Page 27 of Time Out

I should have gone to Cole. Or one of the married guys.

This asshole.

I shook off his hand. “Funny, because I know how that works. And the last time I tried it, it worked a little too well.”

“What’s that mean?”

I glanced around the locker room, but we’d both arrived early and it was mostly empty. A few defensive ends were at one end, looking at something on Cortland Knox’s phone. Probably porn, which meant they weren’t paying a lick of attention to us.

“A while back I met this girl. Took her home. And she showed up the other night.”

“You do repeats? Huh.”

The idea of a repeat to Dawson was unfathomable as people who thought the world was flat.

“She didn’t come for that.” I leaned in closer, and my hands shook. This shouldn’t have been so hard to admit, but it was the first time I realized I was saying the words out loud. “She’s pregnant, Dawson.”

He barked out a laugh. “Get the fuck out of here. You know how many bitches say that?”

I grabbed his shirt and pulled him around the corner. “She’s not like that. I swear it.”

“Kid. Just wait. When the rest of the guys get here today, we’ll do a poll of how many of them have had some kind of groupie or jersey jumper or whatever show up and claim they were pregnant. Happens to us all, and it’s always bullshit.”

It wasn’t. I knew it in my soul. Maggie wasn’t that kind of girl, although it’d make sense. She hadn’t been in the best place when I first met her. But her friend… Belle?

She wouldn’t go along with this, not if she was honest about who her family was.

“She’s not lying, Dawson. I swear it. I don’t know her well, but…” I told him what happened. A quick rundown from the night we met at Lou’s to when she and her friend showed up. What Belle said she and her family did and then how I screwed it up.

“She can’t blame you for that,” he said, and his arms crossed over his chest. “Her name’s Maggie?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Maggie’s gotta realize that’s what any of us would think. Hell, if you don’t want me to do a poll, she should. Or she could go to the Avengers and ask them. It’s the normal reaction. We get that shit all the time.”

The Avengers were Tennessee’s professional hockey team. I’d met them on occasion, but didn’t know any well enough to verify that what Dawson was saying was true.

“Okay, I get that. But I still need to make it right, and I don’t know how to find her, where she is, or if she’s sick and holy shit, Dawson, this is my kid I’m talking about, and I have no idea if I’ll ever see her again…”

The room spun, and before I knew it, Dawson’s hands were at my shoulders, and he was shoving me into a nearby chair.

“Sit before you pass out.”

I did exactly that, but it wasn’t like I could stand. My knees turned to jelly, and Dawson crouched down in front of me. “You want my advice?”

“Yeah,” I croaked, my breathing ragged. “Yeah, I do.”

“First, call a damn lawyer. Call Cole’s, actually. He’s a good dude. And second, go find the friend. You said she seemed all right?”

Belle was terrifying. Sweet and cute and loud and didn’t really appear to care much about me at all, but she had cared about her friend.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“And you know where she works, so start there at least. If that doesn’t work, hire a private investigator. You’ll find her, but before you do anything, have a serious talk with Cole about the importance of custody agreements and that bullshit.”

Right. Of course, because Cole Buchanan, our quarterback, had just been put through the wringer by his ex. He was still dealing with the fallout months later, but word was recently his ex had moved to Nashville, and he was still living in his hometown twenty minutes out with his new girlfriend—a woman he’d wanted since high school.

Eden was all right, and we saw them often. Dawson was right. “I’ll talk to Cole after practice.”

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