I DID MY best to focus on the time I had with my son, on Natalie and everything she needed from me, and on hockey since it was my job, but there was no way I could begin to breathe easy again until I knew that Lennon had been arrested for all the shit he’d put Natalie through. Soon, they told us. They were working on it, but everything in the legal system takes time.
Our back-to-back games went relatively well. We came away with a checkmark in the W column against Winnipeg and a loss against Chicago. We might have had a better chance at beating Chicago if we’d faced them in the first game of the back-to-back weekend, but no one had consulted us as to our preference. This was our schedule, so we had to deal with it.
Carter couldn’t stop chattering the whole way home from the game against the Blackhawks. “Did you see the way Toews went top-shelf?”
“I saw it,” I drawled. “I saw it better than you did since I was the guy who couldn’t tie up the guy’s stick in time.”
“He’s too good for you, Dad.”
And my kid was too smart for his own good—and for my pride. Ouch. “He got the better of me this time. Might not be the case next time.” It would’ve helped if Viktor Frisk had tracked back into our defensive zone better. He’d lost his man, and in the process, he’d left me and Prince out to dry. Hunter had just about lost his shit on Frisky, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. We could’ve beaten those guys if not for a handful of careless mistakes like that one.
Carter kept yammering on and on in the back seat the rest of the way home, and Natalie and I let him. Kids tended to get worked up from all the adrenaline at an event like that.
Or at least my kid did. Maybe others weren’t as susceptible to the big high followed by the huge drop of energy. He would wear himself out before too much longer, and then he’d probably crash hard—which would give me and Natalie some time to talk, just the two of us.
He was still blabbering about the game when I pulled into the garage. As soon as I’d put the car in park, he barreled out of his seat and raced inside to get some puppy love.
“They should both sleep hard tonight,” Natalie said softly.
“Good. His mom prefers for me to send him home well rested before school. He doesn’t get as many red cards if he’s had enough sleep.”
She laughed—an amazing sound to my ears—and reached simultaneously for her purse and the door handle to get out of the car.
The garage door started to close behind us, but then I caught a glimpse of something in my rearview mirror that chilled my blood.
My father.
He was standing in my driveway, arms crossed. It was the same stance he’d always taken up just before beating the snot out of me.
Natalie glanced over at me, and her easy smile quickly dissipated, fizzling like fireworks falling out of the sky. “What? Is Hayes here?” Her voice rose to a high-pitched squeak of fear that gnawed at me from the inside out. She turned to look behind us, but the garage door blocked her view, which only ramped up her tension to a higher degree.
“It’s not Hayes,” I said. “I need you to go inside and stay with Carter and Snoopy.”
Everything flooded out of her in a rush. “You can’t fight with Hayes again. You really can’t. You can’t hit him. It’s a trap. He’s trying to get you to beat him up so he can press charges against you, or so he can use it in court to prove that we’re in a relationship or something, that you were—”
“It’s not Hayes,” I repeated more firmly, but the terror in her expression nearly ripped my guts out through my throat. But she still wouldn’t budge. “It’s my father,” I explained, hoping that would be enough to get her moving.
“Your…” Her voice trailed off as understanding dawned in her eyes. “I’m coming with you.”
“I want you to go inside.”
“You might need a witness. I can have my phone ready to call 9-1-1. I can film a video. You might need evidence.”
“Please, Nat.” I took both of her hands in my own and squeezed hard enough to catch her attention and force her to meet my eyes. “I need you to go inside with Carter. Do it for me, okay? If anything happens, I need you to be there for my kid. And Snoopy can help protect both of you.”
I didn’t like having to put the situation into such stark terms, but she’d been through enough to understand the reality of the situation.
And reality was looking really fucking grim right now.
Her chin and lips trembled, and it seemed as if she was bound to start crying at any moment. But then she squared her shoulders and gave me a curt nod. “But I’m going to be watching out the window. I’ll be ready to call for help.”
“With any luck, you won’t need to.”
“If luck exists, we should be due some by now.” She almost smiled, too. “I’m filming it, too. Just in case.”
“That’s my girl.” I bent closer for a quick, hard kiss. She hesitated for just a moment, clinging to me like her life depended on it, but then she took her purse and headed for the kitchen door to be with my kid and his dog, finding a new level of strength that she might not have realized she possessed.
I’d known it, though. I realized it all the way back when she was unconscious in the hospital. Hell, I probably knew it even before then. Natalie was a hell of a lot stronger than she ever gave herself credit for.
“Tell Carter he needs to take a bath, okay?” I called after her. “Then he’ll be distracted.” And maybe it would be enough to distract her, too.
She met my eyes and held them for a moment before disappearing inside my house.
I headed out the man door and found my father in exactly the same position I’d last seen him. “Something I can do for you?” I ground out.
He actually smirked at me, the son of a bitch. “Your girl’s pretty. No wonder you wanted to get with her. I bet she’s got a nice, tight pussy for you, too. I wouldn’t mind having a bit of that, myself.”
“If you don’t have anything better than that to say to me, you can get the fuck off my property before I call the police and have you escorted off it.”
“You don’t wanna do that, now, son.”
“The hell I don’t. I’d love to see you hauled off in the back of a police cruiser with your hands cuffed behind you.”
He shook his head, looking smug. “No, promise. You don’t want to do that. Not if you want things to go in your favor when it comes to her ex.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” I demanded.
“Brought your mother down with me this time.”
My hand curled into a fist, as if of its own volition. “Where is she?”
“You haven’t seen her in a long time,” he continued, going on at his own pace and completely ignoring my question. “Too long. Your mother misses you. You took off and left us behind, and you broke her heart.”
“If anyone broke her heart, it’s you—her heart and just about every other part of her.”
“You can think what you want, Ethan, but nothing hurt her worse than you walking out and leaving us behind, closing us out of your life. Shutting us out of your kid’s life. I saw him last week. Did you know that? Found out what school his mother has him in and went by there. He’s really good at getting across the monkey bars. No big surprise. He’s got your arms—just like a fucking monkey’s arms.”
Before I realized what I was doing, I’d closed the distance between us and was half a breath away from closing my hand around his throat and shutting off his windpipe.
“You don’t like that, do you, son?” my father said, laughing.
The son of a bitch was fucking laughing.
“Don’t call me son.”
“You are my son.”
“But you’re not a very good father. Never have been.”
“Doesn’t change the truth. You think you’re a good father? You think there’s such a thing as a good father in this world?”
“You go near my kid again, and I’ll have you behind bars before you can blink.”
“You won’t know,” he shot back. “You’ll be down here, chasing your big-dollar contracts and some pussy that rightfully belongs to one of your teammates, and you won’t be able to do a goddamned thing about it. Besides, you’d be too fucking scared of the consequences.”
“You’re the one who’s scared. You’ve been scared of me ever since I got to be bigger than you. That’s why you’ve got to play this game now.”
“No one’s playing games here but you, son.”
“This has never been a game. This is someone’s fucking life you’re messing with. Several lives, actually. And I’m not going to let you get away with it anymore.”
“You always talked a big game, especially when it came to your mother. Said you were going to get away from me and take her with you, but you never followed through.”
He was trying to bait me. I knew it, and I knew better than to fall prey to it, but damn if I didn’t want to rip his throat out. “I tried to follow through.”
“Tried and failed. And you never did stop to think about the consequences of your actions, did you?”
He wanted to talk about fucking consequences? Who the fuck did he think needed to face up to some goddamned consequences?
Breathe. I had to calm down before I let him goad me into doing something stupid.
“This isn’t about my mother,” I ground out.
He was trying to distract me, and it was working. I couldn’t let him do that. I still hadn’t figured out what his game was this time, other than possibly attempting to tempt me into taking a swing at him. Maybe he had a camera somewhere, ready to catch me going for him. Maybe he was going to try to use that to work against me in court and aid Lennon’s case.
I couldn’t let that happen. I had to keep my cool.
“It’s not about Mom, and it’s not about Natalie,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “and it damned sure isn’t about my son. This is about you and me. This is about right here and right now.”
“Ethan?” a small voice implored from across the street.
A small female voice.
And it was entirely too familiar, even if I hadn’t heard her for years.
I took my gaze off my father for long enough to check out the black sedan parked facing the wrong way on the street behind him. The front passenger-side window was rolled down far enough for me to make out a head of dark, curly hair tinged with gray.
In the time it took me to glance over, my father’s expression went from spiteful to downright mean. “The fuck did I tell you, Lydia?”
He took off toward the car with a familiar, purposeful stride—the one that said I was about to get the ever-loving shit kicked out of me. But he was going for my mother, not for me.
I didn’t stop to think. Didn’t have it in me. The son of a bitch was about to beat my mother.
I took off after him.
Consequences?
Fuck consequences.