Carson looms over us and screams some more. “I can’t fucking believe you. I offer you everything but you just can’t stop being a slut. What kind of example do you think you’re setting for our daughter?”
“That’s enough, asshole!” Mandy calls out.
Huffing angrily, Carson whirls around to face her.
Mandy waves her phone in the air. “Yeah, I saw what you did and I just called the cops. You better move away from them!”
Carson looks to me, then back to her, then to me again. Taking a step back, I can see him calculating his odds of getting out of this.
Hope starts to whimper and cry against me in earnest. Her little knees are scraped up pretty bad from the fall. I wrap my arms around her to comfort her and protect her.
“Fuck, it was an accident, Grace,” Carson’s face falls as the full gravity of the situation finally hits him. “Are you okay?”
He takes a step toward me and I snap out, “Don’t!”
Jerking back, his eyes widen with panic. He glances towards Mandy and she waves her phone at him again. “They’re on their way.”
Like the spineless coward that he is, Carson takes off running.
I don’t waste another second. Scrambling to my feet, I pull Hope up with me and apologize, “I know it hurts, honey, I’m sorry,” as I carry her towards the car.
Nodding her head, Mandy hops back into the passenger seat and shuts the door quickly. She even turns the ignition for me as I get Hope quickly buckled in her seatbelt.
“They’re not really coming. I didn’t call them yet,” Mandy says quietly. “Do you want me to?”
Just as I hop into the driver’s seat, Carson’s garage door lifts and his black Audi peels out, narrowly avoiding a collision with my car.
Hope is sobbing in the backseat; Mandy is looking at me worriedly.
I’m totally not in the right frame of mind right now to make this call. Calling the cops in could either solve all of my problems or just make them worse. With how good Carson is at spinning things, he’d probably try to put all the blame on me in some way…
“I don’t know,” I say and throw my car in reverse. The one thing I do know is that I’ve got to get us out of here before Carson comes back.
“I have it all on video,” Mandy drops her voice to a whisper and I glance over at her in shock.
“You recorded it?”
“Yeah,” she nods. “I just had a feeling… What a schmuck.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Max
Raising my arms up, I flex them both in the classic bodybuilder pose as I receive my final weigh-in weight.
“Max Harper, weighing in at two-hundred and sixty-four pounds,” the official announces.
I step off the scale and walk over to stand across from Marcellus.
This is it, it’s fully official. We are fighting. Marcellus came in at two-sixty-five. Nothing left for either of us to do but fight Saturday night.
I stare him down just as he is staring me down, our fists are raised at each other.
The camera flashes are almost blinding. This is one of those press moments that seem to take forever.
We separate without saying a word. We aren’t friends and we won’t pretend to be.
I head back behind the curtain where Brett is waiting with Chase and Dale. My weight wasn’t even a question, I checked at home and in the gym with the guys before we drove over to the arena for the official stuff.