Body Check: Post 24-

Chapter 12 & Epilogue: Make-Up Sex and Beyond

Our hero and heroine have already basically made up and gotten back together, but afterwards Brody had to have his investigatory interview so he promises to come join Hayden at the hotel when that’s done.

Hayden tells Brody that she loves him and he’s filled with “sheer bliss” (156).

The joy in his heart spilled over, warming his insides and making his pulse skate through his veins like a player on a breakaway (156).

Sigh. We had to get one more hockey metaphor shoehorned in here somehow, I guess.

Hayden even goes so far as to say she’ll go to his games but she’ll also bring work along with her because, don’t forget, she hates hockey. That’s … not very gracious, frankly. Brody assures her that he’s already trying to sign with a west coast team so that she can keep teaching at Berkeley. Magnanimous. Not just any college will hire someone without a PhD after all. Harrumph. Then he tells her he loves her more than hockey and asks her to marry him.

They cap this off with more sex, this time in the hallway in the same place they first had sex. He even “peppered little kisses on her flat abdomen” (158). What happened to Hayden being curvy? Oh, right, she’s only curvy in the socially-acceptable way, butt and boobs, I guess.

But then, too, we have to contrast her flat abdomen in this scene with the rounded one in the epilogue, which happens a year later, in CA, when she is five months pregnant. Y’know, I’m very used to the epilogue-pregnancy trope in historical romances but I naively didn’t expect it in a contemporary. How is Hayden going to be a mom AND a professor AND finish her PhD?

Apparently Darcy is visiting and has taken a vow of celibacy. I frankly expected Darcy to get together with another player on the Warriors and realize that commitment isn’t so bad. So point to the author for surprising me with the vow of celibacy.

The epilogue takes us backwards to the time between the last scene and this. To sum up, Brody was (conveniently!) signed by the Vipers, putting him in LA. The text is very confusing here about commutes and courses, but I think they’re living in San Diego and Hayden is teaching online seminars as well as working on her PhD at the University of San Diego. I guess she’d have to be teaching online, since it’s 7.5 hours between San Diego and Berkeley. But she wouldn’t be a professor, not teaching only online. She wouldn’t be able to partake in faculty meetings and other kinds of university service that’s required.

 Brody is commuting from San Diego. That’s a two hour commute each way assuming no traffic. The only way I can see this working is if the practice facility for the LA Vipers is in between San Diego and LA so that some days he only has a one hour commute. But it’s a stupid set up regardless. Two hours after games before Brody can get home to San Diego? Games end at about 10pm, or later. And if the fictional Vipers practice at all like the actual Coyotes, they’d need to be at their practice rink almost every day at about 9am. Not to mention the required gym time, much of which has to happen at the arena and/or training facilities under the eye of trainers. And anyway, why not just live in LA since Hayden isn’t going to campus anyway.

I’m pretty sure there’s something missing from the text, but I don’t think enough is missing to explain the utterly bizarre choice of living arrangements.

The narrative then goes back to the wedding, which occurred in Chicago. Craig Wyatt/Mr Serious attended along with Sheila-the-now-Ex, to whom he’s engaged. Also, she’d apparently gotten half of Presley’s estate. Speaking of Presley, he didn’t attend as he was in rehab. Geez, these two couldn’t hold off their wedding for Hayden’s only family to be able to attend?

Other than rehab, Presley had gotten a fine and four years’ probation. He also lost the team which is now owned by the gentlemen’s club party birthday boy. Random. Becker also got probation and Brody still isn’t speaking with him.

Back in the present, we learn that Brody is policing Hayden’s food choices, which pisses me off. He didn’t bring her the ice cream she asked him to pick up. Why?

“I told you why I didn’t pick up the ice cream,” Brody grumbled. “You’ve got to eat healthy, babe. You’re carrying a future champion in that belly of yours. Our son needs proper nourishment” (163).

This is conversation is presented as playful banter—Hayden counters by saying it’s a daughter who will win the Nobel Prize. But I’m more concerned by Brody’s assertion on what Hayden can and cannot eat. It’s perfectly reasonable for him to voice concern or talk with Hayden about her food choices and how it might affect the unborn offspring, but it’s not okay to make decisions about her body.

As I said, it’s supposed to be flirtatious, to some extent, and the two head off to meet Darcy for dinner with promises of sex when they get back home. And of course the novel ends with the two of them telling each other how much they love each other. Brody says he’d do just about anything she asked because he loves her that much. Anything except, apparently, lie for her father or buy her ice cream.

So, that was Body Check by Elle Kennedy, all 165 pages of Harlequin Blaze glory. Hockey Hero meets Hockey-hating Heroine with family troubles that affect him as well and they fall in love anyway, amidst the concern of their one-dimensional friends and family.

Body Check: Post 23-

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?

Body Check: Post 22

Chapter 12: Heroine Takes Charge

After two days of moping, during which time the Warriors lost to the Vipers in Game 7 and are out of the playoffs, Hayden realizes that lying around and eating ice cream isn’t going to help anything, so she decides to fix her father.

[A]lthough she may not be able to “fix” Doug’s broken heart or Brody’s decision to stay away from her, she could sure as hell do something about her father (142).

Well, I don’t think Doug has a broken heart, actually. I think he was disappointed, but there was never any indication in his behavior, words, or Hayden’s description that he was in love with her (although I do think he loved her, or could have gotten there.) More importantly, the words “do something” in the second half of the above quote are a rephrasing of “fix” and that’s problematic. People really can’t fix another person. And even if I’m just arguing semantics with that, there’s a bigger problem. Presley is Hayden’s father, a grown man who has made his own decisions, for good or ill. Not only is it questionable for anyone to jump in to “fix” things, but it’s even more troubling that it’s his daughter. I’m not sure that’s a viable dynamic.

That said, Hayden heads to the arena where she knows that the league will be interviewing her father. She’s going to look her father in the eye and demand to know what’s going on! Gosh darn it, she wants answers! The truth! About this thing that is only tangentially her business…

But first she has to eavesdrop on him. While he’s on the phone, she hears him refuse to cover for Becker anymore. So now we know he’s involved. See? I TOLD you all he wasn’t the great guy everyone thought, since he was willing to just change plans willy-nilly on his wife to go to the gentlemen’s club with Brody.

Hayden does confront Presley and when he explains it’s pretty much precisely what Sheila-the-soon-to-be-ex said. The only new information was that part of his justification for his choices was that he was afraid if he lost his money, he’d also lose Sheila.

Hayden then goes into a bit of a spiral about how she should have been there for her dad and how she should have known somehow. But I really can’t see how. Hayden is allowed to live her own life—most parents, in fact, want their children to live their own successful lives. She said earlier in the book that she spoke with her father on the phone weekly and wanted to spend more time with him but he pushed her away. Short of being psychic or snooping through Presley’s email and tapping his phone, I don’t know how Hayden could have known.

Presley agrees to face the consequences for his actions and to tell the truth to the league investigators. But first, he demands to know what’s going on between Hayden and Brody. Hayden tells her dad that it’s more than an affair, that she wants to be with Brody, then wonders why she was able to say that to her father and not to Brody. My guess? Because she only just figured it out and hasn’t seen Brody since then. But Hayden seems to like to blame herself for things that she actually has zero control over.

She also claims that she doesn’t deserve Brody because all she’s done since meeting him is push him away, and he has “stayed by her side” despite the rules and her saying it was a fling (147). Hayden likens this to the stability she’s always claimed to want. I liken it to stalking and not actually listening to what a woman says she wants. It’s a fine line, I guess.

(No, actually, it’s not a fine line, I’m just being snarky. What it is, is an accepted trope. Think about it—had it been Doug or any man that wasn’t super attractive and somehow inherently noble, we would have thought his insistence a problem. But because of the ways romance novels work, the readers and the narrative know better than the character and thus Brody’s choices are romantic. To be fair, his choices were far less egregious than many heroes’ choices in other novels.)

Hayden decides she needs to trust Brody’s choice to put things on hold and goes off to find him so she can tell him that.

Brody, meanwhile, is waiting for his interview with the league and, as usual, thinking about how much he wants to be with Hayden. Craig Wyatt, aka Mr Serious, aka the captain of the team, calls him aside to chat. He admits he’s been sleeping with Sheila (no surprise) and that he knows who took the bribes, and it was the goalie (ha! Ha! I told you so! There’s no WAY you could fix a hockey game without the goalie being in on it!) and Becker. Which is dropped on Brody as a huge surprise and a big blow, but of course readers known this from the previous scene with Hayden so it’s missing its impact here. Even so, that’s where the chapter ends, with Brody in disbelief.