after she gets him fed.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Aaron told him. “She said to tell you she’d see you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Confused and sluggish, Stephen shook his head. She hadn’t left his side all morning, and she had to know that he’d already come to depend on her. “I don’t get it.”
Aaron brushed back the sides of his suit jacket and grinned, his hands parked at his waist. “Couldn’t have anything to do with ‘beautiful liefje.’ Nah.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t remember calling her beautiful or liefje?”
He did, actually, but it had seemed perfectly natural at the time. Using his good hand, he rubbed the top of his head. “No big deal. I—I was dopey. Right?”
“Right. Don’t worry about it,” Aaron advised, still grinning. “I’m just gigging you. Nurse Dear isn’t exactly your style. Right? Besides, it’s like she said, you don’t need a private nurse in the hospital.”
That had not been Stephen’s experience. The longer he’d been hospitalized before, the greater difficulty he’d had getting the nurses to respond to him, but he said nothing. No reason to give Aaron more ammunition.
“Say, speaking of Kaylie, she tells me that the paramedics who brought you in are expecting autographs,” Aaron said.
Stephen nodded. “Yeah, I, uh, may even have promised them game tickets.”
“Hey, if it’ll keep them quiet…” Aaron shrugged.
Stephen agreed. Kaylie had said they wouldn’t talk, that they were bound by privacy rules the same as her, but it didn’t hurt to be accommodating. Besides, he owed them.
“I’ve got some autographed pucks out in the car,” Aaron went on. “I’ll bring some in before I leave. Okay? It’s not like you can sign anything with your writing hand in a cast, after all.”
“Always prepared,” Stephen said with as much smile as he could muster. “So how did it go with the team last night?”
Aaron jingled the change in his pocket. “They lost, five to four.”
Bad news. Or good, depending on how he wanted to look at it. He had a hard time thinking of it as good, even if it might mean that the team was missing him. “How’s Kapimsky doing?”
Kapimsky was his replacement in the net, the young, untried backup goalie for the Blades.
Aaron shrugged. “Like you’d expect, stiff and nervous.”
That would change, Stephen knew, with experience. The pressure-cooker of the playoffs was a tough place to get that experience, though. Winning the Stanley Cup was the goal of all thirty NHL teams, the be-all and end-all of pro hockey. For a team to advance to the Stanley Cup series, they had to win four of seven games in each of three rounds of finals. The two teams not eliminated at the end of those three rounds, one team from each division, would then battle for the cup with another series of seven games.
If the Blades advanced, management might start thinking young Kapimsky could handle the job and exercise the clause in Stephen’s contract that allowed him to be cut. On the other hand, if the team lost, they might blame Stephen for not being in the net when they needed him most. Either way, it looked like a lose-lose proposition for him.
Still, he had gotten the team to their first playoff position. The franchise was only four years old, and he’d been guarding net for them for three. That had to count for something. If not, at least the possibility existed that he would be able to play elsewhere next season.
He wondered how much Kaylie’s prayers had to do with that, but then he turned off that line of thought. He didn’t want to think of Kaylie or her God just now. Her absence smarted in a way that he didn’t want to examine too closely. It would pass. In all likelihood, it was nothing more than a result of his debilitated condition, anyway. That didn’t keep it from stinging, a circumstance he found completely unacceptable.
After everything else that had happened, he knew better than to open himself up to that kind of disappointment. Especially now, with all he was currently going through and his future hanging in the balance, the last thing he needed was an emotional involvement. All he needed was a nurse. And peace. What, he wondered, made him think that he could have both in one small, wholesomely pretty woman?
“Aunt Hypatia, I’m sorry, but I’m bound by ethics and regulations. I can’t discuss any specifics concerning my patient. I just wanted to let you know that Ste…Mr. Gallow’s injuries and pain have been addressed.”
“Well, of course, they