Chapter 19 #3
Grayson breaks away from the celebration and skates straight toward our bench. The plan was a kiss for the cameras. What the plan was not was him clearing the boards in one motion, hooking an arm around my waist, and lifting me clean off my feet.
I yelp.
He’s grinning when he kisses me.
His helmet is off, his hair wet with sweat, his mouth hot.
He skids us five feet along the rubber matting so the cameras above the boards get every angle, his arm locked under my ribs, my toes off the ground.
The team hoots behind him while they pound their sticks against the boards, the crowd above us roaring over the rapid clicks of half a dozen shutters going off at once.
He kisses me so fiercely that my toes curl.
The heat through me is immediate and total.
I forget I’m in a public arena. The cameras vanish, the custody case vanishes, the entire arrangement vanishes.
My hands are in his hair before I’ve made the choice.
The taste of him is salt, adrenaline, and something underneath that has nothing to do with hockey.
When he pulls back, his eyes are blown wide.
Then I see her.
Vanessa is standing now, behind the away bench. She has not looked away. Her lips are a thin red line, the edges of the fur coat bunched in her fists.
Something in me locks down.
My hands come up to Grayson’s face. His eyes widen as I kiss him back, harder this time, slower than the first one and twice as deliberate. My fingers drag up into his damp hair, and I tilt my head, taking my time, while somewhere behind him, his teammates lose their minds.
He makes a sound against my mouth I have never heard out of him before.
In two long pushes, he skids us back along the matting, setting me down at the edge of the bench. His arm doesn’t leave my waist. The heaving of his chest presses against mine.
“What was that?” he rasps against my ear.
My face is on fire. “Did I do good?”
He laughs, low and hoarse. His mouth brushes the shell of my ear.
“If I wasn’t wearing this gear right now, sweetheart, you’d know exactly how good you did.”
The heat that floods me is dangerous.
“Behave, Wolfe.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He’s still grinning when he steps back. My ears are burning.
Ethan slams into Grayson’s legs from the side.
“Daddy! Daddy, you were so cool!”
Grayson scoops him up with one arm, lifting him over his head until Ethan shrieks with laughter. “Yeah, buddy? Did you see that goal?”
“You went fwoosh.” Ethan pinwheels his arms to demonstrate. “Then it went boom in the net!”
Grayson is laughing into Ethan’s hair. He sets him down on the bench beside me and crouches so his eyes are level with mine. “Wait for me. I’ll be twenty minutes.”
I nod.
He pushes back through the boards and disappears down the tunnel with the rest of his team. The arena is emptying, the noise dropping in stages. Brody gives me a salute on his way past, following the others to the locker room.
Ethan presses himself against my side, his cheek on my hip.
“Miranda, can we have ice cream once Daddy gets back?”
I lift him onto my lap. He is warm and heavy, his head finding the curve of my shoulder, scented with hot dog and the laundry detergent Linda uses on his clothes. One small hand fists in the collar of my coat.
“I don’t see why not.”
The arena has gone quiet. Behind us, the tunnel is empty. The Zamboni is making its slow loop around the ice while the family section above is clearing out, the press already ushered toward the locker room interview area. We are, for this moment, alone.
That’s when I hear the heels on the rubber matting.
I look up.
Up close, Vanessa is even more beautiful. She glows like she’s just walked out of a magazine. Her coat is still bunched in her hands, and the pale gray of her eyes has no warmth at all.
I tighten my arm around Ethan. He has gone still against me, his small body locking up, his face pressing harder into my coat.
Vanessa looks me up and down slowly, from my scuffed boots to the loose braid.
Then she smiles.
“So you’re his human whore.”
The slur is so out of place against the dress, the coat, the lipstick, that for a beat my brain skips over it. Then I cover Ethan’s ears with both hands. He doesn’t fight me, just burrows deeper into my chest.
That word human snags at the back of my head like Brody’s phrasing did an hour ago, a different word with the same edge underneath.
“Do I know you?” My voice has gone cold, sweet at the edges.
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes have moved past me to Ethan.
“Ethan.” Her voice has gone clipped, no warmth in it. “Come here.”
Ethan shudders against me, his small hand fisting tighter in my collar.
“He doesn’t want to,” I murmur, my voice quiet and even.
“I am his mother.” Her voice sharpens. “He will come when I tell him to.”
Ethan whimpers.
The sound is muffled against my coat, and my eyes tighten, protective instincts flaring.
I lift him gently off my lap, setting him on the bench behind me. Then I stand.
Five foot four doesn’t make me a tall woman. In any room I’ve walked into, I’ve never been the tallest person there. Still, I plant my feet on the rubber matting between Vanessa Taylor and the child shaking on the bench. My chin lifts.
“Back off.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” I keep my voice level, almost pleasant. “The kid said no.”
Her eyes narrow. “He is my son.”
“He’s not going anywhere with you.”
Vanessa is studying me with an expression I don’t like.
“It seems,” she murmurs slowly, “that Grayson has found himself an arrogant little thing.”
I raise a brow. “Your point?”
She leans in close enough that I can smell her perfume, something floral, expensive, and cold. “Do you think a human like you can keep my child from me?”
There’s that word human again, twice now, used like it has a weight I don’t know about.
I tilt my head. “I am Grayson’s fiancée, and this is his son. You are nothing more than a stranger. So back off.”
Her hand comes up.
I’ve only got a second to take in what I’m seeing because what I’m seeing doesn’t match the world I have built around myself for the last twenty-six years.
Her nails are extending, lengthening as I watch, dark, curved, sharper than nails should ever be, until what is on the end of her fingertips is no longer a hand.
The thought that surfaces is small and stupid: Oh.
That’s all I get before her arm comes down.
I lift my forearm to shield my face. Her claws catch me across the inside of my arm, ripping through the white sleeve of my shirt in three jagged lines from elbow to wrist. The pain is immediate and shocking, with blood coming dark and fast, soaking the fabric.
I stumble back a step.
Behind me, Ethan screams.
“Leave Miranda alone! You bad woman! Leave her alone!”
My sleeve sticks to my skin where the cuts are, three red lines pulsing in time with my heartbeat, the pain catching up to me in a wave that makes the corners of my vision go grainy.
Vanessa lifts her hand again. Her face turns toward Ethan, teeth pulling back from her gums in something not quite a smile. “Be quiet. She is not your mother.”
The next blow is coming.
I see it lift, see her shoulder move into it, see the angle. The blow is not aimed at me. It’s aimed at the small, sobbing, terrified boy on the bench behind me.
My body moves before thought catches up. I turn my back to her, throw myself over Ethan, curl my body around his, then close my eyes to wait for it.
A roar splits the air above me.
I have never heard a sound like it in my life. Not a shout, not a word. It bypasses my ears and arrives somewhere lower in my body, in the place where my pulse lives, stopping everything it touches.
No, wait. I’m wrong.
I have heard it before.
When I had been clinging to life, bleeding in my apartment. This sound is the same as back then, vicious, enraged, and it calms me when it should terrify me.
There is the thud of a body hitting the boards.
I don’t lift my head. Ethan is wailing into my chest, both arms locked around my neck. My uninjured hand is at the back of his head, holding him there. The other arm bleeds into the rubber matting beneath us, painting it dark.
“Stay the fuck away from them!”
It’s Grayson. I look over my shoulder at him. His back is to me, and Vanessa is sprawled on the ground in the distance as if someone tossed her there.
No. Not someone.
Him.
My heart slams against my ribs. He’s freshly showered, hair still damp at the nape, plain black T-shirt clinging in patches to skin he hasn’t fully dried. The cotton stretches across his shoulders, and the muscles down his back are rigid.
Vanessa is twenty feet away. Maybe more.
How did he throw her so—?
My pulse climbs into my throat.
Then he looks over his shoulder at me.
When his eyes meet mine, I suck in a breath. The amber I know is gone.
What looks back at me is burning gold.