“I don’t need ice.”
“Shut up,” I demanded, taking his hands into mine for him to sit up.
He did so, and I placed the ice packs over both of his hands to cover his swelling knuckles.
“You have surgery on Johnny Westbrook in two days. That little boy needs you to be at optimum level. You’re icing these knuckles tonight.”
He grunted but didn’t give anymore pushback, leaving his hands in his lap with the cold compresses covering them and doing their job.
I checked the time on the clock to make a mental note to remove the packs after twenty-minutes.
“I hope you won, at least.”
He frowned. “It was a draw.”
“Who’d you fight?”
“Brick.”
I frowned. “Considering he was your second fight of the night, I’d consider that a win.”
He grunted but I suspected it was supposed to be a laugh.
I couldn’t help it when my eyes trickled down his body again to stare at the bruising. The question that’d been on my mind for days finally came out of my mouth.
“Daniel Reynolds from Health Solutions. He’s your father.”
Jacob’s eyes spoke before he did. “Yes.”
“Luke McConnell, he’s your brother, but—”
“He uses our paternal grandmother’s maiden name.”
I nodded.
“He seems to be a fan of yours.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Interesting you both have found the same method to release your aggression.” I’d been thinking about it ever since Jacob dropped me off.
Luke ended up becoming a professional fighter, and a pretty good one by most people’s standards, and Jacob, it wasn’t his profession, but it obviously was a hobby of his.
“We learned at a young age.” Jacob finally looked at me. “I was five and Luke was three the first time my mother made us fight. Luke had soiled himself while we were at the babysitter’s and that she-devil thought an appropriate punishment would be to push aside the furniture in the living room and make me fight Luke, to teach him a lesson.”
“The first time?”
He nodded. “It only got worse as we got older. Whenever one of us brought home anything less than an A from school, she’d force the other to hit and beat on them for not doing our best, as she called it. If we didn’t want to, she would do the job herself, smacking, kicking and clawing at us until we fought one another.”
I shook my head in disbelief because I couldn’t fathom what he was saying.
“And what about your father? He allowed this to go on?”
Jacob shrugged. “He was hardly around. In my family, you either achieved or you didn’t exist, period. The Reynolds are prominent in Washington. My grandfather was a U.S. senator, and his brother was on the short list to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. One of my uncles is a world-renowned cardiologist, while the other sits on the state’s highest court. If you were born a Reynolds, you were going to be either a lawyer or a doctor, and not just an average, run of the mill doctor or lawyer, either. My father decided to become both. He got his medical degree, and after residency in internal medicine, went to get his JD/MBA. His first job at a law firm is where he met my mother. She was a legal secretary. They married, and she became the stay-at-home Stepford wife that everyone believed was perfect. But while he was out building his empire and adding to the family name, she was at home terrorizing us.”
I shook my head again because the pain in his eyes ripped at my insides.
“I think I hate him more than I hate her. A father is supposed to protect his family.”
