Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Thirteen: Sunday Dinner

Delaney

She'd put off the family dinner for two weeks, which Roman had noticed and, to his credit, hadn't pushed about until the engagement made avoiding it impossible.

"Your mother's called four times," he said, handing her the phone she'd been deliberately ignoring on the kitchen counter. "I answered the fifth one by accident. She seems lovely. She also seems like she will show up at my apartment personally if we don't confirm a dinner date by Friday."

"She's not wrong to threaten that. She's done it before." Delaney sighed, taking the phone. "It's not my mother I'm worried about, for what it's worth. She's already decided she loves you sight unseen, mostly because you're the reason I finally stopped talking about Beckett in that particular tired voice she hated. It's my father."

"What's wrong with your father?"

"Nothing's wrong with him. He's just..." she searched for the fairest way to say it, "...protective, in a way that comes from a specific place. He was a linebacker in college, blew out his knee senior year, missed his shot at anything bigger. He's spent thirty years watching sports from the stands instead of the field, and somewhere in there he built a very particular opinion about professional athletes and the women who love them. He watched what happened with Beckett up close. He's not going to be neutral walking into this."

"You could have led with that."

"I'm leading with it now. Sunday. Six o'clock. Wear something that isn't a hockey jersey and try not to mention the blackmail."

"I wasn't planning to lead the conversation with the blackmail, Delaney."

"I'm just establishing ground rules early. You have a track record of confessing things at inconvenient moments."

Roman

Her parents' house was smaller than he expected, warm in a lived in way that reminded him faintly of his grandmother's kitchen, family photos crowding every surface, a lifetime documented in frames.

Delaney's mother, Carol, hugged him before he'd even finished introducing himself, warm and immediate in a way that eased something tight in his chest.

"Finally," she said, delighted. "I was starting to think Delaney invented you. She kept the relationship so quiet at first I genuinely wondered if the articles were about someone else."

"Mom."

"I'm allowed to tease. I've earned it. I sat through two years of Beckett Reyes at this table." Carol waved a hand, dismissive, already steering Roman toward the dining room. "Come, sit, your fiancée tells me nothing useful about your actual personality, only about your penalty minutes."

Delaney's father, Marcus, was harder to read from the first handshake, firm, appraising, the specific measured cordiality of a man reserving judgment until he'd gathered more evidence.

"Roman," Marcus said, settling at the head of the table. "I've watched a lot of your games. You hit hard."

"I try to hit smart, sir. Hard's just a side effect of doing the job properly."

"That's the kind of answer a PR team writes for you." Marcus's tone wasn't hostile, exactly, but it carried an edge that made Roman sit up a little straighter. "I watched the Reyes hit live. Season ending. Clean by the rulebook, sure. But I also watched my daughter cry in this kitchen for a month afterward, and nobody's rulebook accounted for that part of the damage."

"Dad." Delaney's voice had gone tight. "That's not fair. Roman didn't do anything to me. He's not responsible for how Beckett and I ended."

"I'm not saying he is." Marcus kept his eyes on Roman, steady, unblinking. "I'm saying I've spent thirty years watching men in your profession get celebrated for exactly the kind of violence that ends up costing the women who love you the most, and I'd like to understand, plainly, before this goes any further, what happens the next time you take a hit that doesn't end as cleanly as tonight's dinner conversation."

The table went quiet, Carol's hand tightening on her water glass, Delaney's jaw set in the particular way Roman had learned meant she was holding back considerably more than she was saying.

"I can't promise I'll never get hurt," Roman said, finally, choosing honesty over the polished non answer Marcus had already predicted he'd give. "I can't promise the job gets safer just because I love your daughter now. But I can tell you I've spent this whole season learning to play smarter, not just harder, because for the first time I've had someone in the stands worth staying careful for. That's not nothing, even if it's not the guarantee you're actually asking for."

"It's not a guarantee at all."

"No," Roman agreed. "It isn't. I don't think anyone in this profession can honestly offer you one. I can only offer you the truth, which is that I take this more seriously than I've taken anything in my career, including my own safety, because the alternative is losing something I'm not willing to risk for the sake of a clean hit."

Marcus said nothing for a long moment, studying him with the same appraising look from the handshake, and Delaney reached under the table, found Roman's hand, held it tight enough that he understood, without needing the words, exactly how much this conversation was costing her.

"We'll see," Marcus said finally, which wasn't approval, but wasn't outright rejection either, and the dinner moved forward into safer territory, Carol steering the conversation toward wedding logistics with the specific relentless cheer of a mother determined to paper over tension with enough enthusiasm about venues and flowers.

But Roman caught Marcus watching him twice more before the evening ended, careful, assessing, unconvinced, and he understood, driving Delaney home afterward, that whatever approval he'd need from her father was going to take more than one honest answer at a dinner table to earn.

Delaney

"He liked you," she said in the car, trying for confidence she didn't fully feel. "That's about as warm as he gets on a first meeting. Ask my mother. It took him a year to properly warm up to Beckett too."

"He watched me for the entire dessert course like he was calculating something."

"He was. He does that with everyone. It's a defense mechanism from his own knee injury, mostly. He turned every relationship in this family into a risk assessment after the surgery ended his own dreams, because he never got the chance to find out if he could have handled the risk himself." She sighed, leaning her head against the window, tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "He's not actually against you, Roman. He's against the specific kind of heartbreak he watched me carry for a year after Beckett, and he doesn't yet trust that you're different from the pattern."

"Am I different from the pattern?"

"You're the only man I've ever loved who looked back," Delaney said, quiet, certain. "That's not nothing. I just need my father to see it the way I have, and that might take longer than one Sunday dinner."

Roman reached for her hand at the red light, steady, sure despite everything unresolved from the evening. "Then we give him the time. I'm not going anywhere, Delaney. Whatever it takes for him to believe that, I'll keep showing up and proving it, dinner after dinner, until he does."

She squeezed his hand, grateful, uncertain, hoping, without quite saying it out loud, that her father's doubt wouldn't turn out to be the kind of thing that time alone could actually fix.