Chapter 13: Surmounting the
Obstacle
This
chapter picks up immediately where 12 left off, with a bit of “No, he didn’t!”,
“Yes, he did!” back and forth to get through. Craig wanders off and Becker
wanders in. Convenient. I guess Becker felt the need to show up after having
just talked on the phone with Presley a few minutes prior. Sure.
Becker
immediately starts in on yelling at Brody for seeing Hayden, but Brody changes
the subject and bluntly asks why Becker let Presley bribe him. There’s some
token denial before Becker breaks and admits he did it for his wife.
“I did it for Mary, okay?” Becker
burst out, looking so anguished that Brody almost felt sorry for him. “You
don’t know what it’s like living with a woman like her. Money, power, that’s
all she talks about. She’s always needling me to be better, richer, more
ambitious. And now that I’m retiring, she’s going nuts. She married me because
of my career, because I was at the top of my game, a two-time cup winner, a
goddamn champion” (151).
So
essentially Becker’s excuse is that his wife is Lady Macbeth. I guess we should
be glad he just took a bribe and didn’t start a war.
We
never met Mary in this novel. Back when Becker and Brody go to the gentlemen’s
club (I will never tire of calling it that) for the birthday party, Brody asked
Becker what he saw in Mary (since he’d just been saying, multiple times, “she’s
not a nice person” (95).) I suppose in retrospect all of Becker’s complaining
about her in chapter 8 ought to have been foreshadowing. And yet Becker’s
answer to Brody’s question was that he did see something in her, his “soulmate”
(95). That’s the only positive thing that Becker says about Mary. Yet Brody’s
vision of her is as a “tiny, delicate woman who’d been married to Sam for
fifteen years” (94). And he’s spent significant time with the couple. That
whole scene in chapter 8 was played for laughs, it seemed to me—oh haha, big
tough hockey player Sam Becker is henpecked. But, evidently, she really is a
terrible person and also she’s Becker’s soulmate, so he had no choice in his
actions.
Except
of course he did.
Speaking
of actions, he not only took the bribe but he was also the source who told the
journalist about Brody seeing Hayden, and who accused Brody of being one of the
players who took bribes. Brody reacts incredibly poorly to this, blood boiling,
stomach churning, “a red haze of fury swept over him” (152).
This
scene mirrors Hayden’s with her father. When talking with her father, she
realized that Brody was offering her the stability she wanted even if it’s
clothed in the instability she fears. In this scene, Brody realizes that Mary’s
desire for power and money is similar to his own, and that he’d been putting
too high a value on those and not a high enough one on Hayden. I get this, I
guess, in that I think there ought to be a way to compromise, but he’s known
Hayden for two weeks. His career has been his life. Brody continues on in his
thoughts, thinking how he’d wanted a woman who could see past his
athlete-status and not care about his money and that obviously that’s true of Hayden.
So while he won’t lie for her father, he’ll stand by her.
In
other words, they’ve each just realized that the other is exactly what they’ve
been looking for.
Which
is awfully convenient as they’ve also just found each other in front of the
conference doors in the arena. Brody makes a grand gesture of telling Hayden
that he’ll stay by her side through the investigation and beyond. Hayden starts
laughing and has to explain that that’s only because she’d come to tell him
that she was okay with taking a break for the sake of his career but that she
didn’t want it to be permanent.
The
Insurmountable Obstacle has been Surmounted! And there was much rejoicing.
There
is kissing and more kissing.
Flushed, she broke the kiss and
stepped back before she gave in to the urge to pull him into the restroom and
fulfill yet another kinky fantasy (155).
She
has a bathroom fantasy? Really?
Ah, nothing like the completely unexpected villain, foreshadowing be damned. And I sometimes have a bathroom fantasy, usually during a long car ride.
ReplyDeleteOkay, fair point on the bathroom fantasies! I have had those, yes. But I wouldn't categorize that kind as kinky...
DeleteI'm not a particularly fastidious person, but bathroom sex seems less kinky and more unsanitary. I mean, I can totally understand having sex in a bathroom if it's clean or if it's the only semi-private place you can get to, or whatever. But that wouldn't make it, to my mind, a fantasy to be fulfilled, y'know?
Likewise, in the one other Harlequin hockey romance I read (a set of 3 novellas, actually), there was public rink locker room sex. I've been in many hockey rink locker rooms. None of them were clean enough for sex except perhaps the ones at the actual NHL arena (I've only seen the Coyotes dressing room from the doorway but I've actually dressed to play in the refs' dressing room, and both of those were clean and without the hockey-gear stink. Unlike *any* other locker room I've seen.) I've digressed a great deal here.
Regardless, it seems to me that because this was a Harlequin Blaze, they told the writer "make the sex slightly kinky" and her only recourse was escapable pantyhose bondage and slightly public sex, of which the bathroom fantasy (ew) is one. At least I *hope* the allure of the bathroom fantasy (ew) is illicit public sex and not some kind of germophilia or worse...
(I try not to judge. Live and let live. For years I proofread for an erotica publisher and saw all sorts of things. But sometimes things squick me out.)