Lila snort-laughs. “Aw, I wonder where he learned that from.”
“One of his uncles, undoubtedly. I use the European version. Much more subtle.”
“I’m aware. I’ve seen you do it seven times to me this week.”
I have not, but once again, I’m smiling at her like she’s the sun and I’m a Doomsdayer who’s spent the last fifteen years huddled in a bunker forty feet underground and have finally emerged to see the light, despite the very clear suggestion that it’s only my children’s presence keeping her from making a few hand gestures of her own at me.
I clear my throat as if doing so can solve my lack of control over my facial expression. Emma sneezes, and something wet coats my hair. “Dada boogie?”
That gets a full belly laugh from Lila, which is both the most awful and gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.
“It’s just fall allergies, Tripp,” my mom calls as I reach up to check on Emma and the sneeze. “She’s fine.”
“Talented girl,” Lila says, still chuckling. “Oh!” She leaps sideways and looks down.
Dammit. “James. Come here, please.”
Solemn blue eyes blink once at me. “Fiyah-fiyah and Wawwy want hugs,” he insists.
I try to bend to his level, get a crick in my neck from having thirty pounds of toddler straddling it, and end up patting my leg like he’s a dog.
“Please come here,” I repeat to my son on a sigh, though I have to hand it to him.
He’s managed to distract me from checking to see if Emma’s snot is cold-colored or allergy-colored. But if she sneezes again, we’re going inside.
His lips wobble.
Shit.
If he cries, Emma will cry, and then they’ll try to outcry each other, and then there will be the puking that comes with too much crying. We’re getting close to the danger zone for bedtime, which I don’t normally push, but family cookouts are worth the pain. And James probably needs a trip to the potty.
Lila bends carefully, balancing her plate. “Quick hugs, and then Fiyah-fiyah and Larry have to go fly again, okay?”
James presses his truck and car to her face, grinning happily.
Heat washes over my face and down my neck once more, and my heart gives a strangled cry at watching my son with a woman the right age to be his mother. It’s a familiar cry, one that sometimes hits me when we’re hanging out with Sarah or one of the sisters from the neighborhood, and it’s gradually happened less and less frequently in the last year and a half, but that thick, heavy, lonely howl has been quiet just long enough that it takes me by surprise and knocks the wind out of me.
“Wait—what’s this?” she says suddenly, and she pulls a quarter out of his ear.
James gasps.
Me?
I. Am. So. Screwed.
Because I think I just fell in love.
James takes the quarter from her. “Is dat mine?”
“It was in your ear, wasn’t it?”
I stifle the urge to tell him to clean his hands after touching money, because I don’t need to wave my irrational fears out here tonight. Mom’s right. Everyone’s fine.
He tugs at the ear in question, then the other ear. “One in there too?”
She inspects his ear. “No, I don’t think—oh! Look at that. There is one in there too.”
He giggles. “Gwamma!! Gwamma, I got coins in my eayas!” He takes off for the house.
And I have to swallow hard to make my tongue work.
“I didn’t think you liked children,” I say while Emma rubs her sneeze harder into my hair.
Lila watches the darkness where we can just make out James’s shadow dashing through the yard. She slowly lifts a rib, still not looking at me. “I lost my mom when I was little too.”
She was older than my kids, but it still sucks. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. For all of us.” She bites into her rib. Her eyes slide closed, and a low moan slips from her lips, and my cock instantly rises to attention.
“Okay, yes, you can’t get this in New York,” she says huskily.
“Dada appa-coppa!” Emma insists.
“Glad you agree. Gotta run.”
Am I a chicken?
Yes.
But I definitely need to run off this hard-on before I can go back inside. And remember what’s important.
My kids. My family. And the team.
My dick can stay out of it.
14
Lila
I can’t get my pulse under control after watching Tripp jog off with his happily-shrieking daughter bouncing on his shoulders.
There’s a voice that I can’t silence whispering that if he lied once, he’ll lie again. But everything else I’m learning about the man says that he’s more like me than I ever could’ve anticipated or prepared for.
Grief makes a person do a lot of things they wouldn’t normally do.
And attraction makes a person overlook more than they should.
But it’s not like Tripp’s tried to be attractive this week. I know he doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like me sitting in the owner’s office. He doesn’t like me suggesting publicly that the Fireballs need a new mascot. He doesn’t like having the tables turned when he tries to pull a prank.
Although, if that duck poster—all of them—doesn’t get burned this weekend, I’ll be painting over it with red paint myself.
Fireballs red. Not blood red. For the record.
But the problem is, I’m actually smiling about it.
Wondering if he’ll retaliate with the fifty other duck posters he claims he had made.
I retreat to the firepit, where one of the Rivers brothers has built a massive roaring fire, and slip into the open spot next to Knox to eat my delicious dinner. Parker’s chatting with Mackenzie—aka the Fireballs’ real number one fan—and Mrs. Ryder.
“You okay?” Knox asks me. He and Parker have completely sorted Uncle Al’s house, leaving several boxes of personal letters and pictures for me to go through, several more boxes of items that probably shouldn’t be set out during the estate sale, and generally cleaned up most of the mess.
Part of me wants to inspect every last statue and figurine and music box in the house, looking for hints of my mom, but first of all, I know logically I’m being ridiculous in thinking I’ll feel her in things, and second of all, I’m nearly certain Uncle Guido’s been coming in at night and doing just that.
We don’t talk about it, but I know he was always secretly in love with my mother.
“I’m okay. Just surprised,” I tell Knox.
“That they haven’t murdered us yet?” he asks with a grin.
“Yes.”
“Oh my god, he is not!” Mackenzie suddenly squeals. She’s an adorable blonde in Fireballs gear from her hat to her shoelaces, and someone said her car’s even covered in Fireballs decals.
Parker laughs. “Honestly? I thought my other brother was being an idiot when he suggested it, but it makes sense. Brooks is always talking about scoring with women, but there hasn’t been a single photo of him with one anywhere. And I have a friend who’s like a super hacker, and she hacked all the websites where the bat girls hang out—bat girls? Is that what they call themselves? The women who like to score with baseball players? Anyway. Never mind. My point is—she swears there’s no record of anyone ever saying they’ve slept with him. Cross my heart, I think he’s staying a virgin because he thinks his game will suffer if he ever scores off the field. His high school girlfriend told my other brothers that they got all the way to third base one night, and for the next week, he couldn’t hit a single ball, so he broke up with her. He never dated a single woman in college, and the one time I saw him on what I thought was a date, it turned out he was talking to a psychic because his teammates set him up when they heard he hadn’t been laid in forever. Like, literally forever. Isn’t that crazy?”