He shook his head. “Lately, the only thing I’ve been excited about was this trip and helping Erik.”
Nodding, his friend rolled up a piece of prosciutto and took a bite. “Maybe you just need some space away from the field to relight your passion for it.”
“Maybe.” He doubted it though. The more he thought about playing more football, the more he dreaded it. The only thing keeping him in the game was his teammates and his responsibility to them.
Didier reached for some strawberries. “Focus on finding Erik his nice girl. It’ll keep your mind occupied.”
“My mind won’t be occupied long. It’s not going to take long to find Erik a woman. That part is going to be very easy.” Their taxi driver had offered to introduce his daughters, for fuck’s sake. Not to mention that the kid was honest and sincere. At twenty-one, the kid had been playing football professionally for a couple years—he’d been recruited later than most players—but somehow he’d managed to preserve his open inquisitiveness and a bit of naïveté. Combined with his good looks and movie star hair, he’d win any woman over.
They heard the front door open.
It had to be Erik. “We’re in the kitchen,” Jamie called out, popping a strawberry into his mouth.
They turned around right as Erik stepped into the doorway. Tall and lean, the kid wore shorts and a T-shirt that he lifted to mop the sweat off his face. Obviously he’d been running. His hair was—
Gone.
Jamie stopped cold, mid-chew. The long blond hair the kid had had was—mostly—shaved except for thick asymmetrical ridges, like a labyrinth gone wrong. He looked like a blond hedgehog who’d gotten caught in a barbed wire fence.
Not the sort of haircut a nice girl would find attractive. Jamie imagined Erik picking up one of the taxi driver’s daughters looking like that.
“Ah putain,” Didier breathed.
Oh fuck, indeed. He winced. So much for finding a girl by the end of the weekend. Looking at Erik, Jamie wondered if three weeks would be long enough to get this done.
Two
“Always remember, Rachel Morgan, that the right word can change everything,” her grandma Lottie still repeated to her. Lottie believed words could build you up or tear you down. They could inspire you, taking you to places you hadn’t imagined.
She believed that too. The right word had changed her marriage—to divorce, truth be told—but it had changedher. She’d gotten her freedom.
Rachel sat barefoot on the floor of her cubicle, looking at all the words she’d cut out and collected from magazines. She needed a new word STAT—before “loser” was permanently associated with her.
She wasnota loser. She was just unfortunate. She’d married the right person who’d turned out to be wrong. She’d quit her PR job at the height of her success because of said guy. And now she was living with her grandmother—whom she loved, even though she felt like a teenager instead of a grown woman.
A woman who was going to turn thirty-five in two months.
She’d thought she was going to have to worry about turning forty, but it was really turning thirty-five that had her in a tizzy. Thirty-five crept up on you, unaware, bursting the false sense of peace you tried to hold on to, and smacked you upside the head. Thirty-five whispered to you in the dark that you were halfway through life and you hadn’t done ANYTHING yet.
But that was about to change.
Without looking, Rachel picked three pieces of paper and lined them up in front of her.
RELEASE
TROUBLE
ORGASMS
She snorted. Shehadreleased—a year ago she’d finally left her husband. It’d taken her two and a half years to admit that she’d made a mistake in marrying Kevin and that their relationship was hopeless. She hated to give up—and that was definitely what it’d felt like.
But, really, she should have known. Her first clue should have been that he hadn’t been on board with the word she’d picked for their relationship. Apparently “happy” wasn’t something he was interested in. She shook her head and tossed that slip of paper back into the pile.
Trouble? That was easy. She’d quit her job when she’d married Kevin. She should never have done that, but all of the partners’ wives at the finance company where he worked stayed at home, and since he was on a fast track to partner, he’d wanted her to stay home too. Besides, they’d planned to start a family.
She snorted again. She should have clung to her word.
She’d come back to the agency nine months ago after spending three months searching for work. Turned out that when you stopped working for a period of time, employers believed you forgot all your skills. It didn’t help that she was in her mid-thirties, either—not when all the new hires were fresh-faced kids out of college.