night,” Cat went on. “They begged me to move up here. Tom offered me an administrative job with the team. And yes, it was generous of him and it would have been a smart thing to do, but I couldn’t do it to Kyle. His dad had left him, too. I couldn’t upend what was left of his world. I couldn’t haul him away from his friends, his school, the only house he’d ever lived in. I just couldn’t.”
“So you stuck it out in Dallas,” he summarized as he pushed away his half-eaten salad.
She shrugged. “Ben was the dean of students at a private tech college. As the dean’s wife, I took care of the social schmoozing that goes with the job. All volunteer, of course. But I had connections from the years I spent in the trenches. I pulled myself together and called in the chips. A friend of a friend hired me to help plan charity events. It wasn’t big money, but it was enough to keep us going.”
He lifted his bottle in a salute of sorts and said, “You get points for grit.”
“Thanks.” Grit points were a small consolation. They didn’t offset the tally on the big scoreboard. Not only had she been dumped for a twinkie half her age and ripped off in the process, she hadn’t seen it coming. Hadn’t even suspected. Naive and stupid and old. Yeah, earning a bit of respect from Logan Dupree was nice, but it didn’t make the reality hurt any less.
“Do you still have the house in Dallas or have you sold it already?”
And he got points for his effort to keep the conversation going, to keep her from the usual slide into the same ol’ wallow. Bless the man for that, too. “A month before he liquidated the retirement accounts, Ben borrowed against the equity. To the point where it would have taken another ten years of appreciation to break even. I didn’t have much choice except to give the keys to the bank and walk away.”
“Ouch.”
Aw, he seemed genuinely pained by it all. What a sweetheart. At the edge of her vision she caught sight of the waitress coming toward them with their dinners. Cat deliberately turned her head that way and smiled in satisfaction as Logan Dupree did the same.
“Actually, it was a relief to have the six ton gorilla off my back,” she assured him after the server left and they’d taken their first bites. “And we were ready to move on, anyway. When Millie began slipping, Kyle and I started making regular trips up here to help out with her team social functions. Wichita had become a second home to us, so after Tom passed away… Well, moving wasn’t the awful thing it would have been right after Ben took off.”
“It was nice of you to help Millie out like that.”
“It was the least I could do. If they hadn’t anchored me when I desperately needed to be, Kyle and I would be living in a Maytag box under some overpass.”
“I doubt that.”
“Seriously. I was a mess for a long time.”
“You seem okay now.”
“Yeah, I think I’m over the worst of it. My fantasy life has gotten fairly tame in the past year, anyway. That has to be a good sign.” At his cocked brow, she explained, “Oh, the standard thing. The bimbo-ette gaining a hundred and fifty pounds overnight. Ben’s transplants failing and his face sagging back to real. That sort of stuff.”
He grinned. “You’re so vicious.”
Yeah, her attorney had pointed that out, too. But not so kindly, and certainly not with a smile and a twinkle in his eyes. “He is Kyle’s dad.”
“If he walked through the door right now, would you take him back?”
“Not on a bet,” she answered firmly even as her gaze instinctively darted to Hero’s front door. Just in time to see the last of six of the Warriors come through it. She reached for her tea and desperately tried to wash the panic down. God, they had to know she’d fired Carl. He wouldn’t have kept quiet about it. If they saw her and came over to talk about it… Damn, damn, damn.
“Tom didn’t exactly leave you a gold mine, you know.”
Her heart racing faster than the engine on her Jeep, she swallowed hard, begged fate for one huge favor, and replied, “The Warriors have potential. You said so yourself.”
“When?” he demanded, a bite of steak frozen halfway to his mouth.
“In the parking lot behind the Coliseum. Not quite an hour ago.”
He popped the bit into his mouth, chewed and shook his head. He swallowed and picked up his beer. “That wasn’t exactly what I said.”
Relieved that the players had moved straight to the bar without a glance in her and Logan’s direction, she countered blithely, “Doesn’t matter. It’s what I heard and what I believe.”
He lowered his chin and leaned slightly forward. “Well, the guys have to believe it, too. And they don’t. They put on smiles for you, but they don’t for a minute think they have a prayer of ever being any better than they are.”
Yeah, but… She stabbed a chunk of hard-boiled egg. “Carl’s done a number on them, that’s all.”
“It’s frickin’ genetic,” he said as he sagged back into his chair with a half stunned, half amused look on his face.
God, he was handsome. And especially when he smiled in that lopsided way of his. The dimple in his cheek was positively darling. “What is?” she asked, kinda stunned herself.
“Your I-can-fix-anything approach to things,” he said as he rolled his eyes and went back to his steak. “Tom was the exact same way. His theme song should have been ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.’”
It had been. Millie had had it played at the funeral. Along with a whole bunch of other Motown hits. It had definitely been an odd service, but everyone had left with a little spring in their step, so all in all… But Logan didn’t need to know about any of that. There was a larger point to be made and she wasn’t about to pass up the chance to make it. “How’d you wind up in Wichita, playing for Tom?”
His gaze snapped up to meet hers and she saw his mental wheels whir. “I ended up here,” he said slowly and oh-so-grudgingly, “because no one else wanted me.”
She had him and they both knew it. “But Tom believed in you, in what you could do. And he was right, wasn’t he?”
“I’m the exception, not the rule,” he countered. “And besides, the game’s way different now than it was when I went in. Twenty years ago, you didn’t have to fight the Europeans for a chance in the majors. Now you do, and they’re damn good.”
His appraisal was hard and all but growled, Gotcha. Like that was going to slow her down. “So, because the chances of making it to the big leagues are slim, every minor leaguer should pack up their dreams and quit trying? They should just accept that they can’t ever improve? That they can’t be any more than they are today?”
He looked away and sighed. “It’d be the rational thing to do.”
“But?” Cat pressed.
He chuckled softly. “Hockey players aren’t hardwired to be rational. The whole game’s based on the fact that you have to be a few sandwiches shy of a picnic
