by Sabrina York
Squaring her shoulders, she called Sam’s name and came back around the corner as if she had not already seen them. Her knees shook as she yanked Sam away from Brody. The boy’s face dissolved into imminent tantrum. Jack put a hand on her shoulder, and they all stood there, frozen in a bizarre tableau of lies.
Brody’s touch on her arm shocked her, literally sending a jolt up her spine. His lips on her fingers had the opposite effect, as if he had poured warm water across her nerves. She wanted to melt into him, like she used to. Soothe and be soothed in the way they had discovered by accident when they tried to play or mess around with bonds and floggers.
Her child’s voice jolted her back to reality. “Mommy?” he asked, his face dark and unhappy at the vision of his mother so obviously distraught, and of this man, a stranger, kissing her hand.
She pulled away, not angry, just resigned. “Come on.” She turned away from him, once and for all, Sam’s hand grasped in hers. “Let’s get this shit done.”
Chapter Ten
The contract signed, the deed accomplished, Brody took a long, deep breath. He would no longer be a Black Jack, a BJ, one of The Gentlemen, as their marketing department tried to spin them. He glanced down at the fists he had clenched in his lap. Then he caught Sam’s stare over his coloring book. Something here seemed strange, wrong, off-center.
His head pounded with the sort of pain he had never experienced. Like someone or something had his temples in a metal vise and someone else took to pounding the back of his head with a sledgehammer. He leaned over his knees, his breathing ragged. A weird sort of panic had him in its clutches.
“You okay?” A small hand landed on his. He jerked his head up to meet Sam’s eyes. “Mister? Do you need some medicine?”
“No,” he whispered, reaching out to touch the boy’s cheek. Sam let him do it before jumping away at the sharp intake of breath from behind Sophie’s desk. “I’m fine, Sam. Thank you. I should…go.” He stood.
Everything in him screamed stay, but he had obligations. A fiancée, a new job in Boston, back-up goalie for more money than here, less chance of getting injured. And not a whole hell of a lot of promises about playing time. He’d told Amber that would not fly. She’d given him one of her patented leave it to me and shut up looks, then ignored him until he had to give some sort of approval for yet another aspect of the god-awful wedding.
“Wait, don’t…I mean…” Sam glanced wildly at his mother, who seemed, frozen in her seat. To his amazement, the boy wrapped himself around Brody’s lower legs. Heart in his throat, face burning with knowledge and fury, Brody glared at Sophie over the desk, wanting to ask, but terrified of the answer.
Setting her lips in a thin line, she gave an almost imperceptible nod. A tear slid down her face. Brody gripped Sam’s arms and peeled him off. The room narrowed again, to him and the boy, who merely stared back at him, his face a scary mirror into a past Brody wanted but could not remember. He tried to speak, but his throat closed up. Letting the kid go, he stumbled out of the office, his skin ice cold and his face burning hot, the image of Sam’s deep gaze and familiar features branded into his psyche.
He faced the following set of twenty-four-hour periods in a daze. The movers came the day before the wedding and had him packed up in no time. He wandered through his condo, touching all the huge cardboard boxes, sipping a single malt scotch his teammates had given him during an impromptu bachelor party the night before. There had been strippers, a live band, booze, food, the works. He’d sat apart from it all, demurring when offered lap dances, no longer caring about anything, much less interested in celebrating.
His mind spun, and his head hurt daily. He slept maybe three hours a night, turning him into a zombie by day. All he could picture when he closed his eyes was Sophie—her face, her body, her voice. He somehow tasted her, heard her, sensed her skin nearly twenty-four-seven. When not day or night dreaming about making love to her, about fucking around with her…then visions of Sam invaded his brain.
He leaned against a box, gripping the glass. Tugging his phone from his pocket, he thumbed through contacts he found her. Legal Lady. He’d programmed it in after that one hot hook-up. He stared at the set of numbers, wondering what he might say that would make sense.
“Hey, um, this is Brody. Did we have a kid together and you never told me? Oh, and by the way, when did that happen because the last memories I have are from about the time you invited me in to your office and let me fuck you, you know, on your desk? Did I knock you up then, or what?”
Good god, Vaughn, get real. That is not your kid. You barely know the woman other than that once and only in her role as head of the team’s legal department.
And of course, as if summoned, she appeared, naked, smiling, sashaying over to him. Her lips moved and formed words he couldn’t hear or process. He only saw, sweeping his gaze up her lush body. His dick hardened, pissing him off. When his phone buzzed with an actual call, he dropped it, startled out of his near-wet daydream.
The screen indicated that it was, of all people on the planet, Nicolas Garza, the Spaniard who anchored the team and had been so very concerned with Brody’s well-being for the last few years. If he didn’t know the guy already had a steady boyfriend, he’d guess Nicco had the hots for him. He and Parker, their teammate and Nicco’s lover, had spearheaded the bachelor party, and both would be standing with him as groomsmen at the wedding.
“Yeah?” he grunted into the phone.
“Hey, uh, you around?”
“I’m around my condo, if that’s what you mean.” He tried to stretch out his shoulder, which had started aching more and more lately for no obvious reason.
“That’s what I meant. I’m downstairs. You got a minute?”
He pushed back from the cardboard stack, surprised. “Sure. I’ll buzz you up.”
He let his teammate in. “Pull up a box,” he said, pointing at his distinct lack of furniture. Nicco just stood, glancing around, his dark-skinned face full of anxiety. “Well, what is it? I have to meet Amber in an hour, rehearsal or something. I don’t know anymore.” He propped himself against the wall, his head setting up that odd cacophony of pain, echoes of memory, and a sort of dizzy, off-kilter sensation he’d been experiencing a lot lately.
“Listen, Vaughn, I think you need to know something.” Nicco glanced down at the floor. Brody waited. “You had a concussion. A bad one, and it was my fault. You sort of went downhill from there. You didn’t play, then Nate got hurt at that nightclub…so you did—play that is, before you should have.”
Brody’s vision did a strange blur-out thing then, as he processed his teammate’s words. “I don’t…r-r-emember,” he stuttered.
Nicco held up a hand. “Just wait, listen to me a minute. I know they told us not to do this to you, that you had to move on, that you probably wouldn’t ever fully recall your life before…the surgery.”
Brody started pacing, dragging fingers through his hair, running them over the quarter-sized scar near the crown of his head, the one he never asked about, somehow believing it contained a key to a box he should keep firmly locked. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“You have to,” Nicco said, his voice low and firm. “You…and Sophie were together. You were, I mean, we all sort of figured that…shit.”
Brody pulled away. “You are crazy. Bat shit, fucking nuts,” he croaked out.
Nicco pulled something from his inside jacket pocket, looked at it a minute, then handed it over. Brody stared at Nicco’s phone screen a full thirty seconds before his brain registered what he saw. His gut roiled with nausea at the scary déjà vu of seeing at a photo of himself—or some kind of younger, fresher version of the man he met in the mirror every morning. He wore a tuxedo, and had his arm around…. He dropped the phone on top of a moving box. “What happened to me?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“Concussion, traumatic brain injury, again, partly my fault. You ended up in some kind of scary surgery. The docs opened up your skull, an
d in the process of saving your life, gave your memories a solid scramble. They can’t explain it really. Which is why I’m here now. Because you have to know this before you just bolt, marry that…marry Amber, and leave the team, leave your home.”
Brody gulped. Sophie—so beautiful in her deep blue dress, smiling for cameras, tucked into his side exactly as he had dreamed. “I’m gonna puke.”
He raced for the bathroom, but his body would not cooperate. His eyes watered, and his chest heaved. He remembered her, heard her words, and saw her mouth move as she spoke them: Your call, stud, but something tells me the closer the better. As if she were there, right then, talking to him. He saw her, tasted her, sensed her body enveloping him.
More words he now remembered: I have something to tell you, flashed in front of his mind. Then, nothing, blackness, a hole he didn’t even try to dig out of, so focused he’d been on playing, working out, and fucking…and then…Amber.
“Hey, Brody, listen.” Nicco lingered in the bathroom doorway. Their voices echoed in the empty rooms, bounced around his newly aching head. He wanted to scream or to climb up on the balcony and make that final swan dive to drive it all out of his head. Violent tremors gripped his body. His face was hot and wet with tears. Why was this happening? Who was he? Why wouldn’t he remember?
“That boy, Sam…Sophie’s…son,” he whispered.
“Yours. And so help me, if you tell her I told you I will slice off that giant piece of meat between your legs and serve it to you with fava beans and a nice Chianti,” Nicco said, his face split in a grin that seemed so strange and out of place at that moment, Brody laughed. It hurt his chest, but he couldn’t stop.
“What you do with this information is up to you.” Nicco helped him to his feet. “I’m not here to talk you out of marriage or leaving or anything. But I owe this to you. I swear, I’m so goddamned sorry. Because I consider you more than a teammate, you know?” He stuck out a hand. Brody shook it. “You’re a good friend. And you truly got the shit end of this deal.”
Brody blinked rapidly, unable to process. He remained still, staring out the window for a long time after Nicco left, without seeing anything, over the suburban landscape view from his condo.
Chapter Eleven
Sophie observed the man across from her, listened to him make small talk, and acknowledged she really should be more polite. She should act like she wanted to be on this date. Smiling weakly, she sipped her wine and attempted to recall what he’d said, if he’d asked her a question or something to prompt the expectant expression on his face. Susan had fixed her up with him, an emergency room doctor, or something similarly exciting. Handsome, charming, all the things she should want, the guy bored her to tears. Her brain spun and would not let her rest. Coming into her life on the heels of the Brody separation, the poor guy at the table really didn’t have a chance.
“Um, sorry,” she said, reaching for her buzzing phone, figuring Sam had some kind of question for her, trying to distract her in his little boy way from the fact that she wasn’t at home, with him on a Friday night.
A strange number, without a contact attached, lit the screen. She shoved it back in her purse, letting it go to voicemail. The man continued talking, she continued sipping, picking at her salad and ignoring the fact that not only did her son turn four the next day, Brody would be getting married. She tried not to glance at her phone and wished she were home with Sam, eating popcorn and watching a movie. She had no energy for this dating thing anymore.
The man dropped her at home, walked her to her door. “Hey,” he tilted her chin up, surprising her, “thanks. I know this was a blind date set up. So…” He raised an eyebrow as if questioning her.
She thought for a half second that a nice hard fuck was exactly what she needed right then. But it seemed too much trouble to engineer, even with a guy as handsome and fabulous as the one pressing a soft good-night kiss to her cheek.
Ducking inside, she shut the door and put her forehead on its cool surface. The quiet house calmed her. Sam’s cat wound around her ankles. The fridge buzzed, the dryer dinged. All the normal sounds, she thought. No big deal. Calm down.
She poured a glass of water looking out over her dark front lawn as she drank it. She’d alerted Lance to her new reality. He’d been understanding, and they were drawing up contracts to alter their ownership arrangement. Part of her really did not want to let it go. She was Katrina, and that persona had provided her with the impetus to recover not only emotionally but financially from the ruin Frank had left with her.
Her phone buzzed again. She pulled it out of her bag, noting the same mystery number. Figuring it might be some random disaster heralded by a media call, she answered. “Harrison,” she snapped, yawning and leaning in the kitchen doorway.
“Hey, um, it’s Brody.” His warm, honeyed accent coiled in her consciousness, circled around and settled in a familiar, warm crevice.
“What can I do for you?” She tried to keep it businesslike.
“You in there? I mean, is that you at the kitchen window?” he asked. She turned and peered out, not seeing anything, until his motorcycle headlights flashed.
“Yeah. What do you want?” She walked to the door and stepped onto the porch, shutting the door behind her. She would not let him in her house. No way.
He wandered up, dressed in suit pants and a dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck. He stayed back from her, loose-limbed, hands in his pockets, a small smile playing over his lips. She frowned at him as she dropped into a chair, gesturing for him to join her.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” he said as he perched on the edge of a chair like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. As if he might bolt off the porch and down the sidewalk in a heartbeat.
“For what?” she asked, using everything she had to not touch him. To beg him to remember her.
“For not telling me.” He leaned back, seemingly at ease all of a sudden.
Curious but with a lick of fear at the base of her brain where Amber’s threat still lurked, she stayed quiet. She did not want to be named the new general manager and then face something like that. But more importantly, she refused to expose Sam to it, no way. Not even for Brody. “Okay. You’re welcome.” She got up. “You should go.”
“Wait.” He held out his hand, palm up.
Tears formed and fell, despite all her efforts. That was so…Brody. That simple gesture—it killed her because it had started everything for them.
“Don’t,” she croaked, crossing her arms to keep from falling into him. “Please.”
He rose, still with that hand outstretched. His eyes were pleading. “I don’t remember…much. But I know we were together. And I’m glad. I don’t mean to upset you, honestly. I just…need…someone….” His voice broke.
The unbreachable expanse of her small front porch yawned between them. She would not do this. Not as long as Amber made threats with her jealous bullshit. It wasn’t worth it.
“You will have someone. A wife. Tomorrow.”
He sucked in a breath, his face a mask of unhappiness as his arm dropped to his side. It nearly killed her, and she had a brief moment of wonder that her heart could pound so hard and still function. The moment had arrived—let him back in and risk losing her son forever.
“Good luck to you…Robert.” He winced, blinked fast, then that new Brody face slipped into place. She took a deep breath, relieved and destroyed all in one second.
“Thanks. Take care. Of yourself and…him.”
She nodded. He turned and walked back down to his bike. She ached where he had not touched her. Her arms actually hurt where she had not embraced him. But it had to be this way.
When she opened the door and stepped inside, she very nearly fell right over Sam. Clad in his PJs, clutching his blanket, just a little boy, but with the mature expression of a man, studying her, worry making his brow wrinkly.
“Mommy.”
She dropped down to the floor and gathered him in.
“Mommy,” he repeated. “Is that soccer man my daddy? The one who saw me, and how great I was, and left us?”
“Yes, Sam, he is. He got sick. He hurt his head really bad. All his memories are gone. He didn’t leave you. He just…never knew about you.”
Sam pulled away from her and seemed to puzzle over this, turning it around in his brain. “His memories of me?”
“Yes, baby. I’m sorry,” she said, never meaning it more.
“Well, maybe we can give him some medicine. And we can play some soccer together. And you guys can make dinner in the kitchen. And we can help him remember…me?” His face, so earnest and full of hope, eviscerated her. She hated herself and Brody for putting this innocent little boy through so much crap.
“No. He’s moving away tomorrow.”
“On my birthday?” The boy seemed utterly shocked by that. His face fell, a clear sign of oncoming tears.
“Yeah, now let’s get some sleep. We have a huge party tomorrow, right?” She tried to stay chipper, to distract him.
But Sam was already crying, full-on sobbing, sucking in huge breaths and blowing them out. Sophie stood, unable to move for a few minutes when the realization that she had just broken her own son’s heart hit her in the gut.
Sick of lying to everyone, furious with herself, she carried him to bed. The sobs reduced to hiccups, then deep breathing as he dropped into his usual tossing-turning sleep cycle. She’d be dealing with this tomorrow for sure, but for now, all she managed to do was fall over, hanging onto Sam’s warm body, the only thing anchoring her to the universe.
Chapter Twelve
