Knowing the Score (21 page)

The game got dirtier from there. Caitlyn wasn’t sure which rules were being broken, but she could tell things were dicey from the number of times the crowd sucked in a collective breath, and by how often the game was stopped because a player had been knocked out cold or was covered in blood.

As medics rushed on to dislodge an unconscious man’s tongue from his throat, Amanthi cursed. “Not a great game for your first one, I’m afraid. They’re not usually such bloodsport.”

“Why is it so bad?”

“They both need to win,” Amanthi explained. “These are two great teams, and they’re vying to be the best club in Europe.”

Caitlyn’s nerves jumbled in her stomach, but she tried to ignore them. She would focus on understanding the rules of the sport instead of the gripping mass of emotions she felt every time Spencer ended up at the bottom of a man-pile. “Is that related to the World Cup?”

Amanthi shook her head. “No, but the players have next year’s World Cup in mind. They’re competing for spots on the England team. The World Cup only happens every four years, and that’s played by countries, not individual clubs.”

Caitlyn flinched as a Bath player launched himself at Spencer, who managed to sidestep him just in time and run with the ball several more feet, knocking down a couple of monstrous-looking men who tried to attack him. “Are they targeting Spencer, or am I just being sensitive?”

“No, you’re not being sensitive. They know he has a temper, so they’re trying to provoke him into retaliating and getting sent off.”

Caitlyn’s head spun toward Amanthi. Spencer? A temper? She couldn’t imagine it. Every time she had provoked him, he’d been perfectly calm and in control. And she’d provoked him quite a bit.

As if on cue, one of the opposition tackled Spencer and didn’t get up. Several others piled on. Caitlyn waited for the ball to be pushed back from the middle of the heap so the action could start all over again, just like it had every other time, but suddenly fists started flying. The pile turned into a brawl, and referees ran onto the field from the sidelines. Caitlyn watched the big screen, trying to find Spencer in the middle of the mess. After several men had been pulled away, she saw him and a Bath player gripping each other’s shirts and shouting. Other players rushed in to pull them apart, but they wouldn’t be separated. They slowly circled each other, just an inch of air between them as they tried to lift the other off the ground with arms the size of redwoods. Caitlyn saw the opponent’s lips moving as he said something to Spencer. Without any warning, Spencer’s left fist shot around and slammed into the man’s face, knocking him out cold.

Caitlyn froze as the camera caught Spencer’s face, a sneering smile lifting his lips around his bloodied teeth.

Whether it was the shock of witnessing Spencer taking part in such senseless violence or Caitlyn’s first bout of morning sickness, a wave of nausea had her scrambling from her seat.

“Caitlyn, are you all right?” Amanthi’s voice faded away as Caitlyn tumbled over spectators’ knees, one hand waving away Amanthi’s concern and the other braced against the plastic seat backs to keep her upright.

Please
, she pleaded with her churning stomach. It heard her cry; by the time she reached the women’s toilets, the wave had dissipated. The battle left her weak and sweaty, but a quick glance at the bathroom floor told her this was not a place to rest. She splashed water on her face, propped herself against the sink and forced a couple of deep breaths into her lungs.

He’d punched a grown man in the face.
In the face.
For some reason that seemed even worse.

Bam!
Her father’s fist, purple and swollen, cut through the air to smash into her mother’s face, retaliation for an imaginary transgression. Caitlyn cowered in the corner—two years old, five years old, ten years old—the routine was always the same. He would come home from work and make his accusations, always subtle at first. Subtext was everything with her father.
This is a nice steak.
It must’ve cost an arm and a leg
, he’d say.

And her mother was stuck.
Not at all.
It was on sale
, led to
Don’t lie to me
,
Janice.
Bam!

I
thought it would be a nice splurge
invited
Do you know how hard I work for my money
,
you stupid cow?
Bam!

Silence was the worst option she could choose. Janice tried it once. She hadn’t left the house for a week afterward.

Go to your room!
she would shout at Caitlyn. And Caitlyn would run. One time she had stayed to protect her mom. She’d learned the pain of choosing the loser’s side.

Alone in her room, she listened to the muffled grunts and thuds of bone hitting soft flesh. Her hands over her ears, she’d curl up in her bed and go over the lessons the visiting firefighters and cops taught in their visits to her school, always the most interesting lessons.

The fire alarm goes off.
I
roll out of my bed to the floor—smoke rises.
Feel the door.
If it’s hot
,
I
go out the window and call 911.
If it’s not
,
belly-crawl to my parents’ room.
Save Mom.
Get out of the house.
Save the day.

Caitlyn the hero. Caitlyn the contingency planner. Caitlyn the coward.

And through it all was the terrible knowledge she was responsible for everything. She was better at math than her mom knew. She could subtract a March birthday from a September wedding and get a six-month pregnancy. From far too young, she could calculate the limited options for a mother who’d married at eighteen and only had a high school education. Who’d never had a job other than being Mom. Who was married to a lawyer almost twice her age.

And here she was, making her mother’s mistakes all over again. Pregnant by a man she hardly knew. A man she
thought
she knew. But she had no idea he punched other men in the face.

And then
smiled.

Caitlyn stood up straight and glanced in the mirror. Their child. If it was true—and she was still holding out hope it wasn’t—she would have a connection to him for life.

She wasn’t scared of him. She refused to be. He only had power over her if she let him, and she’d learned that lesson well. She knew the risks one ran when giving a man control.

“Oh, there you are! We were worried about you.”

Megan and Amanthi stood in the bathroom doorway, wrenching her mind back to the present. Megan’s voice dripped with mock concern. “Are you ill?” She glanced down at Caitlyn’s stomach.

Caitlyn followed her eyes and realized her hands were unconsciously cradling her belly. Her hands dropped to her sides, but not before Megan’s mocking brows rose nearly to her hairline. Megan’s feline voice taunted, “No, you’re not ill, are you?”

Chapter Twenty

Spencer slung his arms over the shoulders of a couple of his shorter teammates as his sweaty, blood-streaked, grass-stained team gathered in a circle around Liam in the changing room. Liam fondled a ball and led them in their traditional celebration, blasting out in a roof-shaking chorus:

“If I were the marrying kind

Which thank the Lord I’m not, sir,

The kind of rugger I would be

Would be a rugby...”

Liam tossed the ball underhand to Shaggy, who shouted, “Prop, sir!”

The team yelled, “Why, sir?”

Shaggy sang,

“’Cause I’d support a hooker, and she’d support a hooker!

We’d all support a hooker together!

We’d be all right in the middle of the night, supporting hookers together!

“If I were the marrying kind

Which thank the Lord I’m not, sir,

The kind of rugger I would be

Would be a rugby...”

Shaggy lobbed the ball at Spencer, who had to move fast to free his hands and catch it.

“Center, sir!”

“Why, sir?”

“’Cause I’d find holes and she’d find holes! We’d all find holes together!”

After showering, Spencer and his mates made their way to the family room where their loved ones and selected guests gathered after every match. No one had waited there for Spencer for years, not since travel had become more difficult for his grandparents. Today he’d introduced Caitlyn to one of the most important parts of his life, the only one she hadn’t been part of yet. Rubbing his hands together, he searched the room, scanning the tops of dozens of heads for one covered in wild red curls.

“Nice match,” a feline voice purred behind him.

Spencer let his eyes close momentarily. “Megan. What’re you doing here?”

“Jonesy invited me.” She gave the room a wistful look and sighed. “I miss my old friends from Legends, though.”

Biting back his initial response, Spencer tried to brush her off. “Sorry to hear that. I need to—”

The door bounced open and Amanthi rushed in, dragging an obviously reluctant John behind her. The sight of the tiny woman towing her bargelike partner made Spencer chuckle until he realized that, as the opposition, they shouldn’t be here. But Megan stole his attention by grabbing his arm and lifting onto her toes to see over the other players. “What’s going on?”

“Something’s wrong,” he muttered. “Where’s Caitlyn?”

“Oh, Caitlyn! That reminds me why I’m here.”

Spencer’s heartbeat sprinted. “What?”

“Congratulations, Papa!”

* * *

Fucking security doors
. Spencer itched to run up to Caitlyn’s door, rip it open and figure out what the hell was going on.

Instead, he was forced to poke the building’s bell—as hard as he could, as if that was any consolation—and wait for her to buzz him in. Ripping her door off its hinges would be pointless after that.

He stood outside the building with his hands on his hips and his foot tapping anxiously against the brick stairs. Doing a brilliant imitation of a nervous teapot.

Consider the source.
His grandmother’s mantra whenever someone said something to upset him floated through his aching brain.
Consider the source
,
my love
, she’d said when the village hussy started insinuating all about town that she’d been sleeping with Granddad. Ten-year-old Spencer had told his granny he’d beat up the woman’s son to teach her a lesson. Granny just shrugged, told him to consider the source, and left him to figure out what that meant.

It was, he realized some years later, not necessarily a mantra Granny actually lived by. Soon after the rumors started, Spencer noticed the woman ducking her head and hurrying away every time she saw Granny. It took him a while, but he figured out Granny must have confronted her and given her a blistering set-down. At least her sage advice had kept him from getting expelled.

The source today was no more trustworthy. Megan had had it in for him since he’d met her, and today she’d sunk her claws in deep.

And where the hell was Caitlyn? He jabbed the buzzer several more times with his fingertip, the last time hitting it so hard it got stuck, sounding like a swarm of bees in a pillowcase, shaken up and shoved in the postbox.

“Hello.”

He spun around at hearing her subdued voice behind him. The fight went out of him as he took in her pale face and the frowning wrinkle between her brow. Her bottom lip looked like it’d been chewed to hell and back.

“What did my buzzer do to you?” She set down her bag of groceries before using a key to dig the button out.

Words failed him. “You didn’t answer the door.”
Stupid.

“Would’ve been hard to do from the grocery store.”

“I see that now.” He picked up the bag. “Can I come in?”

“Of course.” She led the way up three flights of stairs and unlocked her flat’s door. “Tea?”

“Sure.” Tea: solving Englishmen’s problems for four hundred years. He set the bag on her table and took a deep breath to steady himself. Megan had to be wrong, that was all there was to it. Maybe he could’ve ignored her if Caitlyn had been there to deny it. Or if Amanthi hadn’t rushed over to pull Megan away. He could have asked Amanthi to confirm or deny Megan’s bold statement, but her expression was a confession anyway. Besides, he needed to hear it from Caitlyn and she’d abandoned his match.

Caitlyn walked out of the kitchen and slid a steaming cup of tea onto the tiny coffee table next to the couch, her hands shaking enough to slosh some of the hot liquid over the edge. She yanked her hand away.

“Did you burn yourself?”

She shook her head, but that was all she gave him. No welcoming kiss, no hug. Not even a smile. She perched on the edge of a chair and shook her foot nervously, as he had been doing some moments ago. Sitting on the couch across from her, he forced himself to fake a relaxed-looking pose.

“What did you think of the match?”

Her eyes flicked up to his briefly before gazing out the window. “It was a lot more...intense than what I was expecting.”

“I thought it would be an exciting one for your first one. Maybe I should’ve picked one where there wasn’t so much at stake for both sides.” She wouldn’t make eye contact with him. Bloody awful sign. “We won, by the way.”

“What? Oh, congratulations. I’m sorry, I should’ve asked.”

“You seem to have more pressing things on your mind.”

That finally did it. Her gaze flew to his, and her sudden panic scraped him raw. Her breathing was shallow, her hands gripping the chair’s armrests. She looked like she had after he kissed her under the billboard, but worse. Much worse.

He couldn’t be angry with her. He had no idea why Megan found out before he did, but it wouldn’t be because Caitlyn had confided in her. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t Caitlyn’s fault. Maybe she needed him to help her along.

He set his tea on the coffee table and knelt before her. Holding her ice-cold hands in his, he raised them to his lips. “Whatever’s wrong, love, you can tell me. It’ll be better if we can face it together.”

Her breathing became even more erratic. “You punched that man.”

“What?” Not what he had expected to hear.

“You
punched
him. In the
face.
” She shoved him aside and stood up, backing away as if she couldn’t bear to be near him. He faced her but didn’t pursue.

“Are you talking about that twat Adam Henderson? The man who’d tried to gouge out my eyeballs in the tackle? The one who called me a...well, never mind.”

Bloody rapist.
Spencer choked down fury at the memory, ready to belt the bastard again.

“He did what?”

“He dug his fingers into my eyes while one of his teammates held me down.” He couldn’t bring himself to tell her the rest.

Caitlyn pushed away from the wall and approached him. She frowned as her fingers fluttered over the faint bruises surrounding his eyes—bruises he knew from experience would turn purple by morning.

“That
ass.
He could’ve really hurt you.”

He laughed and brushed a curl away from her cheek. But she pulled away, crossed her arms and refused to meet his eyes.

“The next time you play,” she said, “you should bring my trowel. I use it to dig latrines, but it would make a handy weapon.”

He replayed the match as it must’ve looked from her perspective, and stories she’d told came back to haunt him. Her father breaking her nose. The dick who’d taken vicious potshots at her self-esteem. But surely he’d done enough over the few months they’d known each other to convince her he wasn’t a monster.

Despite that punch he’d thrown.

He rubbed his achy chest. He didn’t remember getting hit there, but pain told him he’d definitely been injured. “I take it you’re not interested in coming to another match?”

She opened her mouth to say something but ended up sighing. “I don’t know.”

He could work with that. Not ideal to fall in love with a woman scared of the sport he was most passionate about, but he could make allowances. As long as she wasn’t scared of him.

Caitlyn held herself stiffly, arms wrapped around herself as if she needed a hug, but not necessarily one from him. “Spencer?”

He leaned down to nuzzle her. “Hmm, love?”

“We have a problem.”

He brushed her temple with his lips, running his hand down her back to try to relax her. “Do we?”

He would treasure this moment. The moment he found out he was to become a father. The moment he began building his own family with a woman he loved, even if she needed a bit of time to embrace loving him back.

“I’ve been offered a job interview in Washington.”

His lips stilled. His hands stilled. His heart stilled. “What?”

“They want me to do a phone interview on Thursday, but they told me that’s pretty much just a formality. It’s with IDEA’s North American headquarters. They emailed me yesterday but it went to my junk mail folder, so I didn’t see it until I got home this afternoon.” She pulled away from him. “The job would start next month.”

Next month? She had a job opportunity that would transport her—and possibly his child—thousands of miles away. Starting next month?

Not a chance in hell.

* * *

Caitlyn couldn’t read Spencer’s expression, but it scared the living crap out of her. Not just disappointed or sad that their time would be cut short, he almost looked shocked at her news, as if he was expecting anything but what she told him. Ridiculous, though. She’d told him from the beginning that her contract and visa were limited. He must have known she was leaving.

Unless...

“Did you see anyone after the game?” Her voice was much smaller than she intended.

“
Washington?
How can you even think... Goddamn it!” He turned away from her and braced his fists on his hips, head bent down.

“You knew I was leaving.”

He whirled around so quickly she took a hasty step back. “Are you pregnant or not?”

She glanced at the bag of groceries where a pregnancy test kit lay buried beneath salmon and an eggplant. “I’m—I’m not sure.”

His eyes followed hers and he dug around in the bag until he found the kit. “Let’s find out then, shall we?” He handed her the kit and swept his arm out wide, as if inviting her to lead the way to the bathroom.

“I’m not doing it in front of you.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m just asking you to do it.”

Gathering up the ragged bits of her remaining pride, she walked into the bathroom and closed the door. What a hideous day. Spencer had gone from being the brightest spot in an otherwise stressful life to being her biggest worry. She desperately wanted to excuse his attack on the eye-gouger, but as rational as his explanation sounded she was still shocked that she’d allowed herself to fall in love without realizing the violence he was capable of—again. Maybe if she’d been able to see what provoked him she wouldn’t have felt like throwing up, and Megan wouldn’t have guessed she was pregnant.

Caitlyn peed on the stick and washed her hands. Two minutes passed really slowly when the outcome of the rest of her life depended on them.

Spencer knocked on the door, and she let him in without saying a word. He stood at the door, fists shoved in his pockets, while she sat on the edge of the bathtub and waited.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She stared at his navel. It was as close to his eyes as she could get. “Tell you what? That I thought but I wasn’t sure?”

“It would’ve been so much better than hearing it from that witch.”

Caitlyn sighed. “I’m sorry. I truly am. I only figured out there was a possibility on my way to the game. And Amanthi said she’d keep Megan away from you.”

“Well, she failed spectacularly.” He glanced at his watch and made room for himself next to her on the tub, scooting her along the rim with his hip. The wand—the oracle that would tell their future—lay on the sink beside them. “You realize it changes everything if you’re pregnant, right?”

She nodded. The only thing she’d decided in the past hour was that she would keep the baby, no matter what challenges it brought. Her life would become a delicate balancing act. Rushing home from work to pick her child up from daycare. Setting alarms at work so she didn’t get tunnel vision and forget to pick the poor kid up. Organizing field visits around when Spencer wanted their kid in London. Missing her baby when she was in the field. Possibly chaining herself to a desk job, if it all became too difficult.

“Time’s up.” He nudged her with his shoulder. “Do you want to look or shall I?”

“Together,” she whispered, scared to make much noise lest she wake herself up from the unreality that cloaked her.

Together they faced their future. Spencer picked up the stick. “What’s it supposed to look like?”

“Not like that.” She sighed. “I’m pregnant.”

Spencer dropped the stick onto the sink. He stood and reached out to help her up. “Now we talk, sweetheart.”

They went into the living room and collapsed onto the couch. She was calculating the airfare for an adult and child to fly from Washington to London once a year when he said, “You’ll have to marry me.”