Fake Shot (Boston Rebels Book 2)

“I’ll get you my estimate for the actual construction, and Colt will get you the costs for replacing the furniture and decor that was ruined,” Jules says, her voice all-business in the way that leaves no room for argument as she walks the insurance adjuster to the door.

I’m relieved that when I’d told her the adjuster was coming, she’d insisted I have a contractor with me. And since I haven’t hired one, she agreed to come with me so that I didn’t get fleeced.

Luckily, she’s totally taken charge and been such a boss the whole time the adjuster has been here. I have a newfound respect for her as I watch her in her element.

“I’ll take that into account when I put together the estimate,” the guy says in response. I can tell that he doesn’t like having to justify his numbers with Jules, but she’s not putting up with any bullshit when it comes to the lowball offer he wanted to give me for what it would cost to fix all the damage in my condo.

“I’m sure we’ll make it work,” Jules says, but the subtext is clear: I’m sure I’ll get my way.

She shuts the door behind him, and turns to face me, opening her mouth, but I cut her off with, “Thank God you were here. For real, Jules, I don’t know what I would have done without you. When he started talking numbers and materials . . . ” I huff out a laugh as I shrug, because it really was all above my head. I’ve never even thought about shit like this, much less had to answer questions about the type of kitchen countertop I had—who the fuck knows? They were black?—or the myriad of other details he asked me about.

“You were completely useless,” she says with a laugh. “How could anyone know so little about their own house?”

“Again, it’s just a place to live. It’s not like this condo holds sentimental value,” I tell her as she walks over to the wall of sliding doors and stops where they open onto the balcony, with Boston Harbor stretching out in the background.

She releases a deep sigh. “But with a view like this . . .”

“The view is literally why I bought it,” I say as I walk over behind her. “Can you see that tiny white speck on the island out in the Harbor?” I stretch my arm out over her shoulder and past her head so she can follow where I’m pointing.

“Umm hum.” The sound emanates from her rib cage, and I feel the rattle against my chest because I’m way too close to her. I quickly step back half a foot.

“That’s Boston Light. It’s the oldest continuously used lighthouse in the country. From here, you can see it lit up at night. Apparently, it’s like a normal hundred-watt light bulb, but it can be seen twenty-five miles out to sea.”

She looks up at me over my shoulder, and I ignore the way the smooth skin of her cheeks is faintly pink and the way her lips shine like she just licked them. Fuck, why am I noticing her like this? She’s my best friend’s little sister and my roommate. Not that she’s so little now, but I would never go there. 

“How do you know that?” she asks, her voice low and breathy.

“My real estate agent told me when I came to see the place before signing the papers.”

She clears her throat. “Karen sure got lucky with you. You must have been the easiest client she ever made half a million dollars off.”

“How do you know what she made?”

“Because when I called her to see if she had any photos, she sent me the original listing with the sales price. I work with real estate agents all the time; I know what their commission is.”

Jules was a champ when we arrived. As soon as she saw the condition of the place, she called my real estate agent herself, asking for the original listing with all the written details about the condo, including all the pictures. She had it in her inbox before the insurance adjuster even got here.

“Hmm. Seems like you’re more interested in this property than you’re letting on. You sure you don’t want this project?” I ask, even though I know she’s going to turn me down.

“Working for friends is never a good idea.”

“You remodeled Lauren’s entire house, and she’s one of your best friends.”

She crosses her arms under her chest, which she does a lot—almost like she’s giving herself a little supportive hug. But standing over her shoulder, I can’t help but notice the way it pushes her cleavage up into the scoop neckline of the clean T-shirt she changed into when she got home from work. She turns her head back toward the windows and stares out at the view. “Lauren’s renovation was different.”

“How so?”

“Because first, we weren’t friends when I started that project—it’s how I met her. And second, Jameson called in the only favor that would convince me to take on that job.”

“What favor could you have owed him that equated to remodeling an entire house?”

Her shoulders stiffen, and her neck elongates, making her seem even taller than she is. “He said the one word that would get me to do anything for him . . .” She stops speaking, and I wait her out, wondering if she’s going to admit whatever it is to me. “. . . Vegas.”

“Shit, Jules,” I mutter, dropping my head so low it almost touches her shoulder. I want to wrap her in my arms as I repeat what I told her that morning in Vegas. But I don’t touch her. I can’t. “That wasn’t your fault.”

“Oh yeah?” Her voice is tight. “Then whose was it?”

I’m about to say “Mine” to admit to the guilt I’ve been carrying around for years, but my damn phone rings, the sound piercing the silence. Jules jumps, and I step back, cursing as I glance down at the screen in my hand and wishing I’d turned off the ringer after the inspector called to tell me he was here.

Or maybe I just need to block this number?

“Fuck, I’m sorry, I have to answer this.” I don’t want to talk to my brother, but I usually end up answering the phone in case he’s calling to tell me something’s wrong with my parents. After not answering last night, I can’t let the call go again.

“No problem. I’ll just . . . check out the view from out there.”

“Hey.” My voice is clipped while watching her walk through the open glass doors and across the large balcony. I turn and walk farther into my condo, hoping the noise of the fans still circulating air inside will drown out my conversation.

“So are you coming, or not?”

My nostrils flare and my chest expands as I take a deep breath, standing there leaning against the door frame, wondering why my brother just can’t let this damn trip go.

“I told you,” I say, my voice flat, “I don’t know.”

“It’s two weeks away. If you want to come, I need to reserve one of the rooms at the bed-and-breakfast for you.

“I don’t know. The league makes the schedule; I have no control over it.”

“Well, it looks like even if you win your first series, you’d have that weekend off before advancing to the next round.”

I watch Jules as she stares out at the horizon, and I think about what Jameson said about her being an incredibly private person. I wonder if I’m making her uncomfortable right now—having this conversation with my brother while she’s trying not to listen. I guess I could have shut the doors behind her, but that felt even more rude. “Even if we’re not playing that weekend, it doesn’t mean I can come up.”

“Just decide, Mathieu. You don’t have to be so wishy-washy all the time.”

“Listen, you’re asking me to make a decision about something that I can’t make a decision about yet. I don’t know what our practice or travel schedule will be. It will depend on whether we win the series early, or go all seven games. So when I know, I’ll let you know.”

This conversation is already taking longer than I’d planned on allowing.

“It’s been fifteen years⁠—”

“Yeah,” I cut him off, my voice heavy on the sarcasm, “you don’t need to keep reminding me. For the last time—if I can come up, I will. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hang up the phone, then close my eyes and take a deep, slow breath—the kind my Zenned-out teammate Zach is always encouraging me to use as a calming mechanism. When I open my eyes, Jules is leaning with her back against the railing, her cool blue eyes assessing me in a way that makes me wonder what she sees.

“Sorry about that,” I say.

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” she says. I can tell she’s curious while trying not to be nosey, and she confirms it when she asks, “Want to talk about it?”

My gaze stays locked on her, and I say nothing for a moment, then I clear my throat. “Nah, it’s fine.”

“Okay.” She raises those perfectly arched eyebrows. “But I’m here if you change your mind.”

I’m oddly touched that she cares enough to offer, but simultaneously terrified to open up to anyone about my brother. “We should go.” I nod my chin toward the glass doors, then turn to head back into my condo.

Adrenaline has me already across the now-dry plywood subfloor of the living room and taking the few steps up to the dining room when I hear her shut and lock the doors to the balcony. I pause, trying to get a handle on my emotions before turning to face her. I know I don’t owe her an explanation, but for some reason, I feel like I should give her one all the same. “I don’t normally get worked up like this. My brother’s just . . . an asshole.”

She freezes. “You have a brother?” Her eyebrows dip with the question, like she’s trying to figure out how she’s known me since she was ten years old and didn’t know I had a brother.

I’m a very public person—somewhat showy, always smiling, happy to raise a ruckus. But there’s a whole other part of my life that almost no one knows about. As time went on and my status rose to one of the best players in the league, I often worried that my past would resurface. And I’m not sure how it hasn’t. Someone could have sold this story to the tabloids and made a small fortune, except obviously the small town I grew up in is protecting one of their own.

“Yeah. We . . . don’t get along well.” I try not to think about how he used to be my best friend. He was the role model I looked up to before he double-crossed me.

“Do you see him much?”

“I haven’t seen him in almost fifteen years.”

Her mouth drops open. “What about when you go home to visit your family?”

I never talk about this. I don’t want to talk about this. But somehow, as she walks across my barren living room, with her look of concern, those big blue eyes boring into me and her light blond ponytail falling over one shoulder, I want to talk to her about it.

“I . . .” I struggle over the words, because I don’t even know how to explain everything that went down after I left for the NHL. I don’t want to revisit this, but I’m also so damn tired of it living rent free in my head. And it makes me wonder if talking about it would help me stop thinking about it? “I had a big falling out with my brother after I moved to Boston. There was . . . a lot of drama, and I haven’t been home since.”

“So when do you see your parents?” Her voice is casual as she comes to a stop in front of me, but I can tell by the way she squints her eyes at me that she recognizes the significance of this conversation.

“They come down to Boston a couple times a year,” I tell her. And now it’s my turn to try to decipher the look that passes over her face. “What’s that look?”

She glances up at me, and now that she’s only feet away, I can see that her eyes are glassy. Holy shit, did I say something?

“It’s nothing,” she says, shaking her head and moving to walk past me. “So tell me more about your brother.”

I grab her wrist, gently enough that she could break free and keep walking if she wanted to, but instead she freezes.

“Not until you tell me why you just had that look on your face,” I say, instantly regretting it—because if she tells me, I’m not sure I’m prepared to say anything more about Gabriel in return.

“It’s nothing, Colt.” She glances away again, and her throat bobs as she swallows.

It’s not nothing, and my voice indicates that I know she’s lying about this. “Jules.”

She looks back at me. “I was just thinking about my own parents, and that feels shitty because here you are telling me about your situation and I’m bringing my own experiences into the conversation when it’s not even relevant.”

“Of course it’s relevant. There’s nothing wrong with you bringing up your parents when we’re talking about family relationships. What were you thinking about, exactly?”

Her words are quiet when she says, “I was thinking about what I wouldn’t give to see my mom again or have my dad back in my life . . . if he could be the person he was before she got sick.”

I barely knew Jules and Audrey before their mom died and it wasn’t too long afterward that their dad left. But once Jameson retired to stay home with his half-sisters, I spent a lot more time with them. Jules was probably twelve or thirteen then, and she was way more torn up about their dad leaving than either Audrey or Jameson were.

Jules was always his favorite. Jameson used to say how she’d follow him around on job sites, with her pink steel-toed work boots and tool belt, and everyone called her Tinker Bell because with her light blond hair, it was like Tink following Peter Pan around. At the time, I didn’t realize how apt the Peter Pan analogy was.

“What was he like, before she got sick?” I ask. Jameson never talks about his father. I only know him as the asshole who walked out on his two teenage daughters, and from what I can gather, he wasn’t much of a father to any of them before that. Jameson was much closer to his stepmom and his two younger half-sisters than to his dad.

“He was . . .” Jules sighs and looks at the ceiling. “He was always kind of a hard-ass. Like, he was this salty old Irish guy who worked long, physical hours and came home to unwind with too much alcohol. But he was also sweet in his own way. He’d pick up a charm bracelet for me because it had a hammer on it, or bring me saltwater taffy if he saw it in a candy store. And he loved that I wanted to learn how to do what he did. Carpentry has always been second nature to me. I always knew I wanted to be able to create things with my hands, and he ate that up. He loved showing me how to do things.” She pulls her lower lip between her teeth quickly, her eyes getting a sad, distant look, and says,“I guess I loved that he paid attention to me.”

She’s all piss and vinegar most of the time, but I get the sense that Jules could use a good hug and a shoulder to cry on—not that she’d want me to fill that role.

Honestly, she has always been a bit of an enigma. As a kid, she loved any moment of my attention, but as an adult, she’s always kept me at a distance. She’s endlessly sarcastic and clearly disapproves of my reputation, but . . . I don’t know. I like that she doesn’t give a shit what people think of her. It’s something we have in common.

“Anyway,” she says before I have a chance to respond, “this isn’t about me and my issues. So, tell me about your brother.”

Fuck.

I glance down then, realizing that I’m still holding her wrist. Clinging to it is more like it. I let it go so quickly it’s almost like I push her away. She takes it in stride, though, sliding her hand into her back pocket, her elbow jutting out to the side where it’s bent. In the light filtering through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her, I can see the little pieces of her arm hair standing on end, like she’s cold—but with the power turned off and no air-conditioning, it’s sticky-hot in here.

“My brother . . .” The pause stretches indefinitely as I run through the million ways I could finish that sentence. But I don’t want to share everything and I sure as hell don’t want to talk about Cheri. “We were really close growing up. But after I left for the NHL, he did something that broke my trust and forever ruined our relationship.”

She searches my face, looking for clues, and it’s a relief when she gives me a quick nod, like she understands I don’t want to give any specifics about what he did. “Forever is a really long time.”

“Yeah . . . I know.” I’m a pretty open and trusting guy. I generally try to see the best in people. But if you fuck with me—if you break my trust or go back on your promises—I’m not big on giving second chances.

I know the old adage is, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. But I’ve never understood why you’d give someone a chance to fool you a second time. I’d rather live by the philosophy, when people show you who they really are, believe them. And Gabriel showed me who he really was.

“I’m not saying that you should forgive someone who broke your trust.” She says the words slowly, with a caution that tells me she’s really thinking about how to say this. It’s so at odds with the ‘Jules has no filter’ refrain I often hear from her siblings. “But . . . couldn’t you still go home to see your parents, and just not see your brother?”

My parents didn’t side with Gabriel. But they also didn’t side with me. And I didn’t make them choose, as I imagine that choosing between your own children is the kind of thing that would break a person. I know they spoke to us individually, letting me know that what happened wasn’t my fault, and letting him know that what he did wasn’t okay.

But as soon as their grandson came along, it sure seemed like all was forgiven. How could it not be? And how could I expect that they’d cut Gabriel and Cheri out of their lives when there was a child involved? Even if, for a very brief time, I thought that growing baby was mine.

“My parents and I have worked out a system for seeing each other. It’s fine.” I even see my nephew occasionally, when they bring him down to Boston with them for a game. He might be the reason I lost my girlfriend and my brother in one fell swoop, but he’s blameless. I don’t think he even knows the history, which is for the best. “But now my brother wants me to come home for my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.”

“Fiftieth?” Her jaw drops open.

“Yeah, they got married right out of high school, then struggled to have kids. Gabriel wasn’t born until they were married for almost ten years, and they had me four years later.”

“Fifty years, and you’re not sure if you’re going up for that?” She sounds like she’s trying to comprehend why I would miss it.

“My parents are the only people in my hometown I want to see. And I do see them. I don’t want to go to some big party.”

“I get that,” she says, then takes a deep breath. “I really do. But half of life is showing up, Colt. Sometimes you have to be there for the people you love. Even when it’s hard. Even when you don’t want to . . . even when it hurts.” Her eyes are glassy again, and I wonder about all the ways she’s sacrificed and shown up for the people she loved in the past.

“I don’t know what happened between you and your brother,” she continues, “and I’m not trying to diminish how big of a deal it was. But think about what it would mean to your parents to have you there for this special occasion.”

I know she’s right.

This shouldn’t still affect me this much, because I’ve moved on. But in my mind, part of moving on meant never having to see that backstabbing asshole again.

I created the space I needed to heal from what Gabriel and Cheri did, and today, they no longer mean anything to me. And yet, I continue to let them influence my decisions about what I do now, fifteen years after the fact.

It would mean the world to my parents to have me there. Why can’t I be the bigger person and just show up? It’s only for one night.

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

“You don’t have to forgive in order to forget, Colt.” She studies me intently. “You just make the choice to move on.”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding my chin toward the entryway to indicate we should go. “Maybe.”