Dirty Tackle: A Football Romance (13 page)

I wasn’t going to let her touch me until we had had a conversation about what the hell was going on the little girl I had met.

After the service was over, I turned to her. “Perhaps you should ride with your parents from here on out,” I said.

I saw the stricken look on her face, but there was nothing but coldness inside of me. I couldn’t find it in myself to feel anything for her or her feelings at that moment. She nodded slowly. I turned and strode toward my car. I needed some quiet and peace, because I had a feeling my life had just been completely flipped upside down.

I spent the majority of the reception after the funeral avoiding Maddy and her parents like the plague. I felt the weight of Maddy’s gaze on me every so often. It would prickle the back of my shoulder blades. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck started to stand up. It felt as if every nerve in my body was electrified in some kind of way. I was hyper aware of her, but even more so of the little girl that I couldn’t help but watch as she moved about the room.

Scarlet Thompson appeared to have the social skills of a butterfly. She flitted from group to group, and I watched as each group lit up from the inside when she approached. She seemed to know everyone in town, and this was what told me I would have known sooner about this particular secret if I had bothered coming back to Rosewood to visit. But I didn’t think that I had left anything behind. Turns out that joke was on me. I had apparently left something very important behind. I couldn’t help but wonder if everyone in the room knew the truth except for me.

I was absently talking to one of my old high school teachers when I felt a small tug on the sleeve of my suit coat. I looked down to see Scarlet gazing up at me. For a moment, I felt as if my heart had stopped. I knew that I was looking into the face of a person that, amazingly, I instantly loved.

I hunched over and thought about what I would even say. The entire dynamic of my life was changed now.

“I’m supposed to say that I’m sorry for your loss,” she said solemnly to me.
 

“Thank you,” I said hesitantly. I had no idea how to have a conversation with her knowing who she was to me, and it was almost as if the little girl sensed my awkwardness because she continued on.

“You must be really sad,” she said. She slowly swung back and forth causing the hem of her dress to move like a fabric bell. She was so beautiful. It made my heart clench to think that somehow, someway, I had a hand in creating this lovely creature. The thought was earthshattering.

“I am sad,” I said. I was sad for far more reasons that I had even known existed that morning. I watched as she pulled her lower lip into her mouth, and it appeared as if she was hesitating as to what she was going to say next. It was a habit that I knew she got from her mother. Maddy did the same thing whenever she was reluctant to say something.

“I don’t know who my daddy is,” she said. “That makes me sad.”

I felt the rush of anger then. She didn’t know who her daddy was because her mommy had decided not to tell her. Her mommy had decided not to tell her daddy that she existed either. How could someone do that to someone else? The betrayal cut so deep it felt hard for me to breathe.

At if I had conjured her up, Maddy appeared behind Scarlet. She put her hands a little girl’s shoulders and turned her toward her. “Scarlet, honey, I’m sure Shane is busy right now. Why don’t you go back to Grandma and Grandpa?”

I didn’t want her to leave, but I didn’t know what else I could say to her. Was I supposed to be the one to tell her that I was her dad? I didn’t know the protocol. So instead, I watched as she drifted away back over to the Thompsons.

“Shane, we should talk,” Maddy said. Her voice was low and strained.

“A conversation that I think should have been had a long time ago,” I said. It was difficult to keep the snarl out of my voice. “Your timing sucks, Madeline. Surely, you can wait until after my father’s wake is over.”

The expression on her face was if I had struck her, especially when I used her full name. That was good. I wanted her to feel some pain. Because maybe then she would begin to start to understand the pain that I felt in knowing that I had a daughter.

I had a daughter.

This idea just didn’t even comprehend in my world. The idea that I could be someone’s father. I was far from a role model for ideal parental behavior, but I thought that I would have to be better at the job than my dad. Hadn’t I learned everything that I didn’t want to be from him? But I had missed so much. Clearly, Scarlet was already in elementary school. She was turning into a young woman already, and I had missed everything.

The idea of having a child had never really occurred to me. It wasn’t something that I ever considered because I never had any kind of relationship with a woman that would have brought the idea into question. The only woman that I probably ever would have considered it with was Maddy because of the depths of my feelings for her back then. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me.

“Of course,” she said. “I suppose I should stay with my parents tonight.”

“I think that would be best,” I said. I spun on my heel and walked away from her again. This betrayal was far too deep to be something that I could just let go after a few hours. Madeleine was going to have to be the one to wait for me now.

Everything had gone to hell. I was furious with my mother for bringing Scarlet to the funeral. My mother had tried to explain herself to me several times, but I cut off every attempt. The last time, I got a warning and a snappish response from my father to let her finish, but I cut him off too. Poor Scarlet had no idea what was going on between the adults around her. She had watched us like someone watching a tennis match as we spoke in low hushed tones between us at the funeral reception.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I said under my breath to my mother for what seemed like the tenth time. At this point, it was more of a rhetorical question. In my opinion, she hadn’t been thinking. Or if she had, it was about nothing but pushing her own meddling agenda.

“I thought that we could sit in the back, and he would never know we were here,” my mother said. “I didn’t expect him to be right inside the door when we arrived. What were we supposed to do? Ignore him?”

I started to say something else, but Scarlet tugged on my sleeve. “How much longer are we staying, Mommy?”

I had expected to be at the funeral reception for the duration so that I could be there for Shane, but it was clear by the murderous look on his face that he wanted nothing to do with me. I felt like I was going to explode and cry all the same time. This was the worst case scenario in anything I had ever considered; Shane finding out before I had a chance to tell him. And the one who had thrown me under the bus had been my own mother.

I should have expected her to do something like this. She had agreed far too easily when I asked her to stay in D.C. and watch Scarlet. It had been obvious that she wanted to come home and go to the funeral with my father. I never in a million years dreamed that she would have brought Scarlet to the funeral, though, without clearing it with me first.

We rode in silence all the way home. I sent Scarlet up to my old room to get ready for bed.

As soon as I was alone with my mother, I whirled on her. “You have ruined everything for me!”

“I’m sorry, Maddy. I didn’t mean for him to find out like that,” my mother said sounding contrite.

“I never even had a chance to explain. He knew. He knew as soon as he saw her. He’s not stupid. He could’ve done the math in his head and figured it out, not to mention she ran right to me calling ‘mommy’ in the church. Besides, what did you expect her to do when she saw me there? This isn’t her fault. This is your fault.” My anger knew no bounds.

“You’re being rather harsh to your mother,” my father said as he entered the room. He had a glass of whiskey in his hand. “She wasn’t trying to do any harm, Maddy. She had the best of intentions.”

“It might not have been her intention, but nonetheless, that is what happened!” I didn’t understand what thought process occurred to my parents that made them think that bringing my daughter to the funeral of her unknown grandfather would be a good idea.

“I think that you should take a walk or something until you cool down, and you can have a conversation like a logical person. It won’t do for you to continue yelling at your mother right now, and there’s a good chance that your daughter will hear you. She knows that something is going on, Maddy. It’s high time that you quit trying to keep the truth from her. It was inevitable that it would come out, and we all knew it.”

“But it should have been my choice,” I said as I felt the bile rise in my throat. I felt ill, and I couldn’t say anything else. I knew that whatever words came out of my mouth were going to be dripping with a kind of venom, and I wouldn’t be able to take them back. I left the house and slammed the door behind me. As I started to trudge down the stairs, I saw the large shadow of a form detach itself from the big oak tree in the front yard and start my direction.
 

My breath caught in my throat until I realized that I recognized him. “Shane,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to come. I was going to leave and head back to the city. But then I realized I needed you to look me in the eye and tell me the truth. I needed to hear you say it,” he said. I could see the hurt in his eyes, and his tone was cool. At least, he wasn’t yelling at me.

I had practiced the words so many times, but now they flew right out of my head. I knew there was nothing that I was going to be able to say or say it in a way that was going to make it right. I had done something treacherous. At the time it hadn’t felt like it, but I knew that no matter what I said, he would still see it that way. He would see it that way because that’s the way that I thought now. It’s amazing the amount of perspective time give someone.

“Scarlet is your daughter,” I said. There was a lot before and after that, but I figured that was the best place to start.

He let out a long breath that made me think he had been holding it the entire time. He had been waiting for confirmation even though he had known the truth from the moment he saw her. He had seen what I saw in her every single day. She looked like him in the way that she interacted with people, and I saw glimmers of his personality coming out. If there was ever a case for nature versus nurture, my daughter was it.

“When did you know?”

“Two months after I got back to Rosewood.” I wanted to add that he didn’t try to contact me either. That I knew he was already seeing some other girl—my old roommate had told me. That I never wanted his charity or his child support, that I never wanted to hold him down.

He let out another long breath. He looked away from me then, and I could just imagine what he was thinking. “I thought you’d never contacted me because we were done. We never even started.”

I felt my lips quiver as I straightened my spine. There was no excuse for what I had done, but I’d been so young. “I knew that if I told you the truth, you’d leave Brooks. You’d throw away your career. I saw back then how great you could be. I didn’t want a mistake like that cost you your future. I hadn’t been lying about that.”

“So you thought that I would consider my daughter a mistake?”

I wasn’t going to be able to hold it together much longer. I could feel the waves of despair building inside of me. “I wasn’t going to be the one to hold you back. I thought that I was doing the right thing, Shane. I was trying to let you have a future.

He ran a hand through his hair. He turned away from me then, and I watched in horror as he rammed his fist into the trunk of the oak tree. I heard the solid crunch of the impact and knew that he had probably done something to his hand.

“Let me look at that,” I said trying to take his hand, but he pushed me away.
 

“Don’t touch me,” he said. The look on his face told me that he hated me in that moment. I had never expected to see that kind of expression on Shane’s face when it came to me.