Stealing Home

by Harlow Cole

  People think an athlete’s ego comes from success. But it’s the other way around. Success is fueled by the ego, by the inability to believe you’ll be anything but great. Every professional ballplayer has two sources of protection. The piece of plastic cupping his balls and the massive ego cutting off the nerves from his brain.

  I couldn’t get the latter to snap back into place. The only thing more screwed than my elbow was the space between my ears. I couldn’t stop myself from wondering how long it would take to tell if I’d be back to the old me or back to being totally fucked.

  Taking care of things with Ashley served as a perfect distraction.

  Giving her space, gave me too much room to think.

  It didn’t help that Micky kept calling to rattle my chain.

  “You’re killin’ me here, kid. All this free time you’ve got, I could’ve retired on these endorsement royalties. I’m turning stuff down left and right. That hometown pussy must be pretty damn sweet to keep you away from the bright lights and all this easy money.”

  “Mick. Man, cut the crap. You have no idea.”

  “Fuck, kiddo, of course I do. Went through the same damn thing with your old man. I’ve seen this shit a thousand times; I’m old enough to be your great-grandpa. But let’s not mess with business, eh? Dip into the honeypot, and then get your ass back to work. Capisce?” He paused and then added, “How ugly is this girl? Can’t ya bring her with you? I’ll add to our list of prerequisites, space on the carpet for arm candy.”

  “Mick?”

  “Yeah, kid?”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. You think I got us all this rich by being nice?”

  I hung up on him and almost didn’t answer when he called again the following day.

  Well, truthfully, I didn’t answer. Then, he sent me a shouty text.

  GOT NEWS ABOUT YOUR SWEET CHEEKS. ANSWER YOUR FUCKING PHONE.

  “Your girl’s in.”

  “What?”

  “The hoity-toity snowflakes running that magazine love her. They want a full shoot. They’re booking space. Need to know your short list of possible dates. Looks like you have to come back home after all.”

  “I am home, Mick. This is home.”

  “Whatever, kid. Quit giving me heartburn. You can’t hide down there in la-la land forever. Time to get to work. Get your chickadee on a plane. Buy her a hot dress. I’m tryin’ to line this up with the Loweman brothers’ big opening. Your ugly mug needs to be there. People in this town got short memories. You don’t remind ’em who the fuck you are, they’ll start throwing their dead presidents somewhere else.”

  “Get it lined up. Call me back with the details.”

  “Josie! Josie!” There was a commotion in the background as he called out for his long-time assistant without covering the phone. “Get on the horn to those pansy-assed magazine people. Tell them to get their shit together, stat. The boy wonder’s coming back to Gotham.” He chuckled in my ear. “You just made that old hag’s day, kid. We’ll be in touch.”

  I hung up and dialed back the need to rush right over and convince Ashley this was good news. I didn’t want to pile too much on her all at once. Hitting her with meeting Jess would be overload enough.

  On a good day, Jessica made Joey look normal.

  We’d entered the part of my master plan where things got sorta fuzzy around the edges, where I had to start making things up as we went along.

  I’d invite Ash to dinner. Let them get to know one another.

  Then, I’d spring the idea of a trip to New York.

  * * *

  Ashley

  Brayden had been avoiding me all week. Like a tease, he was playing an old-fashioned game of cat and mouse. I refused to fall into the trap.

  He’d texted me the dinner invite.

  I’d only agreed to go because he said Matt would be there. They wanted to talk about how to coax my brother into treatment. Matt could lay out new options and delve into the idea of alternative therapies.

  It was a business dinner. Plain and simple.

  I hated to admit, I sort of wanted the company. Joey had spent the week gallivanting at the beach with Conner, Logan had taken a crew out for a three-day cruise, and my brother still flat-out refused to speak to me.

  Early in the week, Nathan had called and canceled a doctor’s appointment purely to avoid the car ride with me. His only form of communication had come via the printed articles and pictures he kept leaving on the kitchen counter. He must’ve thought the old gossip clips about Brayden and other women would silently drive home his point.

  My brother had wicked skills with twisted knives.

  I’d tried to toss them in the trash without looking.

  For Brayden’s not-a-date dinner, I dressed the opposite of all the flashy women in those pictures. I wore white capris and a prim yellow top. Conservative. Classy.

  We’d sit across the table, eat all our vegetables, and act like adults.

  It was one of those rare East Coast summer evenings without shirt-wringing humidity, so I walked over along the path past the old boathouse. The fresh paint was an exact match to the original, but it made the whole place look brand-new.

  Walking by it didn’t hurt as much anymore.

  For the first time in years, the main house seemed alive. It glowed from one window to the next. Bubbly pop music streamed out of the kitchen door. I paused on the threshold to dream up the million ways I was going to poke fun at him for having it on.

  I threw the door open with a little more force than normal, imagining I would catch him in the act of shaking his ass to the mechanical beat.

  Confusion and alarm broke over me like a wave.

  My instinct to dive lay as frozen as my mouth, which hung wide open.

  She stood near the stove, stirring something in a big pot. Her hips swayed back and forth as her head bobbed to the beat of the music. When the chorus began, she started singing along in a high-pitched voice that threatened to break glass. Her slender arms stretched into the air, and she jumped up and down like she’d just melted into the crowd at a packed club.

  Blood pumped in my ears as the scene before me morphed with another night when I’d opened a door in this house to the shock of my life.

  I must’ve gasped. Or knocked into something, because she turned suddenly, her face registering the same surprise.

  She was beautiful in that maddening, no-makeup sort of way. Her coloring was the complete opposite of me. She had soft blond hair that hung in a long ponytail down her back, ice-blue eyes that barely looked real, and porcelain skin unblemished by a single freckle. She wore a weird little headband covered in plastic daisies and a white mesh half-shirt that barely covered her tiny string bikini. It showcased a body blessed by perfect DNA or a calorie-free diet of organic tree bark and grass.

  She was breathtaking, one of those girls other women smiled at sweetly but instantly hated on sight.

  I recognized her, of course. We’d met before. One night in this very kitchen at two a.m.

  I’d stuffed away the image of her face, rebuffing the notion that I could be the other woman, and refusing to ponder the question I now heard myself ask.

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, shit,” she muttered. In startled haste, she put her hand against the side of the pot, scorching that perfect skin. “Fuck me!” she cried out, crossing to the kitchen sink to run it under the faucet.

  Fight and flight battled with one another.

  I don’t want to know.

  I really don’t want to know.

  Panicked, I turned on my heel and started back through the door. I was halfway back down the side path when I heard her shouting, “Brayden! Fuck a duck. Brayden! Where are you? She’s early. She’s here. Do something!”

  I didn’t turn around. I quickened my pace, even as I heard the thwack of the screen door slamming shut and footsteps closing in fast behind me. I’d just decided to break into a run when
arms wrapped around my waist.

  It took me a second to realize my feet were no longer on the ground. We were still moving forward, but in one swift motion, I was in the air and thrown over his shoulder.

  “Put me down.” I kicked back and forth, swimming in his hold.

  “No.”

  “Put me down, goddamn it.”

  “No. Not until you listen to me.”

  He swatted my ass when I didn’t stop kicking. It stung. Pretty bad.

  “That hurt, asshole.”

  “It got your attention. Keep kicking me, and I’ll do it again.”

  I quieted down. He carried me toward the back patio.

  Standing in front of a lounger, he asked, “If I put you down, are you gonna stay put and stay quiet, so I can explain some shit to you?”

  “Depends. If I run, are you gonna chase me?”

  “Damn straight. I can run a sub five forty. Wanna test me?”

  I grumbled some incoherent stuff and then finally said, “Put me down.”

  He unceremoniously dumped me onto the lounge chair and then squatted down in front of me in a catcher’s stance.

  “There’s some stuff I haven’t totally filled you in on. Stuff I didn’t think you needed to know till now.”

  “If you remember, I asked if you had a girlfriend, asshole.”

  “I’ve had one real girlfriend in my life. She’s a sassy-mouthed little wench who kicks really hard.”

  “Well, maybe I should’ve clarified. I meant, fuck buddies, too. We both know you’ve got a lifelong list of them.”

  He snorted and licked his lips, impossibly fighting that stupid little smile. “Jess isn’t a fuck buddy, Ash.”

  The side of his fist lightly tapped the top of my knee. He paused, looking up at me until I returned his gaze.

  “She’s my little sister.”

  17

  Dominoes

  Ashley

  Brayden’s eyes stared back at me.

  Looking into them felt completely surreal.

  Framed by blond curls, they were filled with the compassion of a woman who’d lived through hard times and the wisdom of one who’d come out on the other side.

  Watching her walk through the kitchen door had registered as twice the shock. She was nearly the mirror image of her daughter.

  She had a bombshell figure, glossy hair, and porcelain skin. Her light features made those clear blue eyes stand out even more. Brayden had once described them to me as the eyes of a whore, the piece she’d left behind with him. Staring back at them now felt so strangely familiar.

  Her mouth quirked up into a timid half-smile that struck me hard with another strange sense of déjà vu.

  I’d seen that smile my whole life.

  She’d shared more than just her eyes.

  “Brayden’s told us so much about you. We feel like we already know you.” Her sweet, homespun accent had the cuddle-up feeling of soup and biscuits on Sunday.

  I wanted to sit a spell, rock beside her, and just listen to the way her mouth made words sound so different. It reminded me a whole lot of the way my Brayden used to turn on a little Texas when he wanted to get his way.

  “You have to forgive Jess for being so exuberant. She’s been dyin’ to meet you.”

  Jessica had attacked us as soon as we walked back through the door, apologizing a million times for surprising me. She’d tightly hugged me, like a teddy bear misplaced and then rediscovered. After Brayden pried her off me, she’d jumped up and down and clapped her hands.

  “I can’t believe she’s finally here!” she’d said while throwing her arms around him in the same teddy bear hold.

  He’d laughed and whispered something in her ear that made her stand down. After kissing him on the cheek, she’d given me a half-wave, and taken off up the back stairs.

  Now, I gazed out across the pool toward the guesthouse where Brayden had wandered after his second introduction stole my breath.

  He’d wanted to give me this time alone.

  With his mother.

  “I’m so sorry about your mom. I lost my father to cancer three years ago. I know how terrible it is to watch someone you love go through that hell.”

  I nodded my head, unsure of what to say.

  “I wish I’d had the chance to meet her. I owe her a great deal.”

  “My mother?” I asked, my voice laced with wonder, my hand pressing to my chest.

  She gazed out across the lawn to the sloping hill that reached down toward the water’s edge. “She helped raise Brayden. The stories he tells of her . . . he loved her deeply. She sounds like an amazing woman. Movin’ y’all here like she did. Startin’ a business. She must’ve been very brave.”

  “She was, I guess. I never thought of it that way. She was incredibly brave in the end.” I swallowed.

  “Bravery is a quality I greatly admire. I didn’t have a lot of it as a young girl.” Her voice filled with regret. “I’m not proud of who I was back then, back when I was just a little younger than you are now.”

  Her hand smoothed down over her long blond hair as she considered her words. “I grew up in a tiny town in Texas that few folks ever leave. I was desperate to get out. I was suffocatin’ there. I wanted to go to college so badly. But my daddy was a cattle rancher, and my mama taught preschool. We didn’t have the money.”

  She sighed softly. “You have to understand, in Texas, football players are royalty from the time they’re little kids, barely big enough to wear shoulder pads. So, when a friend told me she could get us behind security at a Cowboys game, it sounded like the perfect chance to rope myself a prince. We hitchhiked our way there and back.”

  She paused and looked out toward the water for a few more minutes, letting me digest an angle of the story I’d never even considered. I’d spent so many years feeling angry with the very idea of her that I never considered the reasons for her actions.

  “I was young and stupid, and Jackson Ross was high on life when I met him. That’s a bad combination. I convinced myself he’d come for me with a glass slipper in hand, ready to whisk me off. In the fairy tales, the prince is never totally in love with someone else.” She smiled sadly.

  “When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t know what to do. My folks sent me to live with an aunt in Mississippi until Brayden was born, so no one in town would know. I was so lonely and scared.” Her voice quivered, weighted down by the kind of pain that time never dulls. She patted her fingertips across the corner of one eye.

  “I felt bad when his girlfriend answered the door. I didn’t mean to ruin his life. But there was nothing I could do to take it back. I had nothing to give my baby, but his daddy was a king. His face was all over the TV every Sunday. A spitting image of my little boy. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  Her watery eyes forced me to reach out my hand. To somehow share her pain. My fingers loosely grasped her own. She squeezed them tight before letting them go and smiling a little brighter.

  “From the outside looking in, I went on without my son. But there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think of him and wonder what could’ve been.”

  I tried to picture her as a younger version. I’d spent so many years with conjured images of the locker-room whore with teased hair and a short, tight skirt. But this woman had a gentleness about her. She had a calm voice and soft creases near the corners of her eyes. She wore a long cotton skirt and a flowery peasant top that gathered all the way up to her collarbone. A small gold cross hung around her neck.

  Nothing about her fit my childhood assumptions.

  “Ashley, I owe your mother for more than the years she helped raise Brayden. I owe her for giving me back my son.”

  My head jerked back to look at her, curious.

  “Brayden coming to find me was her idea.”

  Realization slowly washed across my face. “She told him to start back at the beginning. She wanted him to find you.”

  She nodded.

  “If your mother hadn�
�t been ill, if she hadn’t sent for him and instructed him to heal his past—from the very beginning without shortcuts—I wouldn’t be here. My family wouldn’t be complete.”

  “Everything happens for a reason. Even the shitty stuff,” I murmured, looking up at the sky. I hoped my mother’s haunting abilities stretched this far, that she knew this wish came true. “If you can’t find one, make your own silver lining.”

  She’d made one. As my mother lost her battle to watch her kids grow, she passed that chance to a woman who’d lost her son.

  “Yes. Goodness, when I was your age, I would’ve thought that was a real sack of horseshit.” She chuckled.

  Even her curses sounded sweet.

  “But years and hindsight have a way of proving it ain’t. And the funny thing is, as I’ve gotten to know my son, I’ve come to realize I wasn’t just a domino that led toward his mistakes. I was also a domino that led him toward things he loves. If I hadn’t left my baby in the arms of a man who didn’t love me, he never would have ended up here, in this sweet town. He never would’ve gone to that library and found his silver lining—he never would have met you. So, yeah, I don’t believe it’s just malarkey. ’Cause, darlin’, when I see the look in my son’s eyes, every time he says your name, all I see is reason.”

  I sat quietly, picking at the hem of my capris, trying to digest everything she’d told me. Her words had lifted the veil on the stickiness of life. Situations that seemed so simple as a child had turned out to be a whole lot more complex.

  Storybooks teach us to see heroes and villains.

  Real life doesn’t cut people so plainly.

  She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, chasing away the cool dampness of the summer night air. I sat beside her, numbly still, chasing away the monstrous image of her I’d held on to for so long. She was imperfect and flawed. She had regrets.

  Damn if I couldn’t relate to that.

  “I’m sorry I grew up hating you.” I’d meant to apply a filter before the words tumbled out, but my mouth had moved ahead of my brain.