Power Play (Crimson Romance) (14 page)

A day later, he was back in Chicago and life went on until the next time he left. That time she took comfort from the light he left burning and the separation was a tiny bit easier to bear. Again and again it had happened until she grew used to living life in day or week-long installments, to finishing conversations over the course of weeks. It became a part-time marriage to a part-time husband.

Shuddering, she put the lamp back, automatically reaching down to switch it off. Her hand halted midway. After six years, she found that she couldn’t break the habit. Turning off the lamp was akin to jinxing her husband and hockey players were a superstitious lot, even if Cahal wasn’t particularly so. In the end Lila decided it was better to leave the lamp on than to explain why she had turned it off and risk sounding as silly as the players who always laced up one skate before the other or who hopped over every line on the ice.

The big bed was a powerful temptation and without thinking too much about it, Lila hopped under the duvet and pulled the fluffy folds up to her chin. The last thing she saw as her eyelids drooped low was the comforting glow of the tiny lamp.

With the hearing scheduled for the following morning, Cahal was extremely calm. His team of lawyers no longer included the white-haired divorce attorney he’d previously thrown at her but a circle of youngish men with stiff smiles and a habit of laughing. The lawyers laughed often as Lila was introduced to them, making small jokes to which she had no idea how to respond. Even her husband seemed to merely tolerate their presence.

Over the dining table was spread a layer of statements and affidavits, one from each of Lila’s bodyguards, and a copy of the police report she had filed a few days earlier. The meeting was long and repetitive and Cahal treated it with the same steely determination he displayed during games. At the end of the evening, the lawyers thanked him and a mostly silent Lila, and shut down their laptops and departed with hardly a titter. She gathered that it was not going to be the easiest case the young partners tackled and the knowledge of sure publicity would shine a spotlight on their efforts.

“This won’t last,” Cahal said, nodding at the silent telephone sitting at his elbow.

“I’m surprised the papers haven’t picked it up already,” Lila replied.

Her husband rose to his feet. “Terrence Brantford offered me a million dollars to drop the court application.” A long pause gave her the opportunity to respond, something Lila couldn’t have done with a gun to her head. “The money is for my inconvenience, as he put it.”

A turn of his beautiful mouth made it clear what he thought of the offer.

“Isn’t it too late to withdraw the case?” Lila asked the question, still unable to comprehend the dollar figure. “I mean, just the fact that the application was filed with the court is newsworthy information. It isn’t the final outcome the public would be interested in — it’s the spectacle of a hockey player and a team owner’s daughter battling it out in the courts.”

“You’re right,” Cahal said. “What else is new? You can tear your body up finishing a playoff series yet when it’s over the fans only care if you win. It’s your family who has to put up with your bad moods and recovery.”

Lila set aside the glass of wine she’d been using to fortify herself following the lawyers’ departures and looked up into his face.

“Is it that bad? You never complain.”

“Whiners don’t make it in the big leagues,” he chanted.

She took a guess. “Is that one of your father’s sayings?”

Cahal turned away. “My dad had a whole bunch of sayings about the big leagues. He never made it out of the minors.”

Lila knew of George Wallace’s own hockey dreams but she knew much more about the toll those dreams had taken on his son.

“Victoria’s upbringing was the opposite of mine,” Cahal said, when she joined him by the window. “She told me that her father expected nothing of her and her brother and they suffered no consequences for their failures. Everything she wanted, Terrence got for her.”

Raised in the strict but loving household of her grandparents, Lila couldn’t quite understand the deficiencies Cahal and others suffered although she once tried hard to comprehend. When her husband kept offering his own childhood as a reason to put off having children, she was patient with him. One day, she thought, he would come around. But then they ran out of days.

“Being spoiled must have been just as damaging as being driven to succeed,” she suggested.

“It likely was. Victoria’s brother ended up addicted to drugs and he stills spends a good portion of his time in and out of rehab facilities. She was promiscuous, living the lifestyle of a beautiful heiress and chasing after celebrity conquests.”

Cut by the way he rattled off information about the other woman, Lila hid her hurt beneath a cool tone.

“Victoria didn’t seem ditzy when I met her,” she told him, “nor did she appear to be promiscuous.”

A second too late, she realized how silly and pompous her speech sounded. Having met the other woman once, she could hardly draw conclusions. It bothered her that Cahal had spent so much time with the blonde woman and that his assertions were well-informed and reasoned.

“When I met her, Victoria was already in the process of making a big change in her life. She was fighting her father for more responsibility with the team — before that she had always held an honorary title on the payroll which allowed her to meet any new players who caught her interest — and she was distancing herself from her old crowd of rich wild partygoers.”

It was difficult to relate the slender, elegant young woman in Cathy Monahan’s living room with a spoiled celebrity-hungry vixen such as those often portrayed in magazines and low-budget reality shows.

“Although she was well on her way on her own steam, Victoria credited me with the changes in her life and she latched onto me as a kind of good luck charm. Knowing that I was separated, her father pushed the relationship — ”

“And it’s hard to say no to the man who signs your paychecks,” Lila finished for him.

He scowled out of the window. “It’s not about the money. It never was. In fact — ”

The tantalizing opening went unfinished until she prompted, “In fact what?”

By turning his head, his profile became etched in the glass, cool and distant. With the living version in front of her, Lila felt no closer to the real man.

“In fact,” he said, “Terrence and the other owners knew very well that I was willing to leave the team if an opportunity opened up in Toronto, even if it meant taking a pay cut. That was done against Billy’s advice.”

This was news to her, not about Billy Avery, but her husband’s willingness to sacrifice his career opportunities for a trade to the city where Lila wanted to live.

“W-when did you tell him that?”

“Before we were married. I knew you wanted to stay in Toronto with your grandparents.”

“You never told me you requested a trade,” she said.

He hardened both his real and reflected mouths into a rocky line. “It didn’t come through so I didn’t see the point in telling you. It made sense to start our marriage with both of us trying to make a go of it in Chicago.”

And to let her keep thinking that he didn’t care that she wanted to stay in their hometown, apparently. Lila was both touched and annoyed and after a brief tussle, touched triumphed.

She touched his arm. “Thank you for trying.”

Her hand dropped when he stared at it. “You don’t think I should have kept it from you.”

“No, you shouldn’t have, but I’m glad you told me about Victoria and the restraining order and her father’s offer.”

His smile flashed. “So I’m getting better?”

“Every day.” The words choked her.

The silence left by the succession of rustling papers and legal remarks could not be a comfortable one yet it was tranquil, the kind of peace they were never able to reach during the tumultuous years in Chicago.

Into the serene silence, Cahal spoke with sudden violence, ably contained but potent.

“Would it have helped if we had had the child you wanted?”

The child you wanted.
Beneath the painful force of the question lay the bitter direction of his thoughts. It was still her baby, the child she came close to begging him to have. He never wanted a child.

With honest simplicity, she told him, “A child wouldn’t have made a difference.”

Not a child he didn’t want. He would have come to resent such a child, something she couldn’t have borne.

The face in the glass appeared more distant. “Would anything have made a difference?”

Sensing that he was at a low ebb, Lila tried to be sympathetic, though she dared not repeat the mistake of touching him.

“The solution wasn’t going to come from outside, Cahal. It was between us all the time, waiting to push us apart like water trapped in a stone.”

The portion of his mouth she could see was tightened into a warped line. “Water in stone. Was that part of your university education?”

Lila’s head went back. In seven years, he’d never thrown her education back at her.

Out of a perverse need to show him how she benefited from a higher education, she took the time to struggle against her anger and reply in a normal tone.

“It’s late and I’m working the opening shift tomorrow. Good luck in court.”

Swift as a striking cobra, he caught her arm before she turned away.

“Lila, forgive me. That was inexcusable.”

She kept her face averted. “I thought you were proud of my degree. You insisted on — ”

“On putting it up on the living room wall where visitors could see it,” he finished. “I am proud of you, my darling. Always.”

While the words eased some of the hot fury in her chest, it couldn’t obliterate the lingering shock. A new idea rose out of the tight uncomfortable feeling.

“Cahal, did you think that I was jealous of your career?”

“No.”

The answer came a little too quickly.

Her fingers stilled in his grasp. “It makes sense now. You were always pushing my education, my degree, when your career made it impossible to work or do anything outside of the charity work the team arranged. Did you think it was all I had?”

The hand holding hers went tight and then let go.

“Outside of me, yes.”

“Thanks.” The word came on a stinging intake. “Thanks for letting me know how you feel.”

He pinned her with his silver eyes. “You don’t know the first thing about how I feel.”

Lila turned back to the darkened lake, her perch on the top floor giving her a strange distant view of the nearby crescent-shaped island to which its inhabitants traveled from their jobs in the city. The island was disputed land; technically belonging to the city but rented out on long-term leases to the inhabitants who built houses, tended gardens and raised families on contract. Now the islanders wanted to the chance to buy the land they loved and the city wanted to turn it into an extension of the water park, demolishing houses and replacing them with roller coasters and gift shops.

Simple things — a piece of land, a home, yet there was a world of difference between the two.

She pressed her forehead against the cold glass.

It was true. It was all a matter of perspective. She didn’t know how he felt, driving himself to the limits of his strength and endurance every day, spending half of his time far from home, any more than he understood what it was like to stay behind and wait for his return. Tending the garden and not knowing if she would be there to reap the harvest.

Her life had been lived on contract, dependent foremost on Cahal’s security as the team’s number one goaltender but also on his health, his popularity, the ability of the team to meet his salary commitments. Many teams in smaller cities simply could not afford a player of Cahal Wallace’s caliber.

Hating herself for the weakness, she was contemplating heading down a path she already knew well and had reason to dread. Remembering how life had been in Chicago was also imagining what life would be again returning to a role Cahal never truly asked her to resume. Because he hadn’t. He warned her about Jack and she recognized the reasoning behind his warning. He’d enlisted her help for another reason altogether. While he’d hinted about the past and their mistakes, he hadn’t come out and asked her to be his wife for real.

“I have a job now,” she said, her voice a soft fog against the cool glass. “I volunteer for local fundraisers. I help out with the Wives. I’ve been taking a course in ceramics at the community college. I’m busy. I don’t spend all of my time sitting and waiting for you to come home or around people who only know me as your wife.”

“That’s good.” The smoky reflections gave no hint of his facial expression.

“It is good,” Lila agreed. “It’s also lonely.”

The admission landed between them.

Turning to meet his eyes, she went on. “It’s good to step out of your shadow because I never realized just how large and suffocating it was until we separated. Even Chris, I think, never saw me as Lila, only as your wife.”

The pieces fit together. Chris’ sympathy, his obsession with her, his desire to snatch her away from his cousin and his later disinterest in winning her for himself — it all showed that he saw her as an extension of Cahal rather than a woman in her own right. Well, he was in good company.

“So you’re happy to be free,” her husband said.

Her vigorous nod hurt her neck.

“You also said it was lonely.”

“Until a couple of months ago, I never thought it would be.”

“Oh, yes, the boyfriend.” He regarded her through narrowed eyes. “I forgot about the picket fence and the yard full of toys, just as you seem to have forgotten that he was a hockey player like me.”

“His priorities were different.”

It was clear he didn’t like her quiet answer, for his eyes became a silver gleam through thick gold lashes.

“I guess that says it all.” He pushed away from the window in a savage motion, pausing long enough to glance down at her glossy dark head. “By the way, it isn’t too late for us to withdraw the case but I would never exchange your safety for money or a break from the publicity.”