Delay of Game (37 page)

“
SHE TOLD ME
upfront, right on our first date, that she would never marry a guy that you didn’t approve of.” Dylan leaned against the back of the dining room chair, relaxing a little for the first time since they’d all arrived a couple of hours ago.

Mom and the girls still had Sara in the living room, but it looked like maybe Sara was starting to let go of her tension some, too. Every now and then I heard her laugh—hers was lower and richer than theirs, a lot like her voice. I knew this was still about a million miles outside of how she’d prefer to be spending her day, but she wasn’t fighting it. She wasn’t trying to run away from it.

That gave me a little hope.

My conversation with Dylan was giving me hope, too. He had a job as a junior broker with a big investment firm in Winnipeg, but he was also in graduate school part time, working on a Masters of Finance. He wanted to move up within the company and become a financial analyst. He wanted to be able to provide well for his family.

And he wanted Chloe to be his family. He’d made that part abundantly clear.

I grunted, letting his statement sink in. “So are you asking me for approval? Is that what this is?”

“No,” he said, throwing me for a loop. “Not yet. I don’t want you to decide you approve of me—of us—two hours after you met me. You don’t know me well enough to make that kind of decision. Frankly, if you gave it to me now, I’d be pissed off at you.”

I liked this guy more by the moment. Chloe had chosen well.

“That’s smart,” Scotty said. He’d just come back to sit with us a few minutes ago after walking around for a while. “On both your parts. Don’t want to decide anything off first impressions. They’re important, but they’re not everything.”

Sara’s phone rang. It was still on the kitchen counter where she’d left it when my family arrived and hauled her off to have their way with her. I got up and grabbed it for her. Dana was trying to send a FaceTime call through, so that must mean they were ready to show her some wedding dress options.

I’d never seen her look more relieved than she did when I handed her the phone. She hit a button and answered the call.

“You ready?” Dana asked.

“You have no idea,” Sara responded, and I chuckled.

Cadence and Chloe raced around behind the sofa so they could look over her shoulders and see everything on the little screen, and Corinne and Mom both leaned in closer from the side. I headed back to the dining room, leaving them to it.

Half an hour later, Dana and Rachel had settled on their wedding dresses and picked out the color and fabric for all of the bridesmaids to wear, and they’d decided on a style for Sara’s dress. Apparently all the bridesmaids were getting different styles. Whatever. It was all done, and all the women in the house here were gushing about how gorgeous and perfect and amazing everything was going to be.

All I knew was I was starving and no one had done anything about putting lunch together. Scotty’s stomach rumbled right around the same time as that thought crossed my mind.

“Unless you’re hiding an alley cat in there, we need to eat,” I said, raising a brow in his direction.

He laughed—something he’d been doing around me more and more lately. I still wasn’t sure how to react to it, but at least he was loosening up around me some. Maybe I was loosening up around him, too.

“I was wondering when anyone else was going to notice,” Scotty said. “I hate to say anything since I haven’t been able to help out much.”

“No helping out today. You up to going out or should I order something to bring in?”

“If I don’t get out of this damn house—” he glanced at Dylan with an apologetic look on his face, even though he’d limited himself to
damn
instead of
fucking
like he would usually say “—sometime soon, I’ll go crazy. I’m sure Sara’s feeling the same way. Let’s go.”

At least he’d kept his voice down and hadn’t cursed in front of my mother. It wouldn’t have surprised her, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to hear it. I was pretty good about keeping a lid on it around her. That was something most hockey players—hell, probably most athletes—learned at a young age. Language like that was fine around the guys but not around your mothers.

We got up and filled all the girls in on the plan—Sara gave me another look that said I was rescuing her—and got everyone organized to head out. Sara still didn’t have a bra or real shoes on, so she headed upstairs to get a pair.

“Oh! Can I come with you?” Cadence begged, clapping her hands together and practically hyperventilating in her excitement over seeing Sara’s shoe collection. “Cam told me you have lots of shoes, and I’m absolutely
dying
to see them.”

“I don’t see why not,” Sara said, but I couldn’t interpret her tone.

I wished she’d been facing me when she’d spoken, but she was already heading down the hall toward the stairs with Cadence racing after her. The pair of them came back down a few minutes later. Sara had put on a dusting of makeup—not that she needed it—and was in a pair of bright-pink pumps that made me salivate. Not that it mattered what shoes she put on. These days, just looking at her in anything or nothing at all was enough to cause that reaction in me.

Scotty went with Mom, since the SUV she’d rented had running boards which would be easier for him to get in and out of than my truck, but that meant Cadence had to come with Sara and me.

I helped Sara in, and she carefully slid over to the middle. She winced while she did it, though. I knew I shouldn’t have gone along with her idea last night. We’d probably set her back in her recovery. Now wasn’t exactly the best time to talk about how I shouldn’t have given her oral and made her come, though, since my barely seventeen-year-old sister was clambering up to sit beside her.

“You’re going to look amazing in that bridesmaid dress,” Cadence gushed. “With your boobs? Hello, cleavage. What shoes are you going to wear with it?”

Sara shot me a look that was equal parts mortification and bemusement. I shut the door after Cadence got settled, chuckling the whole way around to the driver’s side and wondering about Sara’s shoes just as much as my sister was. Even if I’d had months to try to prepare Sara to meet my family, it wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing in the world could prepare a person for Cadence.

On the way to Amani’s—the only place I could think of that would be able to handle a large group on a Saturday at a moment’s notice—Sara leaned into my side.

Small victories. I had to appreciate them when I recognized them.

Maybe today hadn’t been too difficult for her yet.

SPENDING THE DAY
with Cam’s family hadn’t been horrible. Far from it, actually. I’d definitely been overwhelmed at first, but the more time I spent with them, the more I wanted to.

Mrs. Johnson made me think of Mrs. Campbell a lot, the sort of mom who would give you a homemade cookie or brownies or something equally soothing and bad for you after a crappy day. She was easy to talk to, and even though she asked a lot of questions, it never felt like she was prying—she just wanted to get to know who I was beyond whatever the Canadian news had to say.

Corinne was the oldest sister. She was petite, like Mrs. Johnson, and had some natural curl to her long, brown hair. She worked as a nurse at one of the major hospitals in Winnipeg, and of all the Johnson women, she was the most reserved—kind of like me, in that regard. It wasn’t that she didn’t want me to know anything about her; she just wanted to be cautious about how much she shared and why. I got the impression that her trust didn’t come easily, but once you’d earned it, you had it for life. That was something I could relate to.

Cadence, the youngest, was possibly Corinne’s exact opposite in every way, other than their height and hair color. She was a bundle of exuberance and curious about everything, but not in a way that felt intrusive. I honestly wasn’t sure how she pulled that off, because with anyone else, I’d be wanting them to back off. Cadence’s endless questions just made me laugh, though. She was still in high school, and she was a pairs figure skater who was hoping to be selected to Canada’s national team in the next year or two so she could compete internationally. From everything they told me, she probably had a good shot at that.

Then there was Chloe, the tall, middle sister with lighter, sleeker hair that had been cut in a sassy bob and the gorgeous boyfriend. The whole time we’d talked about wedding dresses and bridesmaid dresses, Chloe had been the most into the conversation. She didn’t have a ring on her finger, but it was pretty obvious she was hoping for one sometime soon and was trying to soak in all the details so she was prepared to make those decisions for herself. She was an undergraduate majoring in elementary education. I couldn’t imagine having a career that would require being surrounded by kids all day. I didn’t dislike kids—hell, I was about to have one of my own—but the thought of being
surrounded
by so many of them
all day long
was enough to make me break out in hives. She seemed like the type who could pull it off, though—smart, funny, energetic. If anyone had the tools for that job, it was probably her.

After we’d come back from lunch, they had all stuck around while the wedding dress party came over to do some modeling in person. It wasn’t long after that before Soupy, Babs, and Zee had showed up with Rachel’s kids, and we’d had a house full of people the rest of the day. Someone ordered pizza around the time Kally and Webs showed up with the puppy and the Weber teenagers, and then the house was so full I couldn’t hear myself think.

At one point, I sneaked up the stairs to have a few minutes of quiet, using the bathroom as my excuse. When I came out, Cam was waiting for me in my bedroom.

“How did you know I was up here with all that insanity going on?” I asked.

“I’ve been watching you. All day.” He held out his arms, and it was the easiest, most natural thing in the world to go into them. He knew just how to hold me to ease all of my stress away. “This hasn’t been too much for you, has it? They’ll all go home soon.”

I shook my head, my nose brushing against his shirt as I did. “It actually helped to have all the others come over.” They gave me a buffer—a way to get to know Cam’s family without it being strictly just me and them. I felt more like myself, too, when I was around Dana and Laura and the others. I didn’t feel like I had to put on a show. I could just be me, and then Mrs. Johnson and her girls could see who I really was without all my nerves and anxiety poking through to the surface and making me prickly.

He bent his head down so his nose was buried in my hair, and he breathed in deeply. “How are your ribs?” Even as he asked, he placed the palm of his hand on them, just where the pain was always at its worst.

How the hell could he make that sound sexy?

“Not too bad,” I said. “Better than this morning.”

“Then why have you been cringing all day?”

I shook my head and pulled away from him. “It’s nothing.” Just gas. That was what I kept telling myself, at least. I headed for the door.

“I don’t like it when you lie to me, Sara. I wish you trusted me enough to tell me the truth.”

It wasn’t about trust, though. It was about fear and about my own belief that if I didn’t speak my fear aloud then maybe it wouldn’t come true. I went down the stairs and rejoined the party, and I tried to push it all out of my mind. That wasn’t easy to do, though, because the rest of the evening I felt Cam’s eyes on me. It was as if he was trying to stare through me in order to get to the bottom of things.

Eventually, everyone started to trickle out and head home for the night. The team had practice in the morning, so they needed to get some rest. Maddie and Tuck needed to get to bed, and Noelle’s puppy had been fighting sleep for so long that his head looked like it was about to fall off his body. Having this many people around had proven to be way too much excitement for the little guy. Dana, Zee, and Babs had been the last to leave. They’d stuck around to help tidy up the mess. It was almost ten o’clock before the three of them headed out the door, leaving the house suddenly empty and quiet.