Page 106 of Well Aware

“You can love on her all you want.” She frowned. “Are you ready to go?”

No.

No, I was not.

But we didn’t really have a choice.

“One more game,” I said. “I’m lucky we know the owner, and they had no problem with us arriving the day before the game.”

“No joke,” she said. “I just heard Beau in the hallway bitching to Apollo about his sister. Any news on that?”

“Just that she ‘worked it out with the judge’ that she can leave the state for games. As long as she’s back within forty-eight hours,” I grumbled.

“And Cain?” she asked.

“He hasn’t left that ski resort since he was released,” I answered as I passed Margie back to her mother and led her out of the room with my arm looped through hers. “Gentry and Black have a hawk eye on him. The man won’t be going anywhere without someone following his every move.”

When we got to the living room, it was to find the Dixie Wardens drinking whiskey, passing around a bottle.

Boone was in the middle, looking clearly heartbroken as his sister leaned into his side, asleep.

The rest of them were passing the bottle around but not saying much, not wanting to wake Ida Bell.

I let Nettie go and went in search of Beau.

I found him on the porch, looking angry.

“What’s wrong?”

His jaw worked. “My sister decided to take the company jet and take off to Seattle without letting us know. Court is currently filing a report with the FAA and any other agencies that’ll listen. The plane was made to turn around, too.”

“It’s not very easy to steal a plane,” I admitted. “How did that happen?”

“She knows the pilot,” he growled. “She actually tried to do it several times this season. Once because she wanted to fly to Paris, and another because she wanted to go to Milan.”

I hated his sister.

With a passion of a thousand burning suns.

If I could erase her from his memory and this planet, I’d do it without hesitation.

I never thought it possible that I’d find someone that I hated as much as I hated Cain McDuff, but Seraphina Vanderbilt was definitely competition.

They’d both tie in the worst person in existence award.

“What now?”

“Now, I guess we go up in the morning instead,” he growled. “As long as we get there by nine, we should be on time for the game at noon.”

There were rules and regulations with the league that I didn’t understand and had no desire to.

This time tomorrow, I will have played my very last soccer game. Maybe not ever, but definitely professionally.

I was so dang excited, I could barely stand it.

If only everything else in life wasn’t so bad.

TWENTY-SEVEN