Dropping Gloves (22 page)

“Let Mr. Jamie walk, Peyton.” He bent down to pick up one of the girls.

I held out my free arm, and he passed her over to me. “Ginger Ninja to the rescue once again. Thanks for the assist.” I’d been calling him that since I first met him years ago when he was five.

He blushed a ferocious shade of red, but then he pried Sidney, the other twin, free. “They like to climb Mr. Soupy’s legs, too. They make him carry them around while they ride his feet and stuff. Mom isn’t letting them do that right now, though, because he’s hurt, and I’m too little. They still try sometimes.” He grinned. “But you’re as big as Mr. Soupy, so I guess they saw their chance and took it.”

“Not quite as big as Soupy.” I shouldn’t have opened my mouth because the second I did, Peyton shoved her fingers in there and giggled. I wasn’t sure what she’d been into, but at least whatever sticky stuff was all over her tasted sweet.

“Close enough.”

Sidney was too heavy for Tuck to carry very far, but he didn’t let that deter him, coming along beside me as we headed for the front where the women were congregating.

Sure enough, Katie and Laura were there with Sara, Rachel, Brie, and Mia Quincey, Q’s wife. Katie’s brows were pinched and her lips were thin, so I knew she was worried or upset about something, but the moment she looked up and saw me carrying the two toddlers, her whole face lit up.

“I see you come bearing gifts,” she said, and all the other women glanced over.

I winked. “Something like that.”

“Did they try to ride you over here?” Rachel asked, rolling her eyes.

“They tried to. Might have succeeded if the Ginger Ninja hadn’t come along.”

She took her daughter from me, and Laura reached for Connor, who was squirming to go in the opposite direction of his mother. Sara had a hand on the small of her back and looked like she was absolutely miserable. Mia patted her lap for Sidney, and Tuck passed over his sister right as Jessica Lynch, Nicky’s fiancée, came in with his niece and two nephews. Elin found Tuck’s older sister, Maddie, in her usual spot in the other corner up front. The two of them huddled together, probably waiting on Danger’s wife and kids to get there since Elin and
É
tienne were kind of a thing lately. The boys, Hugo and Nils, were right around Tuck’s age. His face lit up when he saw them.

“Later, Mr. Jamie,” he said, racing away.

“Homework, Tuck!” Rachel called behind him. I had a feeling he was going to feign deafness on that one.

Katie got up to join me, but Brie caught my eye before we took off to find somewhere quiet to talk.

“When you get a chance, I need a word.”

“After the game?” I asked, taking Katie’s hand. Brie nodded, and I wound my way through the obstacle course of kids and toys to a corner near the back, leading Katie along with me.

“What’s up with Brie?” she asked me, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Just a thing for Burnzie she asked me for help with.” It was a bald-faced lie, and I
hated
lying ever. Especially because I was really fucking bad at it. I searched Katie’s face to see if she was on to me, but I thought this time I might have gotten away with it. This was all supposed to be a surprise for her, though, so I was going to have to get used to lying, and in very short order. “So what happened with the doctor? And why are you upset?”

“I really hate how you can always tell when I’m upset.”

“I’d be a bad boyfriend if I couldn’t.”

She perked up a bit at the word
boyfriend
, and her lips quirked up in a grin. “You looked really hot carrying those kids in.”

“Thanks.” Now I was blushing again. “Stop avoiding the question, though.”

Katie’s smile turned to a pout. “Party pooper. The good news is they’re not going to force me to stay in the hospital for weeks at a time. The bad news is they want to do systemic radiation this time, so I’ll have to be pretty much isolated while I’m going through it.” She sounded upbeat, like she was trying to laugh it off, but her eyes told another story.

“Isolated how?”

She shrugged. “Stay at my house. Not be around pregnant women, kids, or animals at all. Limit my contact with anyone else to less than two hours a day. Oh, and any clothes, bedding, dishes, and whatnot that I use while I’m radioactive will have to be tossed later.” No matter how hard she fought to give off an air of nonchalance, she couldn’t pull it off. Not with me.

“For how long?” I was trying to wrap my head around the fact that she would be right next door to me but I wouldn’t be able to hold her, to comfort her when she felt bad.

“A few days each time. Four rounds of this, about a week apart, before moving on to chemo.”

“But more tests first,” I reminded her. “You might not need chemo.” The radiation might shrink it enough to go ahead with the surgery without going through that step.

She let go of my hand and crossed her arms in front of her. “I’m getting chemo if there’s even a remote possibility it will get rid of that tumor before they decide to cut me open.”

I wrapped her up in a hug because there wasn’t much to be said. Sometimes, touch was the best comfort to be had. Which only made it worse that she was going to have to spend so much time completely isolated from everyone she loved. I squeezed her close. “Less than two hours a day? But we could break that up, right? So you could be around your mom for a while, and your dad, and me…”

“It’s not much.”

“It’s not much, but it’s something.”

“That’s not even the worst news I got today, though.”

My stomach dropped. What was worse than learning about her treatment plan? “No?” I asked.

“I don’t guess you’ve taken a look at Twitter today, have you?”

I
knew
I should have gone back in to the drugstore last night and confronted that douchebag who had checked us out. “It’s not something I feel the need to do every day,” I said cautiously.

Katie backed away so she could look up at me with shining eyes. “I thought I was safe from paparazzi here.”

“Paparazzi? So not just the dude at the drugstore?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think Mom and Dad have seen it yet, but it won’t be long. You should probably talk to your family. Tell them what’s going on before they see it. I’ll figure out how to explain it to Mom and Dad, but I don’t want your family thinking…” She shook her head, lost for words.

“Seen what?” My blood pressure was going through the roof, and I didn’t even know exactly what I was mad about yet. “Explain what?”

She slipped her cell phone out of her pocket, pulled something up, and handed the phone to me. The TMZ headline read
Katie Weber Caught with Not One But Two New Boy Toys
, and it had a picture of her surrounded by two guys who were clearly me and Razor even though our faces had been blurred out. It was from last night. I clicked on it to get to the main article, which was riddled with photos from dinner. No blurring here. A lot of the pics had me holding her hand or with my arm around her waist, but the photographer hadn’t missed Razor dipping her to kiss her on the cheek at the hotel, or when she’d kissed him again afterward when we were dropping him off. With the angle of the shots, though, those kisses looked like
real
kisses. We might be lucky that they hadn’t caught her planting one on Zee’s cheek when we first got to the hotel. But then again, maybe they had, but since he hadn’t come to dinner, they hadn’t used it.
Yet
. When I scrolled down to the bottom, I found the tweets from the guy at the drugstore, and they were every bit as offensive as I had imagined and worse. He’d even snapped a pic of us when we’d been in the condom aisle, multiple boxes in hand. The whole article made out that we’d gone back to the hotel with Razor and had an orgy or something.

I handed her phone back to her, my rage barely held in check.

“You should probably fill the team in if they haven’t seen it already,” she said, tucking it away in her pocket. “Jim, the coaches. They might need to get PR on damage control. And Razor, too. He should probably let his parents know what it really was, and he’ll need to explain things to the Thunderbirds brass.”

I’d be sure Razor knew, but I doubted his parents would react like mine would. I’d never met his father, or even heard him talk about the guy, and his mother seemed to take everything in stride as long as he was happy and healthy. He did everything he could to make her life easier, but I didn’t think he would need to do too much to explain himself. My parents would believe whatever I told them, especially since they knew I would never lie to them, but I doubted they’d be thrilled about having to explain this to my youngest brothers if they got wind of it. And then there were their neighbors and coworkers to think about, and the parents of kids my brothers went to school with, and former teachers who would wonder where I’d gone wrong. The list of people my parents would have to deal with seemed endless.

“This is what they’ve been doing to you all along, isn’t it?” For the first time, I really thought I understood how damaging her years in Hollywood had been. It had gone far beyond Jesse Carmichael and Beau Brunetti. The ways those two had hurt her had only been the tip of the iceberg.

She nodded, hugging her arms to her chest. “Pretty much. They sneak around, following everything you do, take a pic, find a way to make it incriminating in some way, and ruin your life.”

Several of the other guys had already come and gone from the owner’s box, and I knew I was running out of time before I needed to get down to the locker room. I kissed her on the forehead. “I’m not going to let them ruin your life,” I said.

She nodded, but she didn’t seem as if she believed a word out of my mouth. I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t have the first clue how I would prevent the paparazzi from doing anything, and it might not even be possible.

But I’d be damned if I didn’t try.

The game against
the Thunderbirds turned out to be an absolute blowout. Nicky had a shutout, the Storm put up eight goals, and the T-Birds were an utter wreck throughout. I felt bad for Zee, Hunter, and Razor having to play for a team that had zero chance of getting to the playoffs, and likely wouldn’t for years to come. They said all the right things to the media, of course—well,
now
Hunter did, even if he’d let a few choice sound bites fly when he’d first been claimed in the expansion draft—but it wasn’t hard for anyone who knew those three to realize they would rather be playing for any other team in the league.

Jamie must have filled in the Storm’s head honchos on the TMZ stuff before the game, because Rachel sat down next to me midway through the third period. She wasn’t just Soupy’s wife. She was also Jim Sutter’s assistant.

She dropped her voice and leaned in close. “Does your mom know yet?”

I nodded. “Filled her in during the first intermission.”

“Good. Jim’s already got PR working on it in conjunction with the Thunderbirds. We’re going to do everything we can to squash it as what it was—completely innocent.”

I wrung my hands together. I’d been doing a lot of that today. “I just hate that Razor’s being dragged into this. I mean, he just wanted to hang out with Jamie for a bit. They never get to see each other.”

“He’s a big boy. He can take it.” One of the twins waddled over and held up her arms, and Rachel instinctively drew her onto her lap. “I can see if Jim can sneak you in to talk to him for a minute after the game without the media around, if you want.”

“Could you?” I owed him an apology for involving him in my screwed-up life, if nothing else.

A few text messages later, it was all arranged. When the final horn sounded, I went with Davey through some back hallways and a private elevator, and he took me straight to an entrance to the visiting team’s area. I’d been all over this building through the years, but only on the home team’s side. It felt strange to turn right instead of left at certain points. Another security guard stopped us at the double doors leading to the locker room and went inside, and a couple of minutes later, Razor came out. He was covered in sweat and still had on his skates, breezers, and all of the lower half of his equipment, even though he’d removed his jersey and shoulder pads.

The two security guards stepped a discreet distance away and started up a conversation, leaving us to talk.