Delay of Game (38 page)

Now that they’d all gone home, I realized just how exhausted I was—physically, emotionally, and in every other conceivable way. What might have exhausted me more than anything else was what Cadence asked me right before they left to go back to Cam’s house.

“Do you love him? Because he really, really loves you, Sara.”

She’d asked it quietly, when no one else was right beside us. That might have been the first quiet thing she’d said the whole day, actually.

I knew she was right about her brother and his feelings for me. It went beyond the simple fact that he’d told me he loved me. Everything he did, the way he treated me—it all added up to love. Lust wasn’t enough to account for his actions. Neither was any sort of misplaced guilt he might feel about Daddy’s heart attack. There wasn’t any good, reasonable explanation that fit. He might have initially told my father that he was the one who’d gotten me pregnant for some reason other than love, but everything else? The way he was so careful with me. The way he gave up all his free time to take care of not only me but also my father. The way he was willing to risk his position on the team in order to pursue a relationship with me, the coach’s daughter. The way he bathed me and washed and dried my hair and held me at night, all night, without thought to his own comfort. These were the actions of a man in love.

A man in love with me.

But did I love him, too? Hell, did I even
deserve
him? I wasn’t sure. Of any of it.

“I don’t know,” I’d said to her. “I care about him, more than I ever expected to. I don’t want to do anything to hurt him. But I also don’t want to lie and tell you what I think you want to hear. I don’t want to say it unless it’s the truth, unless I know it’s the truth and I believe it with everything that’s in me.”

I’m not sure what reaction I’d been expecting, but it definitely hadn’t been the big grin she’d given me. “Okay,” she’d said. “But when you do figure it out, you should tell him first. He deserves to know.”

At the moment, as Cam was taking me upstairs so we could go to bed, that was the question that kept racing through my head:
Do you love him?
Falling in love with him hadn’t been in my plans, but then again, not much of anything that had happened lately had been in my plans. Maybe I didn’t know what was best for me in this case, and maybe falling in love with a hockey player wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

At least it wouldn’t be if it was Cam.

He closed the door behind us, and he kissed me—a slow, languorous kiss that shouldn’t have turned me on like it did. And, like he had every night since coming to stay here, he helped me change clothes, all the while being cautious of my injury. But it was more than just caution. There was love in every movement he made, as though he was being careful with me not just so he wouldn’t hurt me but because I was precious.

He was taking such tender care in helping me that it brought tears to my eyes. My arms were up over my head so he could pull my shirt free, and I tried to brush the stupid tears away before he noticed. I should have known that wasn’t possible, though. He noticed everything about me, always.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked as I lowered my arms. He tossed my shirt onto the bed and cupped my cheeks, using his thumbs to brush away the wetness that was continuing to fall.

I shook my head, wishing I could make myself stop crying, but it all just kept building within me.

He slipped his arms around me, holding me close like he had that night in the hospital after Daddy’s heart attack. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I shook my head again. What I wanted was for someone to sift through everything that had been going through my head over the last couple of weeks and tell me what it all meant. Did I love him? Would it come between me and Daddy if I did? How would I be able to handle it if there were two men in my life—two men who I loved—and one of them had to go to a different team, a different city? Hockey players and coaches moved around all the time. How long would I have with both of them here, together, in Portland?

I’d never wanted to date a hockey player, but for the first time in my life I was starting to come to terms with the reasons behind that refusal. Only now, it might be too late for me to be coming to this realization.

“Okay,” Cam said softly. “It’s been a long day. We don’t have to talk about it right now.” He sat on the edge of the bed, pulled me onto his lap, and held me until the tears stopped.

After sniffling for a few minutes and reveling in the way he held me, his hands moving gingerly along my back, repeatedly, in a manner that both soothed and inflamed, I tilted my head up so I could see him. His hazel eyes were staring down at me, worried.

I stretched my neck so I could kiss his chin, despite the two-weeks’ growth of scratchy facial hair.

“Don’t go asking me to hurt you again tonight,” he warned.

I shook my head. While sex wasn’t far from my mind, it was definitely not in the cards for tonight. “I just wanted to ask you something.”

“Anything.”

“Why do you love me?” I sounded so damn vulnerable when I asked him that, and I fucking hated to be vulnerable. I never wanted anyone to see me when I was weak, but Cam could do that to me. He made me feel fragile, but in a way I’d never experienced before. It was as though being open with him in this way gave me a different kind of strength. I hadn’t wrapped my head around it yet. I was almost afraid to.

“Why do I love you?”

Was it possible for him to come across as both fierce and soft at the same time? He looked like an avenging teddy bear, like a man determined to love me into submission until I couldn’t help but love him back.

He might not have to try too much harder, either.

“I love you because you have the sexiest pout in the world. I love you because you won’t get mad at me if I accidentally curse in front of you, since you probably curse more than I do. I love you because you’re even more stubborn than I am. I love you because even when you frustrate the hell out of me, you fascinate me. I love you because you might be wary about letting me and my family love you, but you have good friends and you keep them close, and that means you’re loyal. I love you because you let me hold you when you cry and because you wake up wanting to kiss me. I love you because you went to visit my dog when I was gone. I love you because you would do anything for your father and that means your family is important to you. I love you because you’re you, Sara.”

If I hadn’t already melted into a puddle of goo when he’d told me he loved me
because
I was stubborn, not
in spite
of the fact that I was, the way he kissed me when he got to the end of that speech would have done the trick. He put every bit of that love that he’d professed into it, one hand cupping my cheek as his lips brushed gently across mine and the tips of our noses rubbed together.

My heart felt like it was going to thunder out of my chest because of all the
feels
he was making me feel, and my hand shook as I lifted it to press his closer to me so I could feel more of his touch.

He slipped his hand back toward the nape of my neck and eased me forward so he could kiss my forehead. “Come on. Let’s finish getting you ready for bed.”

There was no chance I was going to fall asleep anytime soon. Not with that frantic pulse and the thousands of thoughts racing even faster through my mind.

My whole world had been tipped on its axis in the last couple of weeks—but I was starting to think that maybe I didn’t mind too much.

SARA HAD BEEN
squirming and trying to find a comfortable position every few minutes for hours. The sun was already starting to come up, but she probably hadn’t even gotten a good hour of sleep the whole night with all the tossing and turning she was doing. Which meant I hadn’t gotten
any
sleep to speak of. I couldn’t because I was so worried about her. I’d spent the whole day knowing I’d caused her pain, and now she was in so much distress that she couldn’t sleep.

I was an ass. Especially since I’d known what kind of shape she would have been in yesterday, and yet I’d asked her to go through a full day of dealing with my family. She hadn’t been up to that, but she’d gone along with it, and now she was even more miserable than she’d been before. I wished there was something I could do to take some of the pain away. Anything. But all I could do was hold her and try to make her as comfortable as I could.

What really worried me, though, was when she started moaning in her sleep—a painful sound, followed by a whimper.

That was it. I couldn’t take any more. I eased my hand along her back, hoping the movement would rouse her gently and not startle her awake. I’d learned in the last couple of weeks, though, that she could be a pretty heavy sleeper—she woke when she was ready to wake and not before then—and now was no exception to that rule.

“Sara?” I said, my mouth next to her ear. “Wake up, baby.”

She whimpered again, and I rolled us until she was on her back and I was on my side next to her. Her eyes popped open, and she blinked a couple of times before moaning and pulling her knees up to her chest.

Fuck
. If it was her ribs bothering her, getting into that position would only make it hurt worse. Was it a really bad case of morning sickness or something else like that—something to be expected? Or was something wrong with the baby? That thought made
me
feel nauseated.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, brushing her hair out of her eyes and tucking it behind her ear. “Talk to me. Let me help.”

She shook her head and struggled to get up, heading straight into the bathroom and closing the door behind her, shutting me out. It felt like an eternity went by with just odd sounds coming from the other side of that door, nothing I could distinguish. It didn’t seem like she was puking, but that realization didn’t exactly calm my nerves.

Finally, I heard the swish of the toilet flushing and the flow of water from the sink. A moment later, she opened the door.

“I think I need to go to the hospital,” she said just before bursting into tears.

I’d never felt more useless than I did at that moment.

I COULDN’T SIT
still. Everyone kept telling me I needed to calm down—doctors, nurses, Scotty, Mom—the whole lot of them wanted me to sit and be calm and patient while we waited. But I couldn’t.

So I paced.

Corinne went with me to walk outside, trying to calm me down. “She might not have miscarried,” she said. “Spotting is normal in early pregnancy. Lots of women have that. It’s nothing to worry about.” She said a whole lot of other things, too, but none of them had helped because it had been a hell of a lot more than just spotting. There was also something else I’d overheard Corinne telling Chloe and Cadence weighing on my mind: fifteen percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Maybe a lot more than that.

After a while, she gave up on the idea of getting me to talk about it, and she went back inside. I went in, too, when I realized that the fresh air wasn’t helping. Nothing would help but seeing Sara, knowing that she was okay. Until then, I would continue to feel like someone was ripping my heart out from the inside. It had started back in Sara’s bedroom when she’d broken down in tears. The big kicker, though, had come when we’d arrived at the ER and she’d told them she didn’t want me to stay with her.

She didn’t want her father, either. Hell, she’d refused to let anyone at all in the examination room other than hospital staff until Dana and Zee had arrived. It was only when Dana had threatened to never speak to her again if she didn’t let
someone
come in and sit with her that she’d relented. So she had Dana, at least. Sara wasn’t alone, even though she was trying to be.

I glanced at the sea of faces staring at me in the waiting room without seeing any of them, and I went over to the coffee station to fix myself a cup. My hands shook so badly that I spilled half the sweetener on the counter, which pissed me off so bad I crushed the Styrofoam cup and threw it at the wall.

“Here, let me,” someone said beside me. Not just someone. Scotty. He reached over and took another cup from the stack. “How many?” he asked with his hand hovering over the tin of sweetener packets.