Sarina Bowen's Blog, page 26

First Chapter: Superfan

June

Silas

What do a bunch of hockey players do during the weeks after they’ve been eliminated after Round 1 of the playoffs? Lay around my apartment to watch more hockey, apparently. Although I really don’t mind. These past two years have been crazy, and maybe we all need a breather.

Last season we made it all the way to the finals. It was the ride of a lifetime. And it didn’t come easily to me. I’m only twenty-five years old, but already my career has had more ups and downs and bumps than an aging roller coaster.

I’m not one of those guys who rocketed from obscurity to success. There have been moments when I was sure my hockey career was over before it started. There have been terrible disappointments. But now I’m coming off my best season ever.

Though it ended abruptly ten days ago when my defense broke down during overtime and allowed a play that I was helpless to stop. When the puck whistled past my ear and dropped into the corner of the net, nobody even blamed me.

Not much, anyway. But I’m a goalie. You get used to it.

Suddenly, our season was over. We were all on summer break, but you can bet that none of us had planned a vacation. Who would tempt fate like that—by trying to guess which date in May or June we’d suddenly have a lot of free time? Not this guy.

The first thing I did was fly home to Northern California to spend a few days with my mom. But now I’m back, a little uncertain of how to spend my precious summer weeks.

I’m not the only one, either.

I’m sitting on the center cushion of my sofa, wedged between my old roommate, Leo, and my current roommate, Jason. And Jason’s girlfriend, Heidi—who is my roommate now, too—is perched in his lap, so there’s four of us on one couch.

At least I have a seat. Our teammate Drake is sprawled out on the rug, and our team captain O’Doul has dragged a kitchen chair into the room for his own use.

We’re watching Game 6 of Round 3, between Dallas and Los Angeles. Nobody in this room is rooting for Dallas. Not after last year’s overtime loss of the championship. We hate that team. A lot.

I have a good feeling about tonight’s game, though. The series is three to two in L.A.’s favor. And L.A. has the momentum. Dallas is going to get a taste of humility tonight. I can’t wait to see it happen.

“Who wants to rent a house on the water in early August?” O’Doul asks, poking at his phone. He’s surfing AirBnB rentals.

“Sounds like fun,” Jason says. “You think you can find something even though it’s already June?”

“Dunno,” O’Doul grumbles. “Cape Cod and Fire Island are all booked up.”

“Of course they are,” I mutter. “Shh, you guys! Power play. Gaborova can make this happen.”

“L.A. can’t win it tonight,” Jason says. “They look tired.”

“Bullshit!” I argue. “Dallas is playing scared. They lost two in a row. Now they’re gonna choke.” Ask me how I know.

“You’re the only one who thinks L.A. can win tonight,” Leo says.

“Really? I think the L.A. fans beg to differ.”

“We’re just managing our expectations,” Heidi says from Jason’s lap. “This is so stressful. Maybe if someone brought me a drink I could relax.” She bats her eyelashes at her boyfriend.

“Great idea. What are we drinking?” Jason asks.

“Hard liquor,” his girlfriend says. They grin at each other like a Hallmark movie couple. It’s kind of disgusting. Then again, my roommate used to be a grumpy beast, and now he’s in a good mood all the time.

Also, Heidi is a really good person, as well as a great cook. Since she feels a little guilty for moving into what was once a bachelor pad, she always makes enough food for three. Tonight she fed me roast salmon over pureed potatoes with wilted garlic-spinach on the side.

So I muddle through somehow.

“What’s in your liquor cabinet?” Leo asks from my other side.

“You could go look,” I point out. “Don’t ask me to get you a drink during the power play.”

“L.A. can’t capitalize,” Leo argues. “Ever since they changed their third line they never score on a power play.”

Even as he’s saying this, L.A. makes a crummy pass. It lands neatly on a Dallas stick, and I groan.

“Name some towns in the Hamptons, Leo,” says O’Doul.

I’m glued to this game, but our captain is trying to find a beach house to rent?

“Southampton, East Hampton, Westhampton,” Leo drones.

“Well, duh!” comes the reply. “I tried those first.”

“Don’t forget Bridgehampton,” Heidi says. “Sagaponack. Montauk. And Quogue.”

“Quogue?” O’Doul grumbles. “I dunno if I could vacation somewhere with that name. It sounds like a plumbing product. Unplug your clog with a Quogue.”

“Isn’t anyone going to watch the—” I break off on a gasp as disaster strikes. A Dallas D-man makes a blind pass to his wing. It never should have worked. But as I stare at the screen in horror, the wing shoots, finding the L.A. goalie’s five hole.

Dallas scores in the seventh minute of the game.

“See?” Leo says calmly. “L.A. isn’t gonna knock out Dallas tonight.”

“Yeah they are!” I argue because I’m in a mood now. “This will fire them up. Just you wait.”

“The waiting would be better with beer,” Leo prods. “Just saying.”

“Fine.” I get up, full of nervous energy. “I’ll check the fridge.” I don’t need to watch the Dallas fans celebrate, anyway.

“There’s three six-packs in there,” Heidi says as I extricate myself from the sofa. “A Brooklyn lager and two ales from... Whoa! Silas!”

Heidi’s outburst makes everyone turn and look at the screen again. The cameraman is cruising the best seats in the house, and the commentator is pointing out the team owner and various celebrities in the audience.

And—holy shit—there it is, the celebrity face that fills my dreams. Delilah Spark, the most celebrated new singer-songwriter in the world, is in the second row at the fucking Dallas game. As I stare at her exquisite face, the commentator says exactly what I’m thinking. “This is incredible! Who knew that singer-songwriter Delilah Spark was a hockey fan!”

“Holy moly!” Jason yells. “Dude!”

“This is your chance!” O’Doul laughs.

Heidi gives a little squeak of excitement. “Now you have something in common! Something besides, you know, mooning over her and playing her music all day and all night.”

I can barely hear them, though. I’m still glued to the screen.

“Delilah Spark made the gossip pages last month when she left her on-again-off-again boyfriend, music producer Brett Ferris…” the commentator drones.

My friends all howl. “She’s single, man!” Leo yells. “Get in there!” someone else adds.

“Aren’t you hilarious,” I drawl. And I already saw those headlines about her breakup. But at the moment, it’s the furthest thing from my mind. Because I’ve just noticed something awful. “She’s wearing a…” Could it even be true? “A Dallas jersey.”

The room erupts. Drake howls, and O’Doul throws a paper napkin at the screen. “Ooooh!” Heidi wails. “Plot twist!”

“That is rough, man,” Jason says, shaking his head. “So tragic. You think you know a girl.” He laughs, because he thinks it’s a simple irony.

If only.

Slowly, I walk into the kitchen. I’m suddenly grumpy as fuck. I’m used to taking a lot of flak for my obsession with Delilah Spark, even if my interest in her is slightly less pathetic than everyone assumes.

Slightly.

Still, it’s not like I know her. But Dallas? It’s like a knife to the heart. It also makes no sense. Delilah is a California girl.

I pull out my phone and open Twitter. I follow exactly sixty-seven people on Twitter—teammates, other hockey friends, sports commentators, and Delilah Spark.

Sure enough, she’s been tweeting about the Dallas matchup. My first hockey game! Someone tell me the rules.

The tweet has 834 likes already, and dozens of replies. Don’t watch the puck, watch the players! And, All you need to know is that if the lamp turns red, they scored. And, Hockey players are hot! Etc.

I tweet a reply, even though I doubt she’ll see it. I’m a big fan of yours, but I have to know why you’d support Dallas. Will they even let you back into California after this?

Shoving my phone into my pocket, I don’t feel any better. Why couldn’t her first hockey game be mine?

I open the fridge. Heidi has stocked us up on beer, just as she said. I take all three six-packs out, grab an opener, and carry the whole lot into the living room. “Nobody better be in my seat,” I grumble.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Drake says from the floor.

There’s a knock at the door as I’m setting the beer down on the coffee table. “Get that like a good rookie, would you?”

“When am I done being the rookie?” he asks, getting up anyway.

Castro snorts. “The minute there’s someone else we can call ‘rookie.’ You see anybody like that here?”

“No.” Drake opens the door to find Georgia, Leo’s wife. She’s dragging a beanbag chair behind her. And also Bayer, our recently retired teammate. 

There’s a chorus of happy sounds, because we never see this guy anymore. “He’s alive!” someone shouts. “Tell us everything.”

“I would, but there’s a game on.” He kicks the beanbag into place against the wall for Georgia. “Are we ordering pizza?”

“Let’s do it,” Heidi says. “Who has a phone?”

I unlock mine and hand it to Heidi. Then I open a beer for myself. On the screen, L.A. is looking more alive. “See? They’re going to fight for it. Sometimes being down a goal lights your fire.”

“Or down a game,” Jason argues. “We need a bet. Who’s with Silas that L.A. can win this thing?”

My teammates prattle on, and I’m trying to watch the game. But now that I know Delilah Spark is sitting just to the left of the Dallas bench, I can’t stop looking for her. And every time they cut to a wide shot of the coach chewing his gum behind his players, I get a glimpse. Dark, shiny hair and a smile that knows secrets.

And that green jersey. That’s the part I wish I could unsee.

“Everybody owes Silas fifteen bucks,” Heidi says, tapping away at a food-delivery app on my phone. “If you don’t have change, just make it twenty.”

“Did you remember to order one with—” Drake starts.

“Yes,” Heidi cuts him off. “You think by now I don’t know what everyone likes?”

“My bad,” Drake says from the floor, because he’s not stupid.

Heidi is a full-time assistant to the team’s general manager. Underestimate her at your own peril. “Silas,” she says, “your Twitter is blowing up. Here.” She hands back my phone.

“Really,” I say slowly, taking it from her. Forty-two new notifications. Huh. That can only mean one thing. “Delilah Spark tweeted me back.”

“What?” Heidi squeaks. “Let me see!” She grabs the phone before I can read it. “OMG! Listen: ‘Can’t I be fans of both teams? A Dallas radio station sent me to my first game.’”

“Wait, you’re busting on your idol for wearing a Dallas jersey?” Jason asks, and then everyone else roars.

“I had to ask,” I say, and it comes out sounding defensive.

My teammates find this hilarious. They laugh so hard that beer comes out of Drake’s nose.

“Let me see!” Jason says, and then my phone gets passed around the room, as if we’re all in seventh grade again, and a cute girl passed me a note.

“You have to reply,” Leo says.

“She should wear an L.A. jersey for half the game,” Georgia points out, “so she doesn’t piss off her hometown fans.”

“Ahhh,” says the room, because that’s a good point. Georgia is a publicist, so she has to think of these things on the regular.

“Who do we know at the game?” Leo asks.

“Well, we know all the guys on the ice,” O’Doul says, and I snort. “Can’t exactly ask Gaborova to hand the girl his jersey.”

“Besides them,” Leo argues.

Georgia lets out a little groan and then reaches for her handbag. “You guys are going to make me work right now, aren’t you?”

“Please?” I beg. “You must know someone in the L.A. office.”

“We need an L.A. jersey, right?” she says, poking at her phone. “In a gift bag. And someone to run it down to her?”

“And a note,” I say.

“Ooh!” Heidi squeaks and then pokes me in the arm. “What should it say?”

What indeed? “Say… ‘This jersey has two purposes. First, it will keep you on the good side of your hometown crew. And you’ll also be on the right side of history when L.A. clinches this series in the third period.’”

“They can’t clinch tonight,” O’Doul argues.

“Just you wait,” I snap back.

* * *

But waiting is hard. I eat too many slices of pizza because I’m nervous. L.A. is fighting for it, but halfway through the second period they’re still trailing 2-0. “Come on, come on,” I chant on their next possession of the puck. “You can do this. Dallas is getting complacent.”

“For a reason,” Jason whispers.

“You shut up.”

The stress of the game is compounded by Delilah Spark’s frequent appearance on our screen. The TV camera loves her almost as much as I do. She’s still wearing that godawful jersey, though. I’m trying hard not to see it as some kind of jinx.

But then L.A. calls a time out, and while they enjoy their sixty seconds of togetherness, the camera cuts once again to Delilah. And—holy shit—someone wearing an L.A. jacket is trying to hand her a bag. After a moment’s negotiation with a burly-looking bodyguard, the bag is in her hands.

“Did it!” Georgia yells. She gets up off the beanbag chair and pumps her fist.

“You are such a babe!” Leo says, getting up to high-five his wife. He blocks my view of the screen for a second, and when I look again, Delilah is pulling a black garment out of the bag.

“What’s this?” a commentator asks. “Delilah Spark is getting a gift at her first hockey game. It’s…” Delilah reveals the L.A. logo on the jersey.

The crew in our living room goes wild.

“This is hilarious,” Jason says beside me. “Even if Dallas wins—”

“Bite your goddamn tongue.”

“Wasn’t there a note?” Heidi asks. “Did she see it?”

We don’t find out, because the camera cuts away again to set up the faceoff.

Bummer.

“You have to tweet her again,” Heidi says. “She needs to know it’s from you.”

“No, she doesn’t.” It really doesn’t matter one way or the other.

“But what if the note fell on the floor?” Heidi presses, and there’s a worried line between her eyebrows.

“Then it fell on the floor,” I say. There are worse accidents of fate. Ask me how I know.

“Let me see your phone,” Heidi says.

“No way.”

“I just want to see if she replies.”

“Tweet something and die,” I threaten, handing it over.

“Power play!” Drake yells, and my attention goes right back where it should be—on the game.

“L.A. can’t capitalize,” Leo grumbles.

But they do! Dallas gives up a goal twenty-seven seconds into the penalty period. And then Dallas has a meltdown, tripping an L.A. player right in front of the ref and drawing a second penalty.

The room goes silent. All eyes are finally on the screen. Forty seconds later, L.A.’s Gaborova scores again, tying up the game.

The Slovak player pumps his fist, and my living room erupts with excitement.

“Told you they could do it!” Leo says, earning a punch from me. “Ow. Kidding!”

“Boys!” Georgia says. “Look.”

The camera pans wide, and there’s my girl again. Now she’s wearing a black jersey and laughing. She takes her phone from the woman sitting beside her, and taps something on the screen.

“This is her tweet!” Heidi says a moment later. “‘Apparently I’m magic,’ it says. ‘Who knew?’ Now her feed is going to be full of Dallas fans begging her to change back into the other jersey.”

“She can’t!” O’Doul yells at the screen. “This is finally getting interesting.”

Heidi nudges me with her elbow. “Look, Silas. She thanked you.”

I grab that phone so fast that I hear laughter.

@SilasKellyGoalie Thank you for the jersey. It seems to be working.

I type back quickly. @DelilahSpark Had to be done. If you could leave it on until the end of the game, it would be much appreciated.

“Oh, my heart!” Heidi coos. “Silas is flirting with a rock star on Twitter.”

“L.A. still probably can’t win,” O’Doul says, just to infuriate me. “They’ve switched up the lines to rest Myerson. That tendon of his isn’t gonna magically heal before the buzzer.”

Unfortunately, he has a point.

The next forty minutes are brutal. When there’s just five minutes left—and still a tie score—I’m as tense and exhausted as if I’d played the game myself.

I don’t know much about hockey, tweets Delilah Spark during the Dallas time out. But five minutes isn’t long, right? What happens if they tie?

“The poor girl doesn’t know the rules,” Heidi says. “She needs private hockey instruction from you, Silas.”

“Yeah,” Jason says with an evil grin. “That’s what Silas wants to give her. Private instruction in hockey.” He takes the phone out of his girlfriend’s hands.

And here’s where I make a big mistake. I look away, watching the faceoff instead of watching Jason. It isn’t until after the play travels down the ice and into a corner that I notice he’s typing something on my phone.

“Hey!” I lunge for it, but he holds it out of my way. “What are you doing?”

“I’m helping you,” Jason says, cocking an eyebrow. “This is what you should say next—‘Let’s make a bet, Delilah. If L.A. scores in the next five minutes, you’ll go out on a date with me.’”

“No,” I say calmly, measuring the short distance between me and my phone. The only problem is that Heidi’s in the way. I need to get it back without clocking her in the struggle.

“This is a great idea,” Jason says, his grin devilish. “You’ll thank me later.”

“Dude, yes!” Leo agrees. “Let’s vote. Who wants Silas to ask Delilah out?”

Everyone in the whole goddamn room raises his hand.

“Not funny,” I say through clenched teeth. I glance away, but it’s just a fake-out. Quickly, I turn back toward Jason as I shoot to my feet.

It should have worked, but when you tussle with professional athletes, anything can happen. Jason and I are well-matched for both strength and sharp reflexes. My hand darts toward the phone, but he anticipates me, his fingers closing around the screen.

Where the SEND button is.

“Did you just hit Send?” I demand.

“I… Um… Let’s see.” Jason looks at the phone in his hand and lets out a nervous laugh. “I’m afraid to look.”

“Oh dear,” Heidi whispers.

I lunge for the phone.

Get Superfan at: Amazon | Apple | Kobo | Nook | Google

Cover Reveal: Man Cuffed

Tanya Eby and I had so much fun writing our Man Hands series that we realized we weren’t done just yet! We’re so excited to be bringing you Man Cuffed on November 19th! Hats off to Christine Coffey for this great cover! Scroll for more info and a giveaway!

A new comedy from the USA Today bestselling duo!

Mac
A good cop can always spot trouble. That’s why my senses started pinging the moment I met the hottie next door. The neighborhood may never be the same. First she confuses me for a male stripper and tries to remove my uniform. (The guys on the force will never let me live that down.) And then there’s the breaking and entering.
I don’t know what to do with her. My libido has a few ideas of its own, though. Bad, bad ideas.

Meg
Hey, I it’s not my fault that Hot Cop’s nightstick gets excited every time we see each other. And I can’t help that someone broke into his apartment.
Fine—that last thing was totally my fault. And I intend to make amends. So when he needs a date for his sister’s wedding, I’m there. This is right up my alley. I’m an actor. By the time it’s over, his entire family will believe we’re a couple.
Even him.

Warning: may cause unrestrained giggling in public. Contains: a bridezilla with a turkey leg, a flash mob, and a growly hero.

Pre-order yours at: Amazon | Apple | Nook | KoboEnter to win one of three copies via Goodreads

New Releases: Week of October 6th!

Fall is settling in! Quick - one-click some of these goodies to curl up and read on cold nights

Moonlighter is coming!

First Chapter: Overnight Sensation

I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Jason

“Gentlemen.” I lift my beer bottle high, signaling the start of a speech. “It was the best of scrimmages, it was the worst of scrimmages…”

The moment I utter my version of Dickens’s most famous opening line, there are groans as well as laughter.

“Oh, brother,” my teammate Bayer complains. “Here we go with another speech.”

“It was the afternoon of victory, it was the afternoon of too few shots on goal. It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of ‘holy shit, I should run more sprints before training camp!’”

O’Doul, our team captain, snorts as my other teammates shake their heads. They’re used to my antics.

“It was the season of lamplighters,” I continue. “It was the season of exhaustion, it was the autumn of hope, after the summer of despair. We have eighty-two games before us, we have nothing to stop us, we are all going direct to Heaven, except whichever of you asswipes tripped me during the second period…”

There’s more laughter around the long table, so I pause for a swig of beer.

“Does he always quote Dickens after a scrimmage?” asks Heidi, the girl I’ve been eyeing all night. If I’m honest, this little show I’m putting on is for her benefit. Although I’m not sure if I should be trying to attract her or trying to drive her away.

“He usually quotes Shakespeare,” answers Silas, my new roommate. “But I guess it’s more of a Dickens kind of night.”

“In short,” I wind up for a strong finish. “The scrimmage was the same gongshow as last year. And all the noisiest authorities predict—for good or for evil—that every goddamn day of the new season will be a familiar struggle!”

A cheer rises up because I stuck the landing. I lean back against the paneled wall of the tavern and chug the rest of my ale, spilling a few drops of it on my team T-shirt.

“Classy,” Silas snorts. He’s one of our goalies.

“Yeah?” I slam the bottle down on a table that’s already littered with our empties. “Where’s your speech, then? I’m listening.”

“I meant the mess you’re making.” He swats at my shirt with a cocktail napkin, and I grab him quickly into a headlock.

“Fuck,” the goalie says from my armpit. “Let go.”

“You’re just lucky I showered,” I say, not letting go.

Silas laughs, but it’s a fake-out. The second I relax, he wrenches out of my grip and tries to knee me in the balls. I’m saved by my lightning-fast reflexes. I swivel my package out of harm’s way.

“Children, cut it out,” Bayer says with a sigh. “If you knock over the bottles, Pete won’t serve us until we clean ’em up.”

Grinning, Silas and I take our hands off each other. We have some excess adrenaline to burn off. Anyone would.

I’d forgotten how the beginning of a season feels. Training camp has me stirred up inside and raring to go. Dickens had it right. It’s the best of times, and also the worst of times. Sixty guys fighting for twenty-three slots on the opening-day roster. Any player who says he’s relaxed tonight is a goddamn liar.

We’ve just finished the big scramble where all the new prospects skate with the veterans. It’s like Hunger Games on Ice—a flock of youngsters trying to show us up and take away our roster spots. And it’s our job to smack ’em back down to the minors where they belong.

I know all about it. It took me three tries to make the Bruisers’ roster. Last year was my first full season in the big show. I had a killer year with gaudy stats.

Until it all went wrong at the very end. Regrets? I have a few. The stupidest thing I’ve ever done—and there’s some competition for that award—is to imagine that once I made it to the big leagues, things would feel easier.

They don’t. Not ever.

There are a few perks, though. The plush charter jet is a lot more comfortable than riding the bus in the minors. And these days someone else carries my pads into the stadium and hangs ’em up at my locker.

But not one thing in my life is relaxing. Every game is a brutal test of my staying power. Should I fail, there are a hundred other guys lined up to take my place. And after the inglorious way my last season ended, some days I think one of them will.

That was a Dickens kind of day, indeed. They all are.

But tonight we celebrate. I’ve earned this beer. Next week the roster will be posted, and I’m going to be on it. I’m healthy, I’m fast, and I was exactly the kind of playmaker in today’s scrimmage that the team needs.

“I think we should switch to shots,” I say, upping the ante. “Silas, you can choose—tequila or vodka.”

My roommate groans. “You know we have to get up early, right?”

“I’m aware. Rookie!” I snap my fingers. “What’s your name again?”

“Drake,” says the kid.

“Right.” I stripped the puck from young Drake in our scrimmage today at least twice. But he fought back like a beast, and I give him a fifty-fifty chance at making it onto our roster. Now I hand him my credit card. “Ask Pete for a bottle of good tequila and some shot glasses.”

“And limes!” Silas calls out as Drake walks away.

“Okay,” the kid says gamely, turning his big shoulders toward the bar.

“Okay?” I gasp. “How about yessir!”

There are chuckles, but I’m only half kidding. I just spent the summer reading books in a hammock and trying to forget that it was my missed shot on goal that sent us into overtime in game seven of the championship. If I’d rotated my stick two more degrees before I shot, we would have hoisted the cup over our heads at the end of the period. There would have been a parade through Brooklyn and all the other bullshit that comes with being top dog.

But the puck hit the pipe and bounced off. And I will never stop seeing that black shape flip against the white ice, or hearing the condemning sound of buzzer announcing the end of the third period.

Less than a half hour later we lost the championship in overtime.

If I’d made that goal, I would have been the leader of that goddamn parade. I would have hoisted the cup first. The video clip of that goal would have played on repeat whenever the Bruisers were mentioned on TV. Forever, probably.

Pass the tequila.

The rookie comes back with a tray and a message. “Pete says he doesn’t need this—” The kid flips my credit card onto the table. “—because he’s got the number memorized. And he said to tell you to take it easy.”

“Right,” I snort. “Because that sounds like me for sure.”

“Oh, Castro’s always easy,” Bayer says. “Just ask the ladies.”

“You shut up,” I scoff, plucking the shot glasses off the tray and lining them up. I count heads around the table. “You in? Who’s in?”

That’s when my gaze collides with Heidi’s. My gaze does that entirely too often.

“Tequila?” I ask her, my tone borderline rude, and I don’t even know why.

She smacks the bar with her hand. “Yessir.”

And my mind leaps right into the gutter. I’d like to get her to say that again later. When we’re alone.

“Jesus, don’t call him sir,” Silas begs. “The power will go right to his head.”

Or other places. Fuck me. I pour out shots of tequila. “Ladies first,” I say, passing a shot glass to Heidi.

When I’ve doled one out to all takers, O’Doul lifts his shot. “To old friends and new challenges,” he says.

To fewer last-minute disappointments, I privately add as I lift my glass.

The sound of six or eight shot glasses meeting for a toast is the backdrop of my life. It’s a good sound. We all toss the tequila back, and I watch Heidi drink hers with wide eyes that turn red as she swallows.

“I think you need this,” I say, nudging the bowl of lime wedges in her direction.

“Thanks,” she gasps, reaching for a wedge and plunging it between her pink lips.

My body stirs. Tonight, then. I’ll take her home with me. Finally.

Heidi and I have been circling each other on and off since last spring, when she turned up to help the team out during a personnel crisis. One day at the practice facility I heard a peal of uproarious laughter. And when I turned the corner, there she was—all bouncing curls and curves and a big smile. She’s five-foot-nothing but full of personality.

And since that very first moment, I’ve been yearning to fill her with something else. She’s open to this idea as well. I see it every time our gazes collide. And they do that a lot.

It hasn’t happened, though, for a couple of reasons. In the first place, I only hook up with randoms. Hockey is my life, and there’s no room for emotional entanglements.

Also? She’s the office intern. The aftermath could be awkward. She doesn’t strike me as needy or crazy. But it’s not like I can put a lot of distance between us afterwards. Worst-case scenario is that I avoid the office wing of the team’s headquarters for a semester, or however long her internship lasts.

I’ve done stupider things, though. And tonight I don’t think I am going to be able to resist her. Every time those big blue eyes land on me, I’m a little closer to giving in.

That’s how distracting she is. I’m not the only one who thinks so, either. My teammates have given her a nickname that suits her personality: Hot Pepper. That’s because she’s attractive, but also lively.

If I’m honest, she reminds me a little of the girl I fell in love with at sixteen. I have very few regrets in this life. A lost love, and a lost goal. Tonight I’ve got both of them on my mind, damn it. But I’m going to let Heidi distract me from both things.

Problem solved.

“Shhh!” Silas says suddenly.

We all fall silent without knowing why. There’s a look on Silas’s face, as if angels are speaking to him from a higher plane.

“Um, what are we listening for?” the rookie asks.

“New song,” Silas says. “It was just released yesterday.”

A groan rises up from the table. Silas is a devoted fan of the singer Delilah Spark. He plays her stuff from sunup to sundown and seems not to mind all the ribbing we give him about it.

“You just shushhed me so you could hear this singer again?” Bayer asks. “Don’t we get enough of her leaking from your headphones on the jet?”

“Try living with him,” I point out. “It’s only been a month, and I already know every lyric to every song. I don’t even have a choice.”

“Have you tried those noise-canceling headphones?” Drake asks. “You could give those a whirl.”

Silas doesn’t even acknowledge us. He slips past me and heads for the bar, where the video for the new song is playing on one of the TVs.

With a snicker, Bayer moves off to harass him, and O’Doul follows.

Our little group thins out, leaving me basically alone with Heidi. I should probably make an excuse to talk to my teammates. I should walk away. I don’t, though, because I feel about Heidi the way I feel about the last cookie in the cookie jar—I should resist, but I don’t really want to.

“Not a big fan of tequila?” I ask her. That’s my opening line. It isn’t too smooth, but she’s already watching me with those big baby-blues.

“I’m not accustomed to shots,” she says. “My mama would be appalled.”

“Why? You’re no worse for wear.”

“It’s not ladylike to drink fast, eat too much, or wear white shoes after Labor Day.”

“God.” I laugh. “Why?”

“It’s just impolite.”

Heidi has a hint of a southern accent, and the word comes out as impolaht. The delicate way it rolls off her tongue does something to my groin. Something very impolite. I’m determined to have her in my bed tonight.

“How was your summer?” I ask, because I’m a gentleman. Or at least I can fake it.

“Pretty dull, if you want to know the truth.” Her perfect lips tense for a moment before relaxing again. “I spent six weeks trying not to argue with my father. I was hoping he wouldn’t lose his mind when I told him I wasn’t going back to Bryn Mawr.”

“But he did anyway?” I guess.

“Absolutely. Total conniption.”

“Oh, man.” I know all about parental disappointment. “He yelled?”

“He yelled, and he threatened. My mistake was thinking that we could have a sensible conversation about it. There’s no arguing with that man when he gets his hard head set on something he wants. And he does not want me in Brooklyn.”

Ouch. “Your father doesn’t want you working for the team?”

“No sir, he does not.”

Sir. I want her to call me that when she’s naked. But we’ll get to that a little later. “Maybe your father doesn’t like hockey players.”

A strange reaction flickers across her face and then disappears immediately. “I think it’s me he doesn’t like. I spent the first twenty years of my life trying to be Daddy’s good little girl. But it’s impossible to please that man, and I am done trying.”

I would have never guessed that Heidi and I had so much in common. “That’s funny because my parents aren’t so wild about having me in Brooklyn, either.”

“My goodness, why? You’re killing it for the team.”

Her expression is full of wonder. God bless the girls who have a thing for hockey players. “My family is a bunch of nerds. They think I’m wasting my life playing a brutal sport when I should be getting a doctorate.”

“Oh,” Heidi says softly. “That sounds familiar.”

It’s actually a little more complicated than that. They think my whole lifestyle is self-destructive. And isn’t that ridiculous? Me with the eight-percent-body-fat ratio and low-resting heart rate.

“The booze and the women,” my dad says when he’s lecturing me. “They’re eating away at you.” He says this with a straight face and the paunch of a guy who sits at a desk much of the day.

“But it comes down to this,” Heidi declares, patting my hand to get my attention. “Who gets to say who’s wasting his life? Why do parents think they have that right?”

“Exactly.” I use my thumb to trap her hand against mine. Then I lean forward and look into her blue eyes. There’s no mistaking my interest.

“Right?” she squeaks as twin spots of pink appear on her cheekbones. But she doesn’t pull her hand away.

“Lucky for me,” I say. “My sister is an academic. So at least someone is following the family plan.”

Heidi blinks. Her gaze drops to our joined hands before returning to mine. “I have a sister, too,” she confesses. “But she does what she wants and they love her anyway. And they treat me like a convict just because I won’t finish my liberal arts degree.”

“Is your father an academic like mine?” I ask. Wouldn’t that be a funny coincidence?

“Um, no,” she says slowly. “But my mother went to Bryn Mawr. Now she is a full-time stay-at-home wife, and the world’s most eager country-club member.” She rolls her gorgeous eyes. “That hacks me off even more. ‘Stay in school, Heidi Jo. So you can graduate and never use that degree!’ They’d be thrilled if I’d settle down with a nice lawyer and start popping out the grandkids.”

“I have so many questions.” I chuckle. “Heidi Jo?”

“That’s what my family calls me. But I call myself Heidi so I don’t sound so…”

“Gone with the Wind?” I guess.

“Right.”

“And your parents really want you to get married? Why?”

She shrugs. “That’s the extent of my mother’s imagination, I think. Also, she’d have a wedding to plan. Marrying me off to a lawyer in a ballroom somewhere is her dream come true.”

“But you’re not down with that plan?” I stroke my thumb across her hand, and Heidi shivers almost imperceptibly.

Her gaze returns to our joined hands. “Weddings are a snore. Lawyers are, too. The ones I’ve met, anyway.”

“Your taste runs more to hockey players, I assume?”

Now her cheeks are on fire. “When the mood strikes,” she says primly, removing her hand from mine. “More tequila, maybe?”

When the mood strikes. Jesus. She’s going to make me work for it. And I’m a hundred percent down with that.

This girl is teasing me in the best possible way. She pushes her shot glass closer to me, then raises that kissable face to look at me. And there’s a challenge in her eyes that I plan to answer with a whole lot more than a couple of drinks.

For now, though, I pick up the bottle and pour.

Get Overnight Sensation at: Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo

-

Want to hear it? Check out the first chapter on Sarina's podcast - Storybites: Website | iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Google

New Releases: Week of September 29th

It’s October already - is that spooky to anyone else? I better one-click some new reading material for comfort…

 















































 

First Chapter: The Accidentals

OVERTURE

OVERTURE: (n.) The opening movement of a dramatic composition such as an opera or ballet. Traditionally, the overture is comprised of themes and motifs which will be further developed as the work progresses. —The Pocket Dictionary of Music

#

I was in the third grade when I figured out that the man who sang “Wild City” on the car radio was the same one who sent a check to my mother every month. The names weren’t exactly the same; the checks said Frederick Richards, while the DJs called him Freddy Ricks.

But I had a good ear, even then. The sigh my mother uttered when she opened his envelopes was exactly the pitch as the one I heard as she switched off the radio.

She wouldn’t talk about him even when I begged. “He’s a stranger, Rachel. Don’t dwell on him.”

But everyone else did. Freddy Ricks was nominated for a Grammy when I was ten, and his second album stayed on top of the charts for months. Growing up, I heard his music during TV ads for luxury cars and while waiting in line at Rite Aid. I read interviews he did with People and Rolling Stone.

I memorized his Wikipedia entry. My name wasn’t in it. Neither was my mother’s.

Even so, my interest was undiminished. I bought his music with my babysitting money, and I saved every magazine article I could find. I was a rabid little fan girl, and I wasn’t nice about it.

Whenever my mother and I fought, I would hang another photo of him on my bedroom wall. Or else I jammed my ear buds in, ignoring the parent sitting next to me to listen to the one I’d never met.

I was so angry about her silence. Now I would give anything to see her face one more time.

Anything.

But I’ll never have another chance to turn the music off and hear my mother’s voice. And the guy who didn’t bother to show up for almost eighteen years? Supposedly he’s waiting at the social worker’s office to meet me.

I feel sick as the van pulls up at the office for the Department of Children and Families. My hands are almost too sweaty to unlatch my seatbelt. After wiping them on my denim skirt, I fumble for the greasy door handle.

Every time I ride in this tatty vehicle, which is probably the same one that shows up to remove kids from meth labs, or whatever else social workers do, I think: This is not my life.

Although, since a week ago, it is.

Living in a state-run group home is horrifying. But it isn’t nearly as bad as hearing my mother’s oncologist tell me it didn’t matter that her cancer had responded to the chemotherapy, because she’d contracted an infection that might kill her first.

He was right. It did. And nothing will ever be the same.

“I’ll pick you up in half an hour,” the driver says as I climb numbly out into the sticky Orlando afternoon.

“Thanks,” I mumble. One-word answers are the only kind I have these days.

Tasting bile in my throat, I watch the van pull away. But I still have a choice. Although the State of Florida has recently made quite a few decisions on my behalf—and some of them are doozies—I’m pretty sure the legal code can’t force me to go inside this building.

I don’t have to meet the man who abandoned me before I was born. Instead of walking inside, I linger on the hot sidewalk, trying to think.

A thousand times I’ve pictured meeting Frederick Richards. But never once have I imagined it would happen under the fluorescent lights of the Florida Department of Children and Families.

I turn around, considering my options. The adjacent parking lot belongs to a strip mall. There’s a smoothie place, a video game store, and a nail salon. I could saunter over there and get a smoothie and a manicure instead of meeting my father. If I were a braver girl, that’s what I’d do. Take that, Frederick Richards! My life can go on without ever meeting him. I’ll turn eighteen in a month. Then my social-services nightmare will end, anyway.

He’ll sit there in Hannah’s office, looking at his watch every couple of minutes, while I sip a smoothie across the street.

Right. I don’t even like smoothies. Drinks aren’t supposed to be thick.

While I take this little mental trip through Crazytown, the Florida sun beats down on me. A drip of sweat runs down the center of my back. And across the way, I catch a man watching me from the driver’s seat of a dark sedan. A nervous zing shoots through my chest. But it disappears just as quickly as I realize the man behind the wheel is absolutely not Frederick Richards. He’s Hispanic, with salt-and-pepper hair.

I frown at him.

He smiles widely.

Creeper. I turn away, yanking open the door to the social worker’s office. A welcome blast of cool air hits me. But the functioning AC is the only pleasant thing about this place. Everything in the room is gray, including the cheap metal office furniture and the dingy walls, which have probably needed a fresh paint job for longer than I’ve been alive.

“Hi Rachel,” the wrinkled receptionist greets me. “You can have a seat, and Hannah will be out to get you as soon as she’s ready.”

I eye Hannah’s door. Is he really in there? I don’t ask, though, because my mouth is suddenly as dry as toast. Another wave of nausea hits as I steer myself into the battered chair just outside Hannah’s office.

Out of habit, I reach into my pocket for my iPod Classic. The steel edges felt cool against my damp fingers. Music has always been my drug of choice. In the palm of my hand, I hold the orderly world, arranged into playlists of my own design. Thousands of examples of prerecorded perfection can be cued up at the touch of my finger.

Some of it was written and performed by the man on the other side of Hannah’s door. I’ve been carrying my father around in my pocket for a long time.

“You’ve wasted entire months of your life thinking about him,” my mother often complained, her laser eyes on the stack of CDs in my room. “And he’s never spent five minutes thinking about us. I can guarantee it.”

I shove the iPod into my backpack and zip it shut.

Mom was right about everything. And it stings knowing that I’ll never have the chance to apologize. Everything stings, all the time. I’m Angry Rachel now. I hardly recognize myself. Even here, glancing around the shabby little office, I want to burn it all right to the ground.

When the door opens beside me, I actually jump like one of those skittish kitties in so many YouTube videos. Whirling around, I see only Hannah and her steady hazel eyes looking down at me. With a frown of concern, she steps forward, mostly closing the door behind her. “Rachel,” she whispers. “Do you want to meet Frederick Richards?”

Yes?

No.

Sometimes.

God.

My knees are spongy when I stand up. Hannah opens the door again, and it’s only three steps into her office.

And there he is, after all this time, sitting in an ugly chair with metal arms. I would know him anywhere, that face made famous on album covers and in the gossip pages of magazines. Thanks to video, I can picture him singing on stage in L.A. or Rome. I know what he looks like wandering the streets of New Orleans or catching a subway train in New York. That’s what Instagram and a couple thousand hours of YouTube can do for a girl.

And now I know what he looks like when he sees a ghost.

He sucks in his breath when I enter the room. For that one moment, I have the advantage. I’d been staring at him forever, but to him, my face is a surprise. Maybe he sees my mother. I’ve inherited her dark blond hair and brown eyes.

Or, maybe he has no memory at all of what my mother looked like.

Eventually he stands up. He’s tall. I’m taken aback by the way he fills Hannah’s little office. Who knew that music videos don’t capture proportion very well?

I’m still rooted in place near the door, my mouth dry. He doesn’t know what to do either. He steps forward, taking my clammy hand in his cooler one. “I’m so sorry about your mother. I’m sorry…” He clears his throat. “Well, I’m sorry about a lot of things. But I’m really sorry you lost your mom.”

I look down at his big hand holding mine, the long fingers. I couldn’t speak at all. People have been saying variations of this for a week, and I can usually stammer out a “thank you.” But not this time.

“Rachel,” Hannah says from behind her desk. “Why don’t you take a seat?”

Hannah’s voice is like cool water. I let go of Mr. Frederick Richards’s hand and slide obediently into a chair, while he retreats into his.

“This is an unusual situation,” Hannah says, folding her hands.

We’re still staring at each other. There are creases around his eyes and mouth. His fortieth birthday has just passed, a fact I know from Wikipedia. He’s aged over the decade that I’d been following him, but it’s still a very handsome face. My mother swooned for him all those years ago. That was her word—swooned. But my mother pronounced it the way her doctor had said “malignant.”

“Rachel, Mr. Richards wants to help you. But he has no legal right to care for you. His signature is not on your birth certificate, which complicates things. So he submitted a DNA test and hired a lawyer to help him navigate family court. But the system doesn’t move very fast. It’s unlikely that he can become your legal guardian before you turn eighteen next month.”

Some answer is required of me. “Okay,” I whisper. What does that mean, then? Will he just leave?

“Look, can Rachel and I talk?” he asks Hannah.

“You mean alone,” Hannah clarifies.

“Yes, I do.” He says it curtly, like a man who’s used to people listening.

“Today? No,” Hannah says. “This is a supervised visit between a child in the state’s custody and a stranger. I’m sure this is very difficult for you, Mr. Richards, and an audience doesn’t help. But this office plays host to hundreds of difficult conversations a year. I can promise that you will survive it.”

Hannah always gives it to you straight. She’s delivered plenty of bad news to me in a short amount of time, and all with a complete lack of bullshit.

Hannah didn’t sugarcoat the fact that I had to move into the group home. “It’s not the Plaza Hotel,” Hannah had admitted. “But it’s run by good people, and if there’s anything really bad about it, you’re going to call me right away.”

Mr. Frederick Richards sighs in his chair. His hands were nervous, fiddly. In most of his photographs he holds a guitar.

“Since you’ve come to Florida to offer Rachel your assistance,” Hannah says, “why don’t you tell us what sort you have in mind? I understand that until now your support has been financial in nature.”

He nods. “Yes, it was. I always…” He presses his fingers to his lips. “Before, I assumed that financial support was the only kind necessary.” He looks right at me. “I didn’t know your mother was sick. Nobody told me.”

Again, I know I should say something, but the words just aren’t there. My father is going to think his daughter is mute.

“So…” He returns his attention to Hannah. “You said Rachel is headed to boarding school in the fall.” His eyes dart toward me. “It sounds like she needs a place to go after she turns eighteen next month.”

“Technically, she will age out of our system in August,” Hannah agrees. “But she can probably keep her place at the group home until she leaves for school.”

I close my eyes, my stomach clenching at the idea of staying there even one minute more. When I open them again, he’s watching me. He turns a bit in the too-small chair so that he is facing me. “Rachel, I want to help you. My first choice was to just take you away from here.” He waves a hand, taking in either the Department of Children and Families or the entire state of Florida. I don’t know which. “But if I can’t do that, I’m going to make sure you’re being treated well.”

“Okay,” I whisper.

He turns to Hannah again. “There must be some way I can see her. She isn’t a prisoner of the state.”

“Well.” Hannah taps her desktop. “That will be up to Rachel. She goes to summer school, and she has a curfew in the evening. If she wishes to make time for you, she can tell you herself. I’m not at liberty to give out her contact information, but I can give her your phone number.”

“Please do,” he says, watching me.

There’s a pounding in my ears. “Pine Bluff High School,” I blurt out, surprising all of us. “I’m usually finished by two thirty.” I sneak a look at Hannah to see if she disapproves. But the social worker’s gaze is steady. “My curfew is seven thirty.”

“All right,” he says, taking a notebook and a pen out of his shirt pocket. I think I see his hands shaking as he scribbles on the cover.

Hannah glances up at the clock. “We still have a few minutes here. I could make a couple copies of the documents Mr. Richards provided. Should I do that now, Rachel? Or I could wait.”

I nod. “Go ahead.”

Hannah gets up and blocks the door open with a rubber stopper on her way out.

Frederick sits back in his chair, his head against the wall. “I know that I…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t expect you to understand. But I want you to know how happy I am to see you.”

I only nod, because I don’t trust myself to speak. I’ve waited my entire life to hear those words. And yet I would trade them in, in a heartbeat, to erase the last month.

“If it’s okay with you, I’ll wait in front of your school tomorrow at two thirty.”

“Okay.” I lick my dry lips. “I’ll have homework.” It’s such an idiotic thing to add. Like homework matters right now.

“I’ll only stay as long as you’d like.”

In the silence that follows, Hannah breezes back in. “Do either of you have any questions?”

“I just want you to call me if there’s any way I can help,” he says. “You have my cell, and I’m just at the Ritz-Carlton.”

That’s when Ray, the van driver, knocks on the door jamb. “Hi Rachel! Are you ready?”

I stand up, ready to flee.

“Rachel?” Hannah’s gentle voice stops my exit. “I left you three messages today. Let’s make sure we confirm our next meeting together, okay?”

“My phone doesn’t work anymore. It must have, um…” I don’t want to admit it—that it must have been shut off. My mother was sick in the hospital for weeks before she died. Some bills weren’t paid. Of all the things going wrong in my life, an unpaid phone bill doesn’t even make the top fifty. But it embarrasses me, anyway.

“Oh,” Hannah says, her face full of compassion. “Then could I email you about our next meeting?”

I nod.

“Take this,” she says, passing me a business card. It reads Freddy Ricks. Hannah has just given me something I’d never been able to find before. His personal phone number and email address.

I look at him one more time, just to check that he’s real. He stares back at me. His eyes have reddened. “Bye,” he whispers. Then, the man whom Rolling Stone describes as “eloquence you can dance to” presses his lips together and turns his head away from me, toward Hannah’s wall.

#

* * *

#

It’s a warm, sticky Florida night, the only kind we have in July. Orlando will be unbearably hot for three more months. By the time it cools off, I plan to be far, far away from here.

I sit on the scratchy bedspread, trying to review a pre-calc homework assignment. Nearby, on the other bed, my roommate Evie conceals herself beneath too-long bangs and monstrous headphones. The music blaring from them is so distracting that I can’t imagine how Evie isn’t profoundly deaf.

Evie has lived at the Parson’s Home for four years. Maybe she doesn’t care if she’s deaf.

This will be my seventh night here. Inside these walls, reality seems to slip and reshape. I watched my mother die. And even though I’d seen her casket lowered into the ground, I keep expecting her to walk through the door, saying “Rachel, gather your things, we’re leaving. And why haven’t you taken all your exams yet?”

I flip another page in my math book. Claiborne Prep—where I’m going next year—won’t accept a report card full of incompletes. I missed all my final exams the week my mother died. My school arranged for me to take them during the summer session. And now I’m stuck with this homework and this room and a spinning head. I try one more time to make sense of the equation on the page. But then I hear a car horn outside.

Dropping my pencil, I run from the room. The stairs are carpeted in a shade of brown which tries and fails to hide the dirt of many thousands of feet over several dozen years.

Outside, there’s a familiar blue beater at the curb. When I emerge, Haze climbs out from behind the driver’s seat. I sit down on the grimy stoop, and he sits down next to me. Haze wraps his tattooed arms around his knees and rests his chin on his biceps. “Evening,” he says.

“Hi.”

“You didn’t call me after. I’ve been waiting to hear how it was.”

“My phone stopped working.” And even if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

“Did you like him?” He gives me a sidelong glance.

I shrug. I’ve always liked him. “It was really hard. We were both terrified.”

“What’s he got to be scared of? Except me.”

“Haze,” I warn. We’d been close since I was in the second grade, when I pinched Adam Lewis on the backside so that he’d leave Haze alone. Haze has been my loyal friend ever since, though he no longer needs my protection. The Adam Lewises of the world do not want to run afoul of the nineteen-year-old edition of Haze.

These days, I’m the one receiving all the protection. When my mother was hospitalized, Haze sat there next to me. While I held her hand, he held my other one. Together we’d watched my mother’s body slip deeper into illness, with new tubes each day, and a hissing ventilator at the end. During the three-week ordeal, he had ferried me to the hospital and back home. When I was too tired and too afraid to be alone, he had slept on my sofa and cut school.

Haze is stuck in summer school now too, which is basically my fault.

And then, after the end came, as I sat numbly in his car before the funeral, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me for the first time. Even now, it rests here on the grimy stoop between us, this unacknowledged thing that has shifted. Haze has always been quick to throw an arm around my shoulders or pat me on the back. But now I sense a kind of heat rising off him whenever I’m nearby.

At this very moment I’m aware of his fingertips sliding onto my bare knee. And I really don’t know what to think about that.

“I don’t see how Daddy thinks he can help,” Haze is saying. “The man is seventeen years too late.”

I know! Angry Rachel privately agrees. Of course I’m mad at Frederick. Still, Haze shouldn’t make me defend my decision to meet him.

As I watch, Haze’s fingers rub my kneecap gently. There’s love in his touch, which I sorely appreciate. But there’s also expectation. I reach for his hand, squeezing his fingers to occupy them. And then I change the subject. “Did you hear any news from Mickey Mouse?” Haze is applying for jobs at all the theme parks, hoping to start after we finally graduate.

“Not yet. I’ve been wondering—what do you think is the worst job there?”

“Is Mickey potty trained? What about Goofy?”

A slow grin overtakes his face. “Did you know the custodial guys have a code for all the bad shit? ‘Code V’ is for vomit. They clean it up with ‘pixie dust,’ which is really sawdust cut with charcoal.”

“Gross. Don’t get stationed by Space Mountain.”

“I know, right? Rachel, your curfew is in two minutes.”

“True.”

“We can hang out after school tomorrow.”

I shake my head. “Frederick is coming to see me again.” His name sounds funny on my tongue. Formal. But I can’t call him “my father” out loud when, as far as I know, he’s never called me his daughter.

Haze’s face falls. “Why, Rae? You don’t need his bullshit. What would your mother say?”

Haze and my mother had always gotten on beautifully together—even after Haze stopped being a cute grade-schooler, and got tattoos, and got left back a grade. “That’s just Haze,” she’d sigh, after the news of his latest mess. “He’s been through a lot.” To me, Jenny Kress was a militant taskmaster. But she had a blind spot for Haze. It was one of the enduring mysteries of my life.

“Jenny would say that man is nothing to you,” Haze presses.

I stare down at the cracks in the concrete walkway. The truth is that my mother said that very thing many times. Until the night that all changed.

“It was her idea,” I say slowly.

“What was?”

My stomach is already cramping. I’m still too raw to think about my mother’s final week. Getting through each day requires that I forget those frantic hours, as doctors scrambled to halt her decline, and nurses—my mother’s coworkers—came and went with anxious faces.

“It was that night you went out to buy milkshakes, because she said she would eat something.” Just the memory of her hospital room pushes me back under the surface of the deep pool of fear I’d been swimming through. “Out of nowhere, she said ‘We need to call your father.’”

At the time, I’d tried to brush the idea aside. “Now is not the time,” I’d told her.

But she’d said, “Now is well past the time.” And then she’d let out the saddest sigh I’d ever heard.

That had been the exact moment when I’d really understood how bad things were. Somehow I’d managed to stay positive until right then, even though I’d never seen her so sick. Even though she slept nearly all the time, and her skin felt like hot paper. Even though Hannah the social worker had begun to make regular appearances in my mother’s hospital room.

Until that moment, I was able to pretend. And then she burst that bubble. We have to call your father. It was the single scariest thing she ever said to me.

“We’re not calling him,” I’d argued again, feeling like I might throw up.

“Calling who?” Hannah had asked from the doorway.

And that was that.

“Well, shit,” Haze says, his voice full of surprise. He clasps one of my wrists and pulls me gently to my feet. “That doesn’t mean it was a good idea. What, uh, happened between them, anyway?”

“I have no idea. Except for the obvious thing.” My neck heats at the implication of sex.

But Haze just smiles. “That much I figured out. Do you think it was a hookup? Or were they a couple?”

All I can do is shake my head. “Whenever I asked questions, she always said she didn’t know him well. That he was a stranger.” Although I never quite bought it. Mom seemed angry at him in a way that a stranger might not deserve. Or was that wishful thinking?

I hated the idea that I was the product of a one-night stand. An accidental child.

That awful night my mother told Hannah to summon him had probably been a window—a rare chance to ask questions. But I hadn’t done it. I was afraid to break the seal, as if, by acknowledging my worst nightmare, it would come true.

And then it had. My mother’s last words were, “It’s okay, Rachel.”

Haze lifts a hand to rub my back in a way that puts me on high alert. “Rae, you don’t have to see that guy again if you’re not feeling it.”

“I know.”

“We were going to drop by your house tomorrow to pick up the things you need.”

That’s something else I’m afraid to do. “It will wait.”

“Okay,” he whispers, his eyes going soft. So I know what’s coming. He cups my face in his hands, and I stop breathing. Slowly, Haze dips his chin toward mine, bringing our lips together. I become overly aware of his palms on my cheeks, his breath on my face and the quiet snick of his kiss.

I pull away as soon as I can without being impolite.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he says. Then he turns and jogs toward his car.

Get The Accidentals at: Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo | Google

Cover reveal: MOONLIGHTER!

I’m very excited today to release the cover for my upcoming release Moonlighter! As always, Hang Le has done an amazing job capturing the feel of this book in a cover. Keep scrolling for more info!

Only in my family could a professional hockey player earning seven million dollars a year be considered a slacker.

I’m at the height of my athletic career. Yet my arrogant brother is always trying to recruit me into the family business: a global security company so secretive that I don’t even know its name. 

Pass, thanks. I don’t need a summer job. 

But the jerk ambushes me with a damsel in distress. That damsel is Alex, the competitive, sassy girl I knew when we were kids. Now she’s a drop-dead gorgeous woman in deep trouble.

So guess who’s on a flight to Hawaii?

It’s going to be a long week in paradise. My job is keeping Alex safe, while her job is torturing me with her tiny bikinis. Or maybe we’re torturing each other. It’s all snark and flirting until the threat against Alex gets serious. And this jock must become her major league protector. 

Moonlighter is a stand-alone novel. No cliffhangers, no prior experience necessary. Contains: hackers, hockey players, and a hotel room with only one bed.  

Pre-order yours at: Amazon | Apple | Nook | Kobo  

New Releases: Week of September 22nd

There’s a lot of great releases this week - don’t miss out! Big congrats to all my writer friends with releases this week!

First Chapter: Brooklynaire

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”

—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

 

* * *

 

April 2, Brooklyn

 

Rebecca

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I am something of a badass.

For starters, I live in Brooklyn, where everyone can more or less handle herself. I drink my coffee black. And I work with professional athletes, holding my own in an office so full of testosterone that caffeine is almost beside the point.

I can do twenty-five push-ups in a set. Last year a hockey player bet against me on this and lost his hundred bucks. So, until twenty-four hours ago, I thought of myself as pretty darned tough.

And I’ll need to be. The Brooklyn Bruisers are closing in on the NHL playoffs for the first time in years. Once my team makes the playoffs, a flood of tasks will head my way. Travel arrangements. Publicity events. Ticket sales in distant venues. As the office manager, it’s my job to coordinate all this happy chaos.

But yesterday afternoon, in a moment of sheer stupidity, I walked out onto the gleaming ice of the practice rink to deliver a message to one of my coworkers.

For two years I’d worked for the hockey team without ever setting foot on the ice. But yesterday I thought…why not? It’s like working at a fine restaurant and never sampling the food.

The why not became obvious about sixty seconds later, when my Chuck Taylor low tops slipped on the slick surface. I went down so fast that I couldn’t even break my fall with my hands. Instead, I went down on one butt cheek. But that slipped, too! I continued falling sideways, my arm and head hitting the ground next. My head actually bounced off the ice before I finally came to rest on the cold, cold surface.

Immediately, I did what any self-respecting girl does after she takes a serious tumble—I dusted myself off and told the two coworkers who witnessed this ridiculousness that I was absolutely fine.

And I thought I was fine, unless we were counting the bruise on my butt, which is the size of the tri-state area.

The concussion I sustained wasn’t noticeable at first. I assumed that my disorientation was from sheer embarrassment. Feeling flushed and confused seemed perfectly rational at the time.

I went home, ate some leftovers out of my refrigerator, and went to bed early. But at two in the morning I woke up again suddenly. My headache had escalated, and I felt a little sick. So I got up and went into the bathroom looking for some aspirin. And when I flipped on the light, the room spun. I grabbed the towel bar so hard that it came off the wall.

For the second time that day, I fell down on my ass.

The crash woke up my sister in the other bedroom. When she found me blinking on the floor, she panicked. That’s how we ended up at the ER at Brooklyn Methodist in the middle of the night. If I think about the bill they’re going to send me, I’ll probably get nauseous again. They poked and prodded me in all the usual places, shining infernal lights in my eyes while I insisted they should let me go home.

They finally did, but not before giving me lengthy instructions on how to recover from a concussion.

So here I roost—on the world’s ugliest couch—in my tiny, overcrowded apartment, wondering what the hell I’m going to do. Meanwhile, tears of frustration are tracking down my face.

And I never cry. What the actual fuck?

Okay, it hurts, dammit. But the headache isn’t what’s got me so upset. The ER doctor said I can’t go back to work for two weeks. He told me to stay home and avoid screens, paperwork, stress, and all physically and intellectually taxing situations.

Another tear glides down my face while I try to get my head around this. I’ve just texted Hugh Major—the General Manager of the Brooklyn Bruisers—to tell him I need a few days off. And I had to squint just to make the letters on the screen stop swimming around.

And two weeks? That’s just crazy talk. The timing is terrible, and Hugh will not be pleased. Nor will Nate Kattenberger, the team’s owner.

Furthermore, I’m not okay with it. My boys are on the cusp of making the playoffs for the first time since I came to work with the team. I have to be there to see it. For two years the hockey team has been my whole life. Sitting out for two weeks? Impossible.

Powering down my phone, I take another shaky breath. My movements are stealthy because my four-month-old nephew is asleep in a basket at my feet. I can’t wake the baby. If he starts crying right now, my head won’t be able to take it.

I focus on his sleeping face and feel a little calmer, because babies know how to relax. Matthew’s dark eyelashes line his chubby cheeks, and the blanket lifts gently with each quiet breath.

Yesterday I thought my biggest problem was sharing an overcrowded apartment with my sister and her family. Oh, and the fact that I haven’t had sex in eleven months and three days. That used to seem like a big problem.

But now I know better.

Four people live in this apartment, but I’m the only one with a full-time job. Fine—the baby is unemployable. But two adults count on me, too. My sister is trying to finish up her associate’s degree, while working a few shifts as a barista. And her baby daddy—our apartment’s fourth occupant—does construction work whenever he can get it. But often he’s doing baby care instead.

That leaves me and my steady paycheck. And even though the team’s owner has known me for seven years, these last two years I’ve worried about my job security. My absence today won’t help.

So what the hell am I going to do now?

I must have said that out loud, because my nephew shifts in his sleep.

Ever since Matthew came to live with me, I’ve learned that babies have an uncanny knack for choosing the worst possible moment to wake up. I wipe my eyes with the heels of my hands and take a deep, calming breath.

Matthew rolls over and grunts softly. His little mouth moves as if to suckle.

Uh-oh.

Slowly, I lean over the Moses basket, where he’s sleeping, and fish the abandoned pacifier out of the blankets. Then, ever so stealthily, I slide the pacifier into his mouth. These are tricks I never thought I’d learn. But then my younger sister got pregnant at twenty-two. “I’m keeping the baby,” she’d announced immediately. “And Renny is going to go work on an oil rig in the Gulf to support us.”

Right.

Fast forward a few months, and I experience exactly zero surprise when Missy loses her Queens apartment for falling behind on the rent. And I experience only slightly more surprise when Renny lasts just a few months on the oil rig.

He came through my door a week ago, dropping to his knees on my rug in an overly dramatic gesture. “I just couldn’t stand another day without my family!” the twenty-one-year-old fool cried. (Yes, my sister fell for a younger man. I’d call him her child-groom, except they aren’t even married.)

Now we’re all one big happy family in the tiny Brooklyn apartment I used to share only with my best friend Georgia. I love my sister, but this apartment really isn’t big enough for so much melodrama.

I’ve been cast in the role of Spinster Auntie. And right now, behind the closed door of the bedroom my sister and Renny share, I can hear the hushed moans of their lovemaking and the rhythmic thump of the headboard rocking against the wall.

They think they’re so sneaky. Ever since Renny returned from Texas, they slip off once a day for a quickie while the baby naps. Any minute now they’ll emerge, flushed and happy, with their soft-eyed glances for one another, their hands lingering on each other’s bodies, as if it would cause them physical pain to let go of one another.

My sister is kind of an idiot. Always has been. And yet she snagged a man who truly loves her. Every time I think about them I want to throw up a little. And that was before I got a concussion.

At my feet, Baby Matthew stretches his short, little arms over his bald, little head. His eyes are still screwed shut, but it won’t last. The pacifier falls out again. Then he makes a breathy little complaint, and those blue eyes pop open.

No matter how shittastic my life is right now, one thing remains unshakably true: my nephew is completely adorable. “Hi,” I say softly, and his eyes find me. “Did you have a good sleep?”

He considers the question.

“Want to come hang out with me on the couch?” I lean over to fit my hands beneath his heavy warmth. I tug. And when I sit up again, my head gives a stab of pain so sharp I hiss with surprise.

The sound catches Matthew off guard, and he whimpers.

“S’okay,” I say, my eyes closed against the pain. “It’s going to be fine.”

It’s unclear which of us I’m comforting.

Matthew makes a few more fussy sounds. He’s working himself up to a full-blown cry. For once I don’t mind because it covers up the sound of the sex crescendo in the other room. But I’ve left the pacifier in the basket on the floor, damn it. Holding Matthew makes it doubly hard to bend over, but I manage it. Barely.

When we’re settled back again on the sofa, the room spins in a way that rooms really shouldn’t. The big brown roses on the ugly couch—The Beast, as Georgia and I call it—seem to swim in front of my eyes.

Trippy.

Matthew sucks a little desperately on the pacifier. It won’t hold him for long. He’s hungry. Sure enough, his whimpers become wails after a couple more minutes. I rock him in my arms, but two fat tears squeeze from the corners of his eyes. In sympathy, a couple of tears leak from my own eyes, too.

Then the bedroom door flies open. “Daddy is here!” Renny declares. He’s bare chested, and the top button of his jeans is still undone. But he runs around the sofa and scoops Matthew out of my arms. “My pumpkin muffin. My sweetie pie.” He lowers his scruffy face to Matthew’s velvety cheek and begins to kiss him.

That baby is hungry, and Renny does not have the plumbing he needs. But apparently a half-naked nutbar like Renny is just entertaining enough to distract Matthew from his empty belly. The baby puts his little starfish hand on daddy’s face, and they stare at each other like long-lost lovers.

“Who’s the best little pumpkin muffin in the world?” Renny babbles. He sits in the other corner of The Beast, and then my sister enters the room looking flushed and more sexually satisfied than any new mother has a right to look. “Mommy!” Renny calls out, sounding like a moron. “We need your luscious titties over here!”

“You know,” I grumble, although I’m positive nobody is listening. “In a couple of years, he’s going to repeat all the stuff you say.”

They don’t even hear me. Missy fits herself against her boy toy and lifts her shirt. Renny adjusts the baby in both their laps, so that the baby can reach my sister’s boob. Matthew latches on, while his two parents gaze at their baby while he feeds, occasionally making sickening little comments about what a great nurser he is.

This is my life.

I’ve never felt more like a third wheel. Or a fourth wheel. Whatever. But this is my couch, and I wouldn’t get up to leave even if I had somewhere else to go. Which I don’t. I will just sit here, stewing in my own misery, alone with my worried thoughts, even if nobody notices.

That’s when the doorbell buzzes. The sound is like a knife through my already achy skull. “Could somebody get that?”

The happiest little family in Brooklyn doesn’t move.

So I get up to answer the buzzer myself. “Hello?”

“Rebecca.” The man’s voice is low and firm. “Can I come up?”

He doesn’t even bother to identify himself. He really doesn’t have to. Nate Kattenberger is the kind of man who’s used to being recognized.

He isn’t, on the other hand, accustomed to stopping by his assistant’s Brooklyn apartment. I’ve worked for Nate for seven years, and never once has he set foot inside my home.

It takes me a moment to shake off my surprise. But then I gather my wits and press the button unlocking the front door downstairs.

I turn my gaze on my living room. The place looks like a bomb went off. “Renny, go put on a shirt! Missy? How much of this baby crap can we pick up in the next 15 seconds?”

“None of it? I’m nursing. Why?”

Because the most successful man in the tri-state area is walking up the staircase right now! I don’t even have time to panic. Nate Kattenberger taps on the door less than a minute later. He must have sprinted up two flights of stairs. Since there’s no cure for my embarrassment, I open the door.

“You should be in bed.” That’s Nate’s opener. He’s never one for small talk.

I don’t answer for a second, because my brain is slow today, and it takes a little longer than normal to get over the same little jolt of disbelief I have every time those intense light brown eyes first lock onto mine. Nate is about ten times more magnetic than an ordinary guy. You’d think after seven years I’d be used to him. But nope.

“Hey,” I point out a beat later. “You rang my doorbell. I can’t open it and sleep at the same time.”

“A fair point, Bec. Were you sleeping before I rang?”

I don’t answer; I just wave him in. As he steps through the door, he pulls something into my apartment with him. It’s the biggest arrangement of roses I have ever seen, outside of a funeral parlor.

“Jesus. I’m still breathing, you know.” The joke is supposed to cover my embarrassment at his generosity, but it comes out sounding snappish. And when I try to take the flowers from him, the basket is so big that I don’t even know where to put it.

“Maybe I overshot,” he says with a chuckle. “Here. You take this instead.” He hands me a shopping bag from Dean & DeLuca, and it’s full of gourmet food. “Can I put the flowers on the table by the window?”

“If they fit! Watch out for the…”

Nate trips on the baby swing because I don’t warn him in time. He almost goes down, but saves himself just in time by leaning on the wall.

“I’m so sorry about that,” my sister says from the sofa. She doesn’t, however, apologize for her half-naked boyfriend, who’s gaping at Brooklyn’s most famous billionaire.

Good lord. We are Brooklyn’s equivalent of a trailer park. And it ain’t pretty.

“Nate,” I say, as if I weren’t dying inside. “You remember my sister Missy.” They met about five years ago when I invited Missy to a benefit at a museum somewhere. I don’t even remember the occasion. “And this is her boyfriend, Renny.”

“How have you been?” Nate asks Missy. The tips of his ears go red, probably because my sister is basically topless. “Are you here to look after Rebecca while she heals?”

“Nope! We live here,” Renny says, swinging his feet up onto the coffee table.

I just want to die now. As long as it’s relatively painless.

“Renny,” I try. “Didn’t you tell me you were going to make a trip to the store? After the baby woke up, you said.” This isn’t even a lie. He did mention making a run for groceries. But that was before he distracted himself by jumping my sister.

“Sure,” he rubs his unshaven face. “I could do that.”

“I’ll come with you,” my sister says, bless her. “We’ll carry Matthew in the sling. He’ll be done feeding in a minute here.”

Praise Jesus.

Renny stands up, rubbing his bare chest. “Hey, is the library open? I finished that awesome book—with the parallel universe? But it ended on a cliffy. I need the sequel.”

Faster, Renny! I can see his shirt through the open doorway of Missy’s room. I mentally coach him toward it. The shirt, Renny. Get the shirt.

“Parallel universes are the best!” He wanders in the general direction of the shirt. “Like, there’s a parallel universe where I’m the quarterback for the Giants. And there’s a parallel universe where you’re the Queen of France.”

“There’s no monarchy in France,” I point out. Put on a shirt.

My sister waves her boobs around, then puts them back into her bra.

“But that’s the point!” Renny yells from the bedroom. Clothed now, he emerges to dance over to his son, scooping him out of Missy’s arms. “Anything can happen in a parallel universe. My little man can fly. Whee!” He supports the baby on his palms and flies Matthew around.

“Won’t that make him spit up?” I ask, preparing for the worst.

Missy takes the baby back from her goofball boyfriend. “Let’s roll. Good to see you, Nate. Go easy on my sister. She spent the whole morning freaking out about missing work. But she’s not supposed to touch a computer until…”

“Missy,” I warn.

“Well, you’re not!” Wisely, she opens the apartment door and disappears outside.

Renny grabs the baby’s sling, and then a blanket, too. Even if he’s kind of an idiot, he’s actually a good dad. “Later, Nate Kattenberger and Becca!”

The sound of the door shutting behind him is the best sound I’ve heard all day. My embarrassment factor lowers from 100 to, oh, a 97.

“Wow,” Nate says.

“They’re a little much,” I mumble.

“No…” He’s staring at the giant brown, velvet roses on The Beast. “Your sofa is really quite…”

“Hideous?”

He laughs.

“Would you believe that it’s super comfortable, though? Georgia and I thought about having it reupholstered, but we weren’t sure it would fit through the apartment door.” I plop down in one corner. “Sit. Try it for yourself.”

Nate drops into the other corner. He lifts his hands behind his head and stretches back. “Yeah, okay.”

“Not only is it comfortable, but when you’re sitting on it you don’t have to look at it.”

Nate laughs again, and I study his profile, as I’ve done a thousand times before. It’s objectively handsome. More than handsome, actually. Hot. Today he’s wearing his trademark black hoodie and a pair of four hundred dollar jeans.

These days he wears suits to his Manhattan office tower. But the hoodie used to be his uniform. Though he didn’t wear expensive jeans or designer sneakers back then. He didn’t have the office tower, either.

When I joined the company, there were 17 employees. Now there are more than 2000.

For five years I worked at Nate’s side as his personal assistant. Then, two years ago, he bought the Brooklyn Bruisers hockey team. That’s when he asked me to leave Kattenberger Tech and manage the team’s office instead. Another woman—the frosty Lauren—took my place as his assistant in Manhattan.

Nate said it wasn’t a demotion, and I didn’t take a pay cut. I actually gained some benefits, because the hockey team is a separate corporation, with a slightly different structure. And I still see Nate several times a week, at least during hockey season.

The move still bothers me, though. I wonder what I did to fall out of favor with Nate.

And now I realize I’m staring at him. But he’s staring at me too. “Are you really okay?” he asks, his face unreadable. Nate is famously stoic. The magazine profile pieces about him love to use the word “inscrutable.” The truth is that he’s actually a bit socially awkward.

“I will be okay.” I clear my throat. “God, it was the stupidest fall ever. I don’t think I even hit my head very hard. I’ll go into the office tomorrow morning, okay? I’ll just take it easy at work for a day or two…”

He’s already shaking his head. “No way. A concussion takes at least two weeks to heal.”

“Two weeks!” I squeak. “But I don’t need to play hockey, Nate. It’s a desk job.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He folds his hands like the CEO that he is, and then he drops a bomb. “For the next two weeks, Lauren is leaving her Manhattan seat to cover the Bruisers’ office. Until you’re really back on your feet. It’s already decided.”

My heart slides into my gut. “That’s really not necessary.” Not Lauren! It’s déjà vu all over again. “Lauren hates hockey, anyway.” She’d said so herself a dozen times.

Nate just smirks. Most men can’t pull off a smirk. But most men aren’t Nate Kattenberger. If you’re as smart and attractive as this guy, you can do pretty much anything. “Lauren will just have to deal.”

“Is there really no way I can talk you out of this? I’m just going to sit around this little apartment, bored.”

“You’re benched, Bec. It happens. The players bitch about the downtime, too. We need your brain, okay? We don’t fool around with concussions.”

I don’t point out the obvious difference—Nate’s hockey players get their head injuries while doing great things for the team. I got mine being an idiot.

Yay me.

“Thank you for the flowers, Nate.” My voice is so low I can’t be sure he heard it.

Our eyes meet, and the years fall away. I see the twenty-something guy I used to know, the one with a scrubby office and a big dream. Back then we worked late, eating leftover Chinese at our desks, and competing to see who could throw wadded-up napkins into the waste can from across the room. He was the guy with the knowing smirk and the big brain. And I took care of the little things so he had time to reinvent the way your mobile device connects to the internet.

Now Nate smiles at me, showing me his dimples. The dimples don’t fit the rest of the Nate Kattenberger package. They’re too boyish for such a serious face. They soften him. I smile back instinctively. And for that moment, everything is okay.

It’s a funny thing to be so familiar with this powerful man, and yet still aware that he holds my whole life in the palm of his hand. I trust him. But I also really can’t afford to let him down.

“Alternate universe theory is a thing,” he says suddenly.

“Wh-what?” As always, I’m a couple of paces behind Nate. Even when I don’t have a concussion.

“Alternate universes. The multiverse. It’s a legitimate theory in physics.”

“Pfft. Renny just reads science fiction.”

Nate’s eyes brighten. “Because science fiction is awesome. The multiverse theory posits that infinity is large enough to simultaneously encompass every parallel chance. Every non-choice. Every possibility.”

“Well, that’s just scary! Please don’t send me to a planet where my brother-in-law runs your company.”

Nate smirks.

“But I do like the idea that there’s a universe in which I did not step out onto the ice yesterday and then mess up our end-of-season workflow.”

His smile fades. “It’s going to be okay, Bec. What’s a little more chaos between friends?”

“Right?” I ask, but my voice cracks. I’m so tired of chaos. I’m just suddenly so…tired.

“Hey,” his voice is soft. He stretches a hand across the ugly brown roses on the sofa and squeezes my hand. “Would you tell me if you weren’t okay?”

“Yes.” No. Probably not. “In a few days I’ll probably feel great.”

“I hope so. Besides—the team still has to get us there. My model predicts we’ll clinch our playoffs spot a week from tonight.”

“In this universe, right?” I tease.

“Listen, bitch,” he says.

And then we both crack up, because “listen, bitch,” is from a B-movie we watched once on a jet to…Brussels? London? I don’t remember the destination. The flight was delayed, and we ended up watching two aliens fighting, and the purple one said “Listen, bitch!” to the green one.

It’s been a part of our shared vocabulary ever since. That and palindromes. With Nate it’s just all dork humor all the time.

“Clinching the playoffs next week, huh?” I poke his foot with my toe. “I’d better chill the champagne.”

“That’s more like it.” His glance travels around my cramped living room, where a giant package of disposable diapers is wedged under the coffee table, and three discarded pacifiers dot the floor. “Are you going to be able to get the peace and quiet here that you need to heal?”

“It’ll be fine,” I insist. “We’re usually not all home at the same time.” That’s true, but only because I’m the one who’s usually at work.

Nate stands up. “You’ll call me if you need anything?”

“Of course,” I lie, rising to my feet. Complaining to Nate isn’t my style. I wouldn’t want to ruin my Tough Girl cred. And he has enough to worry about right now.

He gives me a long look, and I try to smile. The man is observant as hell, and I don’t want him to know how scared I am. “Be well, Bec. Don’t try to do too much before the doctors say it’s okay.”

“All right. I promise.”

He gives me the world’s most awkward hug and then vanishes into the Brooklyn afternoon.

Get Brooklynaire at: Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo