Deals like getting on her knees in my office, letting me think I was punishing her father when I was just another man using her desperation against her.
I must have made some sound, because Conrad’s head snapped up, wariness replacing grief as he studied my face. Good. Let him fear me. Let him remember what he’d done.
“She’s always been like that,” he continued, his voice rough as he turned back to the mess, idly flipping through the thick binder. “So fucking strong. Even when—” He broke off, but I heard the rest anyway.Even when he wasn’t.
He stood with the binder, but his shaking hands betrayed him. It clattered to the floor once again, Eva’s carefully organized pages scattering as the rings snapped open.
Unable to stop myself, I moved to help, wincing at the pain of kneeling.
“You don’t have to—” Jackson started.
“I don’t,” I agreed, continuing to pick up the papersanyway, using it as an excuse to intrude on her privacy, to understand the woman.
Jackson struggled to his feet. I remained kneeling, my damaged joint screaming in protest against the position and the cold. When he offered me his hand. I stared at him for a long moment, then took it.
My grunt of pain was involuntary. Jackson said nothing, but he swallowed hard as he helped pull me upright.
On the coffee table, he smoothed out a photo that had fallen face down. “The ten-year anniversary of her valve replacement. She’d just gotten the all clear.”
The image showed Eva as a teenager, eyes bright with joy, her arms wrapped around two doctors’ waists, grinning widely. My chest tightened at her happiness.
Unable to stop myself, I flipped through the stack of photos Jackson had collected.
My horror grew with each image.
Each picture showed Eva at a different age, always in hospitals, always surrounded by medical equipment, always smiling a brave, determined smile that said she refused to be beaten.
I looked up at Eva, whose expression had turned blank as I invaded her privacy, the puzzle pieces of her life clicking into place.
I stopped at one of a tiny redheaded child in a hospital bed, grinning despite the machinery that dwarfed her small frame, her copper curls barely visible.
“She was six here,” Jackson rasped, staring at the photo instead of me. “Her first valve replacement.”
My heart stopped as I made the connection.
Eva had been six years old when Jackson ended my career.
Conrad Jackson had taken the hit on me to pay for his daughter’s heart surgery.
The photograph fell from numb fingers. Papers scattered as I dropped everything on the table and strode toward the door, needing air, needing space, needing to get away from the crushing weight of what I’d just realized.
Fuck. Fuck!
The team was still loading into cars—kids joking and laughing and teasing as they hung out, not ready to bear the brief separation from their friends.
I rested my hands on my knees, lowering my head as I fought the dizziness of realizing how deeply I’d betrayed Eva’s trust. My chest heaved as I sucked in deep breaths, the sun’s bright light giving me clarity.
Sixteen years.
Sixteen years of hatred for a man who’d sacrificed everything for his dying daughter.
I’d punished Eva for it, used her body and her need to please, all while she was trying to save the man who’d saved her life.
“Coach?” a voice called from somewhere near the road. “Coach, you okay?”
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think past the horror of what I’d done. The taste of bile burned my throat as the full weight of my cruelty crashed over me.
I’d made her kneel, made her suck my cock, fed on her submission while she was drowning in desperation to save her father’s life for a debt he’d taken out to save her.
