Page 119 of Chill Factor

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Scott remained moodily silent as he shrugged off his outer coat, then unzipped the jacket of his sweat suit and took it off. Beneath it he was wearing a tank top.

Wes took a moment to admire his son’s physique. It was that of a natural athlete. He was long waisted and long limbed. His body fat was maybe ten percent, if that. Each muscle was well developed and perfectly toned, impressively delineated beneath his skin.

Wes envied Scott’s near-perfect structure. He hadn’t been that lucky. Thanks to his mother, his legs were shorter than ideal, and he had a propensity for osteoarthritis that had come to him via his old man’s family, most of them bent and bandy-legged by the time they were fifty.

But Scott had been genetically favored with the best of Wes’s and Dora’s genes. He had inherited strength and stamina from him, grace and coordination from her.

Watching him now as he approached the weight bench, Wes thought that if only he’d been blessed with Scott’s body and natural ability, he could have made it into the pros, he could have made it big.

Scott could if he wanted to, but that was the hell of it. The desire, the drive, the bloodlust for competition wasn’t automatically issued along with physical superiority. Scott hadn’t been born with the determination necessary to make a good athlete into a champion, but Wes was going to make damn certain that he acquired it. He was going to build a fire in the boy’s belly if it was the last thing he did.

Scott was hardly on fire now. The effort he was putting into the free weight warm-up was uninspired. “None of those weights have the heft of that chip on your shoulder,” Wes remarked.

Scott looked at him in the mirrored wall behind the bench but didn’t respond.

“What’s the matter with you tonight?”

Scott continued doing alternating biceps curls. “Nothing.”

“Are you mad because I made you come here and work out instead of letting you go over to your friend Gary’s house?”

“Gary’s a jerk.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Scott propped the weights on his shoulders and began a set of squats. “Nothing’s the matter. Everything’s wonderful.”

“Then why are you sulking like a four-year-old?”

“Gee, Dad, I don’t know.” He returned the weights to the rack, keeping his gaze locked with Wes’s in the mirror. “Do you think it could be a mood swing because I’m being pumped full of steroids?”

Wes grabbed him by the arm, spun him around, and roughly pushed him backward against the mirror. He thrust his finger into Scott’s face. “You smart-talk me like that again, and I’ll whip your ass.”

Scott only laughed. “Like I’d care.”

“When I got finished with you, you’d care. Believe me, you’d care.” Wes glared at him angrily, then flung his arms out to his sides. “I don’t get you, Scott. I don’t get your ingratitude. You think I want to give up my evening to be here spotting you while you work out? I’m doing all this for you.”

“Who do you think you’re kidding?” Scott shouted back. “You’re doing it for you.”

Wes knew from experience that Scott had inherited not only Dora’s supple musculature but also her tendency to become muleheaded when pushed too far. He felt like smacking his son for talking back to him. But he reined in his temper and kept his voice at a reasonable level.

“You’re wrong, son. Okay, sure,” he said before Scott could interrupt, “I’ll admit that it does my ego good to know that you’re the strongest, the fastest, the best, but—”

“But you don’t give a shit about me.”

Wes was genuinely dismayed. “How can you say that after everything I’ve done for you?”

“You didn’t do anything for me today, did you? When those FBI agents asked why Millicent and I broke up, I was the one in the hot seat, not you. I stuttered some stupid explanation while you sat there and didn’t say a single goddamn word.”

Speaking softly, Wes said, “Would you have rather I told them the truth?” He saw a flicker of uncertainty in his son’s eyes and took advantage of it. “We’ve never talked about it. Would it have been a good idea for us to thrash through this for the first time in front of them? In front of your mother? Wouldn’t it have embarrassed you just a little for them to learn that your girlfriend preferred me to you?”

“She didn’t.”

Wes chuckled. “That’s not what she said. You were there. You saw. Did it look to you like she was having just a so-so time, or like she was so into it she was about to buck me off her?”

He saw Scott’s hands ball into fists at his sides. His face was flushed, and not because of any exertion he’d put into his warm-up. He was enraged. His breaths were shallow and quick, as if he was on the verge of erupting.

Wes wished he would. He would have liked nothing better than for Scott to lay into him and fight with all his might to win. It would be good for the boy to vent some spleen. He wanted to see him act like a man rather than the sniveling titmouse Dora would have preferred him to be.


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