Page 207 of Wild Card 13
Ty’s eyes dropped to the motion. When they came back to mine, he looked almost afraid to breathe.
“Fine, Ty.” I could not believe what was coming out of my mouth. “I will have one drink with you.”
CHAPTER 25
BUZZ
NOW
Lucy stood in my living room at one in the morning, looking out at the lake like I had accidentally opened the door to a future I had not known I was still stupid enough to want.
She had only stepped past the threshold, boots quiet on the dark wood floor, coat unbuttoned, Dottie’s leash still looped around one hand. Her hair had come loose from whatever professional arrangement had survived most of her day at the arena, curls slipping around her face and catching faintly in the low light from the kitchen. Her glasses sat a little lower on her nose than usual. Her shoulders were tired. Her mouth was soft with the kind of quiet that meant she was taking in more than she intended to give back.
Behind her, through the black-framed wall of glass, the lake stretched dark and frozen beneath a thin cover of snow. No moon showed. Just the far-off shape of the opposite shore, the pale smear of ice, and my own reflection layered behind hers.
Her car sat in the driveway behind my truck, visible through the side window if I turned my head. She had parked with room to leave. Of course she had. Lucy Thomas did not walk into any situation without knowing where the exits were.
But she had walked in.
That was the part my body could not seem to process.
She had followed my taillights down the quiet road out of Northbend, past closed storefronts and sleeping houses andsnowbanks cut hard by plows, all the way to this place I rarely let people see without noise around it. Summer grill nights. A game on. Teammates passing through. Somebody laughing too loud by the firepit. Enough bodies to keep the house from saying anything honest.
Now there was only Lucy, Dottie, me, and the kind of silence that made every object in the room look sterile.
The charcoal kitchen. The stone fireplace. The oversized couch. The glass looking out over the lake. The expensive speakers I had not turned on in weeks. The big TV gone black above the low console, unused. The compression boots folded beside the couch because I had left them there before the Denver trip and forgotten about them. A team hoodie thrown over the back of one kitchen stool. Water bottles lined up near the sink like they had formed a support group.
My house looked good.
That was the problem.
It looked good, and suddenly I could see every place it did not look lived in.
Dottie solved the silence by sitting down in the entry and sneezing.
Lucy blinked. I looked at the dog.
Dottie looked back at me like she had found the acoustics disappointing.
“Bless you,” I said.
Lucy’s mouth twitched. It was small. Fleeting. But I caught it because my entire nervous system had apparently been assigned to monitor Lucy Thomas’s mouth for signs of mercy.
“Can I take your coat?” I asked.
Lucy looked over her shoulder at me.
For half a second, I thought she was going to close the coat around herself again and tell me no. Instead, she slipped the leash from one hand to the other and shrugged out of the wool. The motion pulled her sweater tighter across her shoulders, loosened another curl near her cheek, and did something painful to the center of my chest.
“Thanks,” she said.
I took the garment carefully, like handling it wrong might send her running. It smelled faintly like cold air and her perfume,something clean and soft I remembered too well and not enough. I hung it in the entry closet beside three of my own jackets and immediately regretted how much I liked seeing it there.
Dottie’s tail thumped once. Lucy glanced down. “Can I?”
“Yeah.” My voice came out rough, so I cleared it. “Yeah, she’s good. Let her loose.”
Lucy unclipped the leash. Dottie looked at her, looked at me, then trotted straight across my living room and launched herself onto the middle cushion of my couch with the confidence of someone who had reviewed the deed and found her name on it.
