Comeback (36 page)

He shook his head, clearly not understanding. “We’ll take him to the orthopedist—”

“I mean about his behavior. Getting hurt isn’t exactly the only consequence that needs to come from this if we’re going to be sure this isn’t repeated. I made a huge mistake, but he did, too.”

“Oh.” Nicky looked thunderstruck for a moment. “You’re right. I guess we need to sit down with him and have a talk about not doing things he knows are wrong. Maybe we should ground him from playing Minecraft for a while?”

He’d said
we
, too. It was starting to feel as if we were a unit. Maybe I really could be part of this family.

I nodded. “I think that sounds fair.”

“And maybe he should have to do some community service. The damage to the construction site, to your car… That’s a lot. I know helping other people helps to keep me on the straight and narrow.” He winked at me.

“The officer mentioned something to me in the waiting room,” I said. “He mentioned that there might be a way for Hugo to make up for his mistakes. I bet we could give him a call and arrange for something.”

Nicky smiled. “I think that sounds fair.” But then he turned serious again. “There’s something else. I need you to understand something that I just figured out.”

“What’s that?” I asked, my fingers gripping the edge of the counter so hard my knuckles turned white. That seemed to be the only way I could remember that this was reality and not some strange dream I was having.

“You make the puzzle work. Without you, we’re just a bunch of pieces that look like we belong together, but no matter how hard we try to hold on to each other, we fall apart. You’re the glue. You’re the fifth piece that makes everything fit just right.”

“That’s a lot to put on my shoulders.”

“I know it is.” His hand settled on my waist, his touch light enough I could easily break the contact if that was what I wanted. “I also know you’re strong enough to support that burden. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think you could handle it. No, if I didn’t
know
that you could handle it.”

I squeezed my eyes closed and allowed myself to lean back against him.

Nicky took that as his cue to wrap me up in his arms. He kissed the top of my head. “Does that mean you’ll do it? You’ll move in?”

“I will,” I said, melting into his warmth. “On one condition.”

“What’s that?” he asked. I could tell he was trying to keep his tone light, but his arms had tensed around me.

“Take me to bed.” I needed to touch him. To taste him. I needed to be with him, and I was sure he needed the same.

“I’m sure that can be arranged.”

In an instant, he scooped me up in his arms. There was nowhere else I’d rather have been.

FOR THE MYRIAD
changes that had taken place in all our lives in such a short amount of time, it didn’t take long for the five of us to settle in to our new way of life.

Nicky flew back to Dallas on New Year’s Eve so he could be there as the backup for the game. Hunter got the start even though Nicky had returned—probably because of all the travel he had been doing in such a short amount of time, not to mention all of the emotional turmoil. After that, there was a lot of back and forth between the two goaltenders for a while. One would get the starts until he had a bad game or they had a back-to-back, and then the other would take the ice. It meant a lot of competition between the two of them, but it also meant that the team was getting some great goaltending.

I got through Light the Lamp’s New Year’s Eve event and the kids had a great time hanging out with Brenden, Rachel, and Brie for the night. The party went off without a hitch, even if it wasn’t as well attended as the ones we’d had when the Storm was in town and I could cajole a few of them into helping out. The addition of Katie and Beau gave us a good boost to the turnout, and the night proved to be both a means of raising money as well as serving its original purpose—providing a sober environment to ring in the New Year for anyone who wanted it. To my surprise, Tim showed up, along with Carter and most of his crew, which made me glad. I was even more pleased to see both Mr. and Mrs. Thurston. They stuck by Tim’s side after they realized he was there, proving to me that Carter and I had chosen well all-around.

Once the event was out of the way, I worked on getting everything moved out of my apartment. When the team came back from their road trip, Nicky wrangled several of the guys into doing most of the manual labor, so it turned out to be a relatively pain-free process.

Pain-free
wasn’t a term we could use to describe anything to do with Hugo, however. Rachel had pulled a few strings to get him an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon that the Storm used most often, and it was a good thing she did. The break required surgery to insert a plate and a few screws to keep the bones in place for proper healing. At least he got a cast out of the ordeal and was able to show it off once they went back to school, not to mention he had quite a story to recount to his friends. We settled on a month-long grounding from playing Minecraft, and while he sulked a lot about that, he hadn’t been complaining too much. We had also gotten together with the police officer who’d been to the hospital, and he was working on some community service ideas that Hugo could handle after he got his cast off.

Nicky’s road trips, at least after that first one, proved to be far less stressful for me than that first one had. I had a much better idea of how to get by on my own with three kids for a few days, plus they went back to school when winter break ended. That meant I was able to be in the office while they were at school, and I only had to try to work from the house in the afternoons after I’d picked them up. It wasn’t perfect, but it was manageable. Not only that, but Nicky had laid out that, in no uncertain terms, whether he was around or not, if I told them they had to do something, he wasn’t going to contradict me. We were a team.

Once we were operating as a family and after all of the New Year’s Eve excitement was in my rearview mirror, I turned my attention to the next big task on my work calendar—the dinner and silent auction in February. Thankfully, Liam and Noelle returned from Sweden in mid-January, which meant I had a lot more help in the planning.

The Thurstons’ home was almost complete, too, even with the setbacks in construction from Hugo’s driving adventure. Tim had come around to help pretty regularly, and every time I saw him, he seemed more settled in his clean and sober life. He’d found a job, he’d complied with everything the legal system had asked of him, and he was even starting to make some sober friends among the crew after volunteering as much as he had been. We were to the point of painting walls and installing fixtures. In another week or two, the final inspections would be completed and the family would be able to move in.

Last week, Rachel and Brenden had suggested taking the kids with them to a hockey tournament Tuck was competing in this weekend in Eugene. Hugo and Nils had jumped at the chance, Hugo in particular since he was still stuck with his cast and still wasn’t allowed to play Minecraft for a few more days. Elin had agreed to go, too, once she knew that not only would Maddie be there but
É
tienne, as well. Apparently, Patrice had a tournament in the same complex, so the entire d’Aragon family would be present, at least until Marc had to drive back to Portland for practice.

Today was a Saturday in early February and a day off for the team, one they’d definitely earned with their play of late. At the moment, they were sitting in second place in the Pacific Division, well on their way to the playoffs come spring.

Liam had insisted that I take the whole weekend off.
You’re working too hard
, he’d said.
You have to remember that you’re not Wonder Woman. You have a family who needs you now, too
.

I’d almost argued that they weren’t my family, but then it had struck me that I couldn’t really say that. I might not be the kids’ mother. I may not be married to Nicky. But the four of them felt far more like family to me than anything I’d ever experienced in my life, and Nicky had petitioned the courts to grant me joint guardianship alongside him, just as he’d said he would. Sure, there were days I would give anything for an hour of peace and quiet, but I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t imagine my life being anything but the chaos it was now.

I honestly didn’t
want
it to be anything else.

Anyway, taking the weekend off—however difficult such a thing might be for me—meant that Nicky and I actually had some time to ourselves for once. The kids were on their way to Eugene, and neither of us had any obligations beyond Nicky having practice tomorrow. We hadn’t been alone together in months, outside of the moments we spent in bed at night.

We’d just sent the kids out the door with Rachel and Brenden, travel mugs of hot cocoa and breakfast bars in hand. The sun hadn’t even come up yet, so we hadn’t tried to rouse them from bed in time to eat before they left. Nils had barely been awake enough to put one foot in front of the other. But they were gone now, and we needed to figure out what to do with ourselves for the day.

“We could just go back to bed,” Nicky said with a very suggestive gleam in his eye. He poured two cups of coffee and handed one to me before leaning on the counter, resting his weight on his elbows.

I laughed, seated across from him on one of the barstools, and took a sip. It was too hot, so I set the cup aside to let it cool for a minute. “What, all day?”

“There are worse ways to spend a day.”

“No doubt about that.”

“Did you have any better ideas?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe we could go to the work site for a little while.”

He arched a brow at me, but there was a grin lurking underneath his faux look of disapproval. “I thought Kally told you to take the weekend off.”

“I have no intention of checking my email, stuffing an envelope, or calling a caterer the whole weekend,” I argued. “But we’re almost done with the house, and the sooner we can finish, the sooner that family can have a home. A couple more sets of hands today could make a huge difference.”

“All right. You win.” He gave me a pouting look across the bar. “But maybe when we come home…”

JUST AS I’D
expected, even though there were a lot of volunteers on hand since it was a weekend, Carter and his crew were happy to have a bit more help for the day.

“No need for hard hats this time,” Carter said with a smile when we came through the front door. “I hope you’re not too attached to the clothes you’re wearing, though. Paint tends to get everywhere.”

“I learned early on in this project not to wear anything that mattered to the site,” I replied. I had on an old pair of jeans and a couple of layered T-shirts. I dug a rubber band out of my pocket and pulled my hair back into a loose, messy ponytail.

He handed us each a can of sky-blue paint and the tools we would need, and then he sent us off in the direction of the dining room. We passed Tim on the way, and I smiled and waved but kept going, content with the knowledge that having him here meant he wasn’t somewhere getting high. Once we arrived in the dining room, the tattooed guy named Bud gave us some brief instructions on how to properly use the rollers. A professional painter had already come in and done the taping in every room of the house, and protective tarps were covering the flooring that had been laid in the last few days. The Thurstons had been able to pick out the colors they wanted in each room. Now we just had to get the paint on the walls.

There were sounds coming from every corner of the house, with people working in groups. Lots of talking and laughing accompanied a fair amount of the banging and power-tool noises you’d expect. Nicky and I settled in to work, with him up on a ladder to reach the tops of the high walls and me safely on the ground taking care of what was within my reach. Bud stuck with us for a little while to make sure we were doing everything correctly, but it didn’t take long for us to get into a rhythm with our rollers, so he moved on to help install cabinets in the kitchen.