He paused in the doorway. “None of that apology is for Cross, though. Just to be clear. I’m not sorry I got that shot in at all.”
“I figured as much.” The shrill sound of her phone’s ringer echoed through the apartment, and she cringed.
“Hey, gotta go,” Erik said, and then he fled, pulling the door closed behind him.
When she picked up the phone and sawDadon the screen, she thought about sending him to voicemail. She wasn’t in the mood for Lamont Burke tonight. But he’d warned her this call was coming and dodging it would escalate things. He might even show up at her door. “Hello?”
“What the hell are you thinking?”
“Hi, Pop. How are you? I’m fine, thanks.” Not that this call was any different from his calls in the past. Since most of his communications revolved around her brother, he often forgot to make even a token effort to show an interest in her life.
“Don’t give me your attitude today, when you’re making a mess of your brother’s career.”
She wanted to laugh out loud at her dad’s melodrama, but he had limits and her being amused by this situation would definitely go too far. He didn’t have a sense of humor when it came to hockey. “Erik’s career seems to be just fine.”
“It won’t be if he’s focusing on you and this stunt you’re pulling instead of on his game.”
Kristen closed her eyes, pinching the bride of her nose. She was tired of it—tired ofhim—and just really tired in general. She should have let him rant to her voicemail box until the system cut him off.
It was too late for that, though, so she took a deep breath and decided to once again try to placate him instead of telling him to mind his own damn business. He considered everything even tangentially related to Erik his business, so she’d end up backed into a corner where her only option was to tell him to fuck off. She wasn’t ready to do that yet.
Maybe she wouldn’t ever be. Every time the words formed in her brain, begging to be unleashed, she thought about the fact that cutting her father out of her life permanently would mean having no parents at all. She’d lost her mother, but as long as she accepted Lamont was the way he was, she still had her dad. And turning her back on her dad would put a strain on her relationship with Erik. Not that it would come between them—nothing would ever do that—but it would make seeing each other a lot harder.
So she never said the words, even when he was being like this. And she wouldn’t say them now. “I’m not pulling a stunt, Pop, and Erik and I have discussed this already.”
“And did it ever occur to you that you should discuss it withme?”
She snorted in disbelief before her filter could catch up. Talk about her sex life with her father? Not likely. She’d had to ask a neighbor lady to help her make her first gynecological appointment because the grown man in the house had literally put his hands over his ears and shouted for her to stop talking to him about that inappropriate shit.
It was the last time she’d ever attempted to talk to him about anything even tangentially related to her vagina.
“Are you acting out?” he demanded. “You’re jealous of the attention your brother gets, so you’re going to embarrass him like this?”
Kristen pulled the phone away from her ear, and her thumb hovered over the red circle that would end the call. It wouldn’t be as satisfying as throwing the phone against the wall, but she knew she’d regret that kind of outburst later when she didn’t have a cell phone and had to jump through the hoops to get a replacement.
Lamont was a toxic cloud in her life. She knew it, but as long as his cloud wasn’t actively blocking her sunshine, she rolled with it. Better a dad who was kind of an asshole than no dad, she guessed. But every once in a while, that cloud would drop down like a toxic funnel cloud and batter her emotional shutters.
But he had a tendency to get pretty ugly when she hung up on him and, while she wasn’t afraid of him, she didn’t feel like a pissed off Lamont Burke talking to the press was going to do any of them any favors.
“This has nothing to do with Erik,” she said calmly. “I met a guy, and we hit it off. His name is Will, and it turns out they call him Cross professionally, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
“How long has this been going on?”
Okay,thatwas a problem. If they were going to lie to everybody, they probably should have spent a few minutes on their cover story. The when they met and how they met details would probably trip them up.
“A while,” she said, opting against specifics. And then, knowing her dad in a temper would follow the bouncing rage ball, she turned the conversation away from the details she didn’t have. “He’s a really great guy, Dad.”
It sounded as if he choked on something—maybe his beloved bourbon—and she winced. Having to call an ambulance for her dad because her so-called relationship with Will almost killed him would do the opposite of making the story boring.
“He’s an asshole,” Lamont barked, and Kristen was relieved. If he could bark, he could breathe. Actually, with him it was more like, if he was breathing, he was barking.
“But just imagine what amazing hockey players our sons would be,” she snapped, even though the idea of her having kids any time soon, especially with a hockey player she accidentally picked up in a bar, was ridiculous.
When Lamont didn’t say anything, she wondered if he’d been struck speechless with horror at the thought of a Lecroix grandchild or if he was actually thinking about the potential talent—and marketability—of a kid with Burke and Lecroix DNA.
“This is how it is,” she finally said in a firm voice, wanting to put an end to the nonsense. “If everybody keeps their mouths shut beyond what’s already been said, and you and Erik don’t say anything except that my personal life is my own business, everybody gets bored and moves on. The only way this stays a story is ifyoumake it a story, and then any distraction from Erik’s game is also on you.”
“The fastest way to make the story go away is for you to break things off with Lecroix,” Lamont countered.
