Hot Puck (Rough Riders Hockey 2)

Since he didn’t and couldn’t, he spent the rest of the drive to his mother’s talking to Fred, which calmed him down enough to enter the house only a fraction as frustrated as he’d been twenty minutes before.

He heard his sister’s voice in the family room and headed that direction. She was on the phone, watching the girls playing in the yard out the window.

Lowering the mouthpiece, she whispered to Beckett, “Griff.”

Beckett could tell by her smile alone that Sarah was talking to her husband. “Say hi for me.”

He stepped outside, called hello to the girls, and sat on the steps. They yelled back in unison but didn’t run to him, and Beckett tried to remember that was a good sign, even if he really did need that hug right now.

The excitement and warmth in Sarah’s voice as she talked to Griff made Beckett’s mind drift to Eden. And as he watched Lily, Rachel, and Amy play in the leaves his father had raked into piles around the yard, his hopes for the near future plummeted.

Lily’s giggle rolled through the air and lightened Beckett’s heart a little. She could always make him smile. The screen door closed behind him, and Sarah sat next to him, curling her arms around her knees, her cell phone dangling in her fingers.

“How’s Griff?” Beckett asked.

“Good.” Her smile looked the way Beckett’s had felt a short hour ago with Eden. “Only three more weeks.”

Lucky her. “Man, bet it will be nice to have him home awhile.”

“More than awhile. He’s getting a promotion. He’s going to be stationed at the Pentagon.”

The Pentagon was a short drive or Metro ride from Arlington, where Griff and Sarah had bought their house. “Hey, that’s fantastic.” Beckett reached around Sarah’s shoulders and hugged her. “Congratulations. Do the girls know?”

Sarah shook her head and focused on the kids. “I’m going to wait until he’s home to tell them. Otherwise, they’ll ask me a million questions I can’t answer.”

“And that way, you can say, ‘Go ask your dad.’”

“Bingo. Fair warning: he’s going to want season tickets.”

“I’ll wrap them up for him for Christmas.” He looked out at the girls again. “Hope I’m on the ice next year, not watching with him from the stands.”

“You will be.” She knocked her shoulder against his. “You’re having an amazing year.”

He grinned and nodded, because, yeah, on the ice, he was doing everything he was supposed to do and his game was falling into place. Off the ice… His game had gone askew.

“You’re going to have to pull out a rake when they’re done,” Beckett told her. “Or Dad will be all over you. Where’d he and Mom go?”

“I thought I’d leave the leaves for you. And they went out to lunch.”

“Good job, sis.” It was hell getting their parents out of the house and away from the grandkids, but he and Sarah agreed they needed their own time too.

They sat in a moment of silence while the girls jumped on the swings. But Beckett’s mind drifted to Eden and his sensation of being held at arm’s length unless she wanted sex. Which was ironic, considering that was really all he’d ever done with women. And that brought his mind back to Kim, and that frustrated the hell out of him.

“Everything okay with the team?” Sarah asked.

“Hmm?” Beckett glanced at her and found that worried crease between her brows. “Oh, yeah. Fine.”

“And Kim?”

In an effort to calm Sarah’s nerves, he decided to give her the information he’d learned in the car that had calmed his own. “I talked to Fred on my way over. I told him to go all-out, get all the ammunition he could, just in case. He had someone take a statement from the aunt.”

“Oh, that’s good, right?”

Beckett nodded. “And they’re in the process of interviewing people in both her past and current life with as few ripples as possible. He’s gathered Lily’s medical records and seems confident that if Kim doesn’t sign custody over willingly, it will be taken from her.”

Sarah exhaled. “That’s a relief.”

A slight relief, but after two and a half years of dealing with Kim’s manipulation, Beckett could feel the other shoe waiting to drop. And his sister didn’t need any more worries than she already had, so he hummed an affirmative. “Mmm-hmm.”