Winter looks as startled to see me as I am her.
“How’d you know where I live?” I say in an accusing tone.
She furrows her eyebrows. “I don’t know where you live. I’m here for the couple needing a pet sitter.Shit. Did I get the address wrong?”
She starts flipping through her phone.
Crap. I reach out and catch her wrist. “Don’t bother. This is the right place.”
Her eyes widen.
“You’re the couple with the cat? The agency said the man travels a lot.”
I gesture to the New Orleans Fire sweatshirt I’m wearing. “Road trip next week.”
She sighs. “Oh Lord.”
Oh Lord is right. I raise an eyebrow at her. “So you want a tour of the place?”
She looks at me like I’m nuts. “Right. Like you and I could live together peaceably. No, I’ll just be on my way. My parents will be thrilled to see me, anyway. You know my father—always convinced the square is filled with murderers.”
But after seeing her again for the first time in years, I’m not about to let her go that easily.
“You already came all this way.” I step out onto the porch, and she inhales. “Do you want to come in? Or are you afraid you won’t be able to control yourself if you get too close to me?”
She covers with a forced smile. “Did you know I was coming home?”
My short laugh cuts through the bullshit, and she blushes. No man could make Winter blush but me. No one else could get through that layer of superiority her mother trained her in so well.
“Yeah, and I made sure to hire you. Because we ended things so well the last time.” I try to say it jokingly, but the pain between us lingers.
One thing Winter and I always know how to do is fight. Ever since we were kids, we would get each other going. When we were young, those fights ended in making up with ice cream cones by the lake, and when we got older…let’s just say a good fight between Winter and me finished in an even hotter make-out session.
She bites her lip like she knows what I’m thinking.
I watch her gather herself, put on her polite face, and nod. “Pardon my manners. I left Manhattan before dawn, so I didn’t get a proper night’s sleep.”
But I can’t let go of the thought nagging at me. “So why are you home, Winter? I figured a big Broadway star like you would be too busy these days to visit Louisiana. You just decided to come home for a while?”
She hesitates, and I can tell she’s debating whether to tell a white lie or go for the truth.
When she exhales heavily and purses her lips, I know she’s about to tell me the truth cloaked in some kind of a white lie.
“I hurt my vocal cords performing,” she says in a voice so sad I nearly reach for her. “My manager sent me home. So, no more Broadway auditions until the fall.”
I’m not sure which of the above was a lie, or maybe she simply omitted something. Either way, she didn’t give me the whole story. But I’m not about to call her out on it right now. She’s clearly in some kind of pain, and the last thing she needs is me being a dick.
“I’m sorry,” I say gruffly.
“Thank you.”
Ten seconds of us assessing each other in silence.
Yep. The chemistry’s still there. Winter Allen can still rev me up like no other woman. And she’s still off-limits—she was never meant to stay with me. She had her Broadway dreams to pursue, and hell if I was going to be the asshole to hold her back.
And I had my own dreams. Since we were kids, my three brothers and I were laser-focused on ice hockey. Sounds absolutely nuts to have a hockey dream in a southern city that, honest to God, didn’t always have an ice hockey rink, but we caught hockey fever from watching the college and pro games on TV with our dad. He made sure we could go to camps every summer, and we travelled to Baton Rouge to play in a local club league that’s since defunct.
Somehow, all four of us made the pros.
