I Want You Back (Want You #1)(5)

So far her visits had mostly been on the weekends, since Lucy preferred getting Mimi to and from school. I’d tried not to be bitter about the fact she didn’t even trust me to get our kid to school on time, but I had no right to bitch about it. I’d had limited access to my daughter for most of her life—with good reason due to my past bad behavior—so I needed to prove I intended to be a full-time father even if I only had Mimi part time.

During the years I played hockey, I only saw Mimi sporadically during the season, and hockey has a long damn season. Training starts the end of August, and the regular season ends for most of us in April, unless we make it to the playoffs, and then the season can extend into June. I traveled more than I was home, and even when I was in my team’s home base of Chicago, I had grueling practices, home games and responsibilities to the club and fans that made a single-parent schedule nearly impossible.

But the shitty truth I’d had to face the past three years was I hadn’t cared. I’d cared about one thing: hockey. Family time interfered with that. So even during our longer breaks, I didn’t head to Minneapolis and demand to spend time with my daughter. Instead, I stayed in Chicago, basking in the glory of being a professional athlete in a city that revered athletes above all else. Even now my stomach roils when I think about blowing off my child to get blown by some nameless puck bunny. Nameless mostly because I was too drunk to remember any of it.

I’d lost plenty of sleep over that since I’d sobered up and now steered clear of alcohol.

But I was trying to move forward . . . and I had to do that at the pace Lucy allowed. For the past eight years she’d basically raised Mimi with no emotional support from me. And I’d been so bitter and nasty about the fact she was the only person in my life who called me on every bullshit lie that exited my mouth, that I’d pulled a total dick move and fought her in court for every single penny of financial support she asked for. Some nights I still woke up in a cold sweat when it sank in what low levels I’d sunk to when it came to getting back at Lucy. Mimi—Mimi’s well-being—had gotten caught in the cross fire of my pettiness. If my brother, Nolan, and our parents hadn’t intervened . . .

“Daddy?”

I shoved the guilt aside and looked into my daughter’s sweet face. Mimi looked nothing like me or her mother. She had brown eyes, not dark like Lucy’s but more the color of whiskey. Her dark blond hair had streaks of red—no clue where that came from, since my hair was nearly black and Lucy’s was a rich chestnut brown. Mimi had freckles spattered across her nose and cheeks. I claimed that she inherited Lucy’s stubborn chin; Lucy claimed that immovable set to Mimi’s jaw came one hundred percent from me. Her button nose could’ve come from me. But since my beak had been broken more times than I could count, I don’t even remember what my nose used to look like. I just knew when I was lucky enough to have that cute little face in front of me, smiling up at me, I felt grateful beyond measure to have been given a second chance. I tugged on her left pigtail. “What’s up, squirt?”

“What are we gonna do tonight?”

“I thought I’d leave the choice up to you.”

Her eyes narrowed—that look was one hundred percent skeptical Lucy. “You didn’t make any plans?”

“Not for tonight. I’ve got a surprise for tomorrow night, so what would you like to do?”

“I wanna go ice skating.”

That threw me. Naturally she’d pick the one thing guaranteed to send her mother into panic mode. So I hedged. “Wouldn’t you rather go to Trampoline World? Or Chuck E. Cheese’s? Or . . .” Anything else?

She shook her head. “You’re like the best skater ever. You can show me how to get better.”

Her buttering me up aside, I knew of no place that offered open ice skating on a Friday night.

That’s because you haven’t looked.

“Is there an ice skating rink in particular that you want to go to?”

She blinked at me.

Right. She was a kid. I was the adult. This was my job. “Look. I’ll see what I can find. But no promises. It’s kind of late to try and make this work tonight.”

“Can’t you call Axl? I bet he knows lots of places to skate.”

Doubtful. He played for the Minnesota Wild, and they had a dedicated practice facility. If he showed up at a rink for open skate, he’d likely get mobbed. “He’s on the road.”

“Maybe you could ask Irina? Since she’s a world champion figure skater she probably knows all of the good places,” she suggested.

“When were you talking to Irina? She lives on the third floor of the next building over.”

“When me ’n Calder were playing. I dared him to go up to the third floor. He wouldn’t do it, so I did,” she said proudly, “and Irina gave us Russian tea cookies for being brave spies.”

“Do Rowan and Jensen know that you and Calder were running all over the building?”

“We weren’t running ‘all over the building,’ Daddy. We went up to the third floor one time.”

“But you were up there long enough to have conversation and cookies with Irina,” I pointed out. “The only reason I let you go over to Calder’s unsupervised last weekend is because I know Rowan and Jensen have strict rules and they expect Calder to follow them. Whose idea was it to break the rules?”