Page 24 of On the Line

“How do you even know this?”

Jules looks me up and down, then turns to Audrey in triumph. “I told you so.”

“Go back and finish your show, Graham,” Audrey says as she runs her hand over the top of his head affectionately. “You’re going to have to turn it off when our company gets here.” The minute he’s out of the room, she says, “Yep, you called it.”

“Called what?” I hear how terse I sound, but it doesn’t stop me from narrowing my eyes at them.

Jules just laughs. “You should see yourself right now. You’re so jealous.”

I raise an eyebrow. “I don’t get jealous.”

“Welcome to this new emotion, then,” Audrey says, her lips lifting into a smirk. With her medium brown hair and blue eyes, she looks the most like our father, but never more than when she smiles.

“You’re so obvious,” Jules says. “Mostly because you don’t do favors for people—”

“Except us,” Audrey adds.

“—and you’re tripping all over yourself to help Lauren. Like, you paid off Woody with your own money. Don’t even try to lie to me again and tell me it came from the trust, because Lauren told me how she found out about the house and how it wasn’t in the trust, and what went down with her in-laws, and how she was left with almost no money. And you had me redo that whole second floor before she even saw the house, including the bathroom she was gushing over, and you let her think that her ex-husband and Woody were behind it.”

“He’s not her ex-husband. They weren’t split up, he died.”

“In any event,” Jules says, “you are so gone over this girl, and you obviously have been since before she moved here. What’s the deal?”

“The only deal is that I’m executing the trust I promised her husband I’d take care of. That’s it.” I don’t mention that she’s already had a new trust created and I’m really under no obligation to do anything else. I told her I’d help her get this all figured out, and that’s what I’m doing.

“You keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better,” Audrey says, her voice bouncing up and down like she’s mocking me.

“All right, I’m going upstairs,” I say, eager to get out of here before Lauren arrives. I have no desire to have my sisters watching us and psychoanalyzing our every interaction.

I’m two steps out of the kitchen, my sisters still teasing me, when the doorbell rings. I look over just in time for my eyes to lock with Lauren’s as she stares at me through the window next to the front door.Shit.

It’s not until she lifts her eyebrows and tilts her chin toward the door that I realize I’ve completely stopped moving as I stand there staring at her, and I’ve left her out in the cold holding two toddlers.

I spring toward the door, ushering her inside. As soon as the door is closed behind her, she squats and sets her girls down, but they each grab onto one of her legs.

“They’re getting way too big to carry both of them,” she says with a sigh. There are about ten granite steps between the sidewalk and our brownstone that I know she had to carry them up. “And I wasn’t sure what to do with the stroller, so right now it’s sitting at the bottom of your front steps.”

“I’ll grab it and bring it in,” I tell her. As I step toward the door, I catch her scent, some combination of citrus and vanilla, and it brings back so many memories that I almost recoil.

“Hey,” she says, turning her head toward me and keeping her voice low. She’s close enough that her warm breath moves across my cheek. “I hope it’s okay that I’m here? When Jules invited me over, I was about to lose my mind with the isolation of being home alone with my girls, who were going stir-crazy in Paige’s apartment. But I didn’t mean to intrude on your personal space either.”

“It’s fine, Lauren.” And because I apparently have no concern for my own emotional well-being, I add, “You’re always welcome here.”

The smile she gives me is the first genuine one I’ve seen from her since Josh died, and it cracks some of the walls I’ve put up around my heart. She looks like herself when she smiles like that. Hopeful and determined, instead of defeated.

I hurry down the steps because it’s cold as balls out there today, collapse her stroller, and carry it back up. Everyone’s in the entryway when I step back inside, and Lauren laughs and says, “I wasn’t expecting you to know how to fold that thing up.”

“Oh yeah,” Audrey says. “Jameson’s well trained. Diapers, bottles, strollers ... he’s done it all with Graham.”

“Hmm,” she says, a small smile playing on her lips, and I can imagine why: she’s only really ever seen me in work mode.

I’m a serious guy by nature, competitive and demanding of myself and others. And when we worked together, I was at the tail end of raising two teenage girls. Work was what allowed me to keep our family home, save my dad’s construction company, and put them both through college. I pushed myself as hard as I possibly could to be successful, knowing that if I wasn’t, our family would fall apart.

In the early years of my career as an agent, I built on every relationship I had from my days in the NHL, bringing some of my former teammates over to my agency and recruiting new talent more easily because I knew exactly what types of players each team needed and how to negotiate with them to fill those gaps with the right person. There was no time for fun back then, only winning.

The drive and determination that helped me succeed in agenting may have had me seeming demanding or even cruel sometimes. I may have stepped on some toes and come across as ruthless, but that’s what it took to get me to where I am now—my family intact and closer than ever, my sisters both happy and successful, and my own thriving sports agency.

But Lauren has only seen one side of me and has no idea who I really am or what truly matters to me. Most people don’t. So the question really is: am I ready to show her?

---