She wasn’t sure how long she could live with Vadim and Isobel, though. Oh, they made her more than welcome and this 3000 square foot, glass-walled palace in Winnetka just north of Chicago was spacious enough to allow them to carry on relatively independent lives. Only, whenever she walked into the living room and found her brother with his hand down his wife’s shirt, she felt it might be time to get her own place. But the real reason she wasn’t moving out immediately was because of access.
Namely, access to Tommy Gordon.
Her brother’s agent was stopping by today for lunch and she planned to be on site to demonstrate her … wit? Charm? Sexual magnetism? (Mighty hard to achieve in the presence of an older, scowling brother, but she had to take her shots where she could.)
Alert to her arrival home, her funny little Pomeranian came bounding around the corner on stubby legs. “Gordie Howe! Who’s a good doggo?” She hunkered down to give the toast-colored bundle a rubdown, then led him upstairs. “Come on, buddy. Mama needs fashion advice.”
Thirty minutes later she walked into the living room to find her brother shirtless, revealing his many tats, in his usual king-of-all-he-surveys position on the sofa. This was made all the more annoying by the fact everyone had to attend to him after knee surgery. People told her she resembled him, with their coal-black hair and blue eyes, but she couldn’t quite pull off the moody supermodel look, Vadim’s bread-and-butter.
“Where’s Isobel?” What she really meant was “where’s Tommy?” She was sure she’d heard the doorbell and the low rumble of his sexy voice.
Her brother narrowed his eyes at her. “Why are you all dressed up?”
“This?” She waved at her outfit, a cute sundress that showed her bare shoulders. So she didn’t wear dresses much—or at all—but she wouldn’t call it that unusual. Gordie gave a yelp of approval. He’d sniffed at it earlier, signifying it was the one. “This old thing? It’s just a dress, Vad.”
“You are always in sweats. That is what I am used to.”
“Well, God forbid I dress in something you’re not used to. Again, where’s Iz?”
“She’s still over at Harper’s.”
“Is everything okay?”
He eyed her. “There is discussion of a new franchise. A new women’s hockey franchise. In Chicago.”
Her heart leaped. She sat, practically on her hands to cover her excitement. The National Women’s Hockey League had undergone significant birthing pains from the start and only now seemed to be gaining traction. Expanding to Chicago, a huge sports town, was a good move. “That would be amazing. Are they going to invest or something?”
“Perhaps. Or do a co-host with whatever team starts here. Why? Are you interested?”
“You know I am. I took a break for a while but now I’m working my way back to form. So you didn’t like my choice but it made sense for me at the time.”
“I worry that you have delayed when you could have already won the Cup. Twice.”
She smiled, glad that even when he was mad at her, his confidence in her abilities never wavered.
“There’s still time, Vad. I’m only twenty-four. You didn’t win until you were almost thirty. Practically drawing social security!”
“So insolent. And I was twenty-seven. Hardly old.” Vad returned her grin all the same. Things had been a little tense between them—Vadim didn’t approve of her career choices post-college and Mia couldn’t tell him her exact reasons why she’d gone that route—but it seemed to be easing now that she was refocused on her hockey career.
“Whose voice did I just hear?” She cast a glance toward the kitchen as the sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors increased in volume. Her heart sped up, recognizing that tread, knowing she would see him any moment now. Her beautiful Tommy.
Her gaze clashed with a pair of stunning eyes the color of … fall leaves? Now hold on, there was no good reason for this blatant insult to her fantasies.
“What are you doing here?”
Cal Foreman—even worse, Cal Foreman in a Red Sox tee—took a seat on the sofa and handed off a bottle of water to Vadim. “I’m here for lunch.”
“I mean—I thought—” She jerked her gaze back to Vadim. “Aren’t you supposed to be having lunch with your agent?”
Vadim unscrewed the cap of the bottle. “He had to meet another client who won’t be in town long, so Cal came over instead.” Said as if this was a perfectly normal substitution for Tommy. It was not!
“Wait, your agent is coming over?” Cal sounded annoyed. “You never said that.”
“The point is that he is not coming over. He will be here this evening and we will have dinner.” Vadim cocked his head at his friend. “You need a new agent?”
Cal made a sound of disgust, and while it wasn’t clear what exactly he was annoyed about, Mia could think of a reason.
Five hundred comments and counting reasons.
The first rule of pranking is that if you don’t have the stomach for it, you shouldn’t spend time with your victim in the immediate aftermath. She hadn’t expected to be confronted with the results so soon. After all, she rarely spent any time in Cal Foreman’s presence and she had assumed that state of affairs would happily continue.
Last night she had been so annoyed with him at the wedding, especially at his high-handed inclusion of Mia in his scheme to dump his girlfriend. So Foreman’s ex might have gone gaga over that bouquet but any decent guy would have resolved that in private. Instead this jerkwad decided to put on a show for his buddies and use Mia as the foil for his plan.
What an ass!
So there wasn’t much she could do about it after the fact except take to the Internet for a ruling. She’d kept it as anonymous as possible, though the names of the innocent might have been largely unchanged. Imagination often fell by the wayside when beers were added to the wedding champagne haul.
Lara. Tia. Not her best work.
Since it was posted, it had attracted a healthy interest and the judgment she’d sought: ‘You’re the Dick.’ But it was still anonymous, and no one she knew had figured out the identity of Skaterbro—either the real or fake version. Not even Cal himself, who seemed to be cranky for another reason entirely.
Vadim let it go and switched his focus to Mia. “Isobel is not here to serve lunch—”
“As if she would,” Mia muttered.
“And as you can see, I cannot stand.” Vadim gestured dramatically at his knee in a brace and resting on a footstool, but then he was incapable of gesturing undramatically at anything. “Perhaps you can earn your keep, sestra, and help Cal put it together in the kitchen. We will eat on the patio. Okay?”
Mia shot a glance at Cal, who was grinning, all traces of his earlier bad humor gone.
“Come on, Mia, let’s serve the king his banquet.”
Mia shot a glare at her brother, who didn’t even notice because he was too busy petting Gordie Howe. (Vadim called her puppy “the little dog with big shits” and claimed indifference, an absolute lie.) She followed Cal into the kitchen through the house’s big sprawl, the walk giving her time to enjoy his butt in jeans.
That’s not right.