family, in charge of helping his mom, his grandmother and his sister cope. He’d been no help to his widowed grandmother, who had tried to outrun her loss by moving to Arizona. He hadn’t been much help to his mom, either, beyond setting her up with a computer program so she could manage her finances. He’d tried to help Julia cope but he’d barely been able to cope himself. He should never have let Dad do all that hard physical work.
“Don’t be silly,” his mother always said. “Your father could just as easily have died on the golf course. He was doing what he wanted to do, helping you.”
Helping his son be manly. The house was probably the one endeavor of Jonathan’s that his father took pride in. It wasn’t hard to figure out what kind of son Dad had really longed for. He’d never missed an Icicle Falls High football game, whether at home or away. How many times had he sat in the stands and wished his scrawny son was out there on the field or at least on the bench instead of playing in the band? Jonathan was glad that he had no idea.
“I love you, son,” Dad had said when they were loading him into the ambulance. Those were the last words Jonathan heard and he was thankful for them. But he often found himself wishing his dad had said he was proud of him.
As he pulled up in his yellow Volkswagen with Geek Gods Computer Services printed on the side, his dog, Chica, abandoned her spot on the front porch and raced down the stairs to greet him, barking a welcome. Chica was an animal-shelter find, part shepherd, part Lab and part...whatever kind of dog had a curly tail. She’d been with Jonathan for five years and she thought he was a god (and didn’t care if he was a geek).
He got out of the car and the dog started jumping like she had springs on her paws. It was nice to have some female go crazy over him. “Hey, girl,” he greeted her. “We’ll get some dinner and then play fetch.”
He exchanged his slacks for the comfort of his old baggy jeans, and his business shirt for a T-shirt sporting a nerdy pun that cautioned Don’t Drink and Derive. Then, after a feast of canned spaghetti for Jonathan and some Doggy’s Delight for Chica, it was time for a quick game of fetch. It had to be quick because tonight was Friday, poker night, and the guys would be coming over at seven. Poker, another manly pursuit. Dad would have been proud.
* * *
The first to arrive was his pal Kyle Long. Kyle and Jonathan had been friends since high school. They’d both been members of the chess club and had shared an addiction to old sci-fi movies and video games.
Kyle didn’t exactly fit his name. He was short. His hair was a lighter shade than Jonathan’s dark brown—nothing spectacular, rather like his face.
His ordinary face didn’t bug him nearly as much as his lack of stature. “Women don’t look at short guys,” he often grumbled. And short guys who (like Jonathan) weren’t so confident and quick with the flattery—well, they really didn’t get noticed, even by girls their own height. This had been a hard cross to bear in high school when it seemed that every girl Kyle liked chose some giant basketball player over him. These days the competition wore a different type of uniform, the one worn to the office, but his frustration level remained the same.
The grumpy expression on his face tonight said it all before he so much as opened his mouth. “What’s with chicks, anyway?” he demanded as he set a six-pack of Hale’s Ale on Jonathan’s counter.
If Jonathan knew that, he’d be married to the woman of his dreams by now. He shrugged.
“Okay, so Darrow looks like friggin’ Ryan Reynolds.”
Ted Darrow, Kyle’s nemesis. “And drives a Jag,” Jonathan supplied. Darrow was also Kyle’s boss, which put him higher up the ladder of success, always a sexy attribute.
“But he’s the world’s biggest ass-wipe,” Kyle said with a scowl. “I don’t know what Jillian sees in him.”
Jonathan knew. Like called to like. Beautiful people naturally gravitated to one another. He had seen Jillian when he’d gone to Kyle’s company, Safe Hands Insurance, to install their new computer system. As the receptionist, it had been her job to greet him and he’d seen right away why his friend was smitten. She was hot, with supermodel-long legs. Women like that went for the Ted Darrows of the world.
Or the Rand Burwells.
Jonathan shoved that last thought out of his mind. “Hey, you might as well give up. You’re not gonna get her.” It was hard to say that to his best friend, but friends didn’t let friends drive themselves crazy over women who were out of their league. Kyle would do the same for him—if he knew Jonathan had suffered a relapse last Christmas and had once again picked up the torch for his own perfect dream girl. The road to crazy was a clogged thoroughfare these days.
Kyle heaved a discouraged sigh. “Yeah.” He pulled an opener out of a kitchen drawer and popped the top off one of the bottles. “It’s just that, well, damn. If she looked my way for longer than two seconds, she’d see I’m twice the man Darrow is.”
“I hear you,” Jonathan said, and opened a bag of corn chips, setting them alongside the beer.
Next in the door was Bernardo Ruiz, who came bearing some of his wife’s homemade salsa. Bernardo was happily married and owned a small orchard outside town, in which he took great pride. He wasn’t much taller than Kyle, but he swaggered like he was six feet.
“Who died?” he asked, looking from one friend to the other.
“Nobody,” Kyle snapped.
Bernardo eyed him suspiciously. “You mooning around over that bimbo at work again?”
“She’s not a bimbo,” Kyle said irritably.
Bernardo shook his head in disgust. “Little man, you are a fool to chase after a woman who doesn’t want you. That kind of a woman, she’ll only make you feel small on the inside.”
Any reference to being small, either on the inside or outside, never went over well with Kyle, so it was probably a good thing that Adam Edwards arrived with more beer and chips. A sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, he earned more than Jonathan and Kyle put together and had the toys to prove it—a big house on the river, a classic Corvette, a snowmobile and a beach house on the Washington coast. He also had a pretty little wife, which proved Jonathan’s theory of like calling to like, since Adam was tall and broad-shouldered and looked as though he belonged in Hollywood instead of Icicle Falls. Some guys had all the luck.
“Vance’ll be late,” Adam informed them. “He has to finish up something and says to go ahead and start without him.”
Vance Fish, the newest member of their group, was somewhere in his fifties, which made him the senior member. He’d built a big house on River Road about a mile down from Adam’s place. The two men had bonded over fishing lures, and Adam had invited him to join their poker group.
Although Vance claimed to be semiretired, he was always working. He owned a bookstore in Seattle called Emerald City Books. He’d recently started selling Sweet Dreams Chocolates there, making himself popular with the Sterling family, who owned the company.
He dressed like he was on his last dime, usually in sweats or jeans and an oversize black T-shirt that hung clumsily over his double-XL belly, but his fancy house was proof that Vance was doing okay.
“That means we won’t see him for at least an hour,” Kyle predicted.
“What
