Rags 2 Pitches: A Secret Baby Sports Romance (23 page)

Kayla

After lunch, I really didn’t want to hear anything about my mom and the fact that she was trying to protect me. I did have a feeling that something was wrong when Stephen said that he hadn’t heard from her.

Reg had a special lady friend, who’d let him and Sydney stay at her apartment last night. Chase said that Sydney could stay with her again tonight if I needed space. God, another night away from my baby girl was the last thing on my mind. I didn’t want space. I needed to have Sydney with me, knowing that Dad was alive and that no one could find him.

Yet, he had managed to find me.

He had friends from the force helping him.

I wouldn’t feel safe until I knew that he was back behind bars, but not only him, also whoever he had on his side. They could all be working together to bring me and Mom down. I had to think so. I came up to my room with only one thing on my mind.

Leaving.

Running away like I had three years before.

I was scared shitless. I had visions of Dad getting ahold of Mom and holding her hostage and torturing her or, even worse, killing her. I knew that staying in this room was a bad idea, but when I listened to Sydney talk about her day with her granddad, I kept still.

I had promised Chase and I had promised myself that I wouldn’t put him through a repeat of what I’d done three years ago. Staying meant that I would be vulnerable, but it was a chance that I was willing to take.

For once in my life, I was going with my heart instead of my head, which was telling me to run.

Every single time.

***

“Holy crap!” I screamed over and over again as Chase kept reassuring me that it was real.

“Holy fucking crap.” I couldn’t stop kissing his face and every single piece of his body. I’d been sitting down, flipping through the channels when he came in. He was a bit tipsy. Stephen and he had only been in the bar for a couple of hours, yet they had managed to drink one too many drinks.

“So, Mom went to see Grandma. As part of the trap?” I had to clarify that I had it right and that it really was all over.

“Mary knew that by going to see your grandma, the guy or guys on the force that were helping your dad would be keeping tabs on the family, and they would see her. That was the real reason they found you. Dad told me that part. Apparently, you used to call or something and hang up. So, they kind of figured that you were in Stanford.”

I nodded because I’d known my stupid act could get us in trouble, but hearing Chase say it confirmed my fears.

“When your mom flew back to Ohio, guess who was waiting at the airport to meet her?”

Chase had already told me it all once, but the whole thing felt crazy. All this time I had been running, and it really would have been that easy to catch him.

“He was desperate. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been so clumsy. He didn’t hesitate in trying to grab your mom at the airport with a gun to her side.”

I nodded as I slumped on the sofa.

“And Internal Affairs grabbed him, before he could even take Mary. He was threatening to kidnap her. She had a wire and soon it was all confirmed. They got him.” Chase grabbed me in his arms and said, “They sure did.”

“But,” I said as Chase spun me around to kiss me. “What about the people that were helping him? Are they still out there?”

I had to make sure everything was put to rest. That there would be no repercussions and that this was really the end of it all. I’d thought before that Dad was really dead… How could I trust that this was not the same thing?

Was it a story to make me feel that everything was okay? Like Mom had done to me five years ago when she had let me believe that my dad was dead? That we were all dead to the world and that no one would ever find out the truth unless we told it?

I felt like the last girl standing. Everyone knew. There was a whole department that had put us under this special protection, and they all knew the truth; everyone but me knew.

I hated Mom for keeping it a secret.

“You need to let go,” Chase urged me.

I shook my head. This was so easy for Chase. He hadn’t witnessed what I had as a child. He had never experienced the pain I’d had inflicted on me by my own dad as a teen. It wasn’t easy.

It was fucking hard.

He turned me and made me sit on his lap. My legs slowly flopped and relaxed against the sofa as he said, “I want to fix you. Let me?”

I kissed him as I had done so many times over the last couple of days and cried, “I don’t want to be broken any more.”

I didn’t.

The nightmares had to stop. He had to fix me. I was tired of trying to do it and failing all the time. Maybe in time I would be strong and have the strength to be the woman I aspired to be but, right now, all I felt was weak and useless. I had a daughter to think about. It wasn’t just about me. It was about her, too.

I had to do the right thing.

I just had to.

Kayla

“It is only going to be for two and a half weeks,” Chase whispered in my ear as we stood at the airport.

Saying goodbye at the airport kind of made it official that we were going to be a family. The crazy part of it was, I was so used to everything going wrong. I should have been screaming for joy, thinking that at last my nightmares were over.

But, until the trial had taken place, and until Dad was safely behind bars, nothing would take away my fear of it all going wrong.

I had been used as punching bag by my own father. Lied to by my own mother. Who could blame me for having trust issues? Shit, it was kind of natural, especially after what I had been through. The doubt was killing me.

“Chase, can’t I just stay in the hotel and wait for you to finish? As you say, it’s less than a month.”

At this point there was no self-control. I was crying and a complete mess. We had had this conversation every night for the last three nights. Yet, I thought one last chance had to be taken. One last try and maybe he would change his mind. He’d said that we were better off in Dallas trying to get settled, instead of living in a hotel room.

But I had a trial to face in Ohio.

A mother to face in Dallas.

And a boyfriend in New Haven.

The whole thing was fucked up.

And I never did find out what happened with Hannah - she could be after me too! I started to hyperventilate as I panicked.

“You go back with Dad and then when I get there we’ll find a place, and I’m moving back there for law school, too. Remember?”

That made things even worse. The fact that he was changing law schools just to make me feel better. Just to make me feel safe.

The problem was, I was scared that nothing could ever make me feel that way. Not ever again. The damage had been done. As I kissed him goodbye, Sydney tugged on my pants and whispered with watery eyes, “Mommy, don’t cry. Please, Mommy.”

It was all brought home, the reason I needed to go on this journey and the reason why I had to be strong. Sydney had been in this position far too many times. As much as I’d always tried not to show emotion in front of her, there had been a few times when I had broken down. I held her tight. I needed her as a reminder that all the bruises and damage that I had incurred through training and in the fights were not in vain. She was my strength to go forward. I kissed her on the cheek and wiped away my tears. I was led through the gate, holding not only Sydney’s hand, but my future stepdad’s hand too.

Chase

It was finally time to go back to Dallas. It had only been a few weeks, but it felt like another three years had passed since I’d held Kayla in my arms. She didn’t move back into the house. The wounds that had been opened by Mary would take time to heal.

They jumped for joy as they saw me. I couldn’t believe that my little family was waiting for me. My family had consisted of just Dad and I for so long. Now, I had my own little girl. She had been out of my life for the first two years, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her out of my sight again.

We’d talked on the phone about my staying at Yale and going to law school. But I just felt that it was more important for Kayla and Sydney to be near family. Especially now. Especially with the trial coming up. The crazy part was that Kayla and Mary couldn’t even stay with family in Ohio. They were advised to have as little contact with them as possible until after the trial, just so that nothing influenced the outcome.

Kayla hated the idea of not being able to speak to her grandma and tell her the reasons for her actions, but hey, if it meant getting on with our lives and Kayla not having to spend her life in fear, then I was happy to play along.

“My favorite girls!” I screamed as I ran up to them. I grabbed both of them in my arms and swung them around. They were so precious to me, and I couldn’t believe that it had only been less than three weeks since I last saw them.

Kayla had put on so much weight.

“Kayla, what have you been eating?” I smiled as I kissed her on the lips.

She released me and said, “What haven’t I been eating? That should be the real question.” My love, who I had found wasting away a few weeks ago, had color in her cheeks. She seemed real and alive. Way better than she used to look in high school. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.

Dad had kindly given Kayla a credit card and told her to spoil herself. After all, she had no choice. She still had some clothes in Dallas, but I doubted any of them could have been worn due to her drastic weight loss. Dad was a hopeless romantic and believed that no matter how bad a woman felt, “shopping always makes them feel better”.

His words didn’t reassure me, because he was talking about women that were going through a bad day, or had one particular issue. As a child, Kayla had been abused by her dad, then she’d spent years of her life thinking she had helped kill her dad. I didn't think that buying some clothes, no matter how cute and expensive they were, could make her feel better.

Kayla had been beaten by how many women in the ring? She had refused to talk about it, until she was ready, and I respected her decision. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear the exact details of her story.

As I held my little daughter, who looked beautiful in her pink dress, I suspected that Kayla had spent more on Sydney than she had on herself. Sydney had little pink bows in her hair and matching shoes, whereas Kayla was in a black shirt and pants. She looked beautiful, but then she always did, even after she’d taken a beating that most men couldn’t handle.

“I have something to tell you,” she whispered as we got into the car.

For some crazy reason I thought that she was going to tell me that she was pregnant. But as she started to head off to an apartment that she had rented with the help of Dad, I realized that her news was even better.

***

“You know I’m super nervous about the trial?”

I nodded, because as much as we tried to not talk about it, there was no escaping it. We were being prepped morning, noon and night about the trial. Mary and I were also being prepped. The prosecutor had a strong case against her dad. He was charged not only with kidnapping, but with doing jobs with dirty cops.

“Anyway, there’s something that has always bugged me. Silly, I know, because we have a lot more things to worry about right now.” She glanced in the rearview mirror to check on Sydney. I turned around to see that Sydney was playing with one of her dolls, and that meant she was in her own little world. She did it sometimes when we did video chat. She would spot one of her dolls and then that was it. It was all about the dolls, and I became a distant memory.

“And?” We stopped at a stoplight, and I wanted to know what this big news was. What else could be bugging her?

“Hannah.” She turned to look at me. She didn’t need to say anything more. So, it must have been something else. Something. I just wasn’t expecting.

“I saw an article in the New York Times about her. Her body was found.” She took a deep breath as she took a corner. I sighed in relief. I know it was bad and I didn’t know the woman, but the idea that she was dead and could in no way harm Kayla again brought about relief.

“Anyway, her living relative, who identified the body, was William Turner.”

I asked, “Your coach?”

She nodded. “All the time he was her dad, and I never knew.”

I wondered what difference it would have made if she’d known. He hadn’t stopped Hannah from using Kayla, and my daughter had been in an environment that most men wouldn’t want their dogs, let alone their daughters, brought up in.

I wanted to say something reassuring to make Kayla feel better, but I hated William - Willy. Whatever she wanted to call him. He had let his daughter use my girlfriend. Kayla seemed to think of Willy as some kind of hero, whereas I thought that he was nothing more than the devil. For all we knew, he could have pretended that it was all Hannah. Pretended that she was the evil one. As far as I was concerned, they were both evil. The death of Hannah was a blessing. That was all I could think as she talked about there not being any witnesses, and no cause for Hannah’s death, that the police could find.

Well, they were pretty useless if they couldn’t find out that one piece of information. There were so many probable causes of Hannah’s death. As Kayla parked, I wanted to say how I really felt about Willy. But I didn’t want to kill the mood, so I said, “Well, at least that is one piece of good news.”

She nodded. “I suppose so. I just hope that Willy is alright,” she said as she unbuckled the car seat and got Sydney out.

I mumbled, “I hope not.”