Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
JAMESON
Colt
I need to talk to you. Drinks tomorrow after the game?
Jameson
Yeah, sure. Why do I get the sense you did something I’m going to need to fix?
Colt
Uhhh . . .
I wait for my car to tell me there’s a new message, but the rest of his reply doesn’t come.
Jameson
I don’t like walking blind, Colt. If this is something I might hear about or have to deal with before I see you postgame, you better tell me what the hell is going on.
By the time I park and walk through the back door, I’m already pissed that Colt’s playing these games. He’s a good friend but an aggravating client because trouble has a way of finding him, and he never thinks it’s his fault—especially when it is.
“What’s wrong?” Audrey asks the minute I hang my coat on the hook near the door. I haven’t even looked up yet, but I’m sure the rigid line of my shoulders gives me away. I can feel a tension headache coming on.
“Colt’s just . . .”
“Being Colt?” she offers when I don’t finish.
“Yeah.” I take my wallet out of my pocket and set it with my keys in the bowl on the counter by the back door.
And that’s when I notice how amazing it smells in here.
“What’s going on?” I ask, taking in the two pitchers of drinks in the middle of the table.
The kitchen is warm and smells delicious, and when I glance over at the range, both ovens are on and there are multiple pots on the stove.
“Jules had a bad day.”
Because my sister cooks to de-stress, in a way we all benefit from these bad days. But this is different. “This looks like we’re having company.”
“About that . . .”
“Hey,” Jules says, breezing into the room with a bottle of wine she must have grabbed from the cellar in one hand and her phone in the other. “Lauren says she just parked and is walking over, she’ll be here in a minute.”
“Lauren WHAT?” I know my voice was way too loud by the way my sisters look like I’ve slapped them and Graham comes running into the kitchen asking what’s wrong.
Then Jules bursts out laughing. “You should see your face. Oh my God, relax. I invited her and the girls over for dinner because she hates cooking and Paige is away on a business trip for two nights.”
“How do you even know this?”
Jules looks me up and down, then turns to Audrey in triumph. “I told you so.”
“Go back and finish your show, Graham,” Audrey says as she runs her hand over the top of his head affectionately. “You’re going to have to turn it off when our company gets here.” The minute he’s out of the room, she says, “Yep, you called it.”
“Called what?” I hear how terse I sound, but it doesn’t stop me from narrowing my eyes at them.
Jules just laughs. “You should see yourself right now. You’re so jealous.”
I raise an eyebrow. “I don’t get jealous.”
“Welcome to this new emotion, then,” Audrey says, her lips lifting into a smirk. With her medium brown hair and blue eyes, she looks the most like our father, but never more than when she smiles.
“You’re so obvious,” Jules says. “Mostly because you don’t do favors for people—”
“Except us,” Audrey adds.
“—and you’re tripping all over yourself to help Lauren.
Like, you paid off Woody with your own money.
Don’t even try to lie to me again and tell me it came from the trust, because Lauren told me how she found out about the house and how it wasn’t in the trust, and what went down with her in-laws, and how she was left with almost no money.
And you had me redo that whole second floor before she even saw the house, including the bathroom she was gushing over, and you let her think that her ex-husband and Woody were behind it. ”
“He’s not her ex-husband. They weren’t split up, he died.”
“In any event,” Jules says, “you are so gone over this girl, and you obviously have been since before she moved here. What’s the deal?”
“The only deal is that I’m executing the trust I promised her husband I’d take care of. That’s it.” I don’t mention that she’s already had a new trust created and I’m really under no obligation to do anything else. I told her I’d help her get this all figured out, and that’s what I’m doing.
“You keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better,” Audrey says, her voice bouncing up and down like she’s mocking me.
“All right, I’m going upstairs,” I say, eager to get out of here before Lauren arrives. I have no desire to have my sisters watching us and psychoanalyzing our every interaction.
I’m two steps out of the kitchen, my sisters still teasing me, when the doorbell rings. I look over just in time for my eyes to lock with Lauren’s as she stares at me through the window next to the front door. Shit.
It’s not until she lifts her eyebrows and tilts her chin toward the door that I realize I’ve completely stopped moving as I stand there staring at her, and I’ve left her out in the cold holding two toddlers.
I spring toward the door, ushering her inside. As soon as the door is closed behind her, she squats and sets her girls down, but they each grab onto one of her legs.
“They’re getting way too big to carry both of them,” she says with a sigh. There are about ten granite steps between the sidewalk and our brownstone that I know she had to carry them up. “And I wasn’t sure what to do with the stroller, so right now it’s sitting at the bottom of your front steps.”
“I’ll grab it and bring it in,” I tell her. As I step toward the door, I catch her scent, some combination of citrus and vanilla, and it brings back so many memories that I almost recoil.
“Hey,” she says, turning her head toward me and keeping her voice low.
She’s close enough that her warm breath moves across my cheek.
“I hope it’s okay that I’m here? When Jules invited me over, I was about to lose my mind with the isolation of being home alone with my girls, who were going stir-crazy in Paige’s apartment.
But I didn’t mean to intrude on your personal space either. ”
“It’s fine, Lauren.” And because I apparently have no concern for my own emotional well-being, I add, “You’re always welcome here.”
The smile she gives me is the first genuine one I’ve seen from her since Josh died, and it cracks some of the walls I’ve put up around my heart. She looks like herself when she smiles like that. Hopeful and determined, instead of defeated.
I hurry down the steps because it’s cold as balls out there today, collapse her stroller, and carry it back up. Everyone’s in the entryway when I step back inside, and Lauren laughs and says, “I wasn’t expecting you to know how to fold that thing up.”
“Oh yeah,” Audrey says. “Jameson’s well trained. Diapers, bottles, strollers . . . he’s done it all with Graham.”
“Hmm,” she says, a small smile playing on her lips, and I can imagine why: she’s only really ever seen me in work mode.
I’m a serious guy by nature, competitive and demanding of myself and others.
And when we worked together, I was at the tail end of raising two teenage girls.
Work was what allowed me to keep our family home, save my dad’s construction company, and put them both through college.
I pushed myself as hard as I possibly could to be successful, knowing that if I wasn’t, our family would fall apart.
In the early years of my career as an agent, I built on every relationship I had from my days in the NHL, bringing some of my former teammates over to my agency and recruiting new talent more easily because I knew exactly what types of players each team needed and how to negotiate with them to fill those gaps with the right person.
There was no time for fun back then, only winning.
The drive and determination that helped me succeed in agenting may have had me seeming demanding or even cruel sometimes.
I may have stepped on some toes and come across as ruthless, but that’s what it took to get me to where I am now—my family intact and closer than ever, my sisters both happy and successful, and my own thriving sports agency.
But Lauren has only seen one side of me and has no idea who I really am or what truly matters to me. Most people don’t. So the question really is: am I ready to show her?
“I’m going to go up and change,” I say, nodding toward the stairs. “I’ll be right back.”
Because even though my original inclination was to escape to the solace of my place upstairs so I wouldn’t be here when she arrived, I find that now that she’s here, I want to spend more time with her, even if it means putting up with my sisters and their judgy observations all night.
When I return, everyone’s already seated at the large farmhouse table that takes up the middle of our kitchen. Jules has roasted chickens, baked risotto, green beans, and roasted butternut squash laid out along the center of the table.
“Grab some margarita glasses while you’re up?” Jules asks as I come in.
I take four off the open shelving along the wall and bring them over. “It’s been a margarita kind of day?”
“Yeah. I swear that project in Wellesley is going to kill me. I’ll be amazed if the couple gets through this build without getting divorced.”
“Didn’t they just get married last year?” Audrey asks.
“Yeah, and the stress of building their dream home is really getting to them. Nothing but bickering about every last detail, and every price point. Her tastes are too extravagant for their budget, and his sense of what things actually cost is deranged. It’s been real fun,” Jules says as she takes one of the drink pitchers and fills her glass to the brim.
I hand Audrey her glass, then take my seat across from Lauren and hand her the last glass. I’ve changed into jeans and a short-sleeve T-shirt, and I don’t miss the way her eyes linger on the tattoos along my arms as I reach across the table.
“Jules puts the salt in the margarita, instead of on the rim of the glass. So, if you don’t like salt, I can make you something else.”
“I’m sure I’ll love it,” she says, reaching across the table and taking the glass carefully, like she’s trying not to touch my hand.