Delay of Game (25 page)

My rock.

I drew his hand closer to my side, squeezing it as we went through the front door and stepped into the chaos of Laura’s attempt to make order of my life.

IT FELT LIKE
forever before Laura and her minions finally left. It probably wasn’t fair of me to call them her minions. Hell, half of them were my teammates. It just felt as if all she had to do was snap her fingers, though, and everyone rushed around to do her bidding. I shouldn’t begrudge that. She was going to make sure that Sara and Scotty were looked after all the time, and that meant I wouldn’t have to worry. I just hated that they had all been around so long today and that I hadn’t had any time alone with Sara to really talk to her, and now she was beyond exhausted.

They didn’t get the hint on their own that Sara had long since passed the point where she needed peace and quiet and sleep and had moved into the stage where she was getting loopy between her exhaustion and pain. Eventually, I had needed to put my foot down and kick them out.

For some reason, Babs, of all people, was one of the last to go. He’d been the one to leave the hospital with Razor this afternoon to get my truck. Razor had just gone home once he’d dropped Babs off at the practice facility. Then when everyone had arrived at Sara’s house with the keys, Babs had gone in and brewed a pot of coffee, which was surprisingly completely drinkable—Babs’s kitchen skills were horrible, including something as simple as brewing coffee—and he’d made sure there was always plenty ready for anyone and everyone who wanted some. And when we’d gotten hungry in the middle of Laura’s planning and scheduling, he’d been the one to sneak out—with Katie, of course, while her father wasn’t paying attention—to pick up take-out for everyone. I wasn’t positive, but I had a feeling he’d paid for it all on his own, too, not even bothering to ask everyone else to ante up. Later, he’d volunteered to go over to my place and grab Buster and some of my clothes so I wouldn’t have to leave Sara. Every time I turned around, he’d been quietly doing something that was necessary without a word of complaint.

Sometimes it felt like I didn’t have a lot in common with the kid, but after today, I sure as hell had a ton of respect for him. Babs had spent the entire day working in the background, and it seemed as though he’d accomplished more than the rest of us combined. So when he kept hanging around as everyone else was finally slipping out, I couldn’t help but wonder what was up.

Burnzie was about to leave when Babs stopped him, and he was blushing like a fucking idiot when he did.

“I, uh…” Babs shrugged, and he looked over at Sara. She was propped up by a bunch of pillows on the couch, half dozing but mostly in pain, with Buster curled up by her side. Then he blushed some more. “I was just thinking… Scotty can’t really be going up and down the stairs when he comes home tomorrow, not even with help. At least not for a while. He’s going to need to sleep downstairs. We should find somewhere to put a bed for him down here.”

That made a ton of sense. Just sitting upright in that wheelchair most of the day today had been too much for Scotty, and I’d seen how difficult it was for him to get up and do the little bit of walking that he’d had to do. Stairs would be next to impossible. He’d be able to climb them again someday, but not anytime soon.

Burnzie grunted in agreement and cuffed Babs on the back of the head. “You should do that thinking thing more often, you know? Use your noggin for good, not for evil.”

I practically snorted at that. “When has Babs ever done anything evil?” I doubted he’d ever even walked out of the movie theater with his 3-D glasses instead of dropping them in the recycle bin. Hell, it was legal for him to drink when he was home in Ontario, but just stepping into a bar with the boys here in Portland made him uncomfortable.

“Whatever,” Burnzie said. “Let’s figure out where we can put his bed.”

We’d all been hanging out in the main living areas the whole afternoon, not really venturing down the hall to see what else they had going on beyond the bathroom closest to us. I debated asking Sara for suggestions, but she looked like she might finally be getting to sleep and I didn’t want to disturb her, so the three of us went off together to explore.

The first room we came to was clearly Scotty’s office. He had a desk and computer set up on one side of the room, and the other side was dedicated to video sessions—a big La-Z-Boy chair in front of a huge flat screen TV with lots of other equipment hooked up to it. No wonder he was so stressed out all the time. It looked like he brought a lot of work home with him. There wasn’t much room for us to put a bed in here, though, not without doing a lot of furniture rearrangement, so we moved on.

The next door opened up to a ton of storage—boxes and boxes of paperwork, old files, lots more video equipment, framed photos of Scotty with the Stanley Cup and the various teams he’d coached over the years, and even a few things from his playing days. There wasn’t really any furniture to speak of in here other than some shelves that were filled to bursting with all that crap, but the room was packed to the gills. If it came down to it, the office would be easier to reorganize for him.

There was one more room we hadn’t checked out on the ground level. We made our way to the very end of the hall, and I opened the door.

I’d been expecting it to be a game room of sorts—maybe it would have a pool table or a pinball machine, things along those lines. Never in a million years would I have expected what we found. It was like a shrine to everything from Sara’s life. Where Scotty’s memorabilia room had been a mess, one thing stacked upon another without any rhyme or reason to any of it, this room was immaculate.

There was a trophy case along one wall, filled with participation ribbons and figure skating medals and bowling tournament trophies. Next to that was a wall of her various uniforms from over the years, all in frames—everything from hockey to softball to gymnastics to karate. She’d done it all. Right in the center was what must have been her prom dress, a long goddesslike thing in a blue like the color of the Caribbean Sea. Another wall was lined with framed photos of her—her first school pictures, ballet recitals with her in a cute little tutu, the works.

One photo, right in the middle of the wall, had Sara with her dad on a camping trip. Her brown hair was pulled into messy pigtails and she was missing three of her four front teeth, but she had on the biggest grin ever while he had her hoisted up on his shoulders.

Once I looked closer, I realized a lot of the photos had Scotty in them, not just the one in the middle—and in each of them where he was present, his smile was as clear and true as hers. He wasn’t just proud of her; Scotty Thomas was completely enamored of his little girl. This room proved beyond any doubt that there was a hell of a lot more to him than I’d ever imagined.

“Wow,” Babs said. He sounded as awed as I felt. “Never would have guessed.”

None of us would have. All we ever saw of Scotty was the stressed-out coach. We never really got to see the father, the man. Even when he came to team events like our annual Casino Night or the charity auction Kally had just hosted for his Light the Lamp Foundation recently, Scotty was typically gruff and red-faced, at least when it had anything to do with any of his players.

It was starting to make a little more sense why Sara was as attached to him as she was. And, for that matter, why
he
was reacting to me being in her life the way he had been.

“Well,” Babs said, “I’d say this is probably the best room for a bed.”

There wasn’t really any furniture in the room other than the big trophy case along the far wall, so a bed would easily fit. We would even be able to bring a nightstand down and some of his clothes. We could make this into a real bedroom, even if it was only temporary.

I nodded. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

We made our way out into the living room. Buster lifted his head when we went past him, and when he realized that we were on our way upstairs, he bounded off the sofa to follow us. That movement jostled Sara, and she moaned. Damn. I was hoping she’d sleep through all of the commotion we were about to cause.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice still groggy from the sleep and pain medicine. Her eyes were narrowed on the three of us.

“Moving Scotty’s bed to the room at the end of the hall,” Babs said. “So he doesn’t have to go upstairs.”

She shifted slightly and then winced. “Oh. That’s a good idea.” She tried to move again, but the pain that washed over her face nearly buckled
my
knees.

“We’ve got this, Jonny,” Burnzie said. He and Babs kept going up the stairs, and Buster raced along ahead of them yapping like the freak he was.

That was the only encouragement I needed to leave them to it so I could go take care of Sara. I went down the few steps I’d already gone up and crossed over to her. “What are you trying to do?” I asked.

“I’m trying to get up.”

“Why?”

“So I can help.”

I sat down next to her and cautiously put my arm around her shoulders. I did that for two reasons—one, I liked being able to touch her, and two, the weight of my arm would anchor her to the sofa so she couldn’t get up. Her struggles had to stop. I couldn’t let her wear herself out. That was the whole purpose of me staying here—so that I could take care of things for her, do what needed to be done.

“The only help you can give us right now is telling us exactly what we should move down for him,” I said.

“Which would be easier to do if I could point it all out.”

“But you need to rest, so you can just tell me and I’ll make sure we take care of it all.”

“You should go ahead and figure this out right now,” she said, scowling up at me. “I don’t do the whole damsel-in-distress thing. I don’t sit by and let other people take care of everything. That’s my job—doing what needs to be done for my father.”

“And you’re being put on a leave of absence so you can recover and go back to doing that job the way you usually do it.” I slid my hand over her hair, tangling my fingers in her silken tresses. “I’m going to be your replacement for a while. Me and Dana and Laura…” And about a dozen other people, too. Hell, it might take that many of us just to keep her from doing too much. I had no doubt that if I hadn’t come over to keep her where she was, she would still be struggling against the pain of her cracked ribs to get up and order the three of us around.

The guys were coming down the stairs carrying the bed frame now, with Babs in the lead, walking backward.

“Why aren’t you the one fucking going backward?” he grumbled at Burnzie. “You play
D
. You’re used to doing things backward.”

“Not everything, bro. Just don’t fall and kill yourself.”

It didn’t take them long to get it down the stairs and set up in what would be Scotty’s makeshift bedroom, even with Buster running along beside them the whole time.

When they had disappeared up the stairs again, Sara turned to look at me. “Cam?”

I couldn’t even begin to put into words how glad I was that she was calling me by my name again and not Jonny. It put this big knot of warmth in my belly that spread out to consume every inch of me. “Yeah?”

“I don’t know how to feel about all of this. About you,” she clarified. “I feel like you’re sneaking past all of my defenses, and I don’t like it.”

“I know.”

“It scares me.”

“I know.”

Sara never let men into her heart.
Never
. She had to be terrified right now.

She looked at me, long and hard, her eyes filled with an emotion that fell somewhere between resignation and dread. But then she let her head fall back against my shoulder and she snuggled into me, and she let me be the one to fend all her fears off—at least for right now.

It wasn’t much, but it was progress.