Me: Are you friends with anyone else on the leadership team.
Hawk: No, I don’t trust them. Every single one of them wants me to fail and turn the team back over to my grandfather.
Me: No one has expressed that to me.
Hawk: There are a lot of reasons for that. The first is that you’re new…
Me: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m a woman.
Hawk: As much as I hate that, you’re probably right. It just confirms that I have work to do.
“Who’s got your attention?” Kylie asked.
“It’s work.”
“Are you going to spend the rest of vacation working?” Kylie’s scorn was barely contained. She worked her ass off at the Department of Public Health, but she could keep work from over-taking her life. I couldn’t, but doubted I would want to anyway.
“What do you think?”
“I get it. I’m sure the testosterone in the office is as bad as it is on the field.”
“Speaking of testosterone?—”
Her eyes darted quickly to Luc and then back to me. “Yes?”
“You’re still going to force me to lie to everyone?”
“Omission is not a lie. And we’re not in a position to be making any announcements.”
“I just want you to be happy?—”
“And what about you, Kenny? Outside of work, are you doing anything for yourself?”
“This isn’t a competition about which one of us has the most dysfunctional relationship, Ky.”
“I didn’t say it was. But outside of the assholes you’ve met on dating websites, have you been talking to anyone?”
“No one of note.”
Did I want my sister’s opinion of the friendship I had developed with Hawk? Of course. But I didn’t even know how to explain it. It was far easier for her to assume that Ihad buried myself in my career at the expense of my personal life. And in the meantime, I could work through my thoughts about Hawk.
Then, Kelsey pulled matching t-shirts out for all of us and demanded we put them on before meeting in front of the villa in twenty minutes.
“Um, I picked out a nice sundress for the night. Are you serious?”
“It’s just for photos. You can take it off before we leave.”
I sent Hawk a photo of me in the t-shirt right before I left for dinner.
Hawk: Beautiful.
I looked closely at the photo and realized that I had caught the sunset in the background. He had to have been talking about that, right?
TWELVE
hawk
Christmas dinner wasthe first one in a long time that my grandmother relaxed. Grandpa tried multiple times to get information about the team from me, but I reminded him that his role was as a fan from here on out.
