She was squinty eyed again. Will swore as he dropped his hands. He wasn’t sure what possessed him to say what he said next.
“Saving yourself for the priest, I see.”
Her hand made contact with his face and Will didn’t try to stop her. He’d deserved it. She deserved an apology. Instead he turned on his heel and left the room for a much-needed shower. A cold shower.
Fourteen
Brody was holding court in the crowded tea room of the Tide Me Over Inn, rehashing a call gone wrong in this year’s playoffs. The guests were sympathetic to his indignation about getting called for offensive interference, particularly the three young Frenchwomen who most likely hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. Will shook his head and began to step into the large parlor before a hand grabbed his arm.
“Don’t you dare take him from that room. He’s good for business.”
Will smiled down into the face of Patricia McAlister, the inn’s owner and Gavin’s mother. Her fiery red hair had faded into a more serene champagne color after some fifty-odd years, but her smiling eyes were blue as ever.
“Hey, you’ve got your own professional athlete in the family. Make him entertain your guests,” Will teased.
Patricia’s eyes dimmed. “The baseball season has just begun. He’s too busy. Besides, Ryan doesn’t come home anymore. Except maybe for weddings and funerals.”
Will mentally kicked himself for upsetting the woman who’d been a second mother to him. Apparently the estrangement between Ryan and his family was as bad as it ever was, especially after the death of his father a few years back. Patricia still grieved the sudden loss of her husband deeply; the rift with her son didn’t help matters.
He pulled her in for a hug, brushing a kiss over the top of her head. “He loves you. He just doesn’t like being in this town.”
“Spoken like one who feels the same way.”
“It goes without saying that I love you.” Will neatly sidestepped the second part of her statement. Like his mother, Patricia believed Chances Inlet was her destiny, the place where she’d get her second chance. Will and the McAlister boys all thought the myth was a bunch of crap, hightailing it out of town as fast as they could to find their destiny someplace else. Somewhere they could be someone else.
“I can’t let you in there,” Patricia insisted. “Not with those French exchange students in heat and you without a ring on. Really, Will, would it hurt you to wear a wedding band?”
When news of their wedding broke, Julianne’s brother had spun an elaborate tale of lost love to the media. Most people believed the marriage was real. But those closest to Will—Patricia and Gavin and a few select others—knew the truth. Both his mother and Patricia were as irritated as Julianne that he would not wear a ring. Not that it mattered to him. If Will ever put on a wedding band, it would be because he loved a woman enough to commit his life to her. His feelings for Julianne were a mix of lust, mistrust, and exasperation. Nothing close to love. And any commitment they might have was scheduled to end in a few months.
“Only if he wore it through his nose,” Brody interrupted, slipping from his admirers and joining them in the hallway.
Patricia laughed. “That I’d like to see!”
Will shot Brody a menacing look, but as usual, the tight end wasn’t fazed.
“Go pick on your other sons. Brody and I have work to do.” He turned to the ornate, curved staircase in the inn’s grand foyer, and Brody followed.
“Boys!” Patricia called to them as they climbed the stairs. Her tone was one Will had heard a thousand times in his lifetime, usually as he and the McAlister boys were off to their attic play space. “No roughhousing. This is a hotel, and I have guests.”
Brody winked at her. “Message received. If I want to clean his clock, I’ll take him to the gym.”
“As if that would ever happen,” Will mumbled.
Brody charged up the stairs, Will at his heels, and entered a large suite at the head of the stairs. Patricia had named the rooms after cities and towns in Scotland, decorating them with the colors of the clans who live there. Brody was in the Inverness room, a sunny suite with a king-sized four-poster bed and panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean just across the street from the inn.
Will moved to the center of the room as Brody closed and locked the door behind them.
“You can’t be too careful,” Brody said in answer to Will’s raised eyebrow. He opened the top drawer of the antique tallboy and pulled out a large envelope and two smaller ones, tossing them on the round table between two overstuffed chairs. Brody slouched in one of the chairs, one of his long legs dangling over the side. He grabbed the remote and dialed up SportsCenter on the television.
Will carefully picked up the envelopes.
“Dude, they’re perfectly safe. I had them checked out before I touched them.”
Will hadn’t considered that the letters wouldn’t be safe, but he felt a sheen of sweat break out on his back at Brody’s words. “Paranoid much?”
“Hey, one never knows. Besides, it gave me an excuse to call this FBI agent I know. You should see what she can do with a pair of handcuffs.” Brody winked at him.
He shook his head and sank down into the chair across from Brody, tearing open the first envelope.
“Hey!” Brody sat up in his chair. “You gonna open those here?”
“I thought you said they were safe,” Will said as he pulled the contents from the largest envelope.
“Dude, they are. That doesn’t mean I want to know what’s in them! I don’t want to be incriminated in this mess. You know, guilt by association?”
“Relax. I haven’t done anything wrong, so . . .” Will stared at a photo of him putting a punishing hit on Denver quarterback Mark Callahan. It was the play that cemented Will’s position in the NFL, the one that earned him a starting position. It had also ended Callahan’s career with a separated shoulder that never recovered despite two surgeries.
“Damn,” Brody said from over Will’s shoulder. “That was some hit.”
“It was a clean hit.”
“I’m guessing someone doesn’t think so.”
Will threw the photo onto the table and picked up one of the smaller envelopes. In it was a small wooden emblem, a seven-pointed star surrounded by a wreath, a symbol of the Aurelian Society, one of the secret societies at Yale University and an organization Will was a member of.
“Is that some voodoo good-luck charm?” Brody asked.
Will slid the piece into the pocket of his jeans. It wasn’t a good-luck charm. It was a message. One about honor and duty to the university to which he owed so much. One about keeping his mouth shut.
He didn’t want to open the last envelope, but he couldn’t wuss out in front of Brody. Will slid his finger through the seal and pulled out a single piece of paper. It contained one handwritten line:
SNITCHES DON’T LAST LONG IN THIS LEAGUE.
“Dude, you might want to think about getting a lawyer.”
Despite her resolve to stay hidden while she was living there with Will, the picturesque town of Chances Inlet—decked out in red, white, and blue bunting and American flags to commemorate the upcoming Memorial Day holiday—captivated Julianne. From the way Will had described his hometown, she’d expected the people there to be cold, perhaps even hostile. They were anything but, constantly regaling her with stories of Will’s escapades as a boy. The tales they told were more Norman Rockwell than Will’s abbreviated version of his childhood.
Meandering to the town square after her postpartum check-up with an OB-GYN Dr. Ling had recommended, Julianne sat on a blanket beneath one of the huge live oak trees lining the quaint park in the town’s center that featured an actual Civil War cannon. Children scrambled on top of the cannon as their parents snapped pictures. The ocean roared somewhere in the distance, but the noise didn’t diminish the peacefulness she felt. Owen slept quietly in his stroller, a Blaze baseball cap shielding his face.