Page 5 of The Secret of Emerald Cottage

Chapter Two

Wiping steam off the mirror with a towel, Brec assessed his image, amazed at just how much better—and invigorated—he felt after a shower. His lips canted into a lazy smile as he rubbed the two-day-old scruff on his face.

Of course kissing a gorgeous Yank sure didn’t hurt.

In his bed, no less.

His smile faded. Without him, thank God.

He stared at the man in the mirror, the one who had just screwed up everything in his life and knew that the last thing he wanted—or needed—was more of the same. One lousy mistake, that’s all it had taken, and he’d botched it all.

His hopes.

His dreams.

His future.

He kneaded his temple as his eyelids shuttered closed. He had no business hitting on anyone right now, even if Sleeping Beauty had muttered the request in her sleep.

“Just kiss me, please.”

So he had. Because kissing women was second nature to him, after all. The Achilles heel that had finally taken him down, destroying everything he’d worked so hard to obtain.

In one swoop of a sorry scandal.

Lashes lifting, he studied what some called one of the best forwards in the League of Ireland soccer and knew coming back to the States—the home country he had abandoned—was the right thing to do.

His gut tightened. If one could even consider it a home. He certainly hadn’t, not since the age of eighteen, when his mom and dad had scissored his life with events too painful to ponder.

“Providential,” his agent had called Aunt Lilly’s fall, urging him to go stay with his aunt in her “time of need.” He buried a grunt as he raked a hand through ebony curls damp from the shower. More like his time of need. His gaze roamed from a torso carefully sculpted by hours in the gym to what his ex-fiancée liked to call his “Michelangelo face.”

“Tightly chiseled features and beautiful form,” she would say, “with a body like a Greek god.” The grunt escaped this time as he stripped off the towel and proceeded to get dressed, concurring that the timing of Miss Lilly’s accident was, indeed, providential.

“It’ll do you good to go home to your aunt,” his agent, Morty, had insisted, “until everything blows over.”

Everything. He donned a clean T-shirt with a clamp of his jaw.

His career.

His life.

His engagement.

He waited for the ache to come at the loss of his trophy girlfriend, but all he felt was guilt as he slipped into fresh jeans, wishing he could slip into a fresh life as easily. He regretted the pain he’d caused Lana, but it was for the best. What up-and-coming Italian movie starlet wanted to be saddled with a wayward sports celebrity whose career was effectively over for the rest of the year? He grunted. And maybe longer.

Casting a final glance into the mirror, he zipped up, hoping and praying—dear God, did he even still do that?—that Aunt Lilly’s “home” truly would “do him good.”

Home. Or at least more of one than he’d ever had before.

Padding down the hardwood hallway, he silently slipped down the stairs into the kitchen where Goldilocks was “whipping up” breakfast. He winced as she sang off-key to something that sounded like “God’s not dead” blaring from her phone. He blinked when she took two Jimmy Dean biscuits from a box and slipped them into the microwave, hips and arms rolling in a distant rendition of the latest dance craze.

That’s something nutritional?

Strolling up behind her by several feet, he cleared his throat, and she whirled around. One of the biscuits flew in the air, almost assaulting him while she gaped in apparent shock. “Son of a biscuit!” she shouted, making him smile over one of Aunt Lilly’s favorite—and oddly appropriate— “swear words.”

She sagged against the counter with a hand splayed to her chest. “Don’t ever sneak up on me like that again! What, are you part panther or something? Silently pouncing on your prey? I never even heard you coming.”

“Nope”—he lifted a foot— “just an unshod Irishman drowned out by raucous singing. Or … at least I think it was singing.” Grinning, he retrieved the biscuit from the floor and tossed it once in the air, catching it handily before giving it over. “And this is your idea of ‘nutritious’?”