Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 69919 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69919 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I grimaced. “I am zero percent interested in dating. I want to get my PhD before I even think about any of that again.”
“You and Jarvis can work things out,” Mom said. “He’s sorry. He didn’t mean what he said to Manny. You know how guys are. They try to act all aloof in front of their friends, like they don’t have emotions, but that’s just—”
“Horrible,” I said, interrupting her. “And I don’t want to spend my life with a man who thinks it’s cool to tell his friends he doesn’t find his fiancée sexy. Besides, I’m not in love with him, and I don’t want that for him. He shouldn’t settle any more than I should.” Okay, that might’ve been a tiny lie, since I didn’t give a shit about Jarvis anymore, but it might get my mother to settle down.
“Couldn’t you learn to love him?” she asked.
“Tammy!” Aunt Nita looked shocked. “This isn’t the 1950s. She shouldn’t have to force herself to love someone. There are lots of fish in the sea.”
“Besides, he sucks in the sack,” Grandma G said. “If I’d known that before now, I wouldn’t have let her marry him.”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing as Mom gasped and Aunt Nita dipped her head.
“Mom!” My mother glared at her mother-in-law.
“Okay, we’re not going to talk about my sex life,” I said, quickly changing the subject. I’d blurted out that little tidbit about our sex life this morning when I’d first gotten here; leave it to Grandma G not to miss a thing. “I’m really sorry I waited until the eleventh hour to cancel the wedding, but it wasn’t until I heard him talking to his friend that I realized all those red flags had been my subconscious warning me. He doesn’t love me, not really, and I don’t love him either. It would have been a disaster. I did us all a favor.”
“Your father is very upset,” Mom said, lifting her coffee cup and meeting my gaze over the rim. “You’re going to have to talk to him.”
“I know.”
“It would go a long way to making him happy if you volunteered for the kids’ camp coming up,” she said.
“I’ve got a lot to do at the lab,” I protested. He’d asked me every year if I would help him coach at the hockey camp for underprivileged kids that he sponsored, and I’d always made excuses.
Mom gave me a look. “Your non-wedding cost us tens of thousands of dollars. I think the least you could do is help your father with the camp. He and different guys from the team deal with the older kids, but he needs help with the younger ones, especially the girls. You know how gruff he is and the little ones are scared of him.”
I thought about it for a minute and realized it might not just help mend fences with my dad but also get me out of the lab once in a while. I spent far too much time there, and though I loved what I was working on, my body was starting to protest all the time I spent hunched over a microscope or in front of my computer. Exercise combined with keeping Dad off my back was a win-win deal.
Not to mention, I loved hockey.
I’d played when I was younger, until my love for science had overshadowed everything else. It might be fun to get back out on the ice. And I loved kids, so that part wouldn’t be a problem.
First thing tomorrow, I’d talk to my dad.
Maybe then things could go back to some semblance of normal.
CHAPTER THREE
Boone
I’d never been a person who prayed, but as the phone rang, I closed my eyes and asked God to heal Andy. To give him the strength he needed to get through the fight of his life.
“Hey, man,” my brother said when he answered my call.
“Hey. You answered. That’s a good sign.”
His laugh was gruff, without a note of amusement. “I’m too fucking sick to even sleep. This round kicked my ass.”
Why? I’d asked the universe that question hundreds of times in the past three months. Why did my younger brother have to battle colon cancer when he’d just married the love of his life two years ago? When he’d become a father one year ago? It was so damn unfair.
“Worse than the time we swiped Dad’s huge bottle of whiskey and drank the whole thing?” I asked.
Andy groaned. “Shit, man, I thought I was going to die that day.”
I’d puked into a football helmet from my bed, too sick to even make it to the bathroom. I’d been seventeen and Andy had been fifteen. It had taken me years to be able to even look at whiskey without feeling ill.
“Dad was so fucking pissed.” I smiled at the memory. “You told him the hangover was punishment enough.”