Page 36 of Out of Bounds

Chapter Twelve

Having grown up on the coast of Croatia, raw fish was something that Gunnar was more than used to eating. Sushi just wasn’t the form he was used to it coming in. However, if that was what this beauty wanted, he wasn’t going to stand in her way. Especially since she had not only not kicked him to the curb, but had let him say his peace and had accepted his apology.

It’d been a rough night after getting her response to his accusation. At first, he’d been very confused as to who the little girl in the photo was, but when Dalton had glanced down at the picture and asked him why he had a photo of his sister, Gunnar’s stomach bottomed out. He’d been quick on his feet, coming up with an excuse that Felicity sent it to him by accident, and it seemed like his boss had believed him. At least believed him enough to drop the subject. But from that moment on, the only thing he could think about was just how much of a jerk he’d been. It’d only gotten worse when he was bombarded by a very upset Talia the moment he’d walked through the door this morning. She’d let him have it on everything from his behavior at Bunz on Friday to all the things Felicity had done to help her get settled and how he owed her a thank you. That was when he knew that he needed to apologize—immediately—and in a very big way.

"Can I ask who you were talking to that day on the balcony?” Felicity asked, letting the door swing shut behind the delivery guy. She walked back over to the couch, pulling the food out of the bag and opening the cartons.

“Anya,” Gunnar told her, watching her beautiful curves as she spread out their meal on the coffee table. He took the small plate and pair of chopsticks she handed him, giving her a smile to let her know that he was enjoying this. “My late wife. I talk to her like she’s still here sometimes as a way to process my thoughts. Sounds crazy, but it works.”

“You were married?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“How would I know that?” she asked, giving a questioning look.

“You knew all my stats. I figured that would have come up, since she was the reason I retired from playing.”

“I know your stats because I learned them when we were researching candidates, but I didn’t do much more than a general google search on things that weren’t game related. Figured as long as the guy wasn’t a major PR nightmare then what did it matter?” she answered with a shrug. Her long, blonde hair was piled on top of her head in a knot that seemed to only be half holding it in place, more and more of it seeming to escape every time she moved. “You must miss her.”

“I do. Although, I think for me it was a little different. We knew it was coming. She had been in a car accident and found out that she had a rare blood disease. One where most people who have it didn’t see forty. So I retired at the end of that season, and we spent the next couple of years traveling and doing all the things we said we wanted to do ‘someday.’ We…I…had time to prepare and deal with the inevitable. We only had a couple of years after that, but I got to make sure she was the happiest woman on the planet each day for that short time. She was at peace when she died.” He turned away from her, rubbing his nose as he sniffled.

It’d been a long time since he’d shared that much about her. Most people in his life had either known Anya or had met him long after her death, when he was already a well-established workaholic. He would always love Anya, there was no doubt about that, but most days it seemed like another lifetime that she’d been here. Having those last years with her, being able to live out their dreams, and her being so content with everything at the end had made accepting her dying a little easier. She’d also made it very clear that she wanted him to continue to live and to be happy, making him promise her he wouldn’t be that guy who never moved on because he was so stuck on her. “I’ll be watching, and don’t think I won’t let you have it if you break your promise,” she’d told him. He’d made sure to keep his end of the bargain, even if his version of “moving on” had simply been making football his life instead of her.

“After she passed, I took the job at Dundalk, and that became my primary focus.”

“How did you meet?” Felicity turned back to the coffee table, plating some of the sushi. Resettling herself back into her spot, she handed him one of the plates. The look on her face was soft, her eyes bright with interest. This was a completely different version of Felicity than any of the others he’d seen. Even the night when he put her to bed, when he thought he’d started to see the real her, was nothing compared to this version. She was absolutely stunning, and he wanted to be all in.

“We were childhood best friends, but I didn’t have the balls to ask her out until after my first World Cup. And it wasn't so much asking her out as flat-out proposing. I got off that plane from Paris, went straight to her parents’ house, walked in, and said, ‘I think you should marry me!’”

“The World Cup. Isn’t that where…”

“Where Talia came from?” he asked with a laugh, before popping a piece of sushi into his mouth. He’d let Felicity do the ordering, since she knew the menu by heart, so he had no idea what he’d just eaten, but it was delicious. “Yeah, that’s not lost on me. For the life of me I don’t remember the uh…encounter, that lead to Talia, but DNA doesn’t lie. Anya’s been gone eleven years, but I can see her face plain as day laughing at me over this. ‘Only you, Gun, would knock someone up and then come home to propose to someone you weren’t dating,’” he said, trying to mimic her voice. He wasn’t very good at it, but the little laugh that managed to escape Felicity’s lips made it worth the effort. “She would have loved Talia though. She wouldn’t have questioned any of it, just taken her in and made Talia her new best friend.”

“I’m sure Talia would have loved that. She seems to really miss her mom,” she said, lifting a piece of food to her mouth. Her pretty pink lips looked just as delicious as the sushi, begging him to kiss them as she closed her mouth around the chopsticks. A surge of lust hit him straight in the groin, and he had to fight the urge not to pull her into him.

“Yeah. She told me they weren’t that close, but I get the impression that might not really have been the case.”

“Sometimes you don’t fully realize how much someone means until they aren’t there anymore.”

“You sound like you know from experience. Was that the case for you and your mom?”

“No, my mom and I were very close. I don’t know how much you know about my family…” she trailed off.

“Cullen gave me a brief version, that your mom died when you and your brother were kids, and then your dad married the nanny. Right?”

“I was fifteen and Tripp was twelve when she passed. She’d been sick for a long time and in a lot of pain. Tripp and I were old enough to understand what was going on, but too young to fully take care of ourselves, so BobbiJo was hired. She was the daughter of one of my father’s friends from our country club,” she explained, placing her now empty plate back on the table. “I thought she was soooo cool and I wanted to be just like her. She became the person I turned to with everything that year—and I do mean everything. I turned to her for advice on boys, or when I had an embarrassing period accident at school, or all the weird teenage processing of my feelings about my mom dying. And then she betrayed me.”

“She betrayed you? Your stepmother? How?” he asked, confused. Wouldn’t a teenage girl have wanted her dad to marry someone she liked? He knew he had to be missing something. Women had always confused him, but this one really didn’t line up.

“Oh, did Cruz leave that part out? BobbiJo and my dad were having an affair prior to my mother’s death.”

“Fuck,” he cursed. Yeah, Cullen had definitely left that part out.

“I walked in on them,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I literally left my mother’s bedside, shortly after she drew her last breath, and went to find my father, who had excused himself for “a phone call.” So, I walked into his office, expecting to find him on said phone call, and there he was, with the nanny bent over his desk.”

“Effie…” Gunnar’s heart lurched at her words. No wonder she pushed everyone away. He probably would too if he’d experienced that kind of backstabbing.

“It was the first time I realized that no one saw me for me. I was just a pawn in her game to get to Big D. After that, I was useless to her. He wasn’t any better. Not saying I was a complete joy to be around—I was a teenage girl who’d just lost her mother and caught her father fucking someone else—so I was a real pain in the ass. But his answer was just to throw money at the problem, like somehow telling me I could have whatever I wanted would fix things. Except money wasn’t going to give me the only thing I wanted, which was for him to actually pay attention to me.”