Chapter 14
Grayson
I miss the clean simplicity of football sometimes. Read the defense, trust your instincts, plant your feet, throw.
No gray areas. No live-in nanny with a mouth made for bad decisions and a smile that makes my four-year-old light up like Christmas morning. No fake relationship I volunteered us into because I couldn’t stand watching her shrink in front of a man who never deserved her in the first place.
No Cole Pearson looking at me like I’m a puzzle he solved three throws ago.
The axe leaves my hand with a satisfying thunk and lands just outside the bullseye.
“Cute,” Cole says beside me, arms folded over his chest. “Real intimidating, Gray.”
I glance over. “You sober guys get smug as hell.”
“Nah, we just focus our frustrations on a target.”
“Is the board the target or am I?”
He grins at me. “Both.”
The range is loud — wood splitting, low music from a speaker somewhere overhead, groups of people laughing too hard because there’s beer involved and because hurling sharp objects at a wall unlocks something primitive in the male brain.
The whole place smells like cedar shavings, spilled IPA, and testosterone.
Cole loves it here. He says it gives his hands something to do when they want to hold a bottle, says early sobriety taught him that idle hands are dangerous when your old habits are waiting like wolves just past the tree line.
I get it. Maybe that’s why I agreed to come. My own hands could use a job that isn’t trying not to fidget every time Carly walks into a room.
Cole picks up an axe, tests the weight, and gives me a look over one shoulder. “So, let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You agreed to be her fake boyfriend to piss her ex off?”
“Yes.”
He throws. Bullseye.
Asshole.
He doesn’t even react to it. “Why?”
I drag a hand over my jaw and stare at the target like it personally offended me. “I don’t know. I didn’t like seeing her like that.”
“Like what?”
I exhale hard through my nose. “Deflated.”
The word doesn’t feel big enough, but it’s the closest I’ve got. But Cole waits.
That’s the thing about him. He learned, somewhere between nearly wrecking his life and clawing his way back into it, how to shut the hell up and let silence do the work.
“It was like she was trying to make herself smaller,” I say finally. “Like she said the wrong thing and got cornered and just wanted to disappear. She didn’t even know I was listening.”
Cole’s brows crease in the center. “You do you, man, but being publicly off the market seems like it might put a damper on your... recent lifestyle.”
I bark out a laugh that has no humor in it. “My lifestyle?”
“Your recent streak of casually dating women with no intention of letting any of them matter to you.”
“That is not a thing.”
“It’s absolutely a thing.”
I grab another axe. “It’s been at least six months, for your information.”
Cole arches a brow. “That supposed to help your case?”
“I’m divorced. I’m allowed to sleep around a bit before committing to anything, especially when I have a kid to think about.”
“Might struggle doing that when you’re being public about this.”
I throw harder than I need to. The axe hits high, then drops with an ugly scrape. “Fuck’s sake,” I mutter.
Cole snorts. “You kissed the nanny. You don’t want to want the nanny, but you do. You made her your fake girlfriend instead of firing her to eliminate temptation, and now you’re pretending that’s somehow the more rational route. I’m not saying I’m judging. I’m just saying I don’t understand.”
“Look, I’m not going to be the reason Penny loses another nanny.” My voice is strong and sure, like if I say it with enough certainty it might become true. “I’m not going to fuck her. It’s not going to happen.”
“I mean, I’m not the one who brought fucking her into the conversation…”
I throw another axe harder than I should, jumping slightly as it bounces back off the board.
He studies me for a second, then reaches for another axe. “I can’t tell if you’re trying to tell yourself these things or me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say, because I apparently enjoy making my own life worse, “she’s not interested, anyway.”
Cole turns slowly. “I’m sorry. The woman who you said asked you, while drunk, if you’d be alone together, isn’t interested?”
“She was tipsy.”
“Gray.”
“I don’t think she meant it like that anymore.”
“Buddy.”
“I kissed her and she barely reacted.”
He stares at me for a beat. “You think she didn’t freeze and then spiral after that?”
Fuck.
I hate that he might be right.
Carly throws me off entirely. I don’t know how to read her, not really.
She’s quiet in a way that feels loaded, not empty, like there’s too much happening under the surface and she’s trying to keep every bit of it buttoned up.
At work she’s all careful professionalism and lowered lashes and clipped little answers that somehow still manage to be smart as hell.
And at home she’s warmer, softer around the edges, quicker to laugh, amazing with Penelope.
And she’s beautiful. Too beautiful for me to be around so often without my head wandering and imagining her beneath me.
That last thought gets shoved into a locked box in the back of my skull where it belongs.
Cole watches me bury it alive with a look that says he knows exactly what my thoughts are doing. “So let me get this straight. Your player days are magically over for the moment, the woman in your house is absolutely not into you, and the fake relationship you created is totally strategic.”
“Yes.”
He grins, chuckling. “I don’t buy it.”
“Good thing I’m not selling.”
“Bullshit. You’ve been sold on her since that meeting you told me about. Same girl, right?”
“That’s not true. I’m not—”
“It is.”
“It’s not.”
“Gray.”
I point the axe at him. “You want to keep all ten of those fingers, Pearson?”
He laughs. “There he is.”
We go another round, then another, mostly because it gives me something to do besides think. But thinking creeps in anyway.
Carly in that restaurant, standing there with her pride bleeding out.
Carly at my house last night, trying to act like my little speech about professionalism didn’t land like a slap.
Carly in my kitchen, pizza in hand, laughing at something Penelope did like it actually made her smile and wasn’t a performance.
Carly wearing one of my jerseys and thigh high socks on my couch.
Carly bent over my desk in one of those tennis skirts she designed.
Carly naked on my bed with my head buried between her thighs.
By the time we hand in the axes, I’m more wound up than when I got here. Cole claps a hand on my shoulder as we walk out the exit. “For what it’s worth?”
I unlock my car and pull my jacket in tighter around me. “That usually means I’m about to hear something annoying.”
He smiles. “You did a good thing.”
My feet stop moving, pausing a few paces from my Aston Martin. “What?”
He leans against his truck, hands shoved in the pockets of his leather jacket. “Stepping in for her. Making sure that asshole didn’t think she was struggling. That part of all this? Good.”
“Right,” I say, thinking he’ll say more. But he doesn’t. “The rest?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
* * *
I drive home with the windows cracked, night air frigid across my face, but it keeps my thoughts in check.
Downtown glows in patches as I pass through it — restaurants busy, strings of patio lights over college kids as they spill out onto sidewalks.
By the time I pull into the driveway, the house is quiet.
It’s late.
Too late to hear Penelope thundering around in her socks or demanding one more story, too late for cartoons, too late for pizza crusts left on napkins and toys abandoned on the living room rug. She’s in bed already if Carly did her job right.
I kill the engine and sit there for a second, forehead leaning against the steering wheel.
You can keep yourself from doing something stupid.
I have to.
I let myself in through the garage and the silence hits first — that too-large- of-a-house silence that never feels cozy unless Pen is running around it somewhere. Tonight there’s only the faint hum of the refrigerator and the muted tick of the kitchen clock.
There’s a wine glass in the sink and a couple of clean bowls on the drying rack. One of Penny’s glittery sandals rests by the garage door, another by the backdoor, as if she was taking them off while wandering around.
I toe my shoes off as I notice the light on. Not inside — out back. Blue water ripples, reflecting the moon and the faint yellow flood light, and I stop.
Every muscle in my body goes still.
There, swimming through the middle of the pool in a smooth, steady line, is Carly, wearing what I’m fairly certain is a sports bra and a pair of matching underwear. For one stupid second, my brain quietens so much that it’s almost peaceful.
But then it all comes roaring back meaner than ever.
She’s in my fucking pool wearing almost nothing.
Jesus Christ.
I stay where I am as she surfaces and slicks her hair back, my body half-hidden by darkness inside the house. This is self-destructive. I know this. It’s stupid, it’s reckless, it’s doing the exact opposite of helping my problem, but I can see so much.
She lifts herself backward to sit on the edge of the pool, and in that half a second her lower half is out of the water, I can see the way the water makes her underwear cling between her legs, can see the outline of—
My grip tightens on the doorknob.
Steam rises off her in the cool air, her lips parted as she twists the water out of her hair, her cheeks light pink.
Then she does the worst thing she could possibly do to me without even knowing.