The Wide Receiver's Baby (13 page)

***Bonus Stepbrother Book***

Saving Kayla

About Saving Kayla…

I’m being stalked by a dead man. I’ve been living in the shadows for years, running from a past I didn’t choose, running towards a future that can never exist.

My only means of survival?

My fists.

I try to flee, but I am captured by Chase's sultry lips. He says he can protect me, but I know that’s not true.

And, after one night of passion, I have to make a choice: do I bring him into my nightmare, or do I push him away and save his life?

I can’t stop running.

I can’t escape the past.

I can’t stop giving myself to the one man that I never should have touched.

I don’t deserve him.

It’s better that I keep running, because if I don’t, his life will be in danger too.

And that's a risk that I'm not willing to take.

Chapter One

Kayla

Mom said that no one would come looking for us.  She had it all planned.  The main thing we needed to do was get out of the house. 

I was only eight when I started to learn karate, right after the first time he ever hit me.  I said to myself that if I could get a black belt, then I would have the strength to fight him off.

The more I trained, and the further I got along with my karate, the more sure I was that I could give him a run for his money and surprise him when he used his fists on me.

But the moment he was about to hit me, the nerves settled in.  I forgot everything that I had ever learned as fear took over not only my body, but my mind too.

Most days I was bruised, but he’d developed a habit of beating up Mom and then, when he got bored, he would race into my room and continue what he’d started.  I’d tried running away a few times, but when your dad is on the force, you don’t get very far.  He’d always managed to find me.  I even hated Mom for marrying and having a baby with a monster.

The day had arrived, and it was time for us to leave.  “Mom, are you sure about this?  There must be someone who can help us,” I said as she prepared Dad’s favorite meatloaf - and poisoned it to the core.  I sat on the kitchen stool and watched her.

“Yes, darling. I told you, it's all planned.”

I shook my head.  “But, that is too much of the stuff.  Besides, when they find him dead and us not here, they’ll come looking for us.”

She nodded as she moved her bangs from her eyes.  “It’s too much.  We only need a little bit more than normal.  Otherwise, it will show that there’s too much in his system.”

That was when he walked through the door.  As Mom heard it open, she smiled and put away the poison; it was in a salt shaker.  We never ate salt with our food.  He loved the stuff.  As he put his hand gently on my back, he smiled. “Evening.  My two favorite ladies are here, and I can smell my favorite dish.”

He was right about that last part.  It was his favorite dish.  I nervously tried to smile as he held on to me and expected a warm smile.  I knew one thing: we were far from being his favorite ladies.  We hated him so much, and we couldn’t wait for the nightmare to end.  Which would mean the end of him.

“We have to wait a little while,” Mom calmly repeated as she had so many times before when she told me the plan for the meal.  We had to wait until the poison took effect.  Neither of us would have any meatloaf.  Mom had made sure that it was all for him.  She had planned tonight well.  She made up some story that we were fasting for the church, that we could only eat fish for the whole month.  He would be too selfish to ask us why there was only meatloaf on the table.  He never questioned us about church.  I never went with Mom; I had always gone alone.  I never asked where she went. I always assumed it was to help with the plan or something.  Dad didn’t care that there was only meatloaf on the table for him, and no fish.

“Good girl, Sadie, you put on the dress that I bought you last week,” Dad said to me as I sat down at the dinner table.  I didn’t know that that would be the last time someone would call me by my real name.  I smiled at him and pretended I was in one of my drama classes.  I was putting my acting skills to use. 

I hated wearing that dress he bought me; it was for a little girl.  I was sixteen years old, and he had bought me a long pink dress with a big bow across my small breasts.  No doubt to hide them.  The dress was one size too big for me and it looked horrible.  I had tied my hair in a bun just so that I could look innocent.  Like my age, as he politely put it.  Not like the girls in my class who, according to him, looked like they were working the streets.  That was an exaggeration.   No one was wearing hot pants or miniskirts to school.  Our principal would never allow it.  

Yet Dad had a way of making everything that he didn’t approve of seem as if it was wrong.  The dress was so old-fashioned, with ruffles and mini-bows at the hem of the dress.  I looked as if I was going to a costume party with an ’80s theme, rather than having dinner in my own home with a monster, aka my dad.

“You look so pretty.” Mom smiled, avoiding looking at me. 

The dinner was so false.  Unnerving.  I was never made to have dinner with them.  It was always supposed to be their alone time when he walked through the door.  Mom would be expected to wait until he decided to come back, and then they would sit down and have dinner together.

That suited me fine.

I didn’t feel like eating, especially because he had a personality like Jekyll and Hyde.  He would get angry at the slightest thing and start throwing punches.  That part of the night was always predictable.  What wasn’t known was what would set him off.

“The two prettiest girls in the state of Ohio are having dinner with me tonight,” he proudly said as he closed his eyes and started to pray.  The words were always the same.  Blessing his family, thanking God for keeping him in a job and getting the bad guys off the street and, last but not least, for the meal that we were about to have.  I joined in the prayer, in my mind begging God to make sure that he didn’t get angry until he finished his meal, begging for this to be the last time I had to sit and hear his voice and smell his cheap cologne, that after tonight I would no longer be abused by this monster.

My dad.

“Right.  Grace, serve us the delicious meatloaf.  You did good, kid.”  He winked at Mom.  Anyone that watched us at the table, seeing Mom in her blue chiffon dress, would have thought that we were a lovely family.  The quiet, well-respected police officer with his wife and daughter, serving him his favorite meal on his fortieth birthday. 

Never mind the fact that, the night before, he’d smashed a bottle near my face and I'd had shards of glass removed from it, and the cuts were still visible.  Mom had been beaten many times.  The scars and bruises were everywhere on her body, including her face.  He used to do the same to me.  His excuse was that I was a teenager - and a clumsy one too.  He could get away with punching me when he felt like it, because no one would believe me.  And he was right.

No one did, on the two times I’d tried to tell people that it was my dad.  They laughed.  Dad was the quiet cop, the one that stayed out of any type of trouble.  The problem was, he was quiet because he had us to take his frustration out on.

“Grace, you forgot to put on my favorite song.”  Mom headed to the iStation and put on his favorite song, “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green.

I hated that song so much.  The words used to stick in my mind.

He sung along with Al Green, and Mom whisked around the table, serving us our meal as he had said women who were housewives should do.   Dad didn’t hesitate in taking a few mouthfuls of his meatloaf.  It didn’t take long before he sipped his brandy, the Remy Martin that Mom had made sure was in front of him before he sat down.  He collapsed, and we watched as he slumped out of his chair and on to the floor.  My stomach started to turn knots because it had all felt so perfect and easy.  I’d thought that he would whine and scream or even stand up and try to hurt us as he had done so many times before.

He didn’t care. 

And, as I watched him struggle to breathe, neither did I.

***

“Mom, what are you doing?” 

She was walking around the house as if she had just stepped in here for the first time, confused and bewildered, like something in her mind had triggered.

“Okay, we’re really doing this.  We’re really doing this?”  I didn’t know who she was talking to, but she ran and got the phone.  Then she rang the missed call, or so I assumed she had rang it.

“It’s done,” were the only words that came out of her mouth, and then she hung up.

“Mom, who was that?”  I chased after her like a lost sheep.  She’d told me that she had a plan.  I could see that she either didn’t have one, or was too scared to play it out.  Either way, I was feeling really nervous.  I avoided looking at Dad, thinking that any moment he would get off the floor and beat us to death.  He probably knew what we were up to, like the last time I’d tried to run away.

He'd sat at the Kentucky train station, waiting for me to arrive.  I never had understood how he got there faster than the train.  Later, I found out, when he purposely left the plane ticket in my room, that he had booked his ticket the day after I had booked my train ticket.

Dad left it in my room to make a point.

That I could run.

But never hide.

Now he was lying on the floor like a lump of wood.  Not moving.  Not shouting.  Part of me didn’t think it was real.  I expected him to get up, laughing, bragging about how much he would make us suffer for what we had done. 

But he didn’t, and that was when the door was flung open.

It was Kane, one of the guys on the force, saying, “Grace, get Sadie and let’s go.”

Chapter Two

Kayla

Three years later…

Every year.

Every fucking year on this day, the day it had happened, my thoughts reverted to him.

Mom had picked his birthday of all days to leave.  I’d been only sixteen at the time, yet I remembered it as if it were yesterday.  Especially today.  Especially on his birthday.  I managed to get through the day by going to classes and hanging with a few friends until eight o'clock.  That was when I had to go back to my room to study. 

Memories of that night flashed through my mind.  I shook them off and tried to study.  It didn’t work, and something drew me to the bar.  I could have gone to Starbucks, or even gone to my best friend, Sara’s, room.  But, I didn’t. 

As I opened the door to the bar that I worked.  I expected the see the normal scene; the dim lighting, the college students that had a few minutes of self-indulgence and would spend that time playing pool.  College students wanting to inflate their egos by trying to beat their rival in class.  Or girls wanting to lay one of the sports heroes, hoping that they wouldn’t have to get a job after college.  Their fate was set from the moment their soon-to-be boyfriend would play professionally.  And then there were the quiet ones; wanting to be part of some crowd, huddled together hoping to get noticed, but too shy to talk to anyone.

The worn out wooden flooring and tired decor didn’t mean a thing to the students.  But tonight there was a man talking to the waitress that I worked with most of the time, Brooklyn.  Her fake blond hair and blue eyes were batting as if she had won the lottery as she talked to the one man that I thought was dead: my dad. I wondered if he was a ghost or a figment of my imagination.  He should be dead.  Not here in the flesh.  Breathing. Smiling.   What was he doing here?

He seemed to like the attention of Brooklyn, who was nearly half his age.  He didn’t see me.  They were talking, standing too close to each other.  Acting as if no one else was in the bar.  My heart skipped a beat as I tried to focus on him alone.  I blinked my eyes, feeling like my feet were stuck in quicksand. 

Why today of all days?

Was he looking for me?

He couldn’t be.  He would look for Mom first, surely. 

I had too many questions running through my mind.  But the thing that turned my feet around and had me heading back out of the bar was fear.  He still scared me.  I had a new name and my hair was different, but he might still recognize me.  I couldn’t take the chance.  I had to leave.  Not only the bar, but the campus.  I had to get out of there and pretend that the last few weeks of being with my boyfriend, Chase, were a fantasy, something that I only wished could be real between us.

When we’d lived in Dallas, Chase and I had pretended that we didn’t have feelings for each other.  We’d confessed our love after we went to college.  I couldn’t explain to him why I had to leave.  He would never understand why I was using a fake name.  One that wasn’t given to me at birth.  If I did tell him the truth then he would not only put my life in jeopardy, but Mom’s too.  When he found out that I was missing then, he would report Kayla as the girl that is missing.  Not the real me.

Mom!

Should I call her?  I didn’t know what to do as I ran to my room.  As soon as I got there, I closed my eyes.  When I opened them, I took what I needed - a few clothes and cards - like I’d done when I was sixteen.

No one knew who I really was, and our family thought that we were dead.  Mom had planned it all.  I wondered how successful she had been, because Dad was standing in my student bar.  Then again he was a cop; he had been trained to hunt and all I knew was I had to run.

I grabbed my cards and went to the ATM on campus.  I took out as much cash as I could out of them.  I broke the ATM cards with my bare hands and threw them in the trash. 

“Are you really doing this?” I asked myself.  I didn’t know who else I could talk to.  Someone to reason with was out of the question.  It was me, myself and I, I thought as my hands trembled as I started to walk away.

The craziness wasn’t in my actions, but in my thoughts.  I started to sweat uncontrollably about my fate.

“It was him, wasn’t it?”

I had asked myself a thousand times. 

I was no stranger to being on the run.

I dropped my phone on the floor and stomped on it.

“Damn iPhone!”

Any other phone would have been easy to break.  But as I stomped on it repeatedly with so much force, there was only a crack in the screen. I smashed it against the brick wall, using all my strength to throw it, and then it started to crack, until it eventually broke.

I was no stranger to changing my identity.

I had done it once before.

The only problem was I had never done it alone.

God, I wish my mom was here.

I felt a chill run down my spine, knowing that I was doing it alone. 

Knowing that, from this moment onwards, I was on my own.