[Tulsa Thunderbirds 01.0] Bury the Hatchet Page 7

  That was the last thing I wanted to hear right now, so I cut her off. “It’s all right. I’m sure Lance has plenty of things for you to do tonight, anyway. Maybe some other time.” I intentionally ignored the fact that there wasn’t much chance of there being some other time. She was an adult. She needed to make her own choices in life, and right now she was doing exactly that, whether she realized it or not.

  “That’s right, I do,” he said, coming up alongside us. He glanced down at a clipboard in his hands and tucked a pen behind his ear. “You need your beauty sleep, and we’re going to have to start putting you together at five a.m., so that means an early bedtime.”

  “What the fuck do you need to do to her that you have to start so early?” The wedding wasn’t scheduled to start until two in the afternoon, and she was a knockout even on a bad day. If she had bad days. I wasn’t so certain.

  He gave me a snooty look, waving a hand in Tallie’s general direction as though to encompass every aspect of her. “Hello? Do you think she gets out of bed looking like this? She’s got to be waxed, plucked, spray tanned, airbrushed—”

  “Airbrushed,” I repeated, my tone full of acid. I turned my gaze to Tallie, and she shrugged apologetically. I’d known all along that she looked too good to be real, but that was taking things a bit too far. Hell, it was taking things a lot too far. Someone as gorgeous as Tallie should be able to roll out of bed, brush her teeth, run a comb through her hair, and head out the door, and she’d still look like a she’d just stepped out of the pages of a magazine. There wasn’t any good reason to put her through all of that.

  “Yes, airbrushed,” Lance said, rolling his eyes toward the sky. “Honestly, you have a lot to learn about what it takes to make Tallulah look presentable. You’re going to have a rude awakening once you’re living with her and you see what all goes into it.”

  “Oh, you mean when you’re not there to run the ship?” I spouted off. “I’m sure she’ll be able to manage on her own just fine.” The one who was about to have a rude awakening about things was Lance, but telling him so right now wouldn’t serve any purpose, and I’d likely already said too much, as per usual.

  He looked affronted at the mention that he wouldn’t be involved. Tallie had promised me she would be sure he stayed out of things, but there wasn’t a doubt that he wasn’t taking kindly to the demotion. “Honey,” he said to me, drawing out the word and clearly not ready to let it drop.

  Lance calling me honey was a hell of a lot worse than Mr. Roth and Mr. Jernigan calling me son all the time, and I was this close to seriously losing my shit on him—a lot worse than I already had. This would be a good time for John or Darren to walk over and pull me away, but they were both in conversation with my parents and Mr. Roth. I was going to have to control my reaction to Lance right now without any assistance from my agent or friend. They might as well ask me to do a pirouette on the moon for all the good it’d do me. It would be more likely, anyway.

  Lance nudged his head in Tallie’s direction when I glared at him. “It takes a heck of a lot of money to look this cheap, and it takes even more time than money to make everything seem effortless. I’m good at what I do. Leave me to do my job. You go run along to do…well, to do whatever it is Neanderthals are good for. Lord knows I haven’t figured that one out yet.”

  Tallie winced. Understandably. Throat punching was too good for this slimy weasel of a douche canoe, but I was as close to following through with it as I’d ever been. In a moment of extreme stupidity, I felt the last vestiges of my self-control snapping, almost like a bone breaking. My mouth was open, ready for my foot to enter it without a thought so I could tell the son of a bitch exactly where he could take his bony, meddling, sagging, self-righteous ass, when Tallie stepped forward and put one of her hands right in the center of my chest. It was a gentle touch, nowhere near enough to physically restrain me, but it did the trick. I forced myself to breathe and look down at her, to find those honey-colored eyes imploring me.

  “One more day,” was all she said. Meaning one more day of having to put up with Lance and all the ridiculous things he thought he needed to put Tallie through. One more day of his interference. One more day, and I could do whatever the fuck it took to convince myself I’d never met him, would never have to deal with him again, never had to bite my tongue while he called me a Neanderthal or a hooligan. He wouldn’t be able to control every single aspect of Tallie’s life right down to how many fucking breaths she should take in a minute.

  Lance let out a nasally, wheezing, harrumphing sound.

  Ignoring him, I bit down on the inside of my cheek and nodded, holding Tallie’s gaze. “I should go, then,” I bit off before forcing myself to lighten my tone. It wasn’t Tallie I was mad at, and she deserved better than to have me taking it out on her. “I’ll see you at the church.”

  She smiled so brightly it nearly left me blind. “I’ll be there with bells on.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” In fact, now that Lance had the idea, he might try to dress her in bells and nothing more.

  She stretched up on her toes and kissed my cheek before I turned to leave.

  As I walked away, the sound of Lance’s latest haranguing flitted behind me. I ignored his diatribe about her kissing the Neanderthal when there was no good reason for it since the cameras weren’t around, about how she had messed up her makeup by doing so, about how she was going to have to be far more cautious tomorrow because they were filming it, and high-definition cameras revealed every tiny flaw… I pushed it all from my mind and made my way out to my car.

  One more day. I only had to put up with him for one more day, and then I could pretend he didn’t even exist, just like I did with Kade.

  For some reason, even though Tallie had assured me time and again that she would kick him to the curb once we got past the wedding, I had a sinking suspicion that I wouldn’t see the last of Lance Benton once we boarded our flight for Hawaii.

  Maybe I really should throat-punch him tomorrow.

  THE BIG DAY was here. Sometime in the next couple of hours, I would be a married man. But not before I headed to the airport to pick Carrie up.

  Mom had given me her flight information last night when I’d insisted I wanted to be the one to greet her. She’d tried to deflect me, saying I would be too busy getting ready for the ceremony, but I’d eventually worn her down. It wasn’t like putting on a tux took that much time. I’d been doing it for years, every time my current team held a formal function. I could tie a bowtie with the best of them. So, even though Mom seemed seriously hesitant about it, I was at baggage claim waiting for Carrie and scanning my phone to see what the latest word on me and Tallie was.

  I’d just found the latest news on Twitter—a pic of me kissing her like there was no tomorrow, with an overly enthusiastic caption about the hottest couple in town—when the passengers from her flight started to trickle over. I put away my phone and got up from the bench I’d been waiting on to watch for her more closely. I was tall enough to be able to see over the sea of people pouring through the open space, even if Carrie wasn’t all that tall. There was no chance I’d be able to miss her bright red hair, though, and I’d probably hear Kaylee’s squeals once they reached the escalator.

  I was so consumed by watching for them that I didn’t notice Kade walking toward me until he punched me on my shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I was busy rubbing the spot on my arm where he’d hit me. I glared back at him. “Hey. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Hell of a way to greet your only brother.”

  Hell of an only brother he’d always been. I ground my jaw.

  “Mom told me,” he said when I didn’t respond. “Paid for my ticket. I thought she was going to pick me up so we could surprise you at the wedding.”

  “The wedding you’re not welcome at? That one?” I love my mother. I love my mother. I love my mother. I repeated it in my head over and over again, hoping maybe it would be enough
to keep me from strangling her when I saw her next. Now it made a hell of a lot more sense why she’d been so insistent about being the one to come pick up Carrie and Kaylee. And now that I thought about it, where were they? I glanced around, but there wasn’t a sign of them anywhere. More people were still flooding into the baggage claim area, though. Maybe she’d been near the back of the plane, or they might have stopped to use the restroom before making their way out.

  Except…Kade was here. Which meant they couldn’t be. I pressed my eyes closed, repeating my previous refrain over and over again. I love my mother. I love my mother. I needed the reminder.

  “You’d seriously try to keep me away from your wedding when I flew all the way here?” Kade scowled as he walked past me to the luggage carousel.

  “You might as well just book a return flight and go home,” I said, following after him. “No need to get comfortable. You’re not welcome here.” I leaned my head in and sniffed him, as if that would give me a sense of what he was on right now. His drugs of choice had always been the types he could swallow or shoot into his veins with a needle, though, not something he could smoke.

  He batted me away from him and hefted a suitcase off the carousel. “I’m not on anything.”

  “No? So what’d you bring with you? How’d you get it past security this time?” It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done something like that. My brother was a walking time bomb, thanks to addiction. He’d do anything to get his fix, including risking prison time by doing something stupid like shoving a balloon of the stuff up his ass or sneaking a vial of something into his checked bag by disguising it as a perfume bottle. Hell, once he’d taped a baggie of something to his balls and tried to get through security like that. Not even Kaylee had been enough of a reason for him to get his act together. If his own daughter wasn’t a good enough reason to get clean, nothing was. Years ago, I’d resigned myself to the fact that my brother would never successfully quit. He was going to remain an addict for the rest of his days. It would likely kill him.

  “Doesn’t matter how many times I clean up my act, does it?” Kade asked. He set his suitcase on the floor and pulled up the handle. “You’re always going to assume I’m some piece of shit—”

  “So prove me wrong,” I interrupted. I crossed my arms, planting my feet even as I recognized it as a defensive posture. Somewhere in the back of my head, there was a niggling sense of hope that maybe he was right. Maybe he’d gotten clean and it had stuck. Maybe that was where he’d been—at some treatment facility or another—and why he hadn’t been around in a while. Maybe that was why Mom had invited him behind my back.

  Some people managed to stay sober. Hell, I even knew some people who’d been able to conquer their demons and go on to lead normal lives. Nicky Ericsson, the goaltender the Storm had decided to keep instead of me, had kept himself clean and sober all of last season even though his personal life had gone to hell in a handbasket.

  I just didn’t think my older brother, Kade, had the kind of mental fortitude that getting clean and staying clean required. Maybe I was wrong about that, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to give in to hope.

  He was looking at me in that older-brother way he always had, like I was a dumb kid who just didn’t get it. With one hand, he reached up to scratch his head, and that was when I saw it: an oversized Band-Aid on his forearm.

  “Suboxone strips? You tell them you had staph so they wouldn’t check closer?” I’d heard that some people were doing that these days. Apparently, Kade had, too.

  “It’s how I’m getting clean, Hunter.”

  “If you had a legitimate prescription, you wouldn’t be hiding that shit under a fucking Band-Aid.” I spun around and scanned the crowd again for Carrie’s bright red hair, even though I knew she wouldn’t have come if she knew Kade would be here. She would have stayed home with Kaylee, and keeping that little girl away from my brother was a hell of a lot more important than watching me get married to some chick I didn’t even know. Kade came up alongside me. I figured I might as well make use of the fact that he was here, even if I was going to kick his ass back to B.C. the second I had collected Carrie and Kaylee. “Were they at the back of the plane? Where are they?”

  “Who the hell are you looking for?”

  “Carrie and Kaylee,” I bit off. “Who the fuck else?”

  “They’re not here. She didn’t come.” Kade wheeled his bag ahead of me, making for the exit. “You coming or what? I thought you had a wedding to get to.”

  I couldn’t move. It was as if the soles of my shoes were massive magnets, tied to a metal floor. Carrie hadn’t come, but Kade had. I supposed if it wasn’t going to be one disaster, it would be another. Any blowup that might have occurred when Tallie met Carrie, though, would be mild in comparison to whatever was bound to happen if my brother stepped foot near my wedding.

  WE’D BARELY PASSED the You may now kiss the bride part—Hunter’s lips were still on mine, actually—when all hell broke loose with the cameras still rolling.

  It took the two of us a few moments to realize anything out of the ordinary was going on since we were still putting on a good show for the audience, both the ones in the auditorium and the others who’d be watching at home once it aired. Hunter recognized there was an issue before I did, breaking off the kiss and spinning toward the sea of faces behind us.

  Even through the overwrought ordeal that had been the ceremony, I hadn’t recovered from the verbal attacks on Hunter that Lance had been tossing around all the while my beauty team had been preparing me for the big day. The things he said when Hunter was present couldn’t hold a candle to the language he used in private, and listening to the string of vileness had taken a physical toll on me, leaving me stunned and shaking. Needless to say, my head was still swimming from all of that, not to mention the toe-curling kiss Hunter had just planted on me, so it took me a minute to gather my thoughts and piece together what was going on around us.

  And there was a lot going on back in the rows of seats. Mama would call it a commotion—shouting, maybe a tussle—but whatever name you put on it, it was big. And bad. My gut clenched as Hunter took off down the steps without a second glance at me, diving into the fray in a way that made me expect him to rip off his tux and reveal a Superman costume. Most everyone was on their feet, particularly the small group on Hunter’s side of the aisle.

  His mother was in the hub of it all, her face ghostly pale. “Call 9-1-1. Oh, God. Someone call 9-1-1.”

  Hunter was heading straight for her, pushing people out of his way like a man on a mission. It didn’t matter how many of them there were, they weren’t going to keep him from getting to his mother right now. Enough of the crowd cleared away that I could see Hunter’s brother on the floor at Mrs. Fielding’s feet. But then she passed out. Mr. Fielding caught her by the shoulders as she dropped. He lowered her into a chair, and the camera crew closed in on them and Hunter as he leaped over two rows of seats.

  I couldn’t just stand up here gaping. This was my husband and his family—whether the marriage was meant to last or not—and I ought to be by his side, whatever was happening. It didn’t matter that I barely knew him and I’d only had long enough with the rest of them for a brief hello prior to the ceremony. Before I had an inkling as to what I could do to help, I was on my way to join him. I didn’t know how to do anything. Nothing useful, at least. I didn’t even have my cell phone with me to call for paramedics. It was in the dressing room along with everything else I’d brought to the church that hadn’t been put on my person, which, considering how skimpy my gown was, wasn’t much at all.

  I’d barely gotten down the steps when Lance grabbed my arm hard enough to leave a mark and jerked me to a stop. “Stay right here,” he demanded. “You’ll mess up your hair or ruin your dress.”

  Tears sparked to my eyes from the pain of his grasp, and I tugged myself free. “It’s just a dress. It doesn’t matter.” None of it mattered—the dress, my hair, my makeup, whether I cou
ld walk straight enough to keep a book on my head or answer pageant questions with enough polite but meaningless babble to satisfy the judges. I couldn’t do anything with any of those pointless skills, but at the very least I could get over there with my new family and hold Hunter’s mama’s hand or something. Any buffoon could do that, unless that buffoon’s name was Lance, it seemed.

  He grabbed hold of my arm again. “Now you listen here—”

  “No, you listen,” I interrupted him, surprising even myself with the force of my conviction. I never interrupted him. Not ever, not for any reason. Mama would tell me it was rude and unseemly, and she’d smack my wrists and demand that I apologize. But I was done apologizing to him. I was done doing everything he wanted of me without question. There were no more pageants in my future, so there wasn’t any more need for a pageant guru to run every facet of my life. One at a time, I pried his surprisingly strong fingers free and jerked my arm back to my side. “Today’s it. The wedding is the end of your reign over my life. I get to decide what I want to do and how I want to do it.”

  “Your mama—”

  “My mama isn’t in control of me anymore, either, and I don’t care what she has to say about this, Lance. I’m done letting you run roughshod over me every minute of every day. You should find someone else to micromanage, because it ain’t going to be me anymore.”

  With that, I left him staring at me with his jaw on the floor and headed down the aisle, shaking the ache out of my arm where he’d grabbed me. A couple of tears were still pricking behind my eyes from the force of his grip, but I willed them away. Now wasn’t the time for me to fall apart. I could do that later, when the cameras were gone. I gently touched people on the back or arm to get them to move out of my way so I could get through the gathered crowd without having to leap tall buildings in a single bound the way Hunter had done moments before. When they saw it was me, they parted like the Red Sea, opening up a clearing for me to pass.