Chapter 4
FOUR
Get your shit together. You stress me the fuck out.
—Me to Me
BEAU
Eight months later
The deadline was fast approaching, and I wondered if I should just throw in the towel and admit defeat.
Eight months ago, my father had come to me with a proposal: Make the Montana Cowgirls profitable again, and he’d never ask me to deal with his precious teams again.
More importantly, he wouldn’t force Lysander into helping, either.
He would find a suitable replacement for us and ultimately sell the teams.
I hadn’t exactly wanted to run the Montana Cowgirls.
I’d wanted to continue my work as a science teacher at Jesper County Schools, continue my volunteer work as a firefighter, and live my life the way I wanted to live it.
I’d lived, breathed, and slept those teams. Every major holiday, we were at the stadium. Every important birthday, milestone, or even personal achievement day, there we were.
We’d missed every important dance at school, including prom.
We’d missed parties.
I’d missed my graduation—from both high school and college.
Lysander had missed both of his as well.
The one single graduation Sonja had—elementary—we’d missed that, too.
Hell, three days after her funeral, we were back at that fucking stadium.
To say that I hated the place would be an understatement.
Then, he’d gone and acquired the Cowgirls.
On one hand, my father purchasing the Cowgirls had come from a good place deep inside his heart.
He’d taken her joking “buy the Cowgirls” and run with it.
Meanwhile, Sonja had felt the same way that Lysander and I had.
We’d been mentally and physically exhausted, traveling back and forth between our home in Montana and the stadium in Wyoming once a freakin’ week—because it wouldn’t do to not present a united front family-wise.
Sonja had jokingly said it to our dad because she’d thought life couldn’t get any busier.
Why not add one more team to our already busy life?
Except, my dad had said the magic words.
If you don’t do it, I’ll let your sister keep the Cowgirls.
And that was something that I could never let happen.
My dad lived and breathed football.
He’d played professionally for several years, which was how he’d met my mother, who also happened to work for the same organization when he’d purchased the Condors.
The two of them had moved to Montana, and after Sonja’s passing, they’d sunk every single cent of their savings into buying the Montana Cowgirls.
My parents had four children—Lysander, Seraphina, Sonja, and myself.
As the middle child, I’d always hung at the back of the party, observing and doing the exact opposite of my oldest sister, Seraphina.
Seraphina was everything that I wasn’t.
She knew how to be the billionaire. She went to the parties and wore the fancy clothes. She spent the money, swooned at appropriate times, laughed at jokes that weren’t funny just to appease, and ultimately knew how to live rich.
Meanwhile, I’d figured out young that I didn’t want to have anything to do with the parties or the money grabs. I just wanted to live a quiet, simple life.
I’d joined the Marines at eighteen—much to my parents’ dismay. Spent twenty years there doing what I loved, then retired to become a science teacher who loved that job just as much as his first one.
Lysander, the baby of the group, had just been along for the ride.
He worked at the hospital in town as a radiologist.
He was somewhere in between my live simply lifestyle and my sister’s high life only one.
My sister was a snob who hated anyone who didn’t have money, looked down on you if you worked somewhere she didn’t deem “acceptable” and treated everyone like her servant.
And our parents just let it happen because Seraphina was their child. And their children were their everything.
I couldn’t pinpoint a time when I realized that I didn’t like my sister very much, but one day I’d come into the kitchen and realized that it’d been a really long time since I looked at her like a sister. Someone that I loved.
Honestly, on a good day, I could barely tolerate her.
She was every stereotype you could conjure up when thinking of a stuck-up rich asshole.
I’d felt like that about her since I was old enough to understand, and it’d only gotten worse after she’d killed Sonja in a drunk driving accident. Then gotten off with not even a slap on the wrist.
So, when my father had told me that Serphina was running their beloved company into the ground, I’d reluctantly agreed to turn it around and make it profitable again. When the season was up, he agreed to sell it.
With one caveat—Serphina wasn’t allowed anywhere near me or the Cowgirls.
She couldn’t have any part in any business decisions. She couldn’t show up at the field. She couldn’t even call me.
The most contact I wanted with her was at family dinner on Christmas.
She had to stay so far out of my field of view that I didn’t have to think about her.
Mom and Dad had somehow managed to make her stay away.
For seven and a half months, I’d been running the Cowgirls professional soccer team.
But my sister had really done a number on the team.
She’d embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars, fired anyone who was worth a damn, gotten rid of quality players, and destroyed the team dynamic so thoroughly that the players that we’d managed to keep on had hated each other.
I still had too much work to do, though.
Not even the two star soccer players, Magnolia Baker and Nettie Windsor, could perform miracles and pull us out of our hole.
I’d even managed to score Eddie Grant as the head coach.
Things had truly been looking up.
But my wait time was over.
My sister was allowed to come back in two weeks, and she would likely destroy all of the progress we’d made.
I hated that my father had conditions when I took this particular job.
He’d said he would give me eight months—one whole soccer season—before he let Serphina come back in in the vice president capacity.
If I managed to win the NWSL—National Women’s Soccer League—championship, Dad would finally sell.
But we’d taken too long to find our mojo.
In the beginning, we were battling uphill, trying to piece our team back together.
When we finally did—a lot of thanks to Magnolia for her effort—it was just too late.
Which meant my sister was about to be back in my life, unless we performed some miracle in the next few games.
Though that likely wouldn’t happen. We would need the first-place team to lose both of its last two games. We’d need to win our last two with shutouts. Something so highly unlikely that I wasn’t holding out hope.
The only good thing about all of this was that I got to spend time with Magnolia on a daily basis.
Though we’d mutually agreed that we couldn’t have anything more together than what we’d shared, that didn’t stop me from wanting her. From craving her touch.
It was plain torture to see her out on the field every day. It was even worse to see her in the training room, soaking wet from an ice bath. Or lying flat on the massage table while a masseuse worked kinks out of her tired muscles.
“Are you even listening to me?”
I snapped back to attention, only now realizing that I’d been staring so hard at Magnolia in the ice bath across the room from me that people were starting to notice.
I looked over at Eddie and grinned. “Sort of.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re just as bad as Weaver.”
Weaver, her husband, and a fellow member of the Dixie Wardens MC, was one of my good friends. Eddie had her husband wrapped around her little finger, and without a doubt always would.
“I’m being a sad sack,” I admitted. “I’m pissed as hell that we didn’t win.
By a stupid ref mistake, which likely pulled us out of the running to get to the playoffs.
I’m also pissed that in two weeks, my sister will be back, and she’ll drag this place into hell again.
I’m also mad that I put all this work into this facility, and all she’s going to do is come back and fuck it up. ”
“We haven’t lost…”
My brows rose. “We’re going to.”
She shrugged. “There’s still a chance.”
Ice water sloshed, and I forced myself not to look across the room and watch Magnolia get out of the ice bath half-clothed.
Today was a short practice, as it typically was on days following games. After the short practices that they generally used to work out their muscle soreness, they saw the necessary support staff for any aches, pains, or the like. Then they watched film.
They were due to watch film with Eddie in the next thirty minutes.
“There might be,” I agreed. “But it’d have to be some miracle beyond miracles.”
She patted my hand. “No matter what, you’re done after this.”
“Done?”
I looked over at Nettie, Eddie’s sister, and our star forward who’d played fantastically yesterday.
You’d never know that she had a baby just a few months ago.
She looked strong and healthy, badass and so damn fierce that I was in awe of her sometimes.
I was also jealous as hell of her and Boone’s relationship.
At forty-two, I was more than ready to settle down.
I wanted the kids, the house, the perfect life that everyone always dreamed of.
For twenty years while I was in the military, I’d seen all my buddies pair off right and left. Some of their relationships lasted. Some didn’t.
But the ones that didn’t had caused me to be very cautious about marrying until I could fully be at home where they didn’t have to worry about me twenty-four-seven.
But when I came home, I’d gotten caught up in life.
And it’d just never happened to me.
Maybe I was destined to be forever alone? I didn’t know.
What I did know was that it made my heart ache to see Boone and Nettie together, living the life that I wanted to live.
Though if anyone deserved that life, it was them.
They’d had an uphill battle to fight since the day that they met, thanks to Boone’s mother.
“Could I get you to do me a favor?”
I focused back in on Nettie. “Sure.”
“Could you take Margie out to meet Boone? He was able to get off work early, and he wants to spend some time with her.”