“I thought you said you don’t stay up on the gossip.”
“Summer school dates aren’t gossip,” he quips.
Embarrassment pinkens my cheeks over the fact that he’s right.
His hand grips mine tighter. “I shouldn’t have said it like that. Let’s just have a nice day, okay?”
“Play nice, Mr. Bald…” His head snaps my way. “Roarke.”
A smile replaces his clenched jaw. “Better.”
“Roarke!” A man’s voice booms from down the hall. He’s standing at the end of the hallway in grey athletic shorts and a polo shirt. His hair is thinning, but he appears in great shape.
“Hey, Sean. I’m glad you’re here,” Roarke says with genuine affection.
We walk up to him and the two men shake hands. “This is Hannah Crowley.” Roarke’s hand lands on the small of my back and a tingle lets loose in my stomach. “Hannah, this is Sean, the head coach of the Spartan football team.”
The man’s eyes dip up and down, faster than most and I wonder if it’s because he doesn’t want Roarke to notice. Am I really that much of an anomaly in this town? “Pleasure.” We shake hands and Roarke’s hand never leaves my back.
“If you’ve got the time, the team is practicing right now.” Sean turns around and my eye catches a trophy case right before the back doors.
“You played?” I ask, seeing his picture with a team in the glass case next to a trophy.
“Yeah.” His words aren’t the proud ones I loved in the car. He sounds contrite. “We’ll be right out, Sean.”
The man nods and heads out the doors.
I inspect the other pictures seeing graduation class of nineteen ninety-four. Mentally, I do the math. So he’s forty-one or maybe forty-two depending on when his birthday is. While my head is busy calculating the difference between our ages, I notice a picture that has a much younger Liv in a cheerleading uniform in Roarke’s arms. He’s sweaty and there’s no silver in his dark hair.
“So what happened between you and Liv?” I ask, my nose still pressed to the glass, wanting to learn everything about this man who I thought I hated.
“You know the song ‘Jack and Diane’ by John Mellencamp?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Well, turns out Diane wanted Jack’s best friend, Evan.”
I turn my head to look at him. His hands are stuffed in the pockets of his shorts again, his eyes averted from the glass case.
“I’m sorry,” I say, a frown on my face.
“Don’t be. I wouldn’t be who I am without that experience. I’d probably be like Sean and be coaching right now. Not that that’s a bad thing, I’m just happier where I am.” I picture the strong, capable, powerful man in front of me suffering a heartbreak when he was younger. It’s hard to merge those two visions of him into one whole person.
“But you’d have the girl,” I say, pressing despite not being sure if I should. If I even really want to.
He shakes his head. “She wasn’t the right one. If she was, I wouldn’t have lost her.” He sounds so certain.
“But don’t you think that…”
“If you’re trying to compare Liv to what happened with you and Todd, don’t. It’s very different. Liv and I were young, I didn’t know there was a whole other world out there.”
I step closer, reaching for his hands and entwining our fingers together. “You have so many layers, Roarke. Peel just one back for me.”
Why am I asking for trouble by begging him to show me his heart?
“I am showing you. Bringing you to Woods Parlor is showing you a part of me almost no one knows about. It’s putting on full display why I don’t do relationships.”
My heart cracks for this man. I squeeze his hands.
“And you haven’t even met my mother yet.”
“So the question is, do you believe in true love? In fate?”
At some point, one of us must have moved in because our chests are pressed against one another’s.
His gaze falls down to me. “Truth?”
I nod, swallowing down my expectations. He might surprise me.
“No.”
I step back, but his hands grip in mine, not letting me pull away.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t want to be proven wrong. I’m a lawyer, Hannah.” He steps forward, and my breasts pebble at our proximity. “I see logic, facts. My day is spent dealing with the aftermath of relationships that people thought would be until death do they part but have transformed a couple into conniving and manipulative people wanting harm to the person they once swore they loved the most. But I want a woman to come home to. A woman to warm my bed at night. A woman who doesn’t need me but wants me.”
To my utter horror, tears threaten to spill down my cheeks from his declaration. “And you think I’m that woman?”
He releases one hand, raising it to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “I want you to be her, but first I’d like you to let me in by forgiving me for representing Todd. I want to put that behind us and start fresh.”
I lean into the strength of his palm. “I’m not sure.”
He nods, his eyes falling shut. “Well, good thing I have two more favors.”
My heart is screaming at me. My vagina is flailing on the floor in a huge tantrum. My lips are begging for just one kiss. In a sick way I want him to use a favor to kiss me, but instead, he pulls back, takes my hand again and leads me out the doors without another word.
My mind is in a daze as I stand on the edge of the grass field watching boys hit each other. Roarke is talking to Sean in the corner, inspecting some helmets.
“Water break!” the assistant next to me screams and I smack at a bug sucking on my neck.
“Being near these woods sucks,” one of the boys who raced over to the sidelines says. “I guess that’s why they call us Woods Parlor.” A young kid squirts a stream of water into his mouth and then over his face.
Big blue eyes, sandy blonde hair. He’s a heartbreaker in the making I’m sure.
“I guess so.”
His eyes feast on me and I’m afraid I’ll be the cougar fantasy in his spank bank later tonight. “You’re Mr. Baldwin’s girl?”
Two more boys join him, more interested in the cheerleading practice going on behind me than speaking with me.
“I’m not his girl,” I say.
His lips quirk up. “Why not? He’s got to be a catch what with how rich he is.”
I shrug. “Money’s not everything.”
“It is when you have nothing.” The kid squirts more water in his mouth and swishes it around for a second before spitting it out in front of him. His two teammates nearby are practically drooling over the girls behind me.
The kid’s words ring out in my head and a new stream of questions to ask Roarke form in my head. Why did he ever choose to become a divorce attorney?
“If it wasn’t for Mr. Baldwin, we wouldn’t have the new concussion helmets.” He nods and I look over to see Roarke placing one on top of a player’s head. “We’d be playing with uniforms from when he played fifty years ago.”