Blindsided (26 page)

He rapped on the closed door and waited until he heard the invitation to enter. Drawing in a deep breath, Tanner strode through the door, exuding confidence he didn’t feel, but drawing comfort knowing good or bad Emma waited for him.

The head coach, offensive coordinator, and quarterback coach all glanced up and smiled at him as he entered. Smiling had to be a good sign, especially from Meyer. It beat the hell out of scowling or cringing. Tanner grinned back, dropped into an empty chair across the table, and leaned forward, hands clasped on the desk.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said cheerfully, secretly applauding his acting skills.

They all responded then every set of eyes turned to Miller. As head coach, he’d lead the discussion. Something in Coach Miller’s gaze clutched at Tanner’s heart and spiraled his confidence into a nose dive.

Crap.

Tanner held his breath and waited, his smile frozen painfully on his face.

“Tanner,” Coach began, pausing to consult his iPad. “You have talent. No one disputes that fact. You’re built to be the ideal quarterback—speed, quickness, great arm, smart, and with a competitive drive. Your work ethic is unparalleled. The only unknown is an intangible which separates the great quarterbacks from the good and mediocre quarterbacks. We have concerns regarding your confidence level and your ability to play through adversity and rise above it. Great quarterbacks raise the level of play of their teammates. They win when all the odds are stacked against them. They create opportunities that shouldn’t exist. We don’t know if you’re that guy, but we’ve seen glimpses, and we believe you can be. The question is, do you believe it?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Tanner spoke quickly, hiding his hands in his lap before the coaches noticed they were shaking.

Coach Miller pointed toward Jack Meyer. “Jack is willing to bet his career on you, and Jack’s endorsement is all I need. You’re our starting quarterback unless you do something to lose the job.”

“Thank you,” Tanner answered simply, his brain racing to process the words he hadn’t been prepared to hear.

Coach stood. “Thanks, that’ll be all. See you back here on Monday. Take a few days off and enjoy time with your new wife.”

Tanner nodded and shook hands with all of them. Meyer gripped his hand the longest, giving him a piercing gaze that said more than his words ever could. There’d be hell to pay if Tanner let him down, and Tanner could not let that happen.

Full of hope and already feeling the pressure, he jogged to his truck, anxious to get home to Emma. He started to call her, but decided to tell her in person. She’d be as thrilled as he was. The only other person who’d ever cared this much about him had been his sister.

He’d forgotten how much he’d missed having someone in his life who supported him through good and bad.

Emma did that, and he was starting to find it hard to imagine life without her.

* * * *

Emma paced the length of the front porch, pausing on each trip to check her phone in case she hadn’t heard it ring.

Nothing.

Dread filled her. He’d been in his meeting for almost an hour. The longer the better, right? Unless he was cleaning out his locker and saying goodbye to staff and teammates.

Oh, please, no
.

Tanner being cut wouldn’t be the end of the world. It’d be the Steelheads’ loss. Another team would pick him up because Emma believed he was that good. Under the right circumstances he’d prove how good he was. She had faith in Tanner, but she didn’t have faith in the Steelheads’ new management—and definitely not the old management—to see past his mistakes to the raw, untapped talent beneath.

What if he was cut? And he signed with another team? Then what?

Emma shuddered at the thought. She’d never lived anywhere but the Seattle area and never wanted to move. Sure, she entertained dreams of Nashville, but in her dreams she’d always maintained a house in Seattle.

Tanner didn’t have those ties to Seattle, even though his brother was here, and Tanner had played college ball here. He’d been raised near Pittsburgh. In her eyes, his origins made him an East Coast boy, even though he’d assimilated the Northwest’s casual lifestyle as well as any native.

Darn you, Tanner. Call me, please.

Her phone remained stubbornly silent.

To distract herself, she let her mind drift back to last night. As usual, Tanner performed like a sexual master with her as his star pupil, but their relationship went deeper than that. It had to.

She’d been in love with Tanner for so long, but it’d been a crush, not real love. Once she’d gotten to know the man behind the mask—even as little as he’d let her see behind it—her crush turned to true love. He was the One. The man she’d waited for all her life. The guy she’d been destined to marry, have babies, and grow old with.

Too bad Tanner didn’t feel the same way.

At least, she didn’t think he did.

Yet? If only she dared—

Car tires crunched in the gravel drive. Emma froze, her stomach in knots, her heart pounding. She watched as Tanner drove into sight, gravel spewing as he rounded a corner too fast. Typical, and she knew not to read anything into his driving when he always drove like a crazy man.

He must have spotted her on the porch as he braked to an abrupt stop without driving into the garage. He hopped out of the truck, a huge bouquet of mixed flowers in one big hand and a grin on his face. He took the stairs two at a time, grabbed her around the waist, and spun her in circles. Laughing, she held on until he set her feet on the wooden boards of the porch. He kept a steadying hand on her waist and thrust the flowers at her.

“For the prettiest flower of them all,” he said, still grinning.

“Thank you.” She took a moment to inhale the scent of the fragrant blooms. “You’re in a good mood,” she stated the obvious.

He grinned down at her, his green eyes dancing with pure joy. “You’re looking at the starting quarterback for the Seattle Steelheads.”

Relief washed over her, but she tried not to show it. “Of course I am. Was there ever any doubt?” Despite her tendency to worry, she’d had faith in him.

Instead of giving her a canned cocky answer, he sobered for a moment and let her peek inside his tightly guarded walls. “I wasn’t sure, Emmie. They could’ve chosen a different direction and given me the boot. I’ve had two years to prove myself, and I haven’t.”

“Not yet, but you will.” Emma placed her hands on his broad shoulders and planted a kiss on his stubbled chin. Tanner was lazy about shaving, but she didn’t complain. His stubble was sexier than sexy, and his sexy was worth razor burn any day of the week.

“Even better, Coach isn’t requiring us to report until Monday. Not that I’ll be taking much time off—I need to work out and get a jump on film of Green Bay for the season opener—but today and tonight are ours, and we can do whatever you want.”

“What do you suggest?” she asked.

“I have a plan. Are you game?”

“Always.”

“Feed your cat and pack a bag. Nothing fancy. Throw some stuff in for me, too, while I find a place to go.”

She smiled, loving surprises, and Tanner was often full of them. “I’m on it.” With one more kiss, she hurried to the bedroom to pack while he made a few calls.

Tux watched her from his bed on her pillow, yawned, and closed his eyes. He’d be fine as long as his food dish was full.

Within an hour, they were sitting at the Seattle ferry landing waiting for the Bainbridge Island ferry, a large island across from Seattle. After a beautiful ferry ride across Puget Sound, they checked into a romantic cottage that sat on a rocky cliff with a view of the Sound and Seattle across the wide expanse of water.

The very comfortable queen bed in the loft with two-story windows beckoned to them, and they tested it out immediately. After showering together, they explored the island, visited a few historic sites, and picked up homemade pasta and marinara sauce in a small deli near the cottage. Returning to their little oasis, they cooked the pasta and sat on their small deck listening to the water lapping on the shore below. After dinner, Tanner led her down a set of steep steps to the beach. They walked hand in hand along the rocky shore line, enjoying the evening.

Emma would cherish this night forever. No matter what the future held for them, she’d think back to this one moment in time fondly and with no regrets. Despite the craziness of her decision to marry him, she’d do it all over again.

Live in the moment
, she reminded herself.

Because the moment might be all she had. The past was done and the future hadn’t happened yet.

Tanner sat down on a large rock and pulled her next to him, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. They gazed at the Seattle skyline in the distance from the Space Needle to the skyscrapers.

“When you’re in the city, they seem so big and take up so much room, but when you look at them from this perspective, they seem small and insignificant,” Tanner noted.

“They do, don’t they? With the exception of those downtown skyscrapers, trees mask most of the metropolitan area.”

Tanner nodded, looking across the Sound with a yearning in his eyes she didn’t understand. He met her gaze and must have read the puzzlement there. “I love Seattle,” he said wistfully, as if he were leaving soon. His tone alarmed her slightly, causing her to wonder how well things really had gone today.

“So do I. I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else.”

“I know the feeling even though I’m a transplant.” A sad smile lifted one corner of his kissable lips.

“What’s wrong, Tan?” She reached for his hand and threaded her fingers in his.

“Just wishing life could stay like this forever.”

“Nothing ever stays the same. Life is all about change.”

“Yeah, I know.” He turned his head to gaze down at her, looking as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. Emma waited, hoping he’d trust her enough to talk to her, really talk to her, for once.

“Change can be good,” she added.

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “The only thing that’s ever been real in my life is football. At an early age, I fabricated everything else.”

“What did you fabricate?” she asked softly.

“You know.”

“Your family?”

He nodded, staring across the water at Seattle as dusk turned to darkness and the city lights lit up the evening sky. “Yeah. I perfected the art of lying so none of my friends or teachers would suspect the truth.”

“What was the truth, Tanner?”

“You couldn’t begin to imagine.”

“Try me.”

He set his jaw, and she recognized him digging in, getting ready to resist. She could almost see the steel walls popping up around him.

“Please.”

He looked down at her, his rigid expression softening a little. “Is it that important to you?”

“Yes.”

Again, he sighed. “It isn’t pretty.”

“I’m prepared.” She squeezed his hand as he started to talk.

“My mom died when I was twelve. Before that, stuff wasn’t great, but she absorbed the brunt of Dad’s occasional drunken rages; not all of them, but most of them. We were abused in different ways. I never understood why she didn’t leave, but I guess you can get beaten down to a point that you don’t think you can leave. He was always really sorry after one of their fights. He didn’t get physical with her often, just once in a while. But even once is too much. She must have loved him.” Tanner rubbed the back of his neck.

“I think that’s typical of abused women.”

“Yeah. When she finally got up the nerve to leave him, the next day she was dead.” He gripped her hand tighter, as if he needed her to hold onto him.

“Oh, Tanner, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“What happened to her?” Emma asked quietly, fearing the worst.

“She fell down the stairs, broke her neck.” His entire body tensed, and he stared at the waves lapping on the shore.

“And you don’t believe that?” she guessed.

“Not for one damn second, but what the hell could I do? I’d only just turned twelve, and I worshipped my dad, despite it all. I’d do anything for his approval, which was damned tough to get. Jenny was sixteen, Isaac was fourteen, and Zeke was only ten. Jenny took over as the mom, while Dad worked in a local factory and spent most nights drilling us on our respective sports between shots of whiskey. My friends saw him as the best dad in the word because he did know his sports, and he’d played a little minor league hockey, stuff like that. He came across as charming and fun.”

“He didn’t seem that way to me.”

“He can be when he wants, but after Mom died, he drank even more. Now that he’s retired, he doesn’t have a reason to stop so he drinks all day.”

“So you created a family that didn’t really exist?”

“Damn right. I hate pity. So, yeah, I created the fifties’ family and Ice and Zeke went along with it. At sixteen, Ice joined a junior hockey team out of state and left the three of us to fend for ourselves.”

“You’ve never forgiven him for that?”

“That and other things. Lots of other things.”

“Like what, honey?” Emma squeezed his hand.

“In our early teens, Dad got involved in an underground fight club. First it was only Ice, then it was me, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“He made us fight, and they’d bet on the winners. There’d be hell to pay if we lost. We even fought each other at times.”

“Didn’t your teachers notice the bruises?”

“Oh, yeah, in fact, we had an elaborate story concocted that Ice and I settled all our brotherly issues with our fists. Dad would act properly concerned, even put us in therapy for a while.”

“Wow.”

“About a year into this, the club was raided and shut down, but none of us were there that night. I had a game. After that Dad focused his energies on making each one of us the best athlete we could be. Nothing was ever good enough for him, and he was a brutal task-master.”

“Oh, Tanner, I’m—”

“I don’t want pity, remember?” His voice grew hard, and she realized she’d stepped over an invisible line.

“I’m sorry.”