Delay of Game (15 page)

A suspension didn’t mean I was off the hook for the rest of my responsibilities to the team. I still had to participate in every practice and stay late on the ice in order to keep myself in game shape. I had to travel with the team. I had to attend every game and watch from the press box. I had to be involved in all of the team meetings.

After my phone call with the League this afternoon, I’d had a long talk with Jim, Bergy, and Hammer. They were all adamant that I still had a big role to play with the team even if I couldn’t be out there on the ice.

“The boys all feel a lot calmer when you’re around,” Bergy said. “Most of these guys haven’t ever seen a lick of playoff action, at least at the NHL level—”

“Neither have I,” I interrupted.

“Doesn’t matter,” Hammer said. “You still calm them down. So many of them are so young. When you’re around, they all just seem to play their game and not let anything get under their skin.”

Jim nodded and leaned in, forming his hands into a steeple in front of him. “Exactly. You’re a leader on this team, Jonny. You might not have a letter on your chest, but every guy in that room hangs on every word out of your mouth. They value what you have to say.”

“I almost never say anything, though.”

“But when you do, they all sit up a little straighter, and they listen a little harder.” Bergy narrowed his eyes on me. “You haven’t noticed that? You should pay attention next time you do speak up. You command a lot of respect in that room.”

“And we’re already without Scotty,” Hammer added. “Maybe you can’t play, but you can still help us out. The coaches, in particular. We need you to help keep all the boys focused on the task that’s in front of us.”

Those guys seemed to think a lot more of me than I did. Especially right now. They were forgetting the fact that the only reason we were missing our head coach was because of something I’d done.

All of that made it seem even crazier that I’d gotten involved with Sara at a time like this. Would a guy who had clearly lost his mind—to the point that he was screwing the head coach’s pregnant daughter after he’d caused the man to have a heart attack—fit the impression the coaches and GM had of me? I doubted it. If they knew the whole story, their opinions would change, and fast.

I’d done what I’d done, though, and I couldn’t go back in time and undo anything—even if I wanted to. This thing with Sara, whatever it was, I didn’t want to undo…even if I had jumped the gun.

I walked around the bar to the back door, ignoring Buster’s excited yapping. He’d just fucking come in from outside, and he had his own fucking door he could use any time he wanted. I wasn’t opening the big door for him again right now. All I intended to do was grab a spare key from the magnetic strip I had hanging on the wall there.

I set it down on the bar next to Sara’s saucer of barely eaten toast.

She spun on her barstool, her eyebrow cocked in question. “What’s this?”

“I’ve got to fly out with the team this afternoon.”

“I know that.” She slid the key closer to me, eyeing it like it might jump up and bite her. “If you think I’m going to move in with you… If that’s your idea of
pursuing
—”

“I don’t want you to have to be alone in your house. It’s still going to be a while until your dad’s out of the hospital.” Fuck, I kept screwing everything up with her. She already had too much to deal with, and I just kept adding more to her pile. “I’m not asking you to move in. Just thinking you might want somewhere else to stay for a while.”

“I can go stay with Dana if I can’t handle being at my house. Since you boys are all leaving, she’ll be alone. Zee won’t care.”

That might be the better option, anyway, because at least she wouldn’t be alone. I didn’t like the thought of her getting lonely, and while Buster obviously adored her, he wasn’t the same as a human connection. Still…I wanted her to have the option.

“Just take the key, Sara. Even if you don’t use it.”

Buster barked, as if he understood what was going on.

“He might need some company,” I said, in case that might sway her.

She scowled, but she added it to her keychain.

I threw out the rest of her toast because it didn’t seem like she was going to be able to eat any more of it, and I added her saucer to the dishwasher. Since I wouldn’t be home for several days, and I didn’t know if Sara would take me up on staying at my house or not, I added some detergent to it and turned it on even though it wasn’t full. Then I headed upstairs so I could pack for the road.

When I came back downstairs with my suitcase, she was on the couch with Buster curled up on her lap. She’d put that gold nightgown on again when we got up this morning, which, now that I’d seen and touched and held all that was underneath it, only made her more beautiful.

She’d let me hold her all night. I’d never done that before with any of the women I’d dated. Typically, after sex, either she would go home or I would go home. Sara was the only woman I’d ever shared my bed with that way. The only one who had ever stayed and cuddled and let me get the sense of what the future might be like. She was the only one that had ever really mattered, and seemingly out of nowhere, she mattered to me more than I was prepared for.

I set my bag by the front door and shoved my hands into my pockets. “I have to go.” I wanted to kiss her first. I wanted to pull her into my arms and promise her that everything would be all right, that I would take care of everything so she wouldn’t have to worry. I couldn’t promise her that, though. No one could. How could I make everything all right when so much of it had to do with things like Scotty’s heart and the baby growing inside her?

“Okay,” she said flatly.

“I’ll call you. Every night.” Just to hear her voice. “And I’ll text you.”

She nodded.

“Will you let me know what’s going on with your dad? Keep me updated?” Knowing all of that might be the only thing she would give me to let me know how she was, at least if the way she was acting this morning was an indication of where things stood between us.

Sara shrugged. “I’ll try.”

At least she hadn’t said no.

I nodded. “All right. I have to go.”

Her head shot up, and the ghost of a smile was trying to make its way to her lips. “You already said that.”

She was right. I had. Talking, conversation—those had never been among my strengths. “Yeah,” I said, taking my hands out of my pockets and grabbing the handle of my carry-on bag. “All right, then. I’ll talk to you soon.” I wanted to leave it with that and not with good-bye. I opened the door and headed out to my truck.

I couldn’t leave things like that between us, though. It didn’t feel right.

I put my bag in the passenger seat and headed back inside. Her eyes shot wide when I came through the door. They were all wet, as though she was about to start crying. Fucking hell, I couldn’t seem to go a day without making her fucking cry.

I crossed over to her, shoved Buster out of the way, and straddled her hips, slanting her against the back of the couch and taking her face in both my hands. She gasped, and I slid the tip of my thumb between her lips, pulling the bottom one down.

“I couldn’t leave without one more kiss.”

“Oh,” she said, but it was mainly just a puff of hot breath escaping her.

Her eyes stayed locked with mine, and her hands grasped my ribs, and I could feel her shaking. Or maybe that was me.

I kissed the bridge of her nose and the corners of her eyes and the sensitive space under her chin. When my lips met hers, she was open and warm, and she let me take the kiss as deep as I wanted. Then she deepened it further. She slid her hands up my chest and grabbed on around my neck, and she angled her head, her tongue swirling and stroking mine until we were both panting and needy.

When I finally pulled back so we could breathe again, I kissed her face all over. Lingering. Trying to make it last.

“Cam?” Her voice was as shaky as I felt.

I kissed the backs of her eyelids. “Yeah?”

“You have to go.”

“I know.” After a dozen more kisses, I finally tore myself away.

Buster immediately got back on her lap and barked at me with an annoyed look in his eyes. I forced myself to cross the room to the front door. Then I walked out and got in my truck before I couldn’t find it in me to go.

AFTER PRACTICE AND
lunch with the boys at Amani’s, a family-style Italian place that had been our go-to restaurant since before I’d made the team, there was just enough time left for me to make a trip to the hospital.

Quite a few of the guys were using that time to go say goodbye to their wives or girlfriends. A few of them—the younger, single guys like Jamie Babcock, better known as Babs, and Ray “Razor” Chambers—went home to pack, since they hadn’t bothered to do that in advance. Babs probably would have preferred to spend that time with Katie Weber—Webs’s daughter and the girl Babs wanted to be dating—but she had a chemo treatment scheduled. She never wanted him around for those or immediately after, since she usually got sick from them.

There was some pretty heavy shit on my mind, though. Heavy enough that I had to confront it before we left.

Scotty was still in the ICU, but the hospital staff agreed to let me go in and talk to him for a few minutes. He didn’t look good when I went into his room—pale and pasty, not robust and red-faced like I was used to seeing from him. He pushed a button on his bed remote and raised himself up a little when I came in.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re here,” he said. It seemed odd to hear him talking in a normal voice, not yelling. He always yelled at me. And he wouldn’t be so glad in a minute. Not once I’d told him what I’d come here to say. And then, he’d probably start yelling at me again.

I ran a hand over my face, but I looked him in the eye. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry—”

“You don’t have a fucking thing to be sorry about, Jonny.”

“No, I do.” The list of reasons why only seemed to keep growing, too. I sat down in the chair near his bed, even though I really felt like pacing. I felt like a piece of shit for what I was about to do to him, but when the time came that he learned about the baby, I didn’t want him to be mad at Sara. I wanted him to be mad at me. I figured this was a good way of making sure that happened—the
only
way I’d thought of, actually—and it would protect her from the brunt of his anger.

“Sara told me you were looking out for her the last couple of days,” he said, waving my words aside as though they were insignificant. “She said she’d be sure to thank you for me, but I wanted to do it myself.”

I shook my head. “Don’t thank me. Not until you hear—”

“No, let me.” He struggled to sit more upright in his bed, grimacing in pain as even more color leached away from his face. “She’s always worried about me and trying to take care of me, and I worry that she doesn’t have someone doing the same for her. I—” He cut himself off and struggled for air. This had been too much already, and I hadn’t even said what I’d come to say. “I haven’t done a very good job being her father. It’s been all about the job for so long that sometimes I forget she just needs a dad. Sometimes she needs to not have to be the parent in this relationship. She shouldn’t ever have had to be.”

He looked as though he might cry, which had me squirming. I was fine with most people crying, but the idea of my coach being one of them just felt all kinds of wrong.

“She does have someone looking out for her,” I said, hoping to curtail any waterworks. “Me. I have been for a while.”

Scotty’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head like he was going to say something.

If I let him start talking now, I might not be able to get it all out. I kept going before he could interrupt me again, bracing myself for the yelling that was sure to follow—because I was sure as hell about to earn a good yelling session, after what I was about to do. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Sara and I have been seeing each other behind your back for a few months. I didn’t want you to know because I didn’t think you’d like the fact that one of your players was dating your daughter.”

He blanched to an even paler white than he already had been, but his eyes flashed with the anger I’d been expecting. Good. He should be angry. That was the whole purpose of this—to get it directed at me so it would deflect away from Sara.

Anger seemed to be the way Scotty functioned, the way he got through life. I couldn’t understand why she adored him so much if he treated her the way he treated everyone else, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was different with her. If so, I wanted to keep it that way.

“She wanted to tell you,” I said before he could interrupt. “She didn’t like keeping secrets from you, but I made her promise not to say a word. I thought you might bench me or try to get me sent down to the AHL to try to force me to break up with her. But with everything that’s happened, I need you to know the truth. I’m crazy about her, and I’m going to keep seeing her, and there’s nothing you can do to me that will make me change my mind about that. But I just don’t want to keep lying to you, and I don’t want her to have to lie to you any longer, either.”

He wouldn’t stop staring at me, but he didn’t say a word. Not a single fucking word. For the first time, I realized that he and Sara had the same eyes. Clear blue. Bright. Full of some emotion that I couldn’t fucking interpret. Anger, yes. There was definitely some anger there. But there was more, and it was the
more
that was confusing me.

A nurse came in and walked over to the other side of his bed carrying a new IV bag. “Visit’s over,” she said to me. “He needs to rest.” She set to work changing the bag.

I wished he would say something before I left. Anything. Anything at all. He could tell me to go fuck myself. He could threaten to kill me. He could curse me and rail at me and do all the screaming and yelling I’d come to expect from him. At least then I’d know where I stood.

Granted, I doubted the nurse would be too happy with me if he started doing anything like that. That was what got him here in the first place. It didn’t matter what she would think about it, though, because he didn’t even attempt to do any of it.