Free Delay of Game by Catherine Gayle Page A

expecting me at his office for a couple of hours, so I had plenty of time to find out if Sara had left her purse at the arena. She had. The security guards all knew me and Sara both, and they’d heard what had happened with Scotty last night, so it was easy enough to convince them to give it to me. It had been under her seat in the owner’s box when the crew went in to clean up after the game. In her haste to get down to her father, her purse had surely been the last thing on her mind.
    I sent her a text message to let her know I had it and would bring it to her that afternoon. Then I headed over to the practice facility.
    When I got upstairs, Rachel Shaw was on her phone just outside Jim’s office. His door was closed. She lifted a finger in my direction, begging for just a moment of my patience. I nodded.
    After she hung up, she said, “Jim’s meeting with Bergy and Hammer right now, Jonny. They’re sorting out who’s going to take over for Scotty for now.”
    “I’m early anyway.” I just didn’t know what else to do with myself.
    She gave me a kind smile. “Brenden and a few of the other guys are in the weight room. You can go spend some time with them.”
    “Yeah.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hang out with the boys right now. I didn’t really want to be with anyone. They’d just try to convince me that everything was all right, but it wasn’t.
    She opened a file drawer in her desk and filtered through it, searching for something. “How’s Sara doing?”
    Awful . “She’s as good as can be expected.” Considering I’d nearly killed her dad. And he was having surgery today. And she was pregnant.
    I couldn’t talk about that, though.
    Rachel bit her lower lip in concentration and nodded, her eyes roving the files in her hand. “That’s good. Brenden is going to watch the kids tonight so I can go be with her for a while. We don’t really want her to be alone right now…”
    I understood that better than she could ever know.
    “Do you mind if I just take a seat and wait out here?” I asked, indicating a few chairs along the wall near Jim’s office.
    She shook her head, a curl of red hair falling free from her ponytail and dropping in front of her eyes. She brushed it away distractedly. “Do what you need to do, Jonny.” Her phone rang, and she went back to work.
    I took a seat and waited for Jim to finish up with the coaches. The whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about Sara. About what she’d do if she didn’t have her father. About the baby she had on the way and the son of a bitch who wasn’t there for her right now when she needed someone the most. About how I could make sure she was taken care of. Sara was twenty-three, the same age as Corinne, four years younger than me. I tried to imagine what I would do if my sister were in the same position as Sara, but it only made me angrier.
    Finally, almost an hour after I got there, Jim opened his office door and waved me in.
    “Come on, Jonny. Let’s talk before we get the call.”
    I nodded and lumbered in. Jim clapped a hand on my shoulder, and both Bergy and Hammer stayed in their seats with commiserating expressions. Jim closed the door, and I sat down across from the coaches.
    “You’ve never been suspended before,” Jim said. He skirted around his desk and took a seat in his chair. His glasses were folded and sitting next to his computer monitor. “You play on the edge sometimes, but you don’t really go over the line. I don’t know if that will be enough to get them to cut down on the suspension, but we all think it’s worth a try.”
    “I thought it was automatic.”
    “It is,” Bergy said. “But a hearing wouldn’t be part of the deal if there wasn’t at least some small chance we could change things.”
    Hammer nodded. “So that’s what we’re going to try to do. Because we’re already going into the playoffs down a head coach. We need you.”
    “Right,” I said. There wasn’t a chance in hell the League