Chasing Jillian: A Love and Football Novel (10 page)

“Laundry room.” He grinned at her. “Let’s go inside. You have a cell phone in case we get separated, right?”

“You’re funny.”

Seth’s house was framed by a lush, manicured front lawn. The landscaping was pristine. No weeds dared to grow in this yard. The exterior of the house was painted a shade that probably came straight out of a Starbucks cup—after all, it was the perfect shade of latte, with white trim framing multiple bay windows that sparkled in the sunlight. There was another pair of windows in the apartment over his three-car garage. She noticed blue-green shutters flanking the second-story windows. She realized her mouth was hanging open, and she shut it.

“Just a house,” he repeated. He stepped up to the front porch that ran the length of the house and unlocked the front door. Jillian followed him inside.

“Pee-Wee! Hey, brat. I’m home,” he called out and tossed his keys in a flat art-glass dish that sat on a wooden table against the wall in the entryway.

Maybe Pee-Wee was a cat or something. Jillian was still staring. The floors were dark wide-plank hardwoods, polished to a high sheen. Unless she was really wrong, a decorator had left his or her stamp on his house, and Seth liked earth tones. There was a formal living room to the left of the front door, but the effect was somewhat spoiled by a sock monkey stuffed animal among the cushions on the old gold-colored, overstuffed couch. He saw her glance at the stuffed monkey. “Too damn stuffy,” he explained. “I put a pink flamingo in the yard when I moved in, but I got a fine from the Homeowners Association.”

“Where is it now?”

“I left it in the HOA president’s front yard with a note.” He continued down the hallway. “Come on. I’ll give you the big tour.” She glanced at a staircase broken by a landing featuring another huge window on her left. “Stairs to the second story. Half-bath is to your right. This is my favorite room. Well, other than my room.” The kitchen had glass-front cabinetry that complemented the floors. The walls were a warm light-cocoa color. The countertops were veined copper granite.

Jillian could happily spend the rest of her life in this kitchen. He had two ovens, a center island that featured a wine refrigerator, plenty of room for pots and pans, a top-of-the-line refrigerator, and gas cooktop. A lower counter on the other side had a built-in computer desk. Even more beautiful than the kitchen design was the light that streamed through the house. Maybe you got better light when you spent a lot of money. She had to smile at the sight of one cookbook stored on the shelf over the counter.

“Betty Crocker?”

“My mom tried to teach me how to cook. Now I have a chef,” Seth said. “Gotta eat, don’t I?”

She shook her head.

Just beyond the kitchen of any woman’s dreams, a wooden table and four Bentwood chairs sat on a patterned wool rug. The family room beckoned. Part of Jillian expected an empty beer-can pyramid and a Shark Babes calendar, but his family room had leather couches, a hardwood coffee table, and a huge flat-screen television mounted on the wall neighboring the gas fireplace. She had to smile at the video-game controllers scattered over the tabletop.

“The guys came over to play games last night.”

Jillian heard footsteps rapidly approaching and turned to see a tall, slender, beautiful young woman with long, straight dark hair, a mischievous expression on her face, wearing a T-shirt that read “My life is a complicated drinking game.”

“Hey, Pee-Wee, where ya been? I was yelling my head off down here.”

“I was on the phone. And don’t call me Pee-Wee.”

“Sure, you were.” Seth reached out to ruffle her hair. “Jillian, this is Lauren, my bratty kid sister. Be sure to call her Pee-Wee. She loves it.”

Lauren gave her big brother a shove. “Hey, knock it off.” She stuck out her hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you too,” Jillian assured her.

“Lauren lives here when she’s not at her sorority house at the U. Then again, I think she’s here more than she is there,” Seth commented.

“It was living with Mom and Dad or living here. You won, butthead.” Lauren seemed to have the same missing filter between her brain and her mouth that her brother did, but she was teasing him. She turned her attention to Jillian once more. “Have you gotten lost yet? This place is gigantic, isn’t it?”

“It’s only four thousand square feet,” Seth said with a groan. “You act like it’s Bill Gates’s house.”

“Seth has a chef,” Lauren confided. “He has a housecleaner. He even has a guy who does the yard, and he wonders why I didn’t want to live with my parents when I’m not at school.”

“You wanted to stay here because you could wear rude T-shirts Mom hates. Plus, it doesn’t matter to me if you drink my beer, as long as you’re not driving. You want to hang out with your friends in the spa too.”

Evidently, it was one long fight, but Jillian didn’t miss the easy affection between them. She felt the familiar stab of pain at the fact she had no siblings to tease and talk with; no parents she loved, who loved her in return. She didn’t know what it was like to have shared experiences and memories with anyone but Kari. She was so grateful for Kari, but Kari had a family of her own. Jillian wanted that more than she wanted anything else in life—the opportunity to belong, even to just one person. To be loved and needed as part of her own family.

“Speaking of the beer, you’re all out of Hefeweizen.”

“Thanks for the update,” Seth told Lauren. “I suppose you’d know nothing about that.”

“That’s right.” She beamed at him.

“So, I’m trying to give Jill the tour, and then I might persuade her to have some dinner here. Would you like to join us?”

“Where did you think I was eating?” Lauren said.

“Well, I know that you’ve decided you’re a vegetarian now. We eat meat around here, missy.”

“I eat fish,” Lauren informed him.

“Oh, okay. What if I want a steak?”

She made a huge face. “Eww!”

“I’ll ask Owen to make you one of those vegetable gratin things he made the other day. Will that work?”

“Fine.” She reached out and patted Jillian’s arm. “It was nice to meet you. I’ll see you at dinner.”

Lauren scampered away as quickly as she’d arrived, and Seth let out a sigh.

“Someday, she’ll find a place of her own, and my life will be complete.”

“Are you serious? Wouldn’t you be bored?”

“Well, yeah. I’d miss her. Don’t tell her.” Seth took her elbow in his fingertips. “My chef will be here in an hour. Would you like to have dinner with us? Maybe I should have asked you first, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Sure. It would be fun.”

“Great. We probably have some steak, and I’ll talk him into that vegetable gratin thing. It’s really good.” He moved through the kitchen to another staircase. “Want to see more of the house?”

“I’d like that.”

They arrived on the second floor. Lauren’s room was first, closest to the staircase. Jillian glanced through the open doorway to see her sprawled on her bed with her cell phone clutched to her ear, laughing at something someone was telling her. They walked away.

“She likes to think she’s such a rebel,” her brother told Jillian. “She thinks she gets away with a lot here. I’m stricter with her than our parents are.” He kept walking, past what must have been a guest bedroom, past the office.

“My office. If you want to see it, you can, but it’s not all that interesting.” Jillian gave him a nod. “Bathroom, linen closet, laundry room. Another bedroom.” He opened the door at the far end of the hallway. “Here’s where the magic happens.” He grinned to soften his narcissistic comment.

“You’re ridiculous,” she told him, but he laughed.

Seth’s room was nothing like she’d expected either. The room was dominated by a light-cherry king-sized sleigh bed. The bedding was a mix of soft olive-green leafy print on white, with plenty of fluffy pillows adding coziness. His iPod was charging on the night table next to the bed, and a mushroom-colored throw was tossed over a chair in the opposite corner. There was a gas fireplace too. The windows were covered with privacy sheers that still let the sun stream in. The ceiling was recessed. Mostly, it looked informal and comfortable, and it was very, very neat.

“Don’t you believe in clutter?”

“I haven’t lived here long enough to amass a lot. It’s all in my office. Go check out the bathroom.”

“Why?”

“I thought I was going to have to physically remove Lauren from the jetted tub.”

The tub was the least of it; there was another fireplace set into the wall at one end of the bathroom. More light streamed in through a window made up of beveled glass squares, glittering like diamonds, and looking over a greenbelt. The floor was tile; the countertops were quartz, and Jillian marveled at how beautiful it all was. A double shower with multiple shower heads dominated the opposite wall. The toilet had its own little room, with a built-in padded bench next to it.

“There’s a refrigerator in your bathroom?”

“It was here when I bought the house.” Several bottles of beer and a bottle of champagne waited behind the glass door.

“How do you ever leave this place? I wouldn’t.”

“Sure, you would. You’d get bored after a while.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Seth sat down on the side of the tub. “The house is just a house. Somewhere to live. I’m not home much.” Jillian noticed a somewhat evil twinkle in his eyes. “I’ll bet you’d never get out of the tub.”

“You have a chef, and there’s a refrigerator in here? You’re right.”

“I could be persuaded to rent the bathroom . . . ”

“I couldn’t afford it.”

J
ILLIAN CROSSED THE
bathroom and walked back into Seth’s room. He was enjoying her reaction to his house more than he liked living in it. Yes, it was comfortable. He was glad he had enough room for Lauren to stay with him; he didn’t worry about what she was doing so much. He knew his parents worried about her a lot more than he did.

He was feeling more at home here than he’d ever felt in his house in San Diego. He tried to tell himself that maybe it was because Kim didn’t live here, but mostly it was the fact his family was twenty minutes away. He’d meet some new people that he could socialize with, but his parents were close enough to see whenever he wanted to.

Jillian wandered over to the easy chair in one corner of his room and ran her fingers over the cashmere throw he’d pulled off the bed last night. She moved to the mantel over the bedroom fireplace and studied the framed photos the decorator had grouped there.

“Seth?”

“Yeah?”

He walked back into his room, and an invisible icy hand closed around his gut. He swallowed hard. He knew what she was looking at.

“Who’s the guy in the photo with you and Lauren?”

He had two options: Tell her, or distract her. He knew by now that she was as persistent as he was, and he would have kept asking until he got an answer. He thought about Liam every day, but he typically discussed him with nobody but his family. Publicists in NFL front offices loved to offer stories to sports media about how different players overcame adversity to succeed. Seth wasn’t about to exploit his family’s ongoing pain to give the team or the local papers another feel-good story.

He took a breath. “That’s my brother, Liam.” He licked his suddenly dry lips and tried to pretend he didn’t want to blubber like a baby. Still. “He died five years ago.”

Jillian turned to look at him. “Oh, Seth, I’m so sorry for your loss.” He saw compassion in her eyes. She was as speechless at this news as everyone else his family knew.

“Thanks.”

He sank down on the side of his bed. She picked the frame up off the mantel and came over to sit next to him. The picture was of Seth, Liam, and Lauren on the beach in Maui. He’d just signed his first NFL contract, and he had plenty of money to take everyone on a trip before his first training camp. Lauren’s brothers had wrapped their arms around their giggling little sister after an afternoon of snorkeling. Their mom snapped the photo. None of them had the slightest idea that less than a month later, Liam would be dead.

Jillian bit her lip. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“You probably want to know what happened.”

“Seth, your parents must have been crushed.”

“They were,” he said.

I was too
, he wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come out. He’d never forget the way his mom’s mouth twisted in pain, the wail she let out when the doctor told them Liam was gone. She dropped to her knees, and he knew she didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. His dad aged twenty years in thirty seconds. Lauren wanted to cling to Seth. He wanted to be alone. He could scream and cry, and nobody else would tell him that he should “be strong” for his parents or that he’d feel better someday. It never felt better.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t discuss this with anyone else,” he said. “My family—”

“I understand,” she said. He was willing to bet the deed to his house she would keep his secrets.

He looked at the pattern in the rug into which he was currently digging his feet. “Liam died of meningitis. It didn’t last a day. We didn’t know what was wrong with him, and then it was too late.”

He saw Jillian move a little closer out of the corner of his eye, and she laid her hand over his. He realized he’d clenched his fist in the comforter on his bed. He told himself to let go, to take a breath. He wasn’t going to cry in front of a woman he was still getting to know. They sat there for a few minutes, neither speaking. She brushed his hand again with hers, and he took it. She looked at the photo again.

“What was he like?”

He forced out every word. “He was my best friend.” Seth did nothing but breathe for a couple more minutes. Jillian still had his hand. “We both played football, but while I was screwing off and not studying, Liam was getting all A’s. He was going to start premed at the U in the fall. He couldn’t play football and become a doctor, so he decided he would be a doctor. I know that every time someone dies, we remember the good stuff. In his case, it was all good stuff. I mean, obviously, he was a guy, and guys aren’t always on their best behavior. Liam cared so much about other people, though, and they cared about him. If he was sitting here right now . . . ” Seth paused for a moment. The tears rose in his eyes, and he fought them back. He spoke over the lump in his throat. “If he was sitting here right now, he’d be drinking my beer, and he’d give you a hug.”