Page 21 of Coming Undone
“Hey Danny.” Axel Rankin, their Finnish foster brother, stuck his head in front of the camera for a second. Big and dark-haired, he blended right in with the rest of the brothers except for the Nordic blue eyes. “Welcome home, dude.”
“Thanks, man. Good to be here.” In fact, he was looking forward to returning to the family’s home in Chatham, Massachusetts more than he had in a long time, no doubt because he had Stephanie by his side this time. “Are you guys going to make it home for the party?”
Kyle’s face returned to the screen, his helmet off and his hair sweaty. “Assuming you send the jet to Philadelphia next? Definitely. You’re not the only one with a hot chick to introduce around the clan.”
“So I hear. I’m looking forward to meeting Marissa and Jennifer.” He remembered Kyle’s live-in girlfriend, Marissa, was a matchmaker and the daughter of former pop diva Brandy Collins. Selfishly, he was hoping to meet the singer sometime, since her music was the real deal – gutsy and personal.
Axel, in the meantime, had started seeing a filmmaker from New York who’d relocated to Philly over the summer to be with him. Jennifer Hunter had made a lot of indie films, but she’d met his brother when she filmed a documentary piece on the Phantoms that was a lock for a few awards. Danny had seen the piece on TV while he was deployed and had been impressed. Plus, it had been like hanging out with the hockey team for those few weeks while they made their run for the Stanley Cup.
“And we can’t wait to meet Stephanie,” Axel piped up from behind Kyle, giving Danny the thumbs-up sign. “You’ll be happy to know the nose job you gave Kyle five years ago has been redone.” He pointed to Kyle’s schnoz. “That fight he got in on the ice last spring straightened it right out.”
“Uh, yeah.” Danny had no desire to discuss the nose incident in front of Stephanie. Why the hell had they brought that up when she was around? “Looks good.”
Kyle must have felt the same way because he elbowed Axel in the gut, hard enough to make the Finn back up a step.
“Not a big deal either way,” Kyle assured him. “We just wanted to let you know we’ll be there tomorrow, but we might be a little late, okay? Welcome home, my brother.”
The simple words damn near choked him up. Kyle had never said much about the time Danny broke his nose after a fairly innocuous comment about Stephanie, but the fact that he’d left his nose cock-eyed for years afterward had made Danny feel like crap. The guy had played professional hockey for years without half the damage his own brother had inflicted. And wasn’t that a testament to how whacked out he’d been after Stephanie had been taken?
“Thanks. We’ll be looking for you tomorrow, and make sure Axel knows I’m going to be thinking up embarrassing stories about him to let slip in front of his new woman, okay?”
Kyle grinned and said, “You owe him” at the same time Axel shouted from somewhere behind him, “Hey! What did I do?”
But Kyle disconnected, leaving Danny with a darkened screen and the certainty that Stephanie’s gaze lingered on him.
She cleared her throat while he was thinking about what to say.
“I could pretend I didn’t overhear a thing,” she said finally. “If that makes it easier for you. I don’t have any siblings to tell embarrassing stories about me, so I have kind of an unfair advantage.”
“No kidding,” he shot back drily. “I wish I could say that Axel was the only one of us who is ridiculously blunt and lacking subtlety, but it runs in the family.”
“They seemed glad to have you home.” Her voice took on a wistful note, and he remembered that- no matter how many times Ax and his brothers threw him under the bus for dumb stuff about his past – he wouldn’t trade them for anything.
“I miss hanging out with them. Annnnd, just to get it out of the way, I broke Kyle’s nose when I punched him.” He’d regretted it almost instantly, and the remorse had stretched out over the years. “It wasn’t that long after you were released. I came home between training stints, and he helped me pack up my stuff. I was still mad at the world for what happened to you – the news reports were vague and I couldn’t figure out what anyone was doing to go after the people who took you.”
He’d been climbing the walls and being at home didn’t help. At least on duty, he was busy every second of the day.
“The State Department asked me not to give interviews at first. They really wanted to control the flow of information until they investigated some leads.” Taking her seat beside him again, she reached for the bottled water kept in a mini refrigerator beneath the coffee table. “Would you like one?”
Nodding, he accepted a drink now that the turbulence seemed to have passed. They would be starting their descent into a private airfield outside Chatham soon.
“It makes sense, but at the time…” He shook his head. “I was edgy. Tense. Pissed off in general. Anyway, Kyle was on a mission to make me look on the bright side, which was a truly bad plan. At one point when I snapped at him, he said something about me wearing my heart on my sleeve?—”
The precise words escaped him now. Basically, he was mad at himself and he took it out on Kyle for pointing out the obvious.
“It sounded to me like he forgave you a long time ago,” Stephanie said between sips. “I mean, you know him better than me, but the way he talked about it on the phone made it sound like the broken nose was a non-issue for him.”
Danny shrugged. “Maybe. God knows, hockey players break their beaks all the time. But it’s one thing to get blindsided by a puck. Another to field a blow from your own blood.”
If it unsettled her to learn that he’d been a walking time bomb when she’d been abducted, she didn’t show it. Instead, she narrowed her gaze, a wicked gleam in her eyes.
“So what kind of dirt do you have on Axel in exchange?” She smiled and he hoped maybe he was in the clear.
He planned to focus on helping put her past behind her this week, not dredging up his.
“Are you kidding? The Finn is a goldmine for stories. When he was learning English, we taught him all the curse words first. Nearly got him kicked out of school.”
“Hmm. That story might make the rest of you look worse than him.”