On the Fly (5 page)

Through the legal investigation and
subsequent counseling for me and both kids, I learned it had been
going on for at least three years.

Three years. Under my own
roof.

The man who had given me my daughter
had also taken her away from me.

She was still here, but she wasn’t the
same. Maddie would never be the same again.

At least now I knew he could never
hurt her again. Even if he someday got out of prison, the courts
wouldn’t allow him to come near her. Now I just had to figure out
how to protect her from everyone and everything else in the
world.

“
Did you have a good day at
school?” I asked, holding out my hand to her. She didn’t take it,
but she walked along beside me.

Maddie looked a heck of a lot older
than her eight years—not in her physical appearance, but something
in her eyes. Physically, she had my eyes, green with gold flecks
all around them, but hers looked like those of an old soul. She
talked like one sometimes, too, not like a eight-year-old
child.

“
It was fine.”

It was fine
was her way of telling me to back off. Her
counselor had suggested it back in Texas—a simple phrase she could
use when she needed space.

That only made me more curious about
what had happened, if anything, but it would have to wait for
another time for us to talk about it. It might be nothing and she
just didn’t want to talk. Or she might not want to talk in front of
Tuck. She was really protective of him, always trying to make sure
he was sheltered from things he was too young for. Similar to how I
was with her.

“
Okay,” I said as we got to
my car. “Listen, I have some news. We’re going out for ice cream to
celebrate.”

“
Yes!” Tuck said as he
practically jumped into his booster seat. There were few things in
life that could excite him more than ice cream. He fastened his
seat belt and picked up a Hot Wheels car off the seat beside him,
immediately making it race along his leg while he made
vrrrroom
sounds. He could
entertain himself like that for hours.

I waited for Maddie to get in so I
could close the door and go around to the driver’s seat. She looked
up at me with wary eyes and dropped her voice so Tuck couldn’t
hear. “Can we afford it? We shouldn’t go if we can’t afford
it.”

God, I hated how she was worried about
things like money. She should be worried about whether she should
wear blue or purple barrettes in her hair with her favorite outfit,
not about how tight my finances were. I dropped down to my knees so
I could look her in the eye. “We can. I’ll explain when we get
there, okay?”

“
You’re sure?”

I nodded.

“
Okay.”

I gave her a peck on her forehead, and
she got in. She buckled her belt, and I closed the door. By the
time I got around to the driver’s side, a tear had trickled down my
cheek.

Damn it
. I brushed it away with the back of my hand while I got in
and started the car. I checked the rearview mirror. Tuck was still
racing his cars, and Maddie had pulled a book out of her backpack
to read.

I took a breath and pulled
out into traffic. This was going to get better.
Maddie
would get better. Otherwise,
why did I bring my kids halfway across the country?

“We’re going to
live there?” Tuck asked. His hazel eyes were as
big as his face as he stared out the window of the ice cream
shop.

The condo building Jim Sutter had
recommended was right across the street from where I’d brought the
kids. There was a park with a play area within walking distance,
Powell’s Books was only a short drive away, and there was an
after-school program near the condo that I could get the kids into.
I’d already gone by this afternoon before they’d gotten out of
school and signed a lease, putting down a deposit with the money
Mr. Sutter had insisted I take.

A
signing bonus
, he’d called it. I’d
said only players get signing bonuses, but he just shook his head
at me.

“
Not in this
case.”

I’d never in my life seen so much
money at one time.

“
We’ll go look at it after
you finish your ice cream,” I said to Tuck.

His scoop of mint chocolate chip was
dripping out of his cone and spreading all over the table. Nothing
I could throw at the mess would stop it. I’d given up the fight
after tossing a big stack of napkins on it. I’d have to get a rag
from the workers once he was done. He had gotten more of that
sticky stuff on his face than he had in his mouth. All I could do
was grin at him.

Maddie had asked for a small bowl of
vanilla, no cone, nothing on it. I figured she was still worried
about money and was trying to get the cheapest thing on the
menu.

“
They’ll let Pumpkin live
with us?” she asked between bites.

Pumpkin was the huge, fluffy, orange
tabby cat I’d had since I was twelve years old. I was twenty-five
now, which made him thirteen. He was starting to get on in years,
and the move had been harder on him than it was on the rest of
us.

It didn’t surprise me that Maddie was
concerned about him. The day she was born, he’d become her cat more
than mine. I’d caught him in her crib on countless occasions when
she was a baby, curled up right by her side. If we’d tried to close
her door so he couldn’t get in, he’d clawed at the carpet and
whined and cried until we let him in out of fear that he’d wake her
up. He’d always looked out for her, so now she was looking out for
him.

I smiled. “Absolutely. It’s got
hardwood floors. No carpet for him to tear up.”

Tuck gave me his best
dubious look, raising his left eyebrow so high it was comical. “Are
you
really
gonna
work for a hockey team, Mommy?”

“
Really, really.” I
finished off my hot fudge sundae and wiped my face with one of the
few napkins I’d held back from trying to clean up after him. “Mr.
Sutter said we can even go to some of the games.”

One of my new job perks was four
tickets to every home game. I’d told Mr. Sutter I wanted to donate
all the ones on school nights to some charitable cause or another
because that was too late to have the kids out. But it would be
nice to be able to treat them to something like a hockey game on
the weekends.

“
Awe-some!” he squealed,
emphasizing each syllable. Then the last of his mint chocolate chip
plopped off his cone and splatted on the table. He started giggling
uncontrollably.

His laughter was infectious. As good
as I felt with how today had gone, I was laughing in no time. Even
Maddie laughed for a second before quietly going back to her bowl
of vanilla. I went to the counter for a bucket and rag to clean up
Tuck’s mess.

I was still in awe over it all. I
mean, the salary for this job was going to be more than I had ever
come close to making before. It had full benefits—health and life
insurance, 401(k), vacation and sick time—in addition to all sorts
of perks like the game tickets. I couldn’t figure out why Mr.
Sutter was giving the job to me. Yeah, he’d said he had a thing for
the underdog and that his mom was a single mom, too. But still. It
wasn’t quite clicking. Especially not since he’d handed me that
check today.

“
Get yourself a place to
live,”
he’d said.
“Buy some furniture. Get an appropriate wardrobe, because we
have a dress code. Do something fun with your kids and something to
spoil yourself, and we’ll see you next week.”

Who did things like that? No one I’d
ever met.

It’d been hard to have faith in
humanity ever since I’d gotten pregnant when I was sixteen, and
instead of loving me through it like I thought the Bible taught
people to do, my parents had kicked me out and told me never to
come back. Dad was a minister. He’d said he couldn’t allow sin like
mine to stay in his house, that it was like inviting Satan to stay.
It had gotten even harder to believe in people after what Jason had
done to Maddie.

But now, this man I’d only known for
the length of a thirty-minute interview was trying to turn my life
upside down in the best way possible. I didn’t know how to process
it.

When I got back to the table, Maddie
had finished her ice cream and Tuck was licking the
table.

“
You,” I said to him,
trying hard to have a stern mom voice instead of falling into
another fit of laughter at his antics. “Into the bathroom, right
this second. Go clean yourself up. I don’t want any sticky stuff in
my car, you hear?”

He was still giggling like a loon
while he pranced off to wash. I set to work wiping down the table,
and Maddie took all our trash to throw it away. When Tuck came
back, his hair and shirt were drenched but at least he was
clean.

“
You’d better zip your coat
up tight before we go outside,” I told him. None of us were used to
the colder weather here yet. In Texas, we were more likely to have
temperatures in the seventies than in the thirties in
December.

“
Yes, Mommy.” He got his
arms in and was struggling with the zipper, but Maddie helped him
close it.

I pulled my own coat on and slipped my
purse strap over my head so it hung across my body. “All right.
Ready to go see the new place?”

“
Are we staying there
tonight?” Maddie asked. She sounded nervous.

I hated that there’d been so much
change for her, but change was necessary. “Not tonight. We’re just
looking tonight.” That’d give her time to adjust to the idea and me
time to get some furniture in there, some beds to sleep
on.

“
Okay.”

A minute later, I’d parked the car and
was leading the kids to the elevator. Our unit was on the twelfth
floor. We got off, and I led them down the hall to our door. I’d
just put the key in the lock when the door to the unit directly
across the hall from ours opened.

Out of habit, I turned to smile at my
new neighbor, my Texan nature shining through.

Then I froze.

Brenden Campbell—the too tall, too
big, and entirely too good-looking hockey player who’d hounded me
for a date earlier—was standing in the hallway between our doors.
He had a wheeled suitcase in his hand and a question in his
eye.

“
Hi, Rachel,” he
said.

Shit
.

“
Mommy?” Maddie moved
closer to me and reached up to put her hand in mine.

She never wanted to hold my hand
anymore.

I finished unlocking the door and
opened it. “How about y’all go check it out? I’ll be in in a
minute, okay?”

They went in, and I closed the door
after them. I could hear Tuck’s little feet clomping along as he
raced from room to room. I turned around to find Brenden staring at
me. Hard.

“
So you live here?” I
finally asked.

“
Yeah, me and Babs—one of
the other guys on the team. And you’re moving in?”

I nodded.

His eyes practically sparkled when he
smiled at me, and my belly flipped with awareness. “Martha told me
you were going to be Jim’s new assistant. And now we’re living
across from each other? Well, that’ll make things nice and
convenient.”

Convenient? Hardly. Awkward would be a
heck of a lot more like it.

He rocked on his feet. “Yeah. Well,
I’ve got to go. I’m heading to Seattle for the week. If you need
anything, Babs is a good kid. He’ll help you.”

“
Yeah. Thanks,” I said. I
had no intention of asking this Babs person for help, or Brenden
Campbell, or anyone else. It had been hard enough to accept the
help Jim Sutter had insisted on giving me.

Brenden started heading toward the
elevator, but then he stopped and turned around. He was smiling
again, that same smile he’d given me a moment ago that made me
tingle in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. “Just don’t let Babs
cook,” he said. “Unless you want your kids to die of food poisoning
or the place to go up in flames.”

I was pretty sure he was flirting with
me. How sad was that, that a man might be flirting with me but I
didn’t know for sure? I laughed briefly, but then he got onto the
elevator and was gone.

A nervous zing raced through me. I
tried to convince myself that it was because of the job, the new
condo, all the changes taking place. Not because of Brenden
Campbell.

But that was a lie, and I damn well
knew it.