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Lucky huffed a breath that I was sure was the doggie equivalent of ‘fuck you’ before putting his head on Charm’s back and closing his eyes.
Pushing the door to the office, I found Enzo pacing back and forth as he spoke on the phone with someone.
“Yes sir, I look forward to getting back to you later this week. No, I know this is an amazing opportunity, but I need to speak with the rest of my pack first,” Enzo was saying as our eyes met and he held up a finger telling me to wait. His words were spoken with more of an American accent than they usually were, telling me that whoever was on the other end of the line must be from the states.
“Uh-huh, yep, thank you so much, bye now.”
“Who was that?” I asked casually as I tossed myself down into the comfy chair in the corner of the room. It was Artie’s favorite to sit in and watch Enzo as he worked—or it had been before he’d started losing his sight.
“Colt Stone,” Enzo said with a note of disbelief in his voice. “He’s offered me a job announcing events at his sports complex in Seattle.”
My brain stuttered to a halt because I recognized the name.
Though I’d blocked Ciara on my phone, in my weaker moments I’d looked her up online and found pictures taken by others of her at weddings and family outings.
And in those pictures it would have been impossible not to recognize one of the youngest billionaires in the world—especially one who had dedicated his life to being a patron for winter sports athletes.
He was also mated to Ciara’s sister.
“Do you think he knows?” I asked, swallowing the sudden lump in my throat, my mind going back to the desolate expression on Ciara’s face as she yelled at me in the lobby of the hotel earlier.
Enzo shrugged, scrubbing a hand over his dark beard. “I doubt Colt Stone has the time to be keeping up with who his sister-in-law dates, Lei. He told me he listened to my broadcast of Team USA’s game last night and he was impressed.”
It was the kind of recognition Enzo had been pushing for ever since he’d moved to the UK permanently after university.
Working his way into sports commentating at the BBC had been hard enough for him. Most people didn’t want to hear an American man talking about sports on their telly, even if that American had spent the majority of his life in Europe.
A chance to be the dedicated hockey announcer for Colt Stone’s famous sports center was the offer of a lifetime.
“And there’s a doctor in Seattle who has an experimental trial for glaucoma that I think we can get Artie into.”
I sighed, there was the other shoe that I’d been waiting for him to drop.
“Enzo…” I started as carefully as I could, but the other man shook his head vehemently and stopped my next words.
“Leith, I’m not just going to let him lose his eyesight at the breakneck pace that he currently is losing it at—no matter what he says.”
Once Artie had been diagnosed, Enzo had thrown himself into research about the eye disease that was taking our omega’s sight. For the first three months he didn’t eat or sleep and he very nearly was fired from his job because of his obsession.
That stint had ended with Artie refusing to talk to him until he let it go and let Artie make choices about himself and his rapidly increasing blindness.
But Enzo could never truly let go of anything. It was one of the reasons we loved him so much.
“No—I know we can’t cure it—but this doctor has made some serious strides in prolonging eyesight and he’d be there anyway.” Enzo clasped his hands together as if he was trying to plead with me.
A heavy sigh whooshed out of me, compounding the bone-deep exhaustion I was feeling after the events of the past few days. “I’m not the one you have to convince, Enz, but I also won’t go against Artie’s wishes.”
“Fine by me, but we should talk more about it when Artie wakes up for the day—he’s still sleeping off the drinks from dinner,” Enzo said with a half-grin that told me that our omega was probably sleeping off more than just the alcohol.
We’d all been ecstatic when he’d medaled for his event and had spent a large chunk of the evening at a fancy restaurant celebrating. It had been on our walk back to our flat that we’d run into Ciara.
The medal wasn’t the gold that Artie had been shooting—almost desperately—for, but it was a silver which was more than most of the male figure skaters could claim after yesterday.
“Speaking of sleeping things off, you look rough bud. Why does it look like someone ran you over with a truck?” Enzo asked, nodding at me.
I frowned at that before glancing over at the mirror that hung on one of the walls.
I looked, in a word, disheveled. My hair was coming out of its tie and it floated around my temples in messy waves. My clothing was also a disaster—probably from all of my anxious tugging of it on my walk back to our flat.
