Bury the Hatchet (10 page)

The thing was, I was positive that Tallie’s family was anything but normal. I’d spent more than enough time with them this week to have removed any doubts I might have held on that score. Her father might be all right, but her mother? Not even close. Not only that, but joining me and my family would get her away from Lance for a few hours. That, in and of itself, was more than reason enough for me to want her to join us, so I drew her aside as everyone trickled out of the restaurant.

“Any chance you want to come hang out with my parents this evening? I promise I’ll get you home before too late.” I winked as I added the last part, with a meaningful glance off to the side, where Mrs. Roth and Lance were loudly discussing something to do with the flowers for the ceremony tomorrow, complete with exuberant gesticulation.

She followed my gaze before looking at me again with a sense of longing. “You have no idea how much I’d like that, but—”

But she was going to let Lance make the ultimate call. Again. Just like she always did. As if that wasn’t enough, the asshole was making his way over to us with a purposeful stride, arms flailing at his sides with the effort of making haste. I knew he was coming because that was where Tallie’s resigned eyes had strayed, and I’d turned to see what she was looking at with such long-suffering acceptance.

That was the last thing I wanted to hear right now, so I cut her off. “It’s all right. I’m sure Lance has plenty of things for you to do tonight, anyway. Maybe some other time.” I intentionally ignored the fact that there wasn’t much chance of there being
some other time
. She was an adult. She needed to make her own choices in life, and right now she was doing exactly that, whether she realized it or not.

“That’s right, I do,” he said, coming up alongside us. He glanced down at a clipboard in his hands and tucked a pen behind his ear. “You need your beauty sleep, and we’re going to have to start putting you together at five a.m., so that means an early bedtime.”

“What the fuck do you need to do to her that you have to start so early?” The wedding wasn’t scheduled to start until two in the afternoon, and she was a knockout even on a bad day. If she had bad days. I wasn’t so certain.

He gave me a snooty look, waving a hand in Tallie’s general direction as though to encompass every aspect of her. “Hello? Do you think she gets out of bed looking like this? She’s got to be waxed, plucked, spray tanned, airbrushed—”

“Airbrushed,” I repeated, my tone full of acid. I turned my gaze to Tallie, and she shrugged apologetically. I’d known all along that she looked too good to be real, but that was taking things a bit too far. Hell, it was taking things a
lot
too far. Someone as gorgeous as Tallie
should
be able to roll out of bed, brush her teeth, run a comb through her hair, and head out the door, and she’d still look like a she’d just stepped out of the pages of a magazine. There wasn’t any good reason to put her through all of that.

“Yes, airbrushed,” Lance said, rolling his eyes toward the sky. “Honestly, you have a lot to learn about what it takes to make Tallulah look presentable. You’re going to have a rude awakening once you’re living with her and you see what all goes into it.”

“Oh, you mean when you’re not there to run the ship?” I spouted off. “I’m sure she’ll be able to manage on her own just fine.” The one who was about to have a rude awakening about things was Lance, but telling him so right now wouldn’t serve any purpose, and I’d likely already said too much, as per usual.

He looked affronted at the mention that he wouldn’t be involved. Tallie had promised me she would be sure he stayed out of things, but there wasn’t a doubt that he wasn’t taking kindly to the demotion. “Honey,” he said to me, drawing out the word and clearly not ready to let it drop.

Lance calling me
honey
was a hell of a lot worse than Mr. Roth and Mr. Jernigan calling me
son
all the time, and I was this close to seriously losing my shit on him—a lot worse than I already had. This would be a good time for John or Darren to walk over and pull me away, but they were both in conversation with my parents and Mr. Roth. I was going to have to control my reaction to Lance right now without any assistance from my agent or friend. They might as well ask me to do a pirouette on the moon for all the good it’d do me. It would be more likely, anyway.

Lance nudged his head in Tallie’s direction when I glared at him. “It takes a heck of a lot of money to look this cheap, and it takes even more time than money to make everything seem effortless. I’m good at what I do. Leave me to do my job. You go run along to do…well, to do whatever it is Neanderthals are good for. Lord knows I haven’t figured that one out yet.”

Tallie winced. Understandably. Throat punching was too good for this slimy weasel of a douche canoe, but I was as close to following through with it as I’d ever been. In a moment of extreme stupidity, I felt the last vestiges of my self-control snapping, almost like a bone breaking. My mouth was open, ready for my foot to enter it without a thought so I could tell the son of a bitch exactly where he could take his bony, meddling, sagging, self-righteous ass, when Tallie stepped forward and put one of her hands right in the center of my chest. It was a gentle touch, nowhere near enough to physically restrain me, but it did the trick. I forced myself to breathe and look down at her, to find those honey-colored eyes imploring me.

“One more day,” was all she said. Meaning one more day of having to put up with Lance and all the ridiculous things he thought he needed to put Tallie through. One more day of his interference. One more day, and I could do whatever the fuck it took to convince myself I’d never met him, would never have to deal with him again, never had to bite my tongue while he called me a Neanderthal or a hooligan. He wouldn’t be able to control every single aspect of Tallie’s life right down to how many fucking breaths she should take in a minute.

Lance let out a nasally, wheezing, harrumphing sound.

Ignoring him, I bit down on the inside of my cheek and nodded, holding Tallie’s gaze. “I should go, then,” I bit off before forcing myself to lighten my tone. It wasn’t Tallie I was mad at, and she deserved better than to have me taking it out on her. “I’ll see you at the church.”

She smiled so brightly it nearly left me blind. “I’ll be there with bells on.”

“I don’t doubt it.” In fact, now that Lance had the idea, he might try to dress her in bells and nothing more.

She stretched up on her toes and kissed my cheek before I turned to leave.

As I walked away, the sound of Lance’s latest haranguing flitted behind me. I ignored his diatribe about her kissing the Neanderthal when there was no good reason for it since the cameras weren’t around, about how she had messed up her makeup by doing so, about how she was going to have to be far more cautious tomorrow because they were filming it, and high-definition cameras revealed every tiny flaw… I pushed it all from my mind and made my way out to my car.

One more day. I only had to put up with him for one more day, and then I could pretend he didn’t even exist, just like I did with Kade.

For some reason, even though Tallie had assured me time and again that she would kick him to the curb once we got past the wedding, I had a sinking suspicion that I wouldn’t see the last of Lance Benton once we boarded our flight for Hawaii.

Maybe I really should throat-punch him tomorrow.

THE BIG DAY
was here. Sometime in the next couple of hours, I would be a married man. But not before I headed to the airport to pick Carrie up.

Mom had given me her flight information last night when I’d insisted I wanted to be the one to greet her. She’d tried to deflect me, saying I would be too busy getting ready for the ceremony, but I’d eventually worn her down. It wasn’t like putting on a tux took that much time. I’d been doing it for years, every time my current team held a formal function. I could tie a bowtie with the best of them. So, even though Mom seemed seriously hesitant about it, I was at baggage claim waiting for Carrie and scanning my phone to see what the latest word on me and Tallie was.

I’d just found the latest news on Twitter—a pic of me kissing her like there was no tomorrow, with an overly enthusiastic caption about the hottest couple in town—when the passengers from her flight started to trickle over. I put away my phone and got up from the bench I’d been waiting on to watch for her more closely. I was tall enough to be able to see over the sea of people pouring through the open space, even if Carrie wasn’t all that tall. There was no chance I’d be able to miss her bright red hair, though, and I’d probably hear Kaylee’s squeals once they reached the escalator.

I was so consumed by watching for them that I didn’t notice Kade walking toward me until he punched me on my shoulder.

“Hey,” he said.

I was busy rubbing the spot on my arm where he’d hit me. I glared back at him. “Hey. What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Hell of a way to greet your only brother.”

Hell of an only brother he’d always been. I ground my jaw.

“Mom told me,” he said when I didn’t respond. “Paid for my ticket. I thought she was going to pick me up so we could surprise you at the wedding.”

“The wedding you’re not welcome at? That one?”
I love my mother. I love my mother. I love my mother.
I repeated it in my head over and over again, hoping maybe it would be enough to keep me from strangling her when I saw her next. Now it made a hell of a lot more sense why she’d been so insistent about being the one to come pick up Carrie and Kaylee. And now that I thought about it, where
were
they? I glanced around, but there wasn’t a sign of them anywhere. More people were still flooding into the baggage claim area, though. Maybe she’d been near the back of the plane, or they might have stopped to use the restroom before making their way out.

Except…Kade was here. Which meant they couldn’t be. I pressed my eyes closed, repeating my previous refrain over and over again.
I love my mother. I love my mother
. I needed the reminder.

“You’d seriously try to keep me away from your wedding when I flew all the way here?” Kade scowled as he walked past me to the luggage carousel.

“You might as well just book a return flight and go home,” I said, following after him. “No need to get comfortable. You’re not welcome here.” I leaned my head in and sniffed him, as if that would give me a sense of what he was on right now. His drugs of choice had always been the types he could swallow or shoot into his veins with a needle, though, not something he could smoke.

He batted me away from him and hefted a suitcase off the carousel. “I’m not on anything.”

“No? So what’d you bring with you? How’d you get it past security this time?” It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done something like that. My brother was a walking time bomb, thanks to addiction. He’d do anything to get his fix, including risking prison time by doing something stupid like shoving a balloon of the stuff up his ass or sneaking a vial of something into his checked bag by disguising it as a perfume bottle. Hell, once he’d taped a baggie of something to his balls and tried to get through security like that. Not even Kaylee had been enough of a reason for him to get his act together. If his own daughter wasn’t a good enough reason to get clean, nothing was. Years ago, I’d resigned myself to the fact that my brother would never successfully quit. He was going to remain an addict for the rest of his days. It would likely kill him.

“Doesn’t matter how many times I clean up my act, does it?” Kade asked. He set his suitcase on the floor and pulled up the handle. “You’re always going to assume I’m some piece of shit—”

“So prove me wrong,” I interrupted. I crossed my arms, planting my feet even as I recognized it as a defensive posture. Somewhere in the back of my head, there was a niggling sense of hope that maybe he was right. Maybe he’d gotten clean and it had stuck. Maybe that was where he’d been—at some treatment facility or another—and why he hadn’t been around in a while. Maybe that was why Mom had invited him behind my back.

Some people managed to stay sober. Hell, I even knew some people who’d been able to conquer their demons and go on to lead normal lives. Nicky Ericsson, the goaltender the Storm had decided to keep instead of me, had kept himself clean and sober all of last season even though his personal life had gone to hell in a handbasket.

I just didn’t think my older brother, Kade, had the kind of mental fortitude that getting clean and staying clean required. Maybe I was wrong about that, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to give in to hope.

He was looking at me in that older-brother way he always had, like I was a dumb kid who just didn’t get it. With one hand, he reached up to scratch his head, and that was when I saw it: an oversized Band-Aid on his forearm.

“Suboxone strips? You tell them you had staph so they wouldn’t check closer?” I’d heard that some people were doing that these days. Apparently, Kade had, too.

“It’s how I’m getting clean, Hunter.”

“If you had a legitimate prescription, you wouldn’t be hiding that shit under a fucking Band-Aid.” I spun around and scanned the crowd again for Carrie’s bright red hair, even though I knew she wouldn’t have come if she knew Kade would be here. She would have stayed home with Kaylee, and keeping that little girl away from my brother was a hell of a lot more important than watching me get married to some chick I didn’t even know. Kade came up alongside me. I figured I might as well make use of the fact that he was here, even if I was going to kick his ass back to B.C. the second I had collected Carrie and Kaylee. “Were they at the back of the plane? Where are they?”

“Who the hell are you looking for?”

“Carrie and Kaylee,” I bit off. “Who the fuck else?”

“They’re not here. She didn’t come.” Kade wheeled his bag ahead of me, making for the exit. “You coming or what? I thought you had a wedding to get to.”

I couldn’t move. It was as if the soles of my shoes were massive magnets, tied to a metal floor. Carrie hadn’t come, but Kade had. I supposed if it wasn’t going to be one disaster, it would be another. Any blowup that might have occurred when Tallie met Carrie, though, would be mild in comparison to whatever was bound to happen if my brother stepped foot near my wedding.