Page 17 of Coming Home

"I don't even know who you are anymore," I lied, staring at his bare chest, the small scar near his collarbone from a childhood bike wreck.

"You knew exactly who I was last night." He stepped an inch closer, his voice dropping into something impossibly gentle. "You had several numbers on that phone, Em. You scrolled past every single one of them until you hit mine. That wasn't a mistake. That was instinct. You knew I'd come."

I had nothing left. I stood there in his massive hoodie, undone, because he'd said the one thing I was trying not to know.

"Stay," he said. "You don't owe me a damn thing. You're exhausted, the coffee's regular, and you don't have to rebuild your entire life before seven on a Saturday."

I swallowed hard, looking anywhere but his eyes. "I don't want to be in your way, Ralph. Your life is... you have a timeline. You have the trials."

"Emma, I live by myself in a house with five empty bedrooms," he said dryly. "Trust me. You'd have to actively try to be in my way."

Before I could respond, a heavy, rapid succession of knocks rattled the front door. Three loud, impatient thuds that vibrated through the hardwood floor under my feet, followed by a voice that made everything stop.

"Ralph! Open up, man. I see your truck in the driveway. Why are you ignoring my texts?"

Every drop of warmth drained from my face.

I turned to Ralph. His shoulders had gone rigid, his eyes widening behind his glasses. This wasn't on his calendar. He hadn't planned this.

The voice called out again, louder this time, accompanied by the jiggle of the doorknob. "Come on, man, I've got Abbie waiting for me to return for breakfast. Open the door!"

Theo.

My brother.

CHAPTER 7

Ralph

Her face went white. All at once, like she'd taken a hard punch to the gut and the blood had dropped straight into her boots.

Theo knocked again. Three rhythmic, familiar raps that rattled the heavy timber of the front door. "Ralph, come on. Open up."

Emma's eyes locked onto mine. The panic in them hit me square. She looked cornered, all that old champion's pride with nowhere left to run. I gave her a sharp nod toward the back hallway. She didn't need a formal invitation. She disappeared down the hall. The guest room door clicked shut, and I turned to face the music.

I pulled the front door open, stepping into the frame. Theo Carrow blew past me, shouldering the door the rest of the way open before I'd stepped clear of it, moving like the clock was already running. Suit jacket over one shoulder, phone in hand, already mid-sentence about some fire he needed me to put out or some sponsor I'd managed to piss off before breakfast.

That was Theo. He loved hard, but he managed harder, and the two impulses had been baked into the same aggressive gesture for so long he couldn't tell where the brother stopped and the businessman began.

"I tried calling your cell three times," he muttered, tossing his keys onto the entry console and dropping his frame onto my leather couch like he'd paid the mortgage on it. "Your phone dead?"

"Charging in the bedroom." I shut the door, deliberately positioning my bulk against the island, anchoring myself so the entire length of the hallway remained behind my left shoulder and safely out of his field of vision. "What's the crisis?"

"Multiple things. All urgent. None of which you're going to appreciate before your first cup of coffee." He glanced down at his watch, his jaw tight. "Abbie's waiting at home, so I'm going to give you the short version."

I'd known the guy since I was nine years old. Coach Iris Vance had spotted me thrashing around like a drowning dog in a Bakersfield community pool, somehow convinced there was an Olympic engine buried inside a scrawny, loud kid who dove off the blocks wrong but moved water faster than anyone else in the county.

She'd called in a lifetime favor with Theo's father, Martin Carrow, who ran the biggest elite sports management firm in LA. Martin drove down on a blistering Saturday, watched me grind through six grueling laps in borrowed, scratched-up goggles, and told Coach Vance he'd cover my training out of his own pocket.

Theo was thirteen. He'd been sitting in the backseat of his dad's luxury sedan when I climbed in after that first practice, my skin smelling like cheap chlorine, my eyes bloodshot and burning. He looked at me, looked at the canvas swim bag I was clutching like it held the crown jewels, and said, "You smell like a swamp." I looked right back at his clean polo shirt and said,

"You smell like old money." He'd laughed so hard his old man nearly missed the freeway on-ramp. We'd been locked in ever since.

Twenty years later, Theo had taken his father's blueprint and scaled it into a multi-million-dollar sports empire. His heaviest current investment? My final Olympic run. He was my manager, my strategist, my shield against the press, and the closest thing to blood I had on this earth. He was also, when the mood struck him, the most exhausting bastard alive.

"Alright," he said, his eyes narrowing into corporate mode. "The European sportswear deal is back on the table. They want your face on the global aquatics line for Paris. Massive money, incredible exposure. The catch is the morality clause—it's so aggressive it practically requires you to take a vow of celibacy and join a monastery."

"I already live like a monk, Theo."