuating group of skaters, techs, and stage crew who met for lunch daily in the various hotel coffee shops, he was there . . . and somehow always managed to end up seated right next to her. A group of them went out on the town after the show one night . . . and Mick was there. They played poker in Connie’s room another night . . . Mick was there. They arrived in Portland Friday night and when six of them went together to rent a car to drive to the Saturday Market on Sunday . . . Mick was one of them. It was making her nuts.

  God, she was so aware of him, and the methods he used to enhance that awareness were so subtle she was hard pressed to identify exactly what he was doing to make her feel this way.

  Not that she had dared to even speculate as much aloud, of course. Her mama hadn’t raised no fool, and Sasha didn’t voice her suspicions to a soul—well, except to Connie—because she knew darn good and well that it made her sound paranoid beyond belief. The determined way he was pursuing her was already grist for the rumor mill and it appeared to amuse the hell out of a lot of people. She refused to contribute to their entertainment by suggesting that there might be something calculated in that pursuit.

  Sasha nevertheless recognized that Mick was acting deliberately. She didn’t know how she knew and it didn’t make a lick of sense . . . but she couldn’t quite grant herself permission to trust him all the same. She could lust after him a little, but she would not trust him.

  After wasting too much time thinking about it, she decided her skepticism over his motives had to do with the appraising look in his eyes that she had chanced to see more than once when she’d looked up unexpectedly to find him watching her. At the same time—and this was the confusing part—not discounting the chilling calculation she saw when he trained those assessing eyes on her, there was also a very real heat in the cool, blue depths that she found equally undeniable.

  It was too damn confusing for words. Just admitting she experienced this rampant sexual curiosity in the first place was enough of a shock. Her public skating style to the contrary, Sasha had always thought it was one of life’s little ironies that she actually wasn’t a very carnal person. Privately she found sex to be highly overrated.

  She had been deprived of her illusions on that subject at an impressionable age. Like young girls everywhere, she’d had her share of crushes on members of the opposite sex. Unlike other young girls her age, however, before her social skills had even had a sporting chance to properly evolve she’d already become the social pariah of Kells Crossing’s west side.

  Had she not, she freely admitted she most likely would have been too busy for much socializing anyway. Her life at that point had been a continuum of school, skating, homework, and bed. But it would have been nice to be granted a chance to test her wings. Just possibly she might have found a way to squeeze in a social life between her responsibilities. She had never had the opportunity to find out. Instead it was necessary for her to rush off from school the moment the last bell rang, and her association with Ivan Petralahti contributed to her alienation. Add to that the traveling she’d done to various competitions held in far-off, exotic locales, and it was enough to render her an outsider on her own side of town.

  And therefore to be considered fair game.

  She had been teased in less than friendly tones from practically the moment it was first learned Ivan had chosen to give her private lessons at his compound. Millworkers talked at their dinner tables and the general gist must have been that Carole Miller’s girl was getting above herself, because when their children came to school they had plenty to say to Sasha about the way she thought she was so much better than everyone. They were equally quick to point out that they considered her nothing but a stuck-up snob. Even the friends she’d had before Ivan Petralahti entered her life subscribed to a similar theory once her free time was curtailed by her new skating lessons.

  It had hurt; she couldn’t deny it. But she’d had Mama and Lonnie, who was going through an identical displacement, and perhaps even more
importantly, she’d had her skating lessons with Ivan. The skating made up for almost everything else.

  And so it went for several years. She and Lonnie were different than the usual millworker’s kids and as such were gruffly excluded. The average west-side worker had to struggle just to put enough food on the table—never mind extras—and there was an overt resentment that transferred from parent to child regarding the obvious expense being poured into their development as skaters.

  Then Sasha began to fill out physically, and the less-than-subtle ostracism she’d previously been subjected to began to develop even darker overtones.

  At close to sixteen years old, Sasha had arrived at puberty quite a bit later than most of millworkers’ daughters. She’d always been on the small side, with a thin and gawky appearance, and had tended to look younger than her age. Until shortly before her sixteenth birthday she’d been all sharp shoulder blades and knobby knees, all big eyes, wide mouth, and wild hair.

  I’m so ugly, Mama, she’d frequently lamented in disgust. I’m always gonna be a freak.

  No, sweetie, her mother would invariably reply, sweeping Sasha’s thick, soft hair away from her face and smiling down at her. Trust me on this, baby; someday you’re going to be a swan.

  But Sasha knew that all mothers thought their daughters were beautiful; it made their judgment an iffy thing at best.

  Then overnight, everything she had previously despaired of as being either too awkward or ungainly seemed to rearrange itself into a new configuration that was altogether pleasing. No longer did she have so many protruding bones; there was a new feminine softness overall. It was in the delicately curved but freshly rounded hips and buttocks; in the peach-sized, satisfyingly ripe little breasts; in her rounder thighs and calves; in her softer shoulders and arms. She was suddenly the proud possessor of a contour that, far from voluptuous, made her feel feminine for the first time in her life.

  To cap it off, she also finally grew into her eyes and mouth. It, too, seemed to evolve overnight. She went to bed one evening convinced that while her body might finally have developed into something resembling a female’s, her face was never going to be anything but mutt-ugly. She awoke the next morning to discover that not only was Sasha Miller no longer homely, she was actually becoming downright . . . pretty.

  She should have been allowed to thrill in the discovery for at least a short while. The rancor of her schoolmates, however, seemed to pick up apace with her budding beauty.

  She never knew how the rumors got started, but along with her new looks she’d suddenly gained a reputation. It was commonly accepted that Sasha Miller was the west side’s new good-time girl. Whispers circulated that she put out at the drop of a hat. The first she heard about it was the night she went out on her one and only Kells Crossing date.

  God, how the idea of that date had thrilled her. And it had been everything she’d hoped for, too . . . right up until the moment when she’d had to fight like a demon in the front seat of a parked car, on a dark, deserted road, in order to retain custody of her virtue. She’d had a crush on the boy forever; she might have been willing to surrender her virginity to him on some eventual date if he’d treated her with care and respect. She was not, however, about to let it be taken from her by force.

  With a determination that she failed to realize was quite exceptional, Sasha refused to allow school to become the nightmare it could have been following that incident. There was no denying, however, that it became decidedly uncomfortable. Boys she’d barely even spoken to before were suddenly claiming to have known her in the Biblical sense and making kissing sounds when she walked down the hallway; a hush fell over the girls’ rest room when she entered.

  Lonnie waded in on more than one occasion when he spotted some high school lothario pinning Sasha to a locker while his hands trespassed where they had no business being, and a few other brave souls also attempted to buck the social order and befriend her.

  But Lonnie had problems of his own. More than once he was slammed up against a locker for his efforts while a furious face was thrust close to his and a venomous voice, filled with small-town prejudice, warned, “Keep out of this, faggot! The day I need some dickless wonder’s advice on how to deal with a round-heeled slut is the day I’ll join you in puttin’ on a tutu and prancing around some rink!”

  And Lon, being Lon, had always given just as good as he got. Shoving his tormentor aside, he’d jeer, “Isn’t inbreeding a wonderful thing, Saush? It promotes such intelligence, as you can see by this fine specimen here.” Whirling on the redneck, he’d suggest, “Why don’t you go on home and screw your sister, Bubba? I hear the line’s real short this afternoon.”

  Except for Mary Sue Janorowski, the only girl in school whose reputation was worse than Sasha’s, the other students who’d attempted to go against the flow and befriend her invariably found their own lives made so miserable they soon gave up the attempt. Mary Sue, who had earned every bit of her reputation, breezily flipped people off when they threatened to ostracize her as well, or she stared them in the eye and coolly rattled a skeleton or two. She knew where every single one was buried. Having her as Sasha’s only female defender did absolutely nothing to enhance Sasha’s already black reputation, but Sasha didn’t care. Mary Sue was the only schoolmate she remembered with warmth.

  In her senior year, life on the west side of the river in Kells Crossing developed a nightmarish quality. It was in February that the mills effected a massive layoff, and it turned her neighborhood into a walking horror show. Hollow-eyed men, smelling of stale beer and defeat, loitered outside the ubiquitous street corner taverns at all hours of the day and night.

  It got so that Sasha dreaded walking past the taverns on her way home from school each day. To these men she seemed to represent the affluence that thrived only on the east side of the river. A new desperation prevailed and she became a handy scapegoat. Out-of-work men regarded her as a daughter of the enemy—the mill owners who controlled their economic survival—instead of one of their own. Sasha could have told them the citizens of Town looked down on her every bit as much as they looked down on anyone else from her side of the river, but it didn’t matter. She was representative of something the millworkers couldn’t have. She was a safe target, and their hands would reach out as she walked by; their mouths would open and tongues would wag at her with lascivious suggestiveness.

  Perhaps because she couldn’t remember her own daddy and so tended to revere the father figure, it struck her as ten times more disturbing than what their sons were doing. She crossed streets to avoid them, yet still it seemed she had to contend daily with the feel of rough hands sliding off various portions of her anatomy, as with head held high, she sailed past with as much dignity as she could muster.

  Ivan caught her crying about it at practice one afternoon. Usually able to disguise her feelings more adroitly, this was one instance when it simply proved too much work to dissemble.

  “What iss this?” he demanded in concern, coming across her in the back of the rink where she had gone to be alone until she could get a grip on her emotions. “What iss so bad that it makes my Sashala cry?”

  Sasha swiped at her tears and attempted a smile. “It’s nothing, Ivan,” she assured him stoically. “Really.”

  “The hell it’s not,” Lon’s voice interrupted. He came out of the shadows where he’d been watching her in brooding silence. Turning to Ivan he snarled, “Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that she was nearly raped on her one and only date in this godforsaken town. Or maybe it’s because men old enough to be her father make filthy suggestions and put their grubby hands all over her every goddam time she tries to walk down the street. She can’t step out of her house without being molested.” Lonnie had seen it for himself one day and had nearly gone ballistic. He’d been walking her home ever since.

  Twitching now with a too-long-suppressed rage, he glared at Ivan, transferring his belligerence to the one man he knew would allow him to vent
his feelings.

  Ivan paused to give the boy’s shoulder a comforting squeeze before he sank down on the bench beside Sasha. He reached out to rest his hand upon her head, its warm weight penetrating the thickness of her hair to lend a feeling of security. “I’m sorry, my dahlink girl,” he said gently. “There’s no excuse for such behavior.”

  “It’s criminal, is what it is,” Lonnie said with cold finality.

  “Ya,” Ivan agreed. “It is.” Looking down at Sasha’s averted face he said slowly, “I sink, Sashala, that the people on your side of the river, well, I sink they live desperate lives. And when they look at you, I sink they feel a double measure of hopelessness, because they can see that there iss a specialness, which is yours, that they will never have.”

  And Lonnie, considering Ivan’s words, thought that was probably the truth. Sasha did have something special—she all but shined with it. Hell, for years now she’d been the target of all this unrelenting bullshit. The brunt of it was aimed directly at her, and yet somehow she managed to remain untainted by it. How many times had he seen her backed into a corner with some redneck’s meaty, unwelcome hand on her breast? She never screamed or swore—she usually just stared at her tormentor with those big gray eyes, and if the last of their humanity hadn’t already been chiseled away by small-town prejudices drummed into their heads from the cradle, it pricked at their conscience. He’d watched it with his own eyes, seen it make them shift in shame, make their hands fall away, make them feel like the dog shit they were. She handled everything that life dished out to her with ten times the grace that he did.

  “I’m tired of this crappy longhaired music,” he said with sudden restlessness and hopped up. Skating over to the dual cassette player, he pulled a cassette from his jacket pocket and popped it in. He cranked up the volume and skated back to where Sasha and Ivan still sat. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” blared out of the loudspeakers, and he could feel the bass thumping beneath his skates as he stopped with a flourish in front of them. He held out his hand invitingly. “C’mon, Saush,” he yelled over the music. “Let’s show Ivan what we can do with some real music.”