Halo Violation: A Secret Baby Sports Romance Read online

  “Didn’t they pay in advance?” I ask.

  “Of course they did, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that one of my biggest, most prominent tables is going to be empty. How’s that going to look?”

  “Man, I wouldn’t even worry about it. It’s December, for fuck’s sake. People get snowed in, especially if they spend Christmas in the Swiss Alps. Come on.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but a gap this huge is going throw the whole room off balance unless I fill those seats. Annette and I have worked really hard on making this a special night, and we want everything to be perfect.”

  Now that he’s uttered the words “unless I fill those seats” I finally understand why he’s calling me.

  Damn.

  I was looking forward to partying with Derek. The last thing I want to do is to get my ass into a tux and spend the evening making polite conversation with a bunch of old society biddies.

  “Can you come? Please, Eric? I’m hoping to get as many Vipers into those empty seats as possible. I know this is crazy last minute, and I know I probably won’t be able to fill all twelve seats, but I want to at least try. And it won’t cost you a dime. I don’t expect you to pay for a plate. That’s already taken care of.”

  The cost of a plate is the least of my concern. I’d much rather write a check than show up, but it’s obvious how much Cody needs me to be there tonight. And he’s a great guy, and this is for a good cause, so...yeah.

  “Okay, man. Count me in.”

  “Thank you! Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. The event starts at seven. So far it’s just you and Alex on board, but I’ve still got a whole lot of calls to make. Anyway, I’ll text everyone later so you guys can coordinate transportation if you want. Thanks again, man. Seriously.”

  “No problem.”

  After we end the call, I switch off the TV and head into the bathroom to start getting ready.

  An hour later, I’m stepping out of a chauffeured town car onto the pristine Fifth Avenue sidewalk. Cody managed to get eight people on board, and we split up into groups of two for the ride over. I’m with wide receiver Alex Harmon, quarterback Ryan Blake and Ryan’s fiancé, Charlotte.

  There’s a handful of reporters hanging around in front of the hotel entrance, and it doesn’t take me long to realize that they’re a very different breed from the paparazzi we usually encounter.

  “Ryan!” a slender woman with glasses calls out, “What can you tell us about the Cody Washington Scholarship Fund?”

  To his credit, Ryan spouts off a few sound bites for the press, answering their questions and posing for pictures. Alex and I exchange a smile. It’s obvious that the reporters are zoning in on him because they know who he is. Everyone knows who he is. Poor Ryan was all over the news last year when the truth about his past came to light.

  And it’s pretty clear that these people don’t know Alex and me by name. They’re society reporters, not sports reporters. Even so, they get us to pose with Ryan. They may not know our names, but they do know we’re Vipers, and they’ll figure out our names for the photo captions later when they’re back in the editorial offices.

  We head inside after a couple of minutes, and the concierge directs us down the wide hall to the coatroom. We head in that direction, and just as we’re approaching the end of the hall, the door to the coatroom opens and Coach steps out.

  “Coach!” Alex calls out in greeting.

  He looks up and a wide smile spreads across his face. The four of us walk towards him, all waves and smiles. A young woman emerges from the coatroom behind Coach. She’s looking down, so I can’t see her face, but there’s something very familiar about the way she holds herself. She’s got on a long, black gown with glittery black sparkles along the bodice and shoulder straps. Her dark hair is cut into a wavy bob.

  Oh, wait. I know who she is.

  “Margaret?”

  She turns. She looks straight at me. Her lips part and her eyes widen into almost comic proportions. I watch as the color drains from her face.

  What the fuck is she doing here?

  I turn to Coach. He’s wearing practically the exact same expression that she is. His lips are parted and there’s a crazed look in his wide eyes. Only instead of being devoid of color, his face is quickly darkening into a beet red.

  “Margaret?” he says through his clenched jaw.

  And all of a sudden, it hits me.

  Oh shit.

  Oh shit, shit, fuck, fuck, fuck!

  Margaret isn’t Margaret at all. She’s Molly Fucking O’Neil, the coach’s daughter.

  Wait, no. That can’t be. Molly O’Neil is a bratty emo kid. She’s a stuck-up little princess. She’s the coach’s fucking daughter. She is not the girl I took home last month. She can’t be.

  I turn to her to confirm my suspicions and my spirits come crashing down. Give her longer hair, darker makeup, something baggy and unflattering to wear, thick-framed glasses and a miserable expression on her face, and she’s the spitting image of Molly O’Neil.

  She is Molly O’Neil.

  Fuck.

  “Margaret?” Coach says again, clearly seething in hatred.

  And before I know what’s happening, he’s charging at me. He knocks me over and starts pummelling me in the face, shouting, “You fucked my little angel!”

  “Coach!” Ryan yells as I get a swift punch in the jaw.

  “Coach, stop it!” Alex commands as the coach’s fist lands on my eye socket.

  “Daddy, don’t!” Margaret shrieks.

  Oh my fucking god.

  Daddy.

  “You cocksucking, motherfucking piece of shit!”

  The guys do their best to pull Coach off of me, but this is easier said than done. The man may be in his late fifties, but he’s a big guy with a ton of muscle mass. He was a running back for the Panthers back in the day.

  My hands are curled into fists, but for whatever reason, I can’t bring myself to lay into him, to fight back. I don’t know if it’s because he’s my coach—an authority figure, a father figure, even—or if it’s because deep down I know I deserve this. I guess I really did fuck his little angel. In any case, I don’t just lie there and take it. I do my best to block and dodge his punches. Still, he gets a few good ones in before the guys manage to get him off of me. I can feel the blood trickling down my face where he split me open.

  “You fucked my little angel!” Coach roars as the guys drag him away from me.

  What the fuck?

  This whole thing is so surreal. I can’t even process it in my head. Yeah, I fucked Margaret—or Molly, I guess—but what boggles my mind is how could he know that? Why the hell would she tell her father about it? This doesn’t make any sense.

  “You fucking bastard! You little piece of shit!” Coach seethes. “I’m going to rip your fucking balls off!”

  I don’t doubt it. With that red face and those wild eyes, he looks like a rabid animal. It takes both Ryan and Alex to keep him restrained.

  “Stop it!” Charlotte hisses. “Any second now somebody’s going to walk through that door, and if that happens before you get a hold of yourself, the charity is going to be forever associated with Coach O’Neil going postal on one of his players. Don’t do that to Cody and Annette. Don’t do that to the charity. Don’t do that to the team.”

  Amazingly, her words seem to resonate. Coach stops ranting. He stops struggling. But he’s breathing really loudly and he hasn’t taken his eyes off me. I know if he thought he could get away with it, he’d drive a knife through my heart without a moment’s hesitation.

  Margaret (I mean Molly) is leaning against the wall opposite me with her face buried in her hands and her shoulders shaking with sobs. I have absolutely no sympathy for her. This is all her fault. I still can’t imagine how the hell this happened, though. Why the fuck would she tell her dad about us having sex? It boggles the mind.

  Charlotte opens one of the doors in along the hallway and switches on the light to reveal a sma
ll meeting room. She motions to Ryan and Alex.

  “In here.”

  The guys still have Coach in a tight hold, so they carefully maneuver him into the room. Charlotte then walks over to take Molly’s arm and escort her in. I figure the plan is to talk about what the fuck just happened, so I cautiously take a few steps towards the room, but Charlotte puts a hand up to stop me.

  “Not you,” she says.

  Okay...

  She turns to Ryan and says, “I’ll get him out of here. You guys take a breather, calm down and figure out who needs to leave and who can stay. We can’t all leave. Cody and Annette are counting on us.” She glances at me briefly before turning back to Ryan. “I’ll be back. Probably.”

  “Thanks, babe,” Ryan says. “Text if you need me.”

  She nods, and then closes the door softly behind her. The last thing I see is Margaret (Molly) hugging her shoulders as tears stream down her face.

  Nope. Still no sympathy for that crazy ass bitch.

  Charlotte turns to me with a sigh.

  “Wait here.”

  She hurries down the hallway, and is back within a couple of minutes. She motions for me to join her as she leads me around a corner and down a narrower hallway.

  “Where are we going?”

  She turns to me with a disapproving look. “We can’t very well leave through the main entrance. Those may be society reporters out there, but even they know that a Viper getting the shit beat out of him at a charity dinner is the kind of story that sells papers.”

  That stings. Who in their right mind would even think it was possible that I’d get the shit beat out of me? Me? I could kick anyone’s ass with one hand tied behind my back. My pride has suffered because I had to take one for the team.

  So to speak.

  Charlotte leads the way to the end of the hall and through an exit door, which is, thankfully, not alarmed. After we’ve walked a couple of blocks, she says, “You should go home, get yourself cleaned up.”

  “It’s pretty bad, huh?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  I’m not surprised. It hurts like a motherfucker. My head is pounding and there’s a shitload of blood dripping down onto my white shirt.

  Charlotte sighs. “What were you thinking, Eric? Why did you sleep with Molly of all people?”

  “I had no idea that I had!”

  “What?” She stops and turns to me. “What are you talking about?”

  “I did sleep with her—with that girl—the night before Thanksgiving, but she introduced herself as Margaret. She told me was from Michigan, for fuck’s sake. She said she went to college out in California. She sure as hell didn’t tell me Coach O’Neil was her daddy.”

  She brings a hand to her forehead, staring at me with wide, unblinking eyes.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I wish I was.”

  For a moment, neither one of us speaks. And then I say, “I just wish I knew how and why Coach found out about it. Why the hell would she tell him she slept with me? I mean who does that?”

  Tilting her head to the side, Charlotte says, “You know something? I don’t think she did. When the coach first saw us, he was happy to see all four of us, including you. It wasn’t until you called her Margaret that he went haywire.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But why would that set him off?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We stand there on the street as the traffic streams steadily past, trying to make sense of what just happened. Charlotte frowns and reaches down to unclasp her small beaded bag. Her phone must have vibrated or something because when she pulls it out, the screen is lit up. She takes one glance at it and gasps. She then claps a hand over her mouth and looks up at me.

  “What?”

  She opens her mouth, but no words come out.

  “What?” I say a second time.

  Whatever that text says, I have a pretty good feeling that it contains the answers we’ve been searching for. I reach for the phone. She turns from me and stuffs it into her evening bag, but I reach in and pull it back out.

  The text is from Ryan and it reads:

  Molly is 5 weeks pregnant.

  No.

  No fucking way.

  No, no, no, no, no.

  14. MOLLY

  “Eric Wenzel?” Dad roared as he paced back and forth the well-worn hotel carpet. “Eric fucking Wenzel?”

  I sob in silence, wondering how everything could have fallen apart so quickly. I’d planned to keep Eric’s role as my baby daddy a secret for the rest of my life. I had every intention of taking his identity to the grave. And now the truth is already out, barely a week after I told the family about the baby? What a mess. What a fucking mess.

  “How long have the two of you been sneaking around?” Dad wants to know.

  When I don’t respond, he walks up to me and wraps his large hands around my shoulders. The look in his eyes is positively frightening.

  “Well? Answer me, young lady!”

  “It’s not like... I mean it was...”

  “Answer me, goddammit!”

  “It was just a one time thing!” I blurt out.

  I bury my face in my hands, unable to bear the sight of Dad’s face as he processes the fact that his little angel has sexual urges—and that she acts on them.

  “Jesus wept,” he mutters.

  He releases my shoulders and after a moment I can hear him pacing back and forth again across the floor.

  “I thought you had morals, Molly,” he says. “I thought we raised you better than this. The idea that you would drop your panties for that little piece of shit... I don’t even know who you are.”

  My shoulders shake with sobs. Never in a million years would I have dreamed that Dad would speak to me with such disgust.

  “Coach, don’t you think maybe you’re being a little hard on the kid?” I hear Ryan say. “She’s human after all. And she’s an adult. We’ve all been there. We’ve all had...encounters.”

  “Fuck you, Blake. Just wait ‘til you have a daughter.”

  Nobody says anything for a minute. Dad starts pacing again. I slowly lift my head and try to catch his eye.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

  He glances briefly over at me before turning away again.

  “I don’t know what to say, Molly,” he says without looking at me. “Why did it have to be one of my players? Can you appreciate the situation you’ve put me in? I’m going to have to face that smarmy little rat fuck every single day until we trade him.”

  I gasp.

  “Dad, you can’t trade him! Not because of this.”

  “The hell I can’t! If you think I’m going to tolerate having that piece of shit on the team after he...after he... Fuck.”

  He wraps his arms around his head with a groan.

  Can things possibly get any worse? Because I never thought the baby’s paternity would come to light, I didn’t even consider the consequences of it happening and how it might affect Eric. As much as Dad (understandably) wants to trade him, let’s get real here. “Sex with the coach’s daughter” is hardly a justifiable reason to trade a player.

  Then again, Dad is really good friends with Bruce Maddox, the guy who owns the team, and he can pretty much do what he wants. He might get rid of Eric out of loyalty to my father.

  But then again, Maddox didn’t become a billionaire by making decisions based on emotions. Eric is a highly skilled player. He can block like a tackle, he can run and catch like a receiver, and he scored twelve touchdowns last season. He’s young; he’s got a long career ahead of him. Maddox would have to be crazy to trade him...right?

  “I can’t even...” Dad says.

  He shakes his arms out, shakes his head and flexes his fingers. His knuckles are already starting to bruise. I still can’t believe he attacked Eric the way he did, coming at him like a bat out of hell with a thirst for blood.

  “I have to get out of here.�
� He turns to Ryan and Alex. “Tell Cody and Annette I’m sorry. I just can’t. I can’t...”

  He turns to me, and his face crumples. “I can’t even look at you, Molly.”

  My heart shatters.

  He reaches into his jacket pocket to grab his wallet and pulls out a fifty. He then sets it on the conference table and says, “You’re going to need to find your own way home tonight. Here’s some money for a taxi.”

  I can’t believe this is happening. He really seems to hate me.

  “Maybe...” I start to say, but when I hear my voice cracking and wavering, I stop and take a deep breath before continuing. “Maybe I should stay with Nina and her parents tonight.”

  “Fine. Just let your mother know where you are.”

  What I wouldn’t give for a hug from him. I crave the comfort of Dad’s embrace more than anything else in the whole wide world right now, but I know it’s the last thing I’m going to get. By fucking one of his players—and getting pregnant by him—I’ve destroyed the foundation of our relationship. Will I ever be able to repair the damage and start to rebuild? The odds aren’t looking very good right now.

  Without another word, Dad turns and leaves the room. He shuts the door firmly behind him, and the significance of the action leaves me reeling. It’s almost as if he’s closed his heart to me. Forever.

  And I burst into tears.

  Ryan and Alex hover around, patting me on the shoulder and murmuring reassuring words. This is beyond bizarre. Alex has always been nice, but I’ve only known Ryan to be a first class asshole with a massive chip on his shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, Molly. Coach will come around eventually,” he says now, giving me a hopeful smile.

  This only makes me cry harder. What if he doesn’t come around? I can’t handle the idea that Dad and I will be estranged from now on.

  “Yeah. Just give him some time to process it all,” Alex offers. “Your old man thinks the world of you, and that’s not going to change.”

  I’m not so sure about that.

  What a mess. What a steaming hot pile of rancid, toxic shit. I wonder what Eric thinks of what just went down. I feel so bad for him. He had no idea what he was getting himself into when he took me home last month. As far as he knew, he was only hooking up with some random chick. No harm, no foul. Little did he know he’d be jeopardizing his career by hooking up with me, not to mention fathering a child.