Page 239 of Branded
My hold on my temper had been markedly thin.
Two fucking decades without one word aside from asking me through my social media to show her boys the Cup, and then to show up in my life like this? Hurting my woman? Making a scene at my place of work?
Beth’s hand found my, squeezed. “Breathe, love. I’m okay.”
“Where did she grab you?”
Maybe it spoke to how on the edge I was, but Beth didn’t argue, just held up her arm. “Here. See? I’m okay, love.”
No marks. No bruises. No scrapes or fingerprints. And love on Beth’s tongue.
I breathed.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re going.”
Beth squeezed my hand again. “There are two boys with her. Your half-brothers.”
Shit. Show.
I stopped, gaze hitting the ceiling.
Fucking hell.
“Sir, what do you want?—”
“You’re our favorite player,” a small voice whispered.
My gaze jerked down, and I saw that a boy who was maybe ten or eleven had peeked around the doorway.
Beth’s hand went tight.
“Yeah”—another boy popped his head out, this one younger, maybe seven or eight—“Mom said that we might be great hockey players like you one day if we practice hard enough.”
I clenched my jaw, and I wanted nothing more than to fuck off out of here.
But…these kids weren’t my mother.
They had no fucking clue. How could they?
“Yeah, buddy,” I said. “You can.”
I turned to my mother, sucked in a breath, and searched for anything remotely kind to say. What came out was, “Did you pick better this time?”
Guilt on her face, blue eyes like my own clouding with guilt. “Yes,” she whispered.
That settled somewhere in me, a wound I hadn’t even known still existed. “How long?”
“Fifteen years.”
Fifteen.
And she’d left me with my father still. Left me and started over and?—
I looked at the two boys in the doorway, thought of the abuse my father had put me through, the yelling, the neglect, the shit heaped on day after day, and then I thought about where it had gotten me, where I was today. The woman who was standing next to me, body pressed close, hand tight around mine.
And I waited for the rage to take me over, for the fury of the circumstances to cloud my mind.
But…it didn’t come.
