The Wide Receiver's Baby (27 page)

Chapter Thirty Six

Chase

“Kayla, listen to me.  Everything is going to be okay,” I squeezed her tight, trying to be the voice of reason. I knew if I didn’t, she would be gone. Like she had done before. I loved this woman, but I could tell that she still had the mindset that running was her only salvation. 

“Dad is here.  He will not leave you.”

Dad shook his head.  He was probably thinking the same thing too.  Where the fuck was his wife?

I kissed her on the forehead.  “I need to go back to a couple of classes and then I’ll be back. Promise. Just don’t…”

She shook her head and lifted her finger to my mouth.  “I won’t.”

I felt relieved that we had an understanding.  I kissed her one more time on the lips before I left. 

Mary hadn’t been in touch.  Her phone was off, and my mind was on everything but my studies.  I wasn’t happy about the fact that Dad had known and kept it from me.  Maybe that was part of the reason he’d changed once he met Mary.  He felt as if he had to protect her.

The thing about Dad was, up until he met Mary, it was him and me against the world.  Then, in the space of a few months, he’d just changed.  He’d explained that he’d found love again.  He’d been given a second chance, but the woman he had fallen in love with had so many scars.

Mary had tried to deny that there was anything wrong, but Dad had said it had been obvious. 

“One time, I was so damn mad… my client wasn’t being straight with me.  I remember that day like it was yesterday.  Mary came in and I was shouting down the phone.  She left right after she came in, so I went after her.  Do you know the first thing she said?”

I took a guess.  “She thought you were going to hurt her.”

He confirmed.  “Pretty much.  That was when I knew she’d had an abusive husband.  Also, sometimes when I called out to her, she didn’t respond.  Especially after she’d had a couple of glasses of wine.  That was when I suspected that ‘Mary’ wasn’t her name.”

Getting together with a business man hadn’t exactly been the best move for her.  Dad was so used to studying people that he worked with and for him, that he had studied body language.  He knew everything about a person, without even speaking to them, by the way they spoke, right down to the clothes they wore; it was fucking unreal.

My dad wasn’t the type of man to date loads of girls.  No, that used to be my department.  He didn’t even look at another woman for years after Mom died.  But, when he told me that he was dating Mary, I hadn’t been happy about it.

Sure, I’d wanted him to be happy, but there had been something about her that I didn’t like and, now that I knew the full story, I knew exactly what it was.

She was always so damn eager to please.  I’d thought that she was just damn uptight.

Dad and I spoke at the bar while Kayla and Sydney were tucked up in the bedroom at the hotel, and I started to wonder where we were all going from here.

Dad couldn’t stay here forever, and I couldn’t either.  I had planned to go back home to Dallas, but between Kayla not wanting to see Mary, and her dad still being at large, I didn’t know what the fucking options were.  Everything was all fucked up. 

“Dad, I’d planned to come back home in the next few weeks before I start law school in the fall. But now…” I said, and took a sip of my vodka.

“Now, it’s all fucked up,” he said, and he downed his bourbon.

He took the words out of my mouth and I laughed as he did. 

“What? What’s funny?” he said.  He ordered another bourbon from the bartender.

“Nothing.  Not so much funny.  But more ironic.”

The voice of reason spoke.  “Finish college.  We have security at home.  Sydney and Kayla can come home with us, and I will just tighten it.  I’ll get more men in until they find the son of a bitch.  I should be out looking for Mary.  I just hope she’s cooling off and not with him.”

I shook my head.  Shit, did Dad really think that?

“Wait, you think she’s been kidnapped?” I said as I grabbed his arm and stopped him from drinking too much.

“If I did, would I really be sitting here drinking with you?”

He had a point, but this whole thing was so fucked up, I didn’t know what to think.  We drank, and I decided to take it one step at a time.  Finish college, go back home, and then we would take it from there. 

Dad’s phone rang.  It was Mary.  She had something to say, and the news was so fucking good, that I ran up to the room to tell Kayla.  The whole fucking thing finally had closure.  Something that I’d thought wasn’t possible.  Finding Kayla had put everything to rest.  She had to see that.  She must believe it now.

Chapter Thirty Seven

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.

Chapter Thirty Eight

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.