Chapter 2
Jason
We meet Bruce at the end of a dock that’s as weathered as he is. At ten years old, he hustled a job out of my grandfather and has been managing the cabin and island for not just my whole life, but my father’s too.
Damn.
It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the funeral, and there’s a beat where all the shit that goes unsaid passes between us in a single nod.
How you doing?
Hanging in there. You?
Same.
I miss him.
We all do.
It’s about as much emotion as I’ve ever seen out of the grizzled old guy, and in a blink, it’s gone. He claps my back and clears his throat, waving impatiently for us to hurry up.
Mushy fucker.
I help my teammates load our gear onto the Mae Belle, catching some serious side-eye from Bruce when he sees how much we’ve got.
I know.
But then we’re on our way, pushing off from the pier, leaving the harbor, and rounding the bend.
Far across the bay sits a string of islands ranging in size from little more than a sandbar with a couple scraggly trees to one that’s nearly two miles long with a steep grade, dense woods, and a rocky drop-off on one side.
It’s so familiar, and yet so different this time.
The guys whistle and hoot, ready to blow off some post-season steam.
Miraculously, we make it without anyone falling in. I grab the bow line and hop onto the dock to tie us off while we unload. And the questions that haven’t stopped since we left Chicago just keep coming.
“This one of those lakes with the sketch algae blooms?” Huska asks, leaning down to examine the water.
“How deep is it?” Wexler wants to know. “Can we dive?”
“So it’s just us? There isn’t like… a sister island we can canoe over to visit the girls?” Lattner asks like it’s a damn summer camp.
“Why can’t I get a signal?”
“Does DoorDash work on an island?”
Bruce cuts me a look so pissy, it breaks me out of my moody bullshit and has me coughing into my hand to cover my laugh.
“Sure you want me to leave ya?” he asks.
Not really.
But I toss the line back to him anyway. “Thanks, Bruce. Good seeing you.”
“You too, kid.” He nods to where the guys are throwing their duffels over their shoulders and hoisting a cooler apiece. “Need anything, call or text. Eventually it’ll get through. Signal’s still pretty spotty, but they tell us we’re gettin’ an upgrade this year.”
“Will do.”
He grins. “Left you a surprise up there.”
I lift a brow, my heart legit skipping a beat. “Sally’s oatmeal cookies?”
With Bruce, it could be anything from a stuffed squirrel mounted above the front door to home cooking from his wife. Which would be amazing.
It has to be food. He wouldn’t pull the same squirrel stunt twice.
He’s got his eyes on the water as he lets out a rusty laugh. “See for yourself.”
I turn around, ready to threaten my teammates with bodily harm if they touch whatever baked goods might be waiting. But as I look beyond the guys with their bags strapped across their chests, hefting coolers ahead of me, I stop.
The last time I was here, it was my father walking down the dock in front of me.
I rub my fist over the ache in my chest and push through, putting one foot in front of another until I come up on the guys.
The path is a series of switchbacks with stairs cut into the earth, topped with flagstones, and braced with logs. It’s mostly cleared of major debris, thanks to Bruce, who’s been out this week a few times to open the place up after winter and get the power and water going.
Over the decades, he coordinated as much preparation as we asked for.
When I was little and my grandparents still had their health, it wasn’t much.
In my early teens, he did more to make it easier for Gram and Gramps when they arrived.
And then, when both were gone and it was just me and Dad, we did most everything.
It’s a nice cabin. Three bedrooms… more like two and a half. Couple bathrooms, laundry in the back, a full kitchen. Built-in bookshelves. A stone hearth. And simple furniture in keeping with my grandmother’s tastes.
Loveseats. Because even though everything else in the place was built to Stanvic proportions, she believed if you were going to sit together… you should sit together. And after she was gone, my dad and I never even once talked about changing it.
I’m not exactly sure what Bruce and his team of nephews and local kids did this year.
But atop the hill, the path splits, and we cut right past the overgrown clearing toward the cabin cast in the golden shades of the late evening light, and I see the windows open and hear the music spilling out of them into the sunshine…
I’m grateful to him for taking it upon himself to decide for me.
He knew coming this first time without Dad would be rough and probably didn’t want me to feel like I was walking into a mausoleum. I kind of want to call him back and hug him for it.
He’d probably push me into the lake if I tried, but it’d be worth it.
Huska turns. “Dude, tell me the surprise is a stripper!”
I roll my eyes, digging deep for patience.
Bruce is a family man. He married his third-grade sweetheart, Sally, and blushes when she pulls him down by the ear so she can kiss his weathered cheek.
He’s not the type to surprise anyone with “entertainment.”
Reality check time.
“The surprise is that he already opened the place up to welcome us. Maybe there are baked goods… and unless you want to sleep in the shed, they’re mine.”
On the porch, I prop the screen with my knee and brace for the rush of emotions as I open the door. “Adjust your expectations, guys. It’s not gonna be that kind of week.”
Huska looks past me, one brow lifted. “You sure ’bout that?”
I follow his eyes to the breakfast bar and— “The fuck?”
While the plate of cookies with the loose layer of cling wrap on top makes sense… the open bottle of wine and spilled bag of dill pickle cashews don’t seem like Bruce’s style.
Lattner and Wexler shoulder through, stacking their coolers against the wall, before turning to me with too-eager grins. “Dude, you sure he didn’t—”
I shoot Wexler a glare over my shoulder as I start toward the hall. “He didn’t hire—”
“But—” He points past me.
I turn, mouth dropping open as a woman decked out in knee socks and an oversized work shirt shimmies backward out of my old room.
She’s all long, bare legs, swinging hips, and fluid motion.
Her hair is up in one of those sexy knots the girls call messy, with a few rebel curls hanging wild around her neck.
Holy. Shit.
Bruce… hired… a stripper?
I’m not a guy who gets off on paying a woman to take her clothes off for me and the rest of the room. It doesn’t turn me on, and I don’t seek it out. But this woman is turning my crank like I can’t remember anyone turning it before.
Only that’s not quite true.
It’s the hair, maybe. The curls. The way the gilded light spilling in gives it an auburn hue.
Her hips do some kind of swivel move that is pure sex, and the sight alone hits me hard enough that, damn, I don’t even know where that desperate sound I make comes from.
Only that it’s loud enough to be heard over Billie Eilish singing about sticking together.
Chaos erupts.
The woman whirls around with a bloodcurdling scream that has the guys jumping back.
But it’s that glimpse of her face and those light freckles peppered across the bridge of her nose that have me leaning into the swing of her fists and a kick that lands so close to target, all three of my teammates grab their junk.
We collide, arms and legs tangling in a push-pull I’m not orchestrating. And then we’re going down. The familiar pendant around her neck glints in the light before hitting my eye— Shit!
Still, I’m fast enough to catch her against me to break the fall. I end up flat on my back with a spill of honey and vanilla-scented curls in my mouth and nose, and a barrage of elbows and knees pummeling my vulnerabilities with surgical precision.
“Wait…” Umph. “Stop…” Cough. “You’re gonna hurt yourself…” Crack. “Ow, fuck… Rowan!”
She freezes mid-soupbone. Startled whiskey brown eyes meet mine. Recognition pushes past panic… and for once, she doesn’t look away.
Breathless and flushed, she wheezes, “Jason?”
I’m searching for what to say, but Wexler beats me to it.
“Uhh, Static. Man, isn’t that your sister?”
Lattner gasps. “Your sister’s a stripper?”
I glare at my teammates. “She’s not my sister,” just as Rowan snaps, “I’m not a stripper!”
“Sorry. Right. Dancer,” he corrects, gawking along with Wexler and Huska.
I don’t like the slow roam of their eyes over Rowan’s bare legs and not-buttoned-high-enough shirt. And I really don’t like that the response those heated stares are causing in me is one usually reserved for opposing players taking liberties with my team.
“Turn the fuck around,” I growl. “Right this second. I’m talking to you too, Lattner.”
I look back to the woman who has been upending my life since the day I met her. She’s still half-straddling me, still poised with a cocked elbow she seems to have forgotten about, and still so beautiful, it takes my breath away. Rowan Lakely.
“Hey, you okay?” I ask, looking her over for damage from the fall.
She nods, gingerly climbing off me. “You?”
“Yeah but”— my heart starts a heavy thud —“Rowan, what are you doing in my cabin?”
There’s no way. She can’t be here for me?
“Wait.” She sucks a troubled breath, and her eyes dart away as that bottom lip I spent a year obsessing over ends up between her front teeth. “What do you mean, your cabin?”
Lattner peeks over his shoulder.
Wexler smacks the back of his head.
Huska chuckles, taking his sweet time to face the wall. “Not that kind of week, my ass.”
What. The. Hell.
Rowan
No. No, no, nononononooooooo.
This can’t be happening.
In the nine years since Jason Stanvic moved out of his childhood home, I’ve seen him exactly three times. Once for Christmas, the year he left. Once for a weekend the following spring. And then once, three months ago.
It was at his father’s funeral, and I was with my mom and Ron.
I was still numb from the heartbreak of losing Ed, the closest thing to a father I’ve ever had.
Jason was flanked by one of the guys currently staring at the wall— Wexler?
—and another player I recognized from social media because he’s so big into supporting animal shelters.
It was a stilted, barebones exchange of sympathies between warring factions within Ed’s family, probably lasting less than thirty seconds total. And truthfully, with the sunglasses, I couldn’t say for sure that Jason looked my way even once.
Not that I could blame him. The man had every right to hate me for the chaos I brought into his life.
That I continue to bring.
I suddenly have a very bad feeling I’ve got the answer to a question that’s been eating at me since I found out about the will: Why didn’t Jason challenge it?
He called it his cabin. And more to the point, he’s here.
“Maybe we—”
“Don’t.” He’s on his feet in a flash, those winter sky eyes narrowing into the closed-off, hostile stare I know all too well. “Don’t tell me he left the cabin to all of us. He wouldn’t.”
A throat clears, reminding us of our audience.
The dickhead with the baby face and man bun— Baby Bun —who called me a stripper holds up his phone, mumbling something about needing to make a call. The other two nod, shuffling toward the door, making noises about getting some air and “checking out the sister island for signs of babes.”
The screen door closes with a clack behind them.
And then it’s just me and the beautiful grieving man who was, at one time, my hero and secret crush but, through no fault of his own, became a threat to the only stability I’ve ever known.
“The will.” I swallow hard, forcing myself to ask, “You didn’t read it?”
He blinks, a splinter in his confidence there and then gone. “The lawyers handled everything. But Dad wouldn’t do that. Marsha hated the cabin. You’ve never even been here. He wouldn’t.”
For months, I wondered how Ed, the kindest, most generous, and loyal man I’ve ever met, could leave this property to my mother instead of the son he loved beyond measure. And more, how Jason let it go without a fight.
But when I asked my mom about it, her answer had been 100 percent on brand.
A biting dismissal about a self-centered boy who’d become a man too obsessed with his own celebrity to care about anything so trivial as an old cabin on a lake that clearly meant more to his father than it ever meant to him.
It didn’t sit right with me then. But now, it makes sense in the most awful, heartbreaking way.
Jason hadn’t fought for the cabin because he didn’t know he’d lost it.
Now, he’s furious, staring at me from across the room with his massive arms crossed, wearing a scowl as menacing as his reputation on the ice.
“I’m so sorry, Jason.” I’d ask the universe what I’d ever done to deserve being the one who has to tell him this, but I already know. “Your dad didn’t leave this place to all of us. He left it to my mom. And I’m here to get it ready to sell.”