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Before he could find the right words, Coach Gordon said, “I’m sure she’ll like your place the best. She just wants to be certain before she buys. Like I said, you know women.”
“I vaguely remember them. I’ve been too busy with this house to actually see any of them.” Perhaps Carson wasn’t as good at squashing his irritation as he should be.
“Megan hasn’t come up for a visit?” Mr. Gordon asked, surprised. “The next time I see her, I’ll tell her she needs to be more attentive.”
Little chance that would do any good. Megan was the special teams coach’s daughter. Beautiful, sophisticated, the perfect trophy girlfriend. They’d dated for two months before his injury. She’d been supportive at first—checking in with him to see if he needed anything, visiting so he wouldn’t get bored. When his injury hadn’t healed well, and he needed a second surgery, her attention cooled.
The coaches were always optimistic about his recovery in front of him, but his agent wasn’t one to pull punches. He’d told Carson that if he missed this season, there was no guarantee the Broncos would want him for the next one.
Carson already knew that. Just like he knew that the average career in the NFL was under four years. He’d played for three.
After Carson moved back to Lark Springs to recuperate and oversee the house renovations, Megan ghosted him. She evidently wanted a man who was making serious cash and would happily spend it on her. If Carson couldn’t be that person, she was going to move on to the next guy who could.
“Yeah,” Carson said into the phone. “Tell Megan she should come up. I can teach her how to use a nail gun.”
She wouldn’t come. He’d already made an invitation, and she’d told him that manual labor wasn’t her thing. She’d made it clear she thought it was bad enough that he’d stooped to such a thing.
Andthatwould teach him to go for the trophy girlfriend type. How had he never seen how materialistic she was before? The only reason Carson hadn’t officially broken things off with her was that he liked the idea of making a full recovery, rejoining the team, and then when she wanted to pick things up again, he could dump her in person.
“Well, at any rate,” Mr. Gordon said, “you’ll be done soon and then you can move back to Denver and get reacquainted. I’ll have my assistant send you our flight plans so you can have someone pick us up at the airport.”
“Great,” Carson said. “I’ll see you then.”
He hung up, shut his eyes, and tilted his head back. If the Gordons didn’t buy the property, he wasn’t sure how many other people could afford a multimillion-dollar cabin in a remote area of Montana. He wasn’t surehewould be able to afford it. Not when his position with the Broncos was no longer certain. The last thing he wanted was to be jobless and stuck paying the mortgage on an empty home.
He was just going to make sure Mrs. Gordon loved the place, and that meant making sure it was done by the fourteenth. Carson glanced around at the cement floors and unpainted walls, doing the calculations. He’d have to hire a few more people, but the date was possible. He would make it happen.
Instead of calling it a day, Carson picked up the box of handles for the cabinets and hobbled off to get a drill.
4
Olivia pulled onto the drive that led to the cabin. Although the word “cabin” hardly seemed an apt description. The home was a sprawlingly large place made with the sort of faux logs that were undoubtedly more expensive than actual trees. A green metal roof covered—was it two or three stories? It was hard to tell with all the picture windows that swept upward. An unfinished deck was being constructed on one side, but no one was working on it now. The crew must have left for the day.
Matt had told her that Carson was staying in the guest house while he oversaw the renovations. She ignored the circular drive in front of the cabin and took the one that led there. At another time, she would’ve let her gaze linger on the lush pine trees that framed the home, on the pool and jacuzzi—beautiful if impractical during most of the year—but her nerves barely allowed her to take in the details.
Carson’s dark blue truck was parked in front of the guest house. It looked normal enough to her, although Matt had talked about it longingly. Carson had the truck custom-made to better fit his six-foot-six frame and had added every upgrade known to man.
That was such a Carson Clark thing to do. Why settle for anything average when the world had always given you the best of everything?
Carson had been the town’s golden football boy. Tall and broad-shouldered, the guy could play any position and still run rings around everyone else. During his freshman year, the coach made him the first-string quarterback. Carson had a habit of rushing more than throwing because in his own words, “Plowing over the other team was fun.”
If winning the state championship his first year wasn’t enough to make the entire school overlook his flaws, he was also handsome to boot. All the girls had crushes on him. During her freshman and sophomore years, Olivia had developed her own silent crush. After all, she was five-foot-ten. How could she not crush on the hot tall guy?
She forgave herself for her lapse in judgment back then. She hadn’t known what a jerk he would turn out to be during the rest of high school.
When Carson returned to Lark Springs after a foot injury, no one had wished him a speedy recovery more fervently than Olivia. She hoped for Carson’s recovery so she could stop worrying about accidentally running into him at the grocery store and having to make eye contact, or worse, small talk. He didn’t belong in Lark Springs anymore. He belonged in Denver with the fan girls who gushed over his rippling abs and dimpled smile.
Not that Olivia followed his career. She didn’t. But most everyone else in Lark Springs did, and an assortment of fan girls had prattled on about him on social media. The only saving grace of having him back in Lark Springs was that none of the fan girls had followed him back to town to stalk him. They were apparently a fickle bunch.
Olivia’s problems with Carson Clark started her junior year when he ruined her presentation and hijacked what should have been her school project.
Every year Lark Springs High chose a service project to do for the community. Each grade proposed an idea, and the student body voted on which one to do. Mrs. Green, the social studies teacher, had told them that anyone who presented an idea in class would get extra credit. Most of the juniors didn’t her up on the offer, and the ones who presented their ideas weren’t that compelling. No visual aids. No research. They obviously presented just for the extra credit.
Olivia needed fifteen minutes for her presentation, so Mrs. Green assigned Olivia’s PowerPoint for the following day. After that, the class would vote. Should’ve been an easy win.
She proposed a fundraiser for the local food bank. Not only would the students collect food but also school supplies and shoes for needy students. That was the selling point. The school would be helping their own.
Olivia knew firsthand how hard starting the school year without the things one needed could be. She knew what it was like to spend her babysitting money on supplies because she couldn’t bear to ask her mom to pay for anything else.
