Bury the Hatchet (34 page)

“You did,” I said, smiling through tears. “You’ve always loved me and taken care of me. You’ve always made sure I knew there were more important things in life than pageants.”

“Well, I always hoped it would be enough but feared it wouldn’t be. But now, you’re out from under her control. You’ve got Hunter, and I hope I’m right about this, but it seems like maybe the two of you are hitting it off. Maybe it won’t have to be just the year you originally agreed to.”

“That’s what I’m hoping, too, sir,” Hunter said, and my heart flipped.

Daddy nodded. “Good. Good. And you’ve still got me, if you want me.”

I didn’t answer him. Not with words, at least.

I got up, walked around the table, and kissed him on the cheek.

“I guess I can take that as a yes?” he said, brushing my tears away just like he’d done since I was a little girl. He’d always been the one to comfort me when I cried, to hold me when I was sick or hurt, and to make me laugh when I was sad.

“You’re still my daddy,” I said. He would always be my daddy.

A while later, he got up and left to remove the rest of his things from the house, like he’d promised Mama he would do. After I’d closed the front door behind him, Hunter slipped both his arms around my waist from behind, snuggling me close to him.

“You okay?”

I nodded, even though I was anything but okay. I was a wreck. But somehow, I was calm about it. Did it hurt to know that my mother had never wanted me, that she’d just been using me all along to get what she’d wanted? Yes, but not as much as it should. Maybe because there was some part of me that had always known that to be the case.

“You’re a really bad liar, you know that?” Hunter said.

I laughed. “Yeah, I know.” I turned around in his arms and hugged him, resting my head on his chest.

“I meant what I said. I want this to be real between us. A real marriage, not just a show we’re putting on for the rest of the world to see for a year. Because I love you. Maybe your mother never did, and so maybe it’s hard for you to understand what love is, or what it should be. But I love you.”

I tightened my arms around him, trying to draw myself inside him. “Hunter?”

“Hmm?” He sounded nervous.

“I need you to know something.”

He tensed up, as if bracing himself for another big revelation like Daddy had just put us through. “What’s that?”

And maybe, in a sense, what I needed to tell him was a big revelation. Just one of a different sort.

“I need you to know that I love you, too. That I’ve been falling in love with you for a long time, but I was afraid you wouldn’t love me back because most people in my life haven’t loved me. Like Mama. She never loved me. I thought she did, but I realize now I was wrong. But you know what?”

“What?” he murmured, his chin resting on the top of my head and some of the tension leaving his muscles.

“I know you love me. I believe it. I know how to tell the difference because my parents showed me.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. We just stood there in the hall, holding tightly to each other. But then he took a deep breath and kissed the top of my head. “Thank God for that.”

I DOUBTED I
would like leaving Tallie behind at this point even if Lance wasn’t out of jail and acting like a lunatic. But considering that was exactly what was happening, I had a hard time getting my ass to the airport with the team the next day.

But I went.

Tallie had her father, and both Dennis and Nathan were now officially on the job. She wasn’t alone, and it didn’t hurt that she was now more willing to accept that Lance had officially gone off the deep end and was out to hurt her, so she was far more likely to be aware and cautious if and when she went out.

So I left.

And it was torture.

I talked to her as often as possible while the Thunderbirds were on the road, usually multiple times a day, and definitely every night before I went to bed. I needed to hear her voice and reassure myself that she was all right or else I couldn’t get to sleep.

I talked to her father on multiple occasions, and to her bodyguards at least twice a day, too. They filled me in on anything suspicious, even the tiniest things that neither she nor I were likely to notice, such as unusual cars prowling the neighborhood. Dennis and Nathan took it a lot further than simply telling me there’d been an unfamiliar vehicle around, too. They ran the plates and did whatever background checks they could on the registered owners. I rested a bit easier at night knowing they were keeping an eye on her.

No matter how many times I talked to Tallie and her security team, though, I was a cranky bastard any time I was away from her. It was partially due to the simple fact that I missed her, but worrying about her safety was the far bigger factor in my moodiness. The guys complained about my PMS, said they hoped it was due to me being a newlywed and I’d eventually move past it because I was impossible to deal with. I told them I couldn’t make any promises about that and I might just stay a sullen bastard forever.

Weeks went by without any other reminders of Lance and his vendetta against Tallie, though, and we almost forgot about him entirely.

Almost. There was always the thought of him lurking at the back of my mind, but soon he was no longer front and center.

With the season underway, it didn’t take long before my life was overwhelmed with responsibilities surrounding the team. We started the regular season with an abysmal record of eight straight losses in October, including one against my former team, the Portland Storm. I’d never seen so many pucks get by me in such a short amount of time.

I’d been sure we would be horrible, and we absolutely were. The team was slow to catch on to Spurs’s system, and we were all still getting to know each other and how to play together. It didn’t help that only two of our top six forwards would legitimately be considered top six forwards on any other team, and the two guys who made up our best defensive pairing were far better suited as a third and fourth
D
. Admittedly, some of those guys had the potential to grow into the type of players who would suit their current roles, but looking at us now, it didn’t seem likely to happen any time soon. To call us mediocre would be a gross exaggeration. At this point, we didn’t even belong in this league.

We couldn’t keep the puck out of our own net, and we could hardly score. The good part about that was that it meant I wasn’t experiencing too many heart attacks every time the fucking war drums started up in home games. The bad part about it was that, instead of trying to get their shit together and play like a team, almost every guy on the ice was trying to prove his worth by fighting.

It was the same kind of shit you’d expect to see in the minor leagues. When a guy couldn’t hack it, he thought he could increase his value in the eyes of the decision makers by
standing up for his teammates
or some other shit like that, regardless of whether there was any good reason for the fight. Hell, even Zee—a guy who was typically as coolheaded and businesslike as possible out on the ice—fell prey to it in a game against the Blackhawks, picking a fight with Andrew Shaw. Yeah, Shaw was always willing to drop his gloves, but that wasn’t the point. There was no reason our captain needed to get into it just to spark the team. But he did.

We finally earned our first win of the season in a home game in November against the Oilers. Yeah, the same Oilers who were only one step ahead of us in the standings. If we’d been any other team in the league, that one was a game we’d simply expect to win and then move on.

Life wasn’t very good on the hockey front, which was exactly what I’d expected. At home, things were drastically better.

For one thing, Tallie and I had decided that no matter what the team and my mother-in-law might want, we weren’t going to play their game anymore. We went out when we wanted to, but we weren’t going to put ourselves on display. If the gossip pages wanted to focus on us, they were welcome to, but we weren’t intentionally giving them fodder any longer. Because of that, we were spending a hell of a lot more of our time at home, enjoying each other and truly getting to know one another.

She was still visiting Kade almost every day. She kept giving me updates on him, reporting on his progress. The program he was in was designed to last twelve weeks, so he wasn’t getting out any time soon, but he was making progress. I knew that for a fact because I’d given in and accompanied her to see him a couple of times. Kade was still surly and sarcastic when I saw him, but I would expect no less.

But there were definite improvements. I was beginning to see hints that the brother I remembered from when we were growing up together might still be in there, that maybe he wasn’t fully lost to addiction. There were just enough of those hints that Tallie even had me hoping for the best again, something I’d thought to be well in my past. In fact, there were enough improvements that I’d been thinking about asking Carrie to bring Kaylee down for a visit, after talking it over with Kade’s doctors.

The group of WAGs here were a lot different from the ones I’d been around in Portland, for the most part. This group wasn’t close. There was no cohesiveness, no matter how much Dana and Tallie tried to wrangle them. They were still putting together some plans for an annual charity event, but the women were all bitching and fighting about it instead of working together as a team. Tallie was getting close to Dana and a couple of the others, but for the most part, she was keeping her distance. I couldn’t say I blamed her, and in fact, I was glad she wasn’t getting too involved with most of them. The last thing she needed while she was finally starting to assert herself and make her life what she wanted it to be instead of what her mother had decided it should be was to get tied up in a bunch of cat fights.

Tallie had started her cooking class and was using me and her security guards as taste testers for her homework. I loved coming home and finding her puttering in the kitchen, hair drawn back and some cute apron or another tied around her waist. I’d bought her a few early on with sayings like “Requires Constant Supervision” or “Dinner is Ready When the Alarm Goes Off.” While I was gone on a road trip, she’d apparently bought a few of her own. Now she was wearing ones that said things like “Caution: Extremely Hot” and “I Keep the Best Snacks Under My Apron.”

She had to have a massive stash of aprons hidden somewhere because every time I saw her in one, it was new. I started to look forward to discovering what her apron would tell me, and I bought her more every time I saw something interesting when the team was on the road.

One day in late fall, when I returned home from morning practice and a pregame meal with the guys, I found Dennis monitoring things from his car in front of the house. I waved to him on my way in. Good thing he wasn’t inside or I would have had to kill him, because I walked through the garage door to discover Tallie in nothing but an “I Don’t Have a Dirty Mind, I Have a Sexy Imagination” apron and a skimpy piece of lingerie. She spun around, whisk and bowl in hand and a sexy grin on her face. She raised a brow.

“Want a taste?” she asked, holding out the whisk toward me. It was covered in whipped cream, but the only thing I wanted a taste of was her.

I moved in to kiss her, but she flicked her wrist and sent some of her whipped cream flying from the end of the whisk. It landed on my nose. She laughed.

“Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?” I dragged a hand down my face to clean it off. Some ended up on my lips. I licked. It tasted amazing, but not as good as she would once I got my hands on her.

“Yes.”

I made another move to grab her, but she was faster than me. She dropped the whisk, dug up a handful of whipped cream from the bowl, and smeared it all over my face. I kissed her anyway, both of us laughing as we ended up covered in the stuff.

It didn’t take me long to get her naked and on the counter, my head between her legs as I got a taste of what I really wanted.

She’d always been responsive, but lately her sensitivity was off the charts, especially when I played with her breasts. I must have been learning better how she reacted to my touch, pushing all the right buttons. Either that or she was becoming more aware of her own body and the things she liked. It had to be one of the two because I couldn’t come up with any other good reason for the way she responded to my efforts these days.