by Jill Shalvis
“He’s coming home with me tonight for dinner. I’ve got steak.”
“Steak?” Pru repeated, realizing she was starving. “But after our games, you usually make hotdogs.”
Jake shrugged. “It’s steak tonight. I’ve got enough for you to join, if it’s okay with Thor.”
Thor tipped his head back like a coyote and gave one sharp “yip!”
Pru spent a few seconds weighing a steak dinner cooked for her versus watching Finn in those sexy butt-hugging, relaxed-fit Levi’s of his for a little bit longer. It was a tough decision, but in the end, she took the jeans. “No, thanks.”
Jake just gave her a knowing head shake and rolled off.
“Did you just almost trade me in for a steak dinner?” Finn asked.
Pretending she hadn’t heard that question, she started walking, but he stopped her.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We lose all the time.”
“I meant because you used your face as a slip-n-slide on that last play.” Earlier, when she’d convinced him to come play, he’d gone inside his house for a duffle bag, from which he’d pulled out his mitt earlier. Now he pulled out a towel and gingerly dabbed it against her chin.
“Ow!” she said.
“But you’re fine, right?” he asked dryly.
She removed the towel from her chin, saw some blood and with a sigh put the towel back to her face.
Finn took her bag from her shoulder and transferred it to his, where it hung with his own. “I’ll get an Uber.”
“I don’t need a ride.” She started walking, and after a beat he kept pace with her. She worked on distracting herself. The temperature was a perfect seventy-five-ish. The sun had dipped low, leaving a golden glow tipped with orange flame in the west, the rest of the sky awash in mingled shades of blue.
“So what was that about?” Finn asked after a few minutes of silence.
“Nothing. Like I said, sometimes we lose, that’s all.” Or, you know, always.
“I mean the look Jake gave you.”
“Nothing,” she repeated.
“Didn’t seem like nothing.”
“He’s got a condition,” she said, huffing up the hill. Damn. Why had she said no to getting an Uber again? “You’ve got to ignore most of his looks.”
“Uh huh,” Finn said. “What kind of condition?”
“A can’t-mind-his-own-business condition.” Her aches and pains were burgeoning, blooming as they moved. It was taking most of her concentration to not whimper with each step.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.
“One hundred percent.”
He gave her a once-over, his dark gaze taking in the holes in her knees, and she amended. “Okay, ninety percent,” she said and then paused. “Ten at the worst,” she amended.
Finn stopped and pulled out his phone.
“We’re over halfway there,” she argued. “I’m not giving up now.”
“Just out of curiosity—do you ever give up?”
She had to laugh. “No,” she admitted.
He shook his head, but he didn’t ask if she was sure, or try to tell her she wasn’t fine. Clearly he was going off the assumption she was an adult.
Little did he know . . .
“Sean plays baseball too,” Finn said out of the blue a few minutes later. “He sucks. Sucks bad.”
“Yeah?” she asked. “As my team?”
“Well, let’s not go overboard.”
She took a mock swing at him and he ducked with a laugh. “In high school, he made it onto his freshman team,” he said. “But only because they didn’t have enough guys to cut anyone. The painful part was making sure he kept his grades high enough.”
Pru hadn’t actually given a lot of thought to the day-to-day reality that a twenty-one-year-old Finn would have faced having to get a teenage Sean through high school. There would’ve been homework to do, dinners to prepare, food shopping needed, a million tiny things that parents would have handled.
But Finn had been left to handle all of it on his own.
Her stomach tightened painfully at all he’d been through, but he was over there smiling a little bit, remembering. “That year half of the JV and Varsity teams got the flu,” he said, “and Sean got called up to the semifinals. He sat on the bench most of the game, but at the bottom of the eighth he had to play first base because our guy started puking his guts up.”
“How did he do?”
Finn smiled, lost in the memory. “He allowed a hit to get by him with bases loaded.”
Pru winced. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. Coach went out there and told him if another hit got by him, he’d string him up by his balls from the flagpole.”
Pru gasped. “He did not!”
“He did,” Finn said. “So of course, the next hit came straight for Sean’s knees, a low, fast hit.”
“Did it get by him?”
“He dove for it, did a full body slide on his chin while he was at it.” Finn gave her a sideways smile. “But he got the damn ball.”
“Did he get road rash too?” Pru asked, starting to get the reason for story time.
“Left more skin on that field than you did.” Finn grinned and shook his head. “He came through though. Somehow, he usually does.”
She loved that the two of them had stuck together after all they’d been through. She didn’t know anything of their mom, other than she’d not been in the picture for a long time. Whatever she knew about the O’Rileys was what she’d been able to piece together thanks to the Internet. She’d done her best to keep up by occasionally Googling everyone who’d been affected by her parents’ accident—needing to make sure they were all doing okay. When she’d discovered that Finn had opened O’Riley’s only a mile or so from where she was living and working, she hadn’t been able to resist getting involved.
And now here he was, a part of her life. An important part, and at the thought she got a pain in her heart, an actual pain, because she knew this was all short-lived. She had to tell him the truth eventually. She also knew that as soon as she did, he wouldn’t be a part of her life anymore.
“Tonight brought back a lot of memories,” he said, something in his voice that had her looking at him.
Regret.
Grief.
“You miss baseball,” she said softly.
He lifted a shoulder. “Didn’t think so, but yeah, I do.”
“Is that why you didn’t want to come tonight?”
“I didn’t think I was ready, even for softball.” He shook his head. “I haven’t played since my dad died.”
“I’m so sorry.” She sucked in a breath, knowing she couldn’t let him tell her the story without her telling him some things first. “Finn—”
“At the time, Sean was still a minor. He’d have gone into the system, so I came home.”
The familiar guilt stabbed at her, tearing off little chunks of her heart and soul. “What about your mom?”
He shrugged. “She took off when we were young. Haven’t heard from her since.”
Pru had to take a long beat to just breathe. “Sean was lucky to have you,” she finally said. “So lucky. I hate that you had to give up college—”
“I actually hated school,” he said on a low laugh. “But I really, really didn’t want to go home. Home was full of shit memories.”
Feeling land-locked by her misery, she had to run that through twice. “Finn, I—” She stopped. Stared at him. “What?”
He was eyeing a deli across the street. “You hungry?”
“I . . . a little.”
“You ever eat anything from there? They make the most amazing steak sandwiches.” He slid her a look. “Don’t want you to miss out on steak on my account.” He guided her inside where he ordered for them both.
Which was for the best because she couldn’t think.
His memories of home were shit? What did that mean?
Finn paid and they continued walking.
He was quiet, keeping an eye on her. But she didn’t want quiet. “What do you mean home was full of shit memories?”
He took a moment to answer. “You grow up with siblings?” he asked. “Both parents?”
“No siblings but both parents,” she said, and held her breath. “Until they died when I was nineteen.”
He didn’t make the connection, and why would he? Only a crazy person would guess that the two accidents—his dad’s and her parents—were the same one.
“That sucks,” he said. “Sucks bad.”
It did, but she didn’t deserve his sympathy. “Before that, it was a good life,” she said. “Just the three of us.”
“Well, trust me when I say, Sean and I didn’t get the same experience.”
His body language was loose and easy, relaxed as he walked. But though she couldn’t see his eyes behind his dark sunglasses, she sensed there was nothing loose and easy in them. “Your dad wasn’t a nice guy?”
“He was an asshole,” he said. “I’m sorry he’s dead, but neither I nor Sean was sorry to have to finish raising ourselves without him.”
She stared at him in profile as she tried to put her thoughts together, but they’d just scattered like tumbleweeds in the wind. All this time she’d pictured his dad as . . . well, the perfect dad. The perfect dad who her dad had taken from him and Sean. She let out a shuddering breath of air, not sure how to feel.
“Hey.” Finn stopped her with a hand to her arm and pulled her around to face him, pulling off his sunglasses, shoving them to the top of his head to get a better look at her. “You don’t look so good. Your cuts and bruises, or too much sun?” he asked, gently pushing her hair from her face and pressing his palm to her forehead. “You’re pale all of a sudden.”
She shook her head and swallowed the lump of emotion in her throat. He’d hate her sympathy so she managed a smile. “I’m okay.”
He didn’t look like he believed her, proven when he switched the deli bag to his other hand and with his free one, grabbed hers in a firm grip. They were only a block from their building at this point, but before they could take another step, Finn stilled and laughed.
Pru looked up to see Spence coming toward them.
Tall and leanly muscled, with sun-kissed wavy hair that matched his smiling light brown eyes, he was definitely eye candy. He wore cargo shorts and an untucked button-down, sleeves shoved up his forearms. He was a genuinely sexy guy, not that he seemed to realize it.
He was walking two golden retrievers and a cat, all three on leashes advertising South Bark Mutt Shop, striding calm-as-you-please at Spence’s side.
Spence himself was calm as well, and completely oblivious to the two women craning their necks to stare at his ass as he passed them. He was too busy flipping Finn off for laughing at him.
“I didn’t realize you worked for Willa,” Pru said. Or that one could actually walk a cat . . .
“He doesn’t exactly . . .” Finn said.
Spence didn’t add anything to this as Finn looked at him. “You’re walking a cat. They’re going to take away your man card.”
“Tell that to the owner of the cat,” Spence said. “She asked me out for tonight.”
“So now you’re using these helpless animals to get laid?”
“Hell yes,” Spence said. “And yuk it up now because later I’m going to let Professor PuddinPop here anoint your shoes. Fair warning, he had tuna for lunch and it’s not agreeing with him.”
“No cats allowed in the pub,” Finn said.
“Professor PuddinPop is the smaller retriever,” Spence said. “His brother Colonel Snazzypants is a specialist in evacuating his bowels over a wide area. Watch yourself. You’ve been warned.”
“What’s the cat’s name?” Pru asked.
“Good King Snugglewumps,” Spence said with a straight face. “He’s actually an emotional support cat, which you look like you could use right now. What the hell happened to you?”
“I slid trying to catch a ball at my softball game,” she said.
“With your pretty face?”
“No, that was collateral damage. But I did catch the ball.”
“Nice job,” he said with a smile and a high-five.
Finn had crouched down low to interact with the animals. The cat was perched on his bent leg, rubbing against him, and both dogs had slid to their backs so he could scratch their bellies.
“The Animal Whisperer,” Spence said. “They always gravitate to him.” He shook his head at Good King Snugglewumps. “Man ’ho.”
Good King Snugglewumps pretended not to hear him.
Finn grinned. “I’m the Animal Whisperer, and Pru here is the Fun Whisperer.”
Spence turned to Pru. “How’s that going? He learning to have fun yet?”
“He’s not much for cooperating.”
“No shit.” He looked at Finn. “Keep your shoes on, that’s all I’m saying.”
And then he strode off, two dogs and a cat in tow.
Finn pulled out his phone and snapped a pic of Spence from behind.
Spence, without looking back, flipped him off again.
Still grinning, Finn shoved his phone back into his pocket and reached for Pru’s hand. “Let’s get you home.”
Good idea. In just the minute that they’d stopped to talk, she’d gone stiff, but did her best to hide it. They entered the courtyard and she glanced at the fountain, which, she couldn’t help but notice, had not been very busy fulfilling her wish for love for Finn. She sagged behind him just enough that she could point at the fountain and then at her eyes, putting it on notice that she was watching it.
The fountain didn’t respond.
But apparently Finn had eyes in the back of his head because he laughed. “Babe, you just gave that thing a look that said you’d like to barbeque it and feed it in pieces to your mortal enemy.”
She would. She absolutely would. Hoping for a subject change, she waved at Old Guy, sitting on a bench.
“Eddie,” Finn said with a male greeting of a chin jut. “You look better than the other night.”
Eddie nodded. “Yeah, it was either a twenty-four-hour flu thing or food poisoning,” he said.
“You could stop eating everything everyone gives you,” Finn suggested.
“No way! I get good shit, man. Cutie Pie here gives really good doggy bags. Chicken wings, pizza . . .” He looked at Pru. “You know what we haven’t had lately? Sushi—” He broke off, narrowing his eyes. “What happened to you, darlin’? This guy get tough with you? If so, just say the word and I’ll level him flat.”
Eddie was maybe ninety-five pounds soaking wet and looked like a good wind could blow him over. Finn had at least six inches on him and God knew how many pounds of lean, tough muscle, not to mention a way of carrying all that lean, tough muscle that said he knew exactly what to do with it.
Pru caught him looking at her with a raised brow, like are you really going to say the word?
“I roughed myself up,” she admitted. “Softball.” She started to reach into her pocket for a few dollar bills to give Eddie but Finn put a hand on her arm to stop her. With his other hand he fished something out of his duffel bag.
The third sandwich he’d bought at the deli.
Eddie grinned and snatched it out of thin air. “See? I get good stuff. And you know your way to a man’s heart, boy. Mayo?”
“Would I forget? And extra pickles.”
“Chips?”
Almost before the word was out, Finn was tossing Eddie a bag of salt and vinegar chips.
Eddie clasped a hand to his own heart. “Bless you. And tell Bossy Lady that I got the bag of clothes.”
“Elle?”
Eddie nodded. “She said I was going to catch my death in my wife beaters and shorts, and insisted I take these clothes from her.” He indicated his trousers and long-sleeved sweater. It was the surfer dude goes mobster look.
“How do they fit?” Finn asked, smiling, enjoying the old man’s discomfort.<
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Eddie rolled his eyes. “Like a cheap castle—no ballroom.”
Finn laughed and reached for Pru’s hand again, tugging her toward the elevator.
That’s when a whole new set of worries hit Pru. Was he going to come in?
Had she shaved?
No, she told herself firmly. It doesn’t matter if your legs aren’t hairy, you are not going there with him.
At her door, he held onto her hand while rummaging through her bag for her keys, and then opened her door like he owned the place.
But before they could get inside, the door across the way opened and Mrs. Winslow stepped out.
Pru’s neighbor was as old as time, and that time hadn’t exactly been particularly kind. Still, she was sharp as a tack, her faculties honed by staying up on everything and everyone in the building.
“Hello, dear,” she said to Pru. “You’re bleeding.”
This was getting old. “Skiing accident,” she said, trying something new.
Finn flashed her an appreciative grin.
Mrs. Winslow chortled. “Even an old lady knows her seasons,” she said. “It’s high summer, which means it was softball.”
Pru sighed. “Yeah.”
“Did you at least win this time?”
“No.”
“I think the idea is to win at least sometimes,” Mrs. Winslow said.
Pru sighed again. “Yeah. We’re working on that.” She gestured to Finn at her side, steady as a rock, but looking a little hot and dusty. “I recruited a new player,” she said.
“Good choice,” Mrs. Winslow said. “He’s put together right nice, isn’t he.”
Pru’s gaze went on a tour of Finn from head to toe and back again. Nice wasn’t exactly the description she would use. Hot as hell, maybe. Devastatingly, disarmingly perfect . . .
At her close scrutiny, his mouth curved and something else came into his eyes.
Hunger.
“I got a little something delivered today,” Mrs. Winslow said. “That’s why I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Me?” Pru asked.
“Yes, my package came via your dumbwaiter.”
“Why?”
“Because, dear, the dumbwaiter is only on your side of the building.”
