Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
JAMESON
The look of shock on Lauren’s face as she cracks open the heavy wooden front door would be priceless, but I’m too focused on her bloodshot eyes and her wild red hair pulled back into a messy bun to enjoy her reaction.
“What are you doing here at”—she glances at her watch, which is big and looks exactly like something Josh would have bought for her—“seven thirty in the morning?”
I hand her the caramel latte in a take-out cup and hope it’s still her favorite. A lot can change in four years. When her hands clasp around it, I reach beyond her to push open the door, stepping into her space as she backs up with a sigh.
“Thanks.” Her voice is a perfect combination of grateful and annoyed. “Come on in, I guess.”
“Are you doing okay?” I ask as I shut the door behind me.
She doesn’t take her eyes off me as she takes a drink of her latte, then lowers it and lets out a deep sigh of pleasure, looks me up and down, and says, “Yeah, I’m just fantastic. So, what are you doing in my house, exactly?”
“I’m sorry for coming by so early. But I’m only in town for the morning, and I wanted to make sure you have a copy of the will and trust and see if you have any questions.”
Her eyebrows dip in confusion. “I haven’t slept more than a few hours a night since Josh—” She forces down a deep gulp that has me focusing on the smooth, creamy skin along her neck. “—died. So maybe I’m not processing what you’re saying. What trust?”
I glance around, taking in the modern mountain house that looks like it could have been featured on some sort of design show. It’s cold steel and warm wood. It’s big and ostentatious. Just like Josh. Not at all like Lauren.
“The one Josh set up, along with the will, to protect all your assets in case anything should happen to either of you.”
Confusion flickers in those deep blue eyes. I don’t know what I expected after more than four years of no communication, but it wasn’t this.
“Oh.” She pauses. “Why are you . . . I mean, what’s your role in all of this?”
“Josh asked me to be the executor. Why do you sound like you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“Because this is the first I’m hearing of it.” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, then looks up and me. “All right, let’s sit down and you can explain this to me.” She turns and walks into the kitchen, and I follow her.
She rounds the huge island and pulls out a barstool, gesturing for me to take a seat.
Then she walks past it and pulls one out for herself, leaving a stool between us.
I set my bag on the seat she left as a barrier and glance over at her.
She’s wearing sage-green joggers and a matching top.
She looks like she just rolled out of bed, but she’s beautiful nonetheless.
I hate myself a little for noticing—then again, I’ve never not noticed.
I watch as she touches her coffee cup to her lips, tilts her head back, and swallows. She catches me watching her as she lowers the cup to the counter, and her eyebrows scrunch up again in confusion or suspicion—it’s impossible to tell which.
“Let’s rewind for a second,” she says, crossing her arms over her abdomen. But then her eyes fill with tears and she looks away.
I reach out and rest my hand on her shoulder, surprised and concerned when I discover how bony it is. “Hey.” I wait for her to return my gaze, but she doesn’t look at me.
Her breathing is deep and labored when she finally glances up and tells me, “I didn’t know Josh was in Sun Valley.
That’s not where he was supposed to be. I also didn’t know he had a trust.” Her voice—normally light and happy—shakes with emotion, and I can tell how much it pains her to have to admit this, especially to me.
“These both feel like things a husband should tell his wife.”
I pull my hand back, and it takes everything I have not to react with my true feelings about Josh.
There’s no way I’m going to trash-talk the man to his widow, but I have no idea how I should respond to this revelation, so I focus on the business side of things instead.
“Are you sure he never told you about the trust?”
“I don’t know. He was always telling me about our finances, different investments, the endorsement contracts. . .” She pauses, like she’s trying to remember. “So maybe he mentioned it, but if so, I don’t remember. He always just took care of that stuff.”
She glances out the large kitchen windows. Beyond them is a bluestone patio surrounded by evergreens. String lights are hung from the house to the trees, and the way they are catching the rising sun makes them appear to glow bright orange.
“I assumed you knew about it and knew I was the executor. The fact that you didn’t . . . I guess that explains why you were surprised to see me here.”
“Should I be worried that my husband set up a trust and didn’t tell me about it?”
“I’m sure he set it up because he didn’t want you to worry,” I say, not at all sure but wanting to put her mind at ease anyway.
When Josh asked me to be the executor, I’d assumed Lauren was involved in that decision.
It never occurred to me to ask, mostly because I’d spent the previous four years, since they got engaged and she left Boston, intentionally not asking about her.
She takes another deep breath, then lets out a little smile. “I’m being ridiculous. Setting up a trust to make sure the girls and I were taken care of is such a classic Josh move. Of course he had one. So what is it that I need to know, then?” she asks.
“It’s all in here,” I say, taking the binder out of my bag and sliding it along the counter until it rests in front of her.
I’m starting to feel that sense of panic I sometimes get when other people’s emotions are out of my control, and sitting here knowing there’s nothing I can do to take away her pain is killing me.
I should never have introduced them in the first place—something I knew the instant the introduction left my mouth.
“You should take some time to read it,” I tell her. “Then call me and we can discuss any questions you have, or any next steps.”
I move my foot from the rung of the stool to the floor and shift my weight as I stand, torn between wanting to be near her and wanting to get as far away as possible.
“Wait!”
Her tongue glides across her lower lip, and I can’t tear my eyes away from the sight until she turns away and looks out the kitchen window again.
I’m spending so much energy trying not to think about how it feels to be back in her presence—the unmistakable scent of vanilla that clings to her skin, the way her eyes change like the color of the ocean does in different lights and depth, how she always bites her lower lip when she’s thinking—that my voice comes out almost strangled as I ask, “Yeah?”
She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear something out of there. “Never mind.”
“Okay.” I lift my bag off the stool and look down at her. As much as I try to reassure myself that she’s going to be okay, that Josh did the right thing here, I can’t help but worry that there’s something that doesn’t add up.
“So, what are the next steps?” she asks.
“Now you’ll become the sole owner of all assets, so there will be a shit-ton of paperwork.
You’ll need to see an estate lawyer about putting all the assets into a new trust, so that everything that now belongs solely to you is left to the girls, and you’ll want to name a guardian in case anything were to ever happen to you.
I’ll help make sure that everything is set up correctly for the future.
After that, you can choose a new executor for your new trust.”
She opens her mouth to respond, but the doorbell rings right then, and her head snaps over to look at a video monitor I didn’t notice sitting on the counter. It looks almost exactly like the one we had for Graham when he was a baby. And it appears that both little girls are still sleeping.
“I’ve got to get the door,” she says. But before she’s even out of her seat, her sister is walking into the kitchen.
“Door’s unlocked,” Paige says airily as she walks in, wheeling a suitcase behind her, then stops when she notices me sitting there. “Oh, hi, Jameson. I didn’t know you’d be here.” She sets a bag that appears to be from a local bagel shop on the counter.
Lauren’s narrowed eyes glance back and forth between us. “You two know each other?”
“We met yesterday at the luncheon after the funeral,” I tell her. I don’t mention that her sister was flirting with me until she realized I wasn’t flirting back.
“Hmm,” Lauren replies, and I wish I could figure out what she means when she rolls that sound around in the back of her throat. I’d also love to know why it still has the same effect on me—like someone dragging their fingertips lightly over my bare skin—that it always has.
Actually, I know why: I’m an asshole. And I’m still coveting the person I can’t have, even five years later.
“Jameson was just telling me about Josh’s trust,” Lauren tells Paige. “Which I didn’t know existed until a few minutes ago.”
“Oh.” The sound is a breathy whoosh of air leaving Paige’s mouth.
“Yeah,” Lauren says, and the two share a look that, again, I can’t interpret.
“I thought I smelled food,” another voice says from the doorway. I turn and catch a glimpse of a woman whose strawberry-blond hair is in a ponytail, and she’s wearing a cropped sweatshirt and a baggy pair of flannel pajama pants. “Oh,” she says when we lock eyes. “I didn’t realize we had company.”
There are so many looks passing between the three of them, and so much estrogen in the room, that I’m ready to get the hell out of here.
Plus, I need to catch a flight to St. Louis because while I was asleep last night, one of my hockey players decided to go and get himself a DUI—luckily no one else was hurt—and now I have a mess to clean up.
“This is Jameson,” Lauren tells her. “He was Josh’s agent.” Again, those blue eyes are glassy with unshed tears, and I wonder how long it will be until she can say his name without tearing up. How long should it be?
“Hi,” she says, “I’m Morgan. Lauren’s cousin.”
“Carson’s daughter?” I can’t hide my surprise. Lauren’s uncle and our former boss, Carson, is big and bald, and she looks nothing like him except for her eyes—they are exactly the same shade and shape as his.
Morgan rolls her eyes and crosses her arms over her chest. “You know my dad?”
“I used to work for him at Kaplan.” I don’t mention that he was my agent back when I played in the NHL, or how he took me under his wing and taught me the ropes of agenting after my early retirement from hockey.
“I’m sorry,” Morgan says, her voice tinged with sarcasm. Carson’s like that—people either love him or hate him. But I don’t get the sense that Morgan hates him, just that she knows what he’s like.
“Don’t be. I learned a lot from him and then moved on.”
Lauren is quiet, and when I glance over at her, she’s staring at me with an unreadable expression on her face.
I have no idea if she knows that things didn’t end well between me and Carson because by the time I branched out and started my own agency she had already followed Josh to Park City and married him.
“I better get going,” I say as I step away from the counter, “I have a flight to catch.”
Not much makes me uncomfortable, but standing between three women who are shooting each other looks I can’t interpret is putting me on edge.
I turn toward Lauren. “I’ll get you the name of Josh’s estate lawyer and his financial adviser. You’ll want to talk to both of them. Just let me know if you want me to be part of either of those conversations, and we can arrange a call.”
“Thanks,” she says, her voice flat and eyes lifeless.
She looks . . . haunted. I’m not prepared for how much it hurts seeing her like this.
I miss the way I used to get her fired up by fighting with her—the way her cheeks would turn pink when she got angry, the way her eyes narrowed and grew darker, like the sea before a storm.
Pissing her off was my favorite part of my job during the years we worked together at Kaplan.
Then, one night changed everything and the next night I introduced her to Josh.
That should have been the end of our story.
I need to get back to that place where she’s a distant memory, someone I used to know rather than someone who’s taking up every spare second of thought.
First, I need to execute this trust. Then there will be nothing tying me to her and I can finally walk away for good.