I bolt to my feet, stifling my favorite Italian curse word. My stomach swishes, but I don’t feel like I have to run to the bathroom.
This is progress.
Definitely progress.
But only on the morning sickness front.
Definitely not progress on the part where I’m living with—and have a crazy stupid crush on—the captain of the Pounders and my stepfather might kill him.
“Tell me Dad will be reasonable about this,” I whisper to Miranda as I fling my door open.
“Zero chance.” She trails me down the short hallway to the entrance of the Pounders’ admin building, where Mom’s holding Jessica, who’s growling at Quinoa because the Pounders have a male receptionist and Jessica needs therapy.
But Mom bringing Jessica to a building with a fair number of men isn’t the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is the largerugbyplayer on crutches swinging into the waiting area from the other side of the building—the side of the building where the players come to work out andsee the physical therapist—sputtering, “Jessica?”
“What the fuck did you just say?” the slightly taller, slightly bigger, mustachioed guy behind him says while the dark-haired woman with both of them gapes at Holt.
Jessica snorts at Holt.
“Mom. You can’t have the dog here,” I say.
Holt’s eyes whip to me and go comically round. I shake my head at him.Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk to me.
Have we known each other long enough for subliminal communication to work?
He blinks like he’s clearing his vision, then squints harder at me, and I wonder briefly if he knows enough Spanish for me to tell him he doesn’t know me.
Hedidsay he was in Spain.
But I don’t want to risk it, so I subliminally communicate harder.
Miranda makes a noise. “Oh, I see it,” she whispers.
“Who the fuck are you callingJessica?” the other guy—rugby player too, I assume, based on the build and the mustache that half of them seemed to have in their team pictures—says to Holt, which jerks him out of gaping at me.
“Fletcher, my goodness, your language,” my mom says. “Jessica is my daughter’s dog.”
The woman makes a noise.
I don’t know if it’s a laugh or a whimper or something entirely different, but she clears her throat, then makes it again.
Do I know her?
She seems familiar.
Roughly my age—fuck.
Was she at Abby Nora’s baby shower?
How does this keep getting worse?How?
“Apologies, Mrs. Keating,” Fletcher says.
“He has a longstanding, difficult history with Jessicas,” the woman says.
Holt’s staring at me again, and it’s not hard to see that he’s putting the pieces together and realizing that this is very, very, very bad.
