Changing Lanes (The Lone Stars Book 3) (16 page)

“I’m here to apologize.” He held up his hands. “Now hold on. I’ve brought breakfast as a peace offering.” He picked up the coffee. “Plain black just like Helen said you liked it.”

“Thanks.” She looked a little confused.

“I have my apology all worked out.” He set Kisses on the desk while he patted his pockets for the piece of notebook paper he and Coco had written it on. “Just give me a minute, I have it somewhere.”

Devon finally found it in his right trouser pocket. As he pulled it out, Kisses noticed the bags of food, walked right up to the first bag, and pounced on it like a cat stalking a mouse. She lay on top of the bag incase it was going to slither away. He picked her up, flipped the piece of paper open, and skimmed it.

Laney watched with one eyebrow curled up.

“Okay, I’m very sorry—wait …” he sat down, “I’m supposed to be seated when I say all of this.”

“You brought a speech?” She folded her arms. “Does this apology come with a multimedia display?”

“No, just some heartfelt paragraphs of humble groveling. Last night was my night to babysit Grace and Chord’s kids. Their oldest, Coco—she’s sixteen—helped me work it out. I’m supposed to compliment your shoes and promise to never buy you a car again. FYI–I was adamant that you wouldn’t want an apology video on YouTube or a mix CD of apology songs. Trust me, those were steps in the wrong direction.” He leaned over the desk. “So let me see your shoes so we can get the ball rolling.”

She held out a foot. He glanced down and grimaced. She wore the single ugliest pair of shoes he’d ever seen. They were black plastic clogs.

“Can I borrow a pen?” He nodded to the cup full of pens on her desk.

“Sure, do I want to know why?”

He grabbed a pen and marked out the first two sentences on the notebook paper. “Needed to make a small adjustment because those shoes um … no longer apply.”

She bit back a smile. “They’re my surgery shoes. Good for standing, but not particularly aesthetically pleasing.”

“Okay, so here goes.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I am deeply sorry for buying you such an expensive gift. It was too …” He squinted at the paper. The writing had smeared. He held it up to the light thinking he could see the original pen strokes and make out the word, but that didn’t work.

“Give me a hand here.” He held the paper out to her and pointed to the word. “I can’t make out this word.”

Dutifully, Laney took the paper and analyzed it. “Soon.”

She handed it back to him.

“It was too soon. I like you just the way you are. Any implication that I wanted you to change in any way was a mistake. Where you are concerned, I’m over eager—”

“Let me stop you right here. I thought we’d resolved things yesterday.” Laney shook her head, but there was a smile on her face. “Does anyone stay mad at you?”

The nausea that had been plaguing him all morning vanished and his stomach rumbled. “Well now, let me see.”

She sat down at her desk and opened the bag closest to her. She pulled out a chocolate muffin, broke it in half, and handed him a chunk. She licked the caramel oozing out of the center. “My favorite, chocolate caramel muffins.”

He forced his eyes to glance away from her flicking tongue as he filled chocolate caramel muffins under her favorites list in his head. “In the third grade, I accidentally knocked out Ted Garcia’s two front teeth with a baseball bat. I’m pretty sure he still hates me. And then in high school, I broke up with Jena Menkins the day before prom, and I know she still hates me. Then there’s my mother who I seem to piss off on a daily basis. After last week’s game, the Denver Broncos aren’t too happy with me right now.”

He bit into his muffin and it was pretty good.

“You’re forgiven,” Laney rolled her eyes, “am I?”

She bit into her muffin half.

“For what?” He said around his bite. She’d done nothing wrong. Well, except for not remembering him.

“I was unforgivably rude. You threw me a party and gave me some wonderful presents, and I was rude. I’m sorry.” She wouldn’t make eye contact.

He smiled. Her sense of fair play was still going strong.

“Does this mean that you’re taking the car?” This was great, better than he’d expected.

“No, I can’t accept it. It’s just too much.” There was real sorrow in her voice. Did she want to take the car?

“How about we agree on visitation? You could babysit it once a week and come over anytime you want to see it. I named her Blue Lightning. She’s really fast. I’m thinking of having some silver lightning bolts painted on the sides.” He picked up the mocha latte and took a sip. While he would have gladly given it to her, he was happy she hadn’t wanted it.

“Let’s hold off on the silver lightning bolts for a while.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Just until we get a feel for whether her name is really Blue Lightning. What if she’s really a Blueberry or Beth? Let’s not jump into anything.”

Here they were discussing the name of the car she wouldn’t take yesterday. It was progress. “How was your birthday?”

“The best I’ve ever had. This super cute guy threw me my very first birthday party. My teammates took me to iFly, and we pretended to skydive. They called it controlled recklessness.” She grinned. “I would have preferred some actual recklessness, but I guess you have to start somewhere.”

“Baby steps.” He managed to keep most of the needy out of his voice. If she wanted reckless, he’d give it to her. “Can I take you out tonight?”

“That depends, are you planning on buying my anything that costs more than this pen?” She held up a cheap plastic gimme pen.

“Dinner only and I hope it costs more than that pen. I think even the value menu at McDonald’s is over that budget.” Instead of a fancy restaurant, he’d take her for a picnic and some adventure. He was beginning to see that Laney wasn’t into the finer things in life, which was fine because he wasn’t either.

“Okay.” She slumped back in her chair. “Wait … what kind of date is it? I don’t have any more dresses. Please say its casual dress because I have a couple of biopsies this afternoon, and I don’t have time to go shopping.”

“How about if I go shopping for you?” It was his day off, he could manage it.

One eyebrow shot up. “You’re not going to buy me a fur coat or diamonds? And sexy underwear at this point would be creepy.” She sighed heavily. “I’ll agree to one condition, I pay for the clothes.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but she shot up an index finger. “I pay or no deal.”

He tunneled his fingers through his hair. She was a tough one, but he could play hardball. “Fine, but the money you reimburse me, I’ll donate to charity.”

She shrugged. “Fine by me. As long as I pay my own way, what you do with your money is completely up to you.”

She peeked into the open bag in front of her, stuck her hand in, and came out with a piece of coffee cake. She unwrapped part of it, took a taste test, nodded, and took a bigger bite.

“What size do you wear?” He’d judged her for a six, but he needed to be sure.

“I wear a six, and my shoe size is a nine and a half.” She said around the cake.

“Shoes too?” He grinned. It was stupid to be this happy about going shopping for her, but he was.

“Unless you want to see these unfortunate things all evening.” She held a blue scrub clad leg up for his inspection.

“Good point.” He chewed on his bottom lip. How long would it take to find the perfect outfit for tonight? Based on the amount of time it took him to dress himself, he’d need about a week to find her something to wear.

Laney pursed her lips and then sucked on the bottom one. It was sexy as hell. “Can I ask you something that may or may not piss you off?”

“Sure.” What else was he supposed to say?

“What’s your end game with me? I can’t figure it out. I feel like we should have a talk about boundaries, but honestly, I don’t know you that well.” She tapped her fingernails on the desktop. “And the thing is, I do want to get to know you better, but I feel like there’s a lot of pressure that comes with that.”

The queasiness was returning with a vengeance. He put a hand over his stomach. It didn’t seem like a good time to mention that he was in love with her.

“I don’t mean to put pressure on you. I didn’t know that I was.” He could feel the muffin and mocha latte turning on him. “I like you a lot. I feel like you could be someone special, and I want to know everything about you. It’s not often that I find someone I’m interested in.” He hoped that was vague enough. It was definitely too soon for talking about spending the rest of his life with her. This whole love thing was complicated.

Her sigh of relief was a kick to the heart. “Thank God. I want to get to know you too, but I’m not sure I’m relationship material.” She shook her head. “I know myself, and I’m not certain that love is in the cards for me.”

“You must have been in love at some point.” At the age of sixteen, she’d professed her love for him. Had that been a lie? It hadn’t felt like it at the time.

“Of course I’ve thought I was in love, but I was very young. Puppy love.” She pointed to Kisses who had curled up in a ball and fallen asleep right on top of her bag of now–squished goodies.

“Tell me about it.” Devon’s nervous stomach turned anxious. Please let it be him.

She shook her head. “It was nothing.”

That was a blow to the soul.

“You really want to know?” She bit her top lip.

He nodded because his voice would have given away the hurt he felt.

“His name was DJ, and I thought I loved him. We met at camp—it sounds silly now—but I thought it was the real thing. For two weeks we were inseparable.” Her voice faded away like she was lost in memory. She picked up Kisses and settled her on her lap. Absently, she stroked the back of the sleeping dog.

After a minute or two, he asked, “What happened?”

Laney started like she’d forgotten he was there. “Camp ended … well my dad picked me up early, and I never heard from DJ again.”

He slid his hand into his trouser pocket and clasped the leather bracelet she’d made for him all those years ago praying to God that she would see him as DJ, but it wasn’t time yet. She needed to work it out for herself.

“Did you ever try to find him?” God knew he’d tried to find her.

“Yes.” She clamped a hand over her mouth. “I’ve never admitted that to anyone including myself. I don’t know his last name. His first name is DJ, and I don’t know if that’s short for something or his real first name. At the time, he lived in Dallas.” Her shoulders shook with embarrassed laughter. “I actually chose to do my residency in Dallas because some part of me thought that if it was meant to be, we’d bump into each other. How corny is that?”

And he’d moved to Austin in the hope that he’d bump into her. He’d turned down much more lucrative offers to join a new NFL franchise, The Lone Stars, because it was in her hometown.

“Tell me about him.” The fact that she’d truly loved him and had been in some way looking for him like he’d been looking for her was heartbreaking and beautiful. The part of his soul that had died the day she’d left began to heal and give him hope for the future.

“He was big and strong and tough, but the kindest person I have ever known. He had a tattoo on his left shoulder of a Chinese symbols that he told me meant courage, only I looked it up and it really meant chicken eyeball. One day I hope to find him and tell him that it needs to be removed.”

A fact he’d learned in a Chinese restaurant in college when his waitress had wanted to know why he had chicken eyeball tattooed on his shoulder. After ten painful laser treatments and a scar from a shoulder surgery, the tattoo was nothing but a memory.

More than anything, he wanted to pull out the leather bracelet and tell her the truth, but he’d made a promise to himself, and he kept every promise he made.

“He was into sports and we’d go jogging every morning. I think he played football too. Back then he’d been at camp under court order. I don’t think that he knew that I knew that. He’d been arrested for stealing cars and it was either summer camp or jail.” She was beautiful lost in thought … softer somehow.

He loved seeing himself through her eyes. “So you’re into bad boys?”

“No, not really … just him. He was big like you, but a little on the pudgy side … not fat, but big. You could tell that he was destined to have a beer belly someday. It was wonderful. I was just me around him and that was all he wanted.”

Devon patted his flat stomach. He did not have a beer belly, but that’s because football had conditioned all that extra fat into lean muscle. Back then, he’d drank enough beer to create ten beer bellies because it had made him feel like an adult, but a tough coach with a heart of gold had given him a choice, football or the highway. Only his love of the game had gotten him through those terrible months after EJ.

“Not that I’m an expert, but it sounds like you loved him.” He sat back and crossed his ankles. “I don’t think age matters. When you find the right person, you just know.”

“How about you? Ever been in love?” She moved from the coffee cake to a scone. It still amazed him how much she could eat.

He thought very carefully about what he should say. “Yes and I too fell in love in high school. Also, a summer thing. She was smart and funny and beautiful. She seemed to calm the restless part of me. I liked who I was when I was with her. She made me want to be a better man.” He was careful to use the past tense, but in his head everything was present tense. His mind screamed for her to remember him. “I loved the little zing I got every time I saw her … you know the rapid heartbeat and throat thickening. Sometimes I’d just sit and stare at her trying to convince myself she was real.”

“I didn’t know men ever got sappy.” She smiled. “It’s nice.”

“Excuse me, sappy?” He took off his jacket and flexed his biceps, which were very noticeable in his short sleeves. “I’m a manly football player. We’re never sappy.”

She put her hand over her mouth. “I beg your pardon. I wasn’t referring to you.”

“Thank God.” He grinned.

“What happened to her?” Laney propped her chin on her hand.