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“Good news or bad?” he asks.
“Depends which side you’re on.”
“Usually does, but your tone tells me you’re on the wrong side of it. Good news first?”
I’m a daddy’s girl through and through, and the fact that he can tell just from my tone reminds me why I chose to stick by my family.
“Well, the good news is I got the Aces correspondent position.”
“Whoa! Congratulations!” He sounds truly excited, and I almost don’t want to tell him the next part.
“Thank you. It’ll be quite an adventure this season, that’s for sure. Marcus told me I need to become best friends with the new coach.”
“Any word on who it is?” he asks. Given his former career and his current one, he gets a lot of insider information about the Aces. But I guess I got this particular scoop first.
“I just interviewed him in an exclusive. The press conference announcing him is starting soon, but I guess I just wanted to talk to you first.”
He’s quiet as he waits for me to give him the name.
“It’s Lincoln Nash, Dad.”
He makes some grunting sound that’s sort of a cross between a hum and a snarl.
It pretty much sums up how I feel about it myself.
“And you had an exclusive with him?” he asks. “How’d that go?”
“We both kept it professional, but it took everything in me to get through it without landing an uppercut on his jaw.”
“That’s my girl. But what about Marcus’s request to become his new best friend?”
“You see my dilemma. I’m not sure how I’m going to be in close proximity with him and not clock him in the jaw.” That handsome jaw with the scruff that I want to feel between my legs.
Scratch that. I don’t want to feel it anywhere except when I land a punch on it and it scratches my knuckles. Maybe even an open palm slap where it tickles against my palm.
He hurt me. I’d never known heartbreak until I met him, and he walloped a doozy on me.
He changed me.
He made me question every man—every person—I got close to after him. Would they find some reason to leave me, too?
It was a lot for a fifteen-year-old girl to deal with, and I had literally no one to lean on. We moved clear across the country.
My mother didn’t get it. She thought it was teenage heartbreak. I’d get over it. I didn’t know what real love was.
She threw every cliché about young love at me, but it didn’t help. If anything, it made me feel even worse. I knew what we had was special, and then just like that—poof—it was gone.
I couldn’t lean on my dad since he was going through his own recovery. He was frustrated he wouldn’t get to play again, and he didn’t have anyone to lean on, either, as we were new to town.
So we spent a lot of quiet time watching movies together. We bonded over Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones. We played cards while my mother tried her hardest to find us a place to fit in. We were new to Arizona, and my mom had a sister in Vegas. Once my dad was done with his rehab, we moved here and we’ve been here ever since.
We didn’t want to go back to New York. There were too many painful memories, but Vegas felt like a fresh start.
What Lincoln did to me made me scared to get close to anybody for a long, long time. And when I finally let someone else in, well, he cheated on me, and he’s proven to pretty much be a deadbeat where our child is concerned. If the court didn’t order me to allow my child to go over to his place every other weekend, I’d just as soon cut off all contact with him.
I’ve learned through experience the only man I could really trust is my dad, and apart from Sam, he’s the first person I turn to when I have news.
“I don’t blame you, pumpkin,” he says quietly. “That whole family is evil. Nobody knows that better than we do. But you’re strong, Jo. You’re fierce. You earned that position on your own merit, and I’m so damn proud of you. Nobody can take that away, and you do what you have to do to keep that position, you hear me?”
