Page 34 of Wanting the Winger

I’m home alone with Bruce in the middle of the day.My workouts are over and I’ve got an hour before I have to leave for my afternoon volunteering coaching youth hockey.I might need to ask those pimple-faced fourteen-year-olds for some advice on women.

He’s probably busy, but what the hell.I push a button on my phone screen to call Eric.

“Sebastian Stone.”He answers on the second ring, a smile in his tone.“How the hell are you?”

“Still sexy as fuck.How are you, brother?”

“No complaints.Callie’s morning sickness passed, thank fuck.She wasn’t just sick in the morning; it was all the time.Neither one of us was getting enough sleep for a couple of months.”

“Damn.Glad she’s feeling better.Is this a good time to talk?”

“Yeah, I’m on the way from lunch back to the office.What’s new?”

I move the phone away from my mouth and huff out a sigh.Eric has known me for so long that I don’t need to tiptoe.

“Lainey’s pissed at me.”

He barks out a single note of laughter.“She can be a hothead.She’ll get over it.”

“It’s been more than a week.She won’t look at me and she blows me off every time I text her or try to talk to her.”

After a couple seconds of silence, he says, “Is she okay?”

“Yeah, I think so.She’s gotten to know Carter’s wife Suki and her friends and she went out to trivia with them last night.Didn’t get home ’til twelve thirty.”

He chuckles.“She’s a grown-ass woman, man.She knows how to take care of herself.”

I stand up from the recliner I’m sitting in, agitated.“It’s not that she came home late, it’s that she’s pissed at me.”

“What’d you do?”

I pause.How can I tell him what I said without making him assume it was just me dogging on Shane like I always do?

“Shane came to visit her first weekend here.I was a shit to him and he got pissed and left.He wouldn’t even talk to Lainey; he just drove off.I don’t like the way he treats her.”

“Keep this between you and me, but my parents aren’t thrilled with Shane, either.”

I stop pacing.“Why?”

“Mom referred her friend Jenny to Shane’s business because Jenny’s daughter and her husband want to build a pool.Jenny’s daughter didn’t say anything about how she heard about his business, and she told her mom, who told my mom, that Shane made her uncomfortable when he came over to give her an estimate.”

My pulse pounds, anger already building in his chest.“How?What did he do?”

Eric sighs heavily.“Something about him telling her he’d move them up on the schedule in order to get her into a bikini faster, as long as she’d sent him pics of her in it.”

“That motherfucker.”

“Exactly.I told Mom she needs to tell Lainey, but she’s worried Lainey will just get mad at her.”

My jaw tenses.“She excuses his shitty behavior.Just because it’s not the worst possible shit a man could do to a woman, that doesn’t make it okay.”

“You know I agree.”His voice is glum.“I feel bad.Like I ignored little warning signs because she was so happy.”

“Like what?”

There’s a pause.“He calls her a nerd.Not in an affectionate way.Callie has never liked him, and she hates him at this point because she and Lainey got ready for Shane and Lainey’s engagement party, and Shane didn’t say a thing about how Lainey looked when he saw her.He just said, ‘Hey.’”

“What the fuck?Why are you just now telling me all this?”

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