Delay of Game (7 page)

Jonny put an arm around my back, resting his hand on my waist as he’d done earlier. Some crazy part of me—probably due to the pregnancy hormones—wanted to curl into him and grab on.

Instead, I let him lead me out of the hospital. He helped me climb up into his truck and shut the door.

I didn’t even have the energy left in me to cry after all of that.

WE’D BEEN SITTING
in the driveway in front of the house for at least five minutes with neither of us saying a word. It might have been even longer than that. It was hard to tell with the way my thoughts were running through my mind at a million miles a minute. Jonny still had the engine of his truck running. He’d put it in park once we got there, and then neither of us had moved a muscle.

If we were just going to sit there, he should probably shut the ignition off. He had to be wasting a shit-ton of gas by idling it like that, and I didn’t want to go inside. Not yet. Not alone, at least.

That house felt too big and open and empty even from the driveway for me to be there by myself tonight. It was weird—when the team was gone on a road trip, I never had any problem being in Daddy’s house without him. But everything felt different now. Probably because my father was supposed to be here tonight, but he wasn’t. He was spending the night in the ICU with IVs poking into him and machines attached to him and everything beeping.

How much time would have to pass before he could come home? Hell, depending on how his surgery went tomorrow, he might never come home again. Then I would have this big, empty house and no one but myself to fill it up.

Myself and a baby.

Oh God. The baby. For just a little while, I’d gotten so caught up in everything going on with Daddy that I’d forgotten I was pregnant. I’d forgotten that I had my own issues to sort out in addition to my father’s heart problems.

Out of nowhere, my stomach flipped, and the most intense bout of nausea hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn’t sure if it was the pregnancy and hormones and whatnot that made me feel sick to my stomach or if it was the fact that I’d completely let all of that slip my mind, but I had to fling my door open and lunge out of Jonny’s truck or else I knew I might puke all over the interior.

“Sara?” He sounded panicked, but he couldn’t feel as panicky as I did with the thought that I might toss my cookies in front of him.

I guess I forgot just how massively humongous his pickup was, too, because I dropped to my feet and flopped over onto the grass beside the driveway in my haste to get down. My knee struck the concrete hard.

“Damn it!” The only good thing about the sudden, sharp pain was that it drove away my nausea, at least for the moment.

I’d barely rolled onto my back before Jonny was hovering over me, almost completely blocking out the ginormous full moon in the sky. All I could make out was his silhouette—a colossal shadow looming over me like an angel. No, like an
avenging
angel. That seemed more accurate. But the more I stared up at him, the more I saw Thor—only minus the flowing, golden locks. Haha…avenging angel or an Avenger?

This buzzed-off, dark-haired version of Thor was working for me way better than the movie version, though. He was making all sorts of things stir inside me that had nothing to do with the about-to-puke stuff from a moment ago. Hell, maybe I’d hit my head and not just my knee, because godlike presence or not, Jonny was still a hockey player.

“Are you hurt?” he said. Or grunted. Or something.

I could only blink in response. My brain was too caught up in debating whether his shoulders were bigger than Thor’s for me to be able to do more than that.

“What hurts?” he asked, as though I had actually managed to form a coherent response instead of blinking at him like an idiot.

“My right knee,” I somehow got out.

“Fuck, Sara.” His words were muttered under his breath, and he kneeled down beside me. In an instant, he’d picked me up and was carrying me to the front door. “You can’t get hurt right now. Your dad’s already going to kill me.”

The way he was holding me allowed me to put an arm around his shoulders and rest my other hand on his chest. He was more Captain America than Thor, now that I could examine his pecs up close. Not that either Captain America or Thor had carried me around before, but still. There were definite differences in their builds. Thor was more muscle mania, body builder-esque. Captain America was buff and lean, designed to be able to move with all that strength.

Jonny was definitely more on the Captain America side of that equation.

“Where are your keys?” he demanded, sounding all bossy and put out.

Maybe in temperament he was more like a quieter, not-even-remotely sarcastic version of Tony Stark. Or like the Hulk, only minus all the giant green dude and temper tantrum stuff.

“Sara? Your keys?”

I tried to shake off my daze and focus. He was standing on the front porch, just by the door, with me in his arms. Keys. Where were my keys? I patted my hand over my right pocket, but it was empty. I never put my keys in the left pocket—only my cell phone ever went there. I felt the weight of it now, but there was no chance I’d shoved my keys in there with it. “Shit.”

“You don’t have them?”

“I think I put them in my purse…” But now the question became, where was my purse? I couldn’t remember having it at the hospital, but I might have. In the lobby? In the waiting room? Had I had it when I went back to see Daddy in the ICU? Hell, I didn’t even remember if I’d had it when Jonny drove me to the hospital, so it might still be up in the owner’s box. Wouldn’t one of the girls have grabbed it before coming to the hospital, though? But if they didn’t know I’d left it behind…

“Do you have a spare hidden somewhere?” Already, Jonny was looking around as though he was trying to find a potted plant we might have a key hidden beneath. Daddy had never liked the idea, and I hadn’t wanted to do it behind his back—even if it might come in handy someday—so there wasn’t any point in Jonny searching like that. He wasn’t going to find a damn thing.

“No.” I tried to shrug my way out of his arms, but he just held me tighter. “Have you ever picked a lock? Or maybe we could break a window or something.”

“I’m not breaking into your dad’s house. I already gave him a fucking heart attack tonight.”

“You didn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Jonny spun around and headed back toward his truck. “Whether I did it or not, I can’t break into your house. Not gonna happen.” He opened the passenger door and set me on the seat. He’d done it all like lugging me around was the easiest thing in the whole world.

“We could call a locksmith?” I suggested hopefully.

“You know many locksmiths that will come out this late on a weekend?”

I scowled up at him. It almost felt as though he was determined to shoot down my ideas before I could even form them. Which wasn’t entirely fair. He had a point. It had to be well past one a.m. on a Sunday night. There were locksmiths who kept emergency hours, of course, but we might have to wait until nearly dawn for one of them to get here.

“I guess you could take me to Zee and Dana’s for the night,” I said after a moment. They had extra rooms. I doubted they would mind too much, and Dana could help me hunt down my purse tomorrow morning before taking me back to the hospital in time for Daddy’s surgery.

Jonny looked at his watch and shook his head. “Not at this hour. Zee has to be at practice in the morning. They’re probably already in bed.”

“Oh…yeah.” I hadn’t really thought about that. Zee and Dana would be able to get to sleep tonight, unlike me. I doubted I’d be able to sleep at all until Daddy came home. Or at least until I knew he would be okay.

“I’ll take you to a hotel and get you a room,” he said. Before I could respond, he’d closed my door and walked around the front of his truck to get in. He hadn’t even shut off the ignition before he’d gotten out earlier. It was still running, the idling motor making a sound like a tiger’s purr.

He looked over at me before he backed out of the driveway. I must have looked an absolute wreck, because he scowled. “You don’t want to go to a hotel.”

It wasn’t a question.

I shook my head. “I don’t want to be alone.” Without having someone else around, my worries would run away with me. Somewhere, deep down inside, I knew it was ridiculous of me, but the idea of Daddy not coming home tonight, on a night when he was supposed to do just that, brought up all of my old abandonment issues from my mom. I’d thought I’d gotten past them—until now. Now I knew they were still very real. Damn it. Daddy wasn’t leaving me, but it still felt like he was for some reason. But at least if someone else was with me, I’d have the possibility of a distraction.

Jonny didn’t say anything. He just grunted and checked behind him before putting his truck into reverse.

He was probably taking me to a hotel anyway, even though I wasn’t too keen on the idea. Really, there wasn’t a good reason why he shouldn’t. Then he’d just be one more person abandoning me. I let my head rest against the window and closed my eyes, trying to redirect my thoughts away from all the awfulness of tonight.

I stayed just like that until he brought the truck to a stop. We hadn’t been moving long, so I figured he’d taken me to one of the hotels near our house in the Irvington district. We lived on the northeast side of town, not too far from the arena.

When I opened my eyes, though, I had to blink a few times because what I saw wasn’t even close to what I’d been expecting. We were parked on the street in front of a house, not a hotel. There was so much landscaping in the front—trees and bushes and flowers of every variety I could imagine—that I almost couldn’t make out the house behind it. It was painted in some dark color that blended in with the surroundings and didn’t stand out in the dark.

“What… Where are we?” I asked, turning to face him.

“My house.” Jonny switched off the ignition, and the truck stopped rumbling beneath me. “So you don’t have to be alone.” It all came out in such a matter-of-fact manner that it was like he’d never thought about taking me anywhere else.

“I don’t understand.” I’d behaved like an absolute bitch to him earlier. I threw my water on him—
after
he’d brought it to me, trying to be nice. Why would he bring me to his house now? Hell, why had he stayed behind at the hospital? Why had he done any of the things he’d done tonight? None of it made any sense…and it threw all my silly ideas of him abandoning me back in my face.

“There’s nothing to understand.” He opened his door and came around to help me out, but I was still in such a stupor that I couldn’t seem to get my body to cooperate. After a moment, he undid my seatbelt and lifted me out, easing me to my feet before letting me go. His hands hovered by my waist, close enough that I could feel their heat. Close enough that I wished he would take hold of me again. He stared at me for a minute before heading up a path toward his porch. “Come on. We should put some ice on your knee.”

No, it didn’t make any sense at all. Especially not my reaction to him—because I should be thinking about my dad being all alone at the hospital tonight, or worrying about his bypass surgery tomorrow, or trying to sort out what I would do about the baby growing inside me, but all I could think about was the way Jonny’s cologne tickled my nostrils and made me want to slide closer to him.

I was a mess.

But Captain America was holding his door open for me and some yippy black-and-white spotted dog was running excited circles around him.

“You coming?” Jonny asked. He kept staring at me, those intense eyes boring into me even from this distance.

I closed the truck door and started up the same path he’d just traveled. Not because I wanted to spend the night with him. More because I was so confused about everything that it was easier to just do what someone told me to do.

That was one thing Jonny seemed to get about me, at least—that I needed someone to just take over right now and tell me what to do and where to be. I climbed the steps of his porch and went through the door, his cologne teasing me and making me shiver as I slipped past him. He closed the door behind me while his dog tried to climb my legs. Now that I was closer, it looked like a Pomeranian—all fluff and excitement and oodles of energy. That was the last sort of dog I ever would have expected Jonny to have. I would have thought he was more the pit bull type, since in many ways, he seemed like one himself.