“Whoa, hold up, old man,” Levi says as we stroll into the lobby of the Manhattan building housing the commissioner’s office for our eleven AM meeting. “You got a little something here on your face…”
“Toothpaste? Bagel? Dammit, did I cut myself shaving?”
“No, it’s this frowny-frown that needs to get flipped upside down.”
The only thing I’m capable of flipping is the bird. And so I do.
Levi doesn’t laugh—which is good, because he’d get slugged if he did—but he does clap me on the shoulder. “I don’t know what you got into last night, or how you lost my shirt, but if you don’t want to talk about it, you need to let it go. You’ve worked too hard for this. You know your kids are gonna love growing up at Duggan Field and watching the Fireballs. Can’t get there if you don’t have your head in the game right now.”
He’s right.
There’s too much riding on this meeting for me to derail it with regrets over being an idiot last night. And for my kids’ sakes, I need to relax and trust that they’re fine. I’ll see them again in a few days, and they’ll be just fine.
So I step into the elevator, imagine James’s expression the first time I take him into the dugout at Duggan Field to meet the team we’ve spent hours watching on TV this summer and fall, squirt my hand sanitizer into my palm despite the look it gets me from my brother, and I find my own game face.
Which turns out to be unnecessary, because at the precise moment when Pakorski is supposed to walk into the conference room so we can pitch our vision for the Fireballs to him, he walks in and drops a bomb on the entire day.
“Gentlemen, we’re going to have to postpone.”
Levi and I trade glances. “Why?” I ask.
Pakorski tips back a bottle of antacids like they’re candy and crunches loudly. “Beversdorf had a stroke last night. Doctors don’t think he’s gonna make it.”
We both stare at him.
He jiggles his bottle. “Change is coming for the Fireballs, gentlemen. Don’t know exactly how it’ll play out, but change is coming. Probably in the form of whoever’s listed in his will, which doesn’t mean you’re out, but it does mean I can’t have this meeting without being an asshole. Sorry for the wasted trip. I’ll have my secretary reach out when we know more.”
And that’s that.
The dream I’ve been working for—the whole reason I agreed to let my in-laws keep my kids, the reason I’m in New York, the reason I was in that club last night—gets a little further away.
Again.
4
Lila
My dad used to tell people I have a photographic memory, but that’s not accurate. I actually have a high attention to detail when it matters. Probably got it from my mom. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t.
But it all means that I can’t make myself forget things that I don’t want to remember.
The green embroidered tablecloth that I stared at while Uncle Al told me that my parents were missing when I was twelve. Getting my period while wearing my favorite lavender jeans one weekend and having the headmistress from my boarding school have to explain to me how to use a tampon, because none of the girls in my dorm liked me well enough to do it.
That look on Levi Wilson’s face last night when he realized he didn’t want to give me that orgasm that was seconds away.
I should be concentrating on what’s going on twenty floors above in the hospital, where Uncle Al is lying unconscious.
Instead, I’m picking at the tacos that my friends delivered here for lunch, feeling guilty that I was enjoying the hell out of making out with a stranger in a club bathroom while my last living relative probably needed me, despite the fact that he wasn’t really there for me for much of anything, and also despite the fact that his stroke happened while he was chowing on cold fried chicken, watching a rerun of Dancing with the Stars, and getting a blow job in the back of a limo at the same time.
If those smoke detectors hadn’t gone off, would Levi have been there with me when I got the call? And would we have gone all the way? Or would we have been laughing over drinks? Would I have asked him to go somewhere quieter with me?
Considering he froze the second before the fire alarms went off—triggered by a malfunctioning smoke machine, I heard later—I doubt it.
Maybe my vagina wasn’t up to snuff, but he had to inspect it closely before he knew.
I throw down my chili lime taco.
Could I be a little more inappropriate?
Or a little more distracted when I’m supposed to be not only running a publishing company, but also the de facto person who needs to run Uncle Al’s affairs while he’s unconscious?
Challenges are usually a good thing. I love a challenge. I’ve built a fortune on challenges.
But today, I can’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t even finish reading a book last night.
“I was thinking we should do a line of crocodile shifter heroines falling in love with mer-dinosaur beta heroes,” Knox Moretti, head acquisitions editor for Wellington Holdings’ publishing house’s romance imprint—aka, my latest challenge at work—is saying. “It’ll be a paranormal fantasy time travel imprint with unorthodox gender roles.”
I nod absently. “Sounds good.”
That kiss…just wow.
But then, that look of horror when the alarms went off…
Maybe he was stoned. He definitely wasn’t drunk, but I’m still having a ridiculous fantasy about making a new picture-perfect life for myself with a guy who knows how to kiss a woman.
What the hell is wrong with me?
“Great, because my grandmother already has a draft, but I’m going to need you to run interference when she tries to work in the meteor angle for the black moment. It’s good, but her meteors are always made of bacon-covered mothballs that turn into flossing armadillos when they touch lava. Flossing like the dance, not flossing like teeth. Plus, she’s done it before.”
I nod again, and it’s not until Parker, Knox’s wife and my friend who knows more about every boy band member in the history of time than I’d be comfortable with if I were Knox, snorts iced tea out her nose that I tune back in to the full conversation.
Mer-what? “Wait. No. We’re not publishing your grandmother. Sorry. Hard no.”
Knox grins. He’s one of those tall, dark, handsome types that I won in a bachelor auction just so I could ask him to come work for Bubble Bath Romance, Wellington’s romance publishing company.
Interview him, actually, without him realizing what I was doing. His internet presence was too clean, and I needed to make sure the man behind it wasn’t going to get weird and embarrass me, and that he actually had the taste his romance-loving blog said he had.
Call me paranoid—the shoe fits for so many reasons—but I don’t tend to blindly trust anything I read on the internet, especially when it comes to men loving romance novels.
“You don’t like my nana?” he asks while Parker tries to keep a straight face and chides him about being inappropriate.
“I adore your nana,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to make her an internationally bestselling dinosaur shifter beta mer-crocodile author.”