Smoke Signals (23 page)

TORI AND I
ended up staying at the hospital all night, waiting for the baby’s arrival. She was exhausted and kept falling asleep with her head resting on my shoulders in the waiting room, but every time I suggested going home to bed, she dug in her heels and insisted she was perfectly fine.

Tallie’s father had joined us. He and Kade spent some of their time in the room with Hunter and Tallie and some of it out in the waiting room with us. Every now and then, Tallie would kick all the guys out and ask for Tori to come and sit with her. I was the only one not going into the room, other than to deliver food or coffee to Hunter. It didn’t seem like something I needed to be part of, and I doubted I’d be welcome. Apparently, Hunter’s parents were planning to take the first flight out in the morning. They’d intended to come down in a couple of weeks so they’d be here in time for the big day, but then the baby had moved the schedule up.

I went out a couple of times for food and coffee to keep the troops operational and in peak form. Every time I came back with something for Hunter, Tallie glared at us until he left the room to partake of whatever I’d brought him. Once he finished, he headed right back in, though, and then I returned to the waiting room to stay with Tori.

When I came back from a three a.m. run to the nearest twenty-four-hour Starbucks, Kade met me at the entry on his way out.

“Is the baby here, then?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I just can’t stay all night without something to do. Going crazy in there. I don’t want to fuck up and do something stupid.”

I didn’t know the guy well, but I did know he had drug issues. I hoped this meant he was being smart and going home to bed instead of trying to find someone to hook him up. He’d been doing well lately, and he seemed to be aware of the choices he was making at the moment, so I decided not to worry. He wasn’t my problem, no matter how I looked at it, and I had my hands full enough already with Tori.

“Get some sleep,” I said. “We’ll let you know when the baby comes.” Then he headed out to his car, and I took the coffee in.

“Took you long enough,” Hunter grumbled. He was a grumpy ass in the best of circumstances, but lack of sleep and worry about his wife and baby wasn’t helping.

“Do you realize how busy Starbucks is at three in the morning?” I passed him his coffee—black with a single packet of sugar. “Apparently it’s the place to be around here. Any change?”

He shook his head and sipped. “Not really. Her contractions are strong and steady, but she’s still not fully dilated. And the longer it goes on, the more talkative she gets. And I don’t understand a lot of it. We’ve been married for over a year now, but I have no clue what half the things she says mean. What the fuck does
squalling like a mashed cat
mean?”

I chuckled. “No idea, but I feel your pain. Tori and I have a few communication issues of our own.”

“Yeah, but at least you have an actual language barrier as an excuse. English is supposedly Tallie’s first language.”

“Pretty sure Southern is an entirely different language than Canadian, eh? I think one year playing in this state is enough to realize just how much we all still have to learn about people down here.”

“True.” He laughed and finished off his coffee, then tossed the cup in a garbage can across the hall. “I guess I’d better get back in there, or she’ll be screaming something about pitching a fit.”

I took the rest of the coffee back to the waiting room, passing Tallie’s father on the way and handing a cup over to him.

Tori took one as I sat next to her. “Still no baby?”

“Still no baby.”

“It’s long time.”

“The guys tell me the first baby usually takes the longest.” Unless I was confusing myself, which was entirely possible.

She nodded and sipped.

I put my arm around her shoulders, and she rested her head on my shoulder again. It’d be a good selfie opportunity, but that would mean digging my phone out and disrupting the moment. Even though I knew I should probably take a pic anyway, I decided to ignore Greg’s advice for the time being.

“Tallie’s not scared of stirrups,” Tori said after a long, comfortable silence.

I looked down at her, questioning with my eyes since I had no earthly idea where she was heading with this line of conversation.

“I asked her. Bed has stirrups. I almost panicked, but Tallie said nothing to be scared of. Said it’s just a tool for Dr. Rodriguez.”

“But it’s not just a tool for you?” There was a part of me that knew as much, even if I didn’t understand exactly what caused her fear.

She shook her head.

“What are those stirrups to you?”

“Nightmare. Used them in porn. They tied me down. Couldn’t move.”

“When Dr. Rodriguez uses them, you’re not tied down,” I said. “You can get out of them.”

“I know. Still nightmare, though.”

I kissed her because there wasn’t anything I could possibly say to that. It made sense. No amount of reasoning could combat fears like hers.

But it made me wonder just what kinds of shit she’d been put through in the couple of years she’d worked in that industry. A bit at a time, she was revealing things to me. I hoped that I’d learn more through the counseling she’d started, but I wasn’t sure how much she’d ever tell me. And I needed to know. What if she encountered something else that, for most people, was nothing to worry about, and she went into a full-blown freak out? It could happen. It nearly had during that doctor’s visit.

As much as the thought of it left me nauseated, I knew I needed to see for myself the kinds of things she’d been forced to endure.

I held her closer to me, and she let her head drop down on my shoulder again. She started nodding off, so I took her unfinished coffee and set it on the table next to me so it wouldn’t spill. In no time, she was out cold again.

I couldn’t sleep. Not with thoughts of what I might find once I started digging into her history racing through my head. Since she was still sleeping, I finished off her cup once my own was gone. Hours passed. Hunter and Tallie’s father came and went from the waiting room. Kade came back, looking rested and not strung out, bearing more coffee and some pastries for those of us who weren’t trying to expel a tiny human from our bodies.

Finally, Harper Paisley Fielding made her first arrival, at once both unexpectedly early and fashionably late—or maybe more than fashionably late, considering she’d put her mother through more than seventeen hours of labor. The little girl had all her fingers and toes and a shockingly full head of dark brown hair, not to mention a set of lungs that should do her Southern mama proud.

Even though I hadn’t slept a wink, I waited until little Harper was in the nursery getting cleaned up and having a few tests run so Tori and I could take a look at her through the window. Once we were there, I realized it was a perfect opportunity to get a selfie, like Greg had commanded.

“Turn around so we can get a picture with the babies in the background,” I said to Tori.

She yawned. “Why picture?”

“Because it’s a big moment.”

“Oh.
Oh
.” Realization dawned in her eyes. She turned and sidled up alongside me.

We put our arms around one another’s waists, and I raised my phone.

A nurse knocked on the window before I could snap it.

I turned around.

“Which baby?” she mouthed through the glass.

Even better. I pointed toward Harper’s bassinette. The nurse picked her up and carried her to the window, holding her up so the two of us could pose with the baby in the background. I pecked a kiss on Tori’s cheek as I snapped the shot.

She gave me a goofy expression. “Crazy man. You need sleep.”

“You have no idea how badly.”

We thanked the nurse and waved good-bye, and then we headed home. I collapsed on the bed almost the second we walked through the door, still fully clothed. I didn’t even bother to take off my shoes. Tori crawled up beside me and lay down in my arms, using my chest as her pillow. In no time, we were both out cold, despite the fact that the sun was warming us as it shined down through the window.

NOW THAT THE
baby was here, Tori wasn’t spending anywhere near as much time with Tallie as she had been before. That meant I hadn’t had much time to research her porn films, because I had no intention of doing it while she was sitting in the same room. The last thing she needed was for me to pull one of those up and have it send her into a panic. I might have been putting it off because of the nauseating factor, too, in the several days since Harper’s birth.

But now Tori and I were set to fly to Portland tomorrow to spend a week with Babs and Katie, and as soon as we came back, training camp was due to start. I would only have so many opportunities to do this, and at the moment, Tori was gone to the ballet studio to dance during some open hours when it wasn’t being used for some class or another. She’d been spending more and more time there, getting back into the swing of things. I figured she wanted to get in as many hours in front of the barre as she could before we left for Portland.

So I took out my laptop and pulled up a free streaming porn site. In the search bar at the top, I typed in
Viktoriya
. Sure enough, dozens of hits filled my screen.

The top video had been viewed more than twenty-one million times. The video’s description read
Russian slave bondage fucked with baseball bat
. It was tagged with more than a dozen search terms, all of which made me want to beat someone bloody. But I forced myself to click Play.

It was only a short clip from what was sure to be a much longer scene, but in the two minutes it was on my screen, everything inside me knotted up.

Instead of giving into the urge and puking, I forced myself to click on the next clip.

And the next.

And the one after that.

For over an hour, I watched as Tori was strangled, whipped, gangbanged, deep throated, caned, bound, gagged, and violently fucked in every way imaginable.

And worse. So much worse.

Watching it was so painful and debilitating it left me numb.

I turned off my computer.

Thought about tossing the whole thing in the trash.

I’d felt the need to understand what Tori had been through. Now I knew.

What I didn’t know was what to do about it.

RAZOR WAS ACTING
unusual.

I wasn’t sure if it was due to the hockey season getting ready to start or if it was more because of all the things we were having to do to prepare for our interview with the immigration people. For all I knew, it could be something else entirely.

All I was sure of was that he wasn’t himself.

Usually, he was good-natured and laughing. Now that we were in Portland to visit his friends and have our honeymoon, such as it was, he was grumbling and surly. It had started yesterday, actually. Maybe it was the stress of taking this trip right before his training camp was set to start. Or it might come down to the fact that he was tired of being my husband and wished he’d never made the offer to begin with. Our new sexual arrangement was better than what we’d been doing before, but it could hardly be satisfying to him, and as of yet, I’d made very little progress at all with the treatments the physical therapist had prescribed.

Any way I looked at it, however, I was typically the one in our relationship who was grumbling and surly, or at least more so than Razor was. I didn’t know what to think of this change in him, or if there was something I ought to do to help him get back to normal.

As we came around the corner to the baggage claim area, Razor tightened his grip on my hand.

“You’re not nervous about hanging out with Babs and Katie this week, are you?”

I shrugged, hoping he wouldn’t notice how anxious I truly was. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. I keep thrusting you into different parts of my life even though you’re not prepared for them.”

Before I could reassure him that I understood and tell him not to worry about me, he saw his friend and waved.