Lanie shivered. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Alarm filled Britt’s eyes. She wore a ruby red bridesmaid’s dress that matched the red roses in Lanie’s bouquet. “Getting married?”
“No, standing outside in falling snow in a strapless wedding dress without a coat.”
Holly walked over to the waiting area next to the glass chapel in the botanical garden. “I can still get you one.”
“No. I’m still worried it will wrinkle my dress. Isn’t it about time to go in anyway?”
Holly smiled. “I just cued them to start the music.”
Lanie’s eyes sought her wedding planner’s gaze, suddenly panicked. “Tyler’s in there?”
“Not only is he in there, but he’s anxiously watching the door. We’ll need to be careful he doesn’t see you through the glass chapel walls before you start walking down the aisle.”
Lanie smiled, so full of happiness she thought she would burst.
“Who knew he’d be so old-fashioned about seeing you in your dress before you walk down the aisle?” Britt asked. “Especially after all our photo sessions before my wedding.”
“I’m not surprised,” Steph said, holding her bouquet of white roses to the side as she brushed snowflakes off her red dress. “Turns out Tyler Norris is a romantic at heart. He had to be, after a proposal like that.”
Holly glanced up at the wooden doors to the chapel. “It’s time.”
The group walked over to the doors, then stood to the side. Steph and Britt kissed Lanie’s cheek before walking down the aisle.
Holly positioned Lanie behind the wooden door while they waited for the music to change. “Still no regrets you didn’t have your dad walk you down the aisle?” she asked.
“No. It would have felt weirder if he did. We’re working on getting closer, and I’m happy focusing on that.” Besides, she’d been independent most of her life. It seemed more fitting to give herself away. She offered her friend a smile. “Thank you for getting the wedding together so quickly. It’s beautiful.”
Holly grinned. “Well, honestly, Kevin might have withheld sex if I hadn’t agreed to help plan his best friend’s wedding.” Then she grinned. “Okay, he would have lasted three days tops, but it would have been a miserable three days.”
Lanie laughed.
“But I would have done it anyway,” Holly said. “And it helped that you set the date practically the same day he proposed. Three months is more than I got for that big socialite wedding last summer. I planned it in three weeks.”
“The one you and Kevin were married in?”
Holly blushed. “Sometimes things are just meant to be.” The music changed, and Holly reached for the door. “It’s time. Don’t be nervous.”
“I’m not,” Lanie said, surprised she meant it. All her anxiety had fled. She knew without a doubt this was the best decision of her life.
“Okay,” Holly whispered as she stepped backward and opened the door. “Go.”
The door opened, revealing the chapel, decorated in red and white flowers. Lanie was surprised at how many people had shown up for a wedding a few days before Christmas. Aiden was in the crowd, as well as Kevin’s sister Megan and her husband—her mother was waiting at the reception with Megan’s baby. Lanie’s parents were there too, but she didn’t look for any of them. Her eyes were glued on the man waiting for her at the altar with his little brother and his two best friends at his side.
Adoration and awe washed over Tyler’s face, and he looked speechless as she walked toward him.
Their relationship had been a whirlwind, and she knew some people thought they were moving too fast—her parents leading the charge—but sometimes you just knew when something was perfect.
Her life couldn’t be any more perfect.
Matt Osborne is the last remaining member of the Bachelor Brotherhood, and he’s determined to hold the fort. That is, until he finds himself face to face with his college sweetheart—and her son. Sexy sparks are reignited…and Matt is about to learn the hard way that love always finds a way back in.
A preview of Always You follows.
Chapter One
Standing at the edge of a grass soccer field, Matt stared into the sea of parents’ faces and resisted the urge to groan. Obviously, word had spread after last season that Coach Matt was relatively good-looking, somewhat successful, loved kids and, most important, was single.
Maybe he should rethink his decision to coach his five-year-old nephew’s soccer team. But when he looked down into Ethan’s adoring face, he knew he’d never quit. He’d swim through shark-infested waters for the kid—what were a few single moms? Well, more like half a dozen…Just his luck that half his team from last season had aged up.
“This is just the five- and six-year-old peewee division,” Matt said, continuing with his introduction while the kids fidgeted behind him, “and we don’t even keep official score. The goal is to learn the rules and have fun. Any questions?”
A redheaded woman with a toddler at her feet shot her hand into the air. “Is it true that you’re single?”
Matt forced a laugh and rubbed the back of his neck. “Any questions about soccer?”
A few of the women giggled, and some of the others looked downright sheepish. He noticed there was one lone man in the group. He stood at the back and seemed to be ogling the women’s asses. Matt planned to keep an eye on the creeper.
A brunette lifted her hand, and Matt relaxed. Phyllis’s daughter, Becca, was a friend of Ethan’s and had been on his team last year. Phyllis, thank God, was very happily married. “I’d be more than happy to coordinate the snack schedule, Matt.”
“Thanks.” He held her gaze, trying to convey how much he meant it.
Her grin told him she knew exactly what she was doing.
He spun around to face nine excited faces. “Okay. Who’s ready to play soccer?”
“We are!” the children shouted, jumping up and down with excitement.
Nine faces. There were supposed to be ten. He pulled the folded printout of the team roster from his back pocket and studied the list. Sure enough, he was missing one. He started calling out the names he didn’t recognize, trying to figure out which kid was missing.
“Trevor Millhouse. Billy Houser.” Both kids raised their hands. “Toby Robins.” No answer.
He scanned the group. “Toby Robins?”
Ethan’s hand shot into the air. “He was at school today, Uncle Matt. He said he was coming. He’s never played soccer before, and he’s scared.”
Matt squatted in front of his nephew. “Scared enough to miss his first practice?” He might have to call the boy’s mother and ask to talk to him. Maybe he and Ethan could meet them for a one-on-one practice to help him work through his fears.
“Nah,” Ethan said, as though Matt had said the most ridiculous thing in the world. “I told him that you’d teach him everything.” The boy beamed up at him with a grin, showing his missing front tooth, and Matt’s heart melted. Matt was thirty-four years old and still single, but he’d always wanted a family—something he wasn’t about to shout from the rooftops in front of his current audience. When his sister’s husband had pulled the deadbeat-dad card last fall, he’d been more than willing to step up.
“Then maybe Toby’s just running late,” Matt said. “We’ll get started and catch him up to speed when he gets here.”
Ethan nodded. “I’ll help him.”
He rubbed the boy’s head. “I’m sure you will.”
Matt lined up the kids and passed out a miniature soccer ball to each of them, keeping one for himself. He rested his sole on the top of the ball. “Now, the important thing to remember is that you can’t touch the ball with your hands. If you touch it with your hands, you lose it to the other team. But,” he said with an exaggerated grin, “you can touch it with any other part of your body.” He scooped up the ball with his toe and tossed it into the air, bouncing it from his knee to the top of his head, back to his k
nee, and then down to the top of his foot before letting it fall to the ground.
The kids released excited oohs and ahhs. Matt tried to ignore the appreciative murmurs from the women behind him.
“You can’t do that now,” Matt said to the kids, “but if you keep practicing, you can learn how. Some soccer players have even made goals with the tops of their heads.” He tossed the ball up with his foot again and then bounced it off his head, this time aiming it toward the goal behind the kids.
“Your uncle’s so cool…” Becca said to Ethan, with awe in her voice.
Ethan’s grin stretched from ear to ear. “I know.”
“Okay,” Matt said as he jogged over to pick up the ball. But one of the mothers, Miranda Houser, had already run over to pick it up, and tossed it to him.
“Here you go, Coach Matt,” she said with a grin.
“Thanks,” he said, catching it with his hands.
“You’re out!” one of the boys shouted. “You touched the ball with your hands.”
“Good job, George,” Matt said to his team. “You were listening.”
He gave Miranda one last glance before heading back to the kids. Miranda was a single mom too, and her daughter had been on his team last fall. She’d never hinted at an interest in him before, but maybe the sudden competition had encouraged her. He wondered if he should give her serious consideration. She was cute and she didn’t come across as desperate. A definite plus. She was an involved mother of three kids and worked for a local insurance agency. Compared to the women he’d dated since college, she had her shit together, but there was no denying that something was missing. Matt had no idea what it was, and unfortunately, only one woman had ever made him feel it. And that had ended badly. Tear-your-heart-into-pieces and drown-your-sorrows-with-beer-on-the-couch-in-your-underpants kind of badly.
In fact, a lot of his relationships had ended badly. The last of his long string of crazy ex-girlfriends had turned out to be a wanted bank robber, something he’d only discovered when the two of them were ambushed by police officers while naked and in the middle of sex. It was like something out of a B-movie, only it had actually happened to him.
Last June, he and his two best friends, who’d also had bad luck with women, had agreed to take a moratorium from dating, forming the Bachelor Brotherhood. Kevin and Tyler had not only caved, but were now both happily married.
Fuckers. Could there even be a brotherhood of one? It had been a long time since he’d been on a date—more than a year.
No, he decided, returning to the question of Miranda. She had kids, and he wouldn’t screw with their emotions. There was no point in going out with her. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her…or anyone.
Maybe he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone.
“Coach Matt!” redheaded Trevor shouted.
Matt shrugged off his melancholy. This was not the time to examine his catastrophe of a love life. No, that type of self-analysis went down much better with a beer or two.
“Look at me, Coach,” Remy, one of the new boys, called out. “I can kick the ball just like you!” Then the ball at his feet flew through the air and slammed into the nose of one of the new mothers.
“Oh, shit,” Matt muttered as the woman screamed.
“Coach Matt said a bad word!” a girl shouted.
The injured mother covered her face with her hands, then looked at the blood covering her fingers and started to wail.
He dashed for his bag and grabbed a clean hand towel and a bottle of water before running over to the still-screaming woman.
The other mothers had circled her, offering sympathy and telling her to lean her head back and pinch her nose. She’d reached up to cover her face again, he noticed. Matt pushed between them as he glanced at Phyllis and mouthed, Do you know her name?
“Amy,” she whispered in his ear.
“Okay, Amy,” Matt said, guiding her to someone’s folding chair. “Let’s have you sit down, and I’ll take a look.”
She quieted and sat down, watching Matt with rounded eyes. “I think my nose is broken.” Her words were muffled by her hands.
He offered her a reassuring smile. “I suspect it’s fine. Kids this age don’t have enough power to cause that much damage.” He pulled her hands down and examined her face. A slow trickle was dripping from her left nostril, but just as he suspected, her nose didn’t look broken. He grabbed her hand and guided it up to pinch her nose. “Just give it a bit of pressure and it will let up in a minute.”
She did as he instructed, the fear in her eyes fading.
Her face and hands were still covered in blood, so he opened the water bottle and poured some onto the clean towel.
As he gently washed the blood off her chin, the look in her eyes changed again.
The women around him began to murmur among themselves.
Oh, shit. He’d treated her like he would have any kid on his team, but he could see how the women might misconstrue his intentions. There was a wedding band on her left hand, but he wasn’t sure whether he should find that reassuring.
Shit.
He tossed the towel to her as he got to his feet.
“You should be fine,” he said, then hurried over to the kids, who were watching with open mouths and wide eyes.
“I want to learn to kick a ball like that,” one of the boys said. “I want to give my brother a bloody nose.”
“Not me,” one of the girls said with a lot of attitude, putting her hands on her hips. “I want to hit Mitchell Blevins in the balls!”
Matt lifted his hands. “Okay! We don’t kick the ball to hurt anyone. We only kick the ball to make a goal.”
“But that’s not what Uncle Kevin said last week at your house,” Ethan said, tilting his head back to look at him. “He said he was going to kick Uncle Tyler in his balls, and he wasn’t even playing soccer.”
He was going to kill his best friend. “Then Uncle Kevin needs a time-out, and I’ll ask Aunt Holly to give him one.” Although it wouldn’t be the kind of time-out Ethan knew about—and he wasn’t likely to find out until he was in a serious relationship, hopefully twenty years from now.
“Your uncle has balls?” Becca asked. “You’re so lucky. My uncles only have cell phones.”
“Not those kind of balls,” the feisty girl who wanted to kick Mitchell Blevins in his private parts said, in a condescending tone. “Those balls.” Then she pointed to the crotch of the boy next to her.
What the hell was happening?
Matt grabbed the girl’s arm and pushed it down. “No more talk about balls.”
One of the little girls started to cry. “I wanted to learn how to kick a ball hard enough to give someone a bloody nose.”
“But Uncle Matt,” Ethan asked insistently, “how can we play soccer without balls?”
Matt shot an exasperated look at Phyllis, but she was too busy laughing to offer help.
“Everybody listen up!” Matt shouted, and the children gave him their attention. “There are lots of different kinds of balls, but we’re just going to talk about soccer balls today. Okay?”
The kids nodded, looking eager to please him, probably so they too could learn self-defense with a soccer ball.
“Oh!” Becca said in excitement. “I get it now. Boys have golf balls.”
Matt leaned back his head and groaned.
“There he is!” Ethan shouted. “There’s Toby!” He took off running toward the street where the parents had parked their cars.
“Ethan!” Matt shouted. “Come back!” He liked to think Ethan was smart enough not to run into the street, but he’d learned over the last six months that five-year-olds sometimes did stupid things for no good reason.
The boy ignored him, but Matt felt better when he saw a small boy running toward his nephew. The woman chasing him looked like she’d come straight from work. Her skirt hugged her curves, the effect accentuated because she was bending forward. Her high heels kept sinking into the soft grou
nd, and her shoulder-length, golden blonde hair kept falling into her face.
“Toby!” she called after him. “Wait for me!”
Thankfully, Ethan had changed directions. He was running back toward Matt, with Toby on his heels.
Ethan stopped in front of Matt, panting with excitement. “He’s here, Uncle Matt! He’s here!”
Ethan’s excitement was infectious, and after glancing back at the other kids—they were happily kicking their soccer balls in a dozen different directions—Matt grinned at the boy standing behind his nephew. He was a cute kid, with dark blond hair and bright blue eyes. Matt noticed his pale complexion and made a mental note to make sure he was slathered with sunscreen when they played their soccer games under the midday sun.
“Hi, Toby. I’m Matt. Glad to have you on the team.” Matt held out a hand to shake with the boy.
Toby giggled as he shook his hand.
Matt glanced up at the woman making her way toward them. Something about her felt…familiar. But maybe it was the stirring he felt down deep. How long had it been since he’d felt like this? Not even with Sylvia, the bank robber.
“Is that your mom?” he asked the boy, trying not to sound too interested.
“Yeah,” Toby said with a scowl. “She was late. Again.”
Was that a British accent? Ethan had mentioned that Toby “talked funny,” but Matt had figured the kid probably had a lisp. Ethan had one too, after his front tooth fell out at Matt’s house the weekend before.
“That’s okay. You haven’t missed much.”
“I don’t know how to play football,” the boy said with a frown.
Ethan chortled. “I told you it’s not football. It’s soccer. Uncle Matt says I’m too little to play football, isn’t that right, Uncle Matt? But he played in high school, and I’m gonna play too, when I’m big like him.”
Toby’s frown increased, and Matt wanted to put him at ease. “Ethan says you’re new. Where did you live before?”
“London.”
England? Had his parents been transferred to Kansas City and found a home in the suburbs?
Matt squatted in front of him, balancing on the balls of his feet. “Well, there you go,” he said with a grin. “We call it soccer here, but you call it football in the UK.”
Until You Page 27