The Total Package (10 page)

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!”

The chant could be heard starting from in all likelihood the top of the stairs and then coming down the hall from the second story of the house Dani had grown up in. Not a distress call, but more of a demand. It stopped periodically, then would start up again until she could see the little cherub behind the ruckus.

“Mommy!” Brendon Carrino stormed into the room like the four-year-old powerhouse he was, barreling up to Dani and grabbing her tight around the legs, nearly knocking her over.

“You found me!” she exclaimed proudly, regaining her balance. She shuffled over to the bed, with him still hanging on, and sat down on it to give him a proper hug.

“This time you stay,” he stated with conviction. His arms tightened around her neck.

She buried her nose into his golden mop of hair. It still had remnants of that baby smell, but it had begun to get darker. It was getting closer to her natural color, before she started spending quality time every four to six weeks in salon chairs with double processing highlight foils. Another sacrifice in the long list of modifications she endured in the pursuit of her ambition.

His blue eyes were also starting to tone down and become more indigo. That was courtesy of his father.

“Don’t you have fun with Papa and Danza?”

Papa was the name they called her father. Danza was the shortened version of the name her father affectionately called her mother. Originally Abbondanza, it represented everything her father loved about his wife, abundance. From her fondness for children and opera that she was terrible at singing to her pear shape that her father still couldn’t resist pinching whenever she passed him. Most importantly her nickname was derived from her insistence that from sunup to sundown, there had to be a pot of something always cooking on the stove. Demetri Carrino moved his bride out of South Philly after the birth of their oldest, Dominic. Now, over thirty-five years later, there probably wasn’t anyone in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, who could tell you that her real name was Doreen.

“Danza!” Brendon yelled joyfully and ran off to find her, already on to the next thing. It spared her from having to comfort him, something she wasn’t sure she was up to right now. And it was confirmation that her son was in good hands, not that she didn’t know it already. There were people whom children were naturally drawn to. And then there were people who were genuinely fond of children. Then there was Danza. The woman clearly had a gift. She was a veritable Pied Piper, specializing in small children, with a penchant for infants in particular. From the time Dani was little, Danza ran a day care out of their home. Dani couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t come home from school to find at least one, if not several, children of varying ages free-ranging around the first floor of the Carrino house, where they were efficiently corralled from wandering upstairs and into the bedrooms. Danza could often be found on the floor, surrounded by either playing or sleeping babies, all while still keeping the pots on the stove simmering. But it was also another painful reminder that Dani was not the center of Brendon’s world. She shook it off with the thought that she wasn’t alone. Throughout the years, lots of working mommies and daddies had been thrown over by kiddies who were over-the-moon excited to see Danza. What parent doesn’t feel slighted by their toddler eagerly outstretching their little arms wanting to be held by someone else?
Separation anxiety
was not a term in Danza’s vocabulary.

“Whoa whoa whoa JAILBREAK!” Dante’s voice boomed as he threw himself against a wall in the hall in dramatic fashion as Brendon tore by him. Dante was the Carrinos’ third child and maintained he would have been the last had he been born a girl. He still occasionally teased Dani about how she should be grateful, because if it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t exist. They all knew there wasn’t any truth to it. Danza would’ve happily given birth to a dozen children, but it wasn’t in the cards. And no child within Danza’s reach could ever claim to feel neglected. The three Carrino boys were all fiercely protective of their little sister, a mandate handed down by Papa when he was still called Daddy.

“How’s it going, Daniella?” Dante said when he appeared in the doorway to her room, drawing out the pronunciation of her name, fully aware that it annoyed her.

Dani shrugged, and went back to packing her suitcase.

“He’s going to be fine,” Dante said, trying to be reassuring.

“I know.” She sighed. After all the inner debate, Dani grabbed a pair of heels anyway and threw them into her suitcase. Better safe than sorry. She wished all her decisions were so easy.

“For someone who’s breaking all the rules, you sure don’t seem too happy.” He leaned against the doorway.

“I’m about to become the indentured servant of a temperamental jock who doesn’t like to communicate. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

“Yeah, but look on the bright side, you’re nearing a hundred million hits on YouTube,” he said with a mixture of pride and envy. “Not bad for a girl who was doing the sidelines for a fourth-level broadcasting team two years ago.”

Dani briefly closed her eyes and then bit her tongue. She wanted to be known for her intelligence and her skill, not for being a viral sensation. She tried to look at the whole scenario as another opportunity, mainly because she had no other choice. Sometimes you just have to make the best of what you have.

Dani’s unexpected notoriety had just celebrated its first birthday and in some ways it was like having a prayer answered. In others, it was like being sent to purgatory. Today she could feel the flames beginning to lick at her feet.

“Dante, could you go check on Brendon and make sure he’s not coloring on Papa while he naps?” she asked, desperate for a minute alone.

“Sure, sis.” Her brother nodded and left, but not before forcefully grabbing her head in both his hands and slamming a sloppy kiss into her forehead. “And don’t worry. We all got your back.”

After Dante left, Dani sat down on her bed and shook her head.

Thanks to her three brothers, Dani genuinely liked male company. She had learned to think like the boys, or at least be able to guess what they were thinking. Her mother had wanted a princess and what she got was a tomboy. Frilly dresses and barrettes felt more like costumes than clothing. Much to her mother’s chagrin, in her young years she refused to be told she couldn’t climb as high, run as fast, or throw as far. Her protective older brothers indulged her. But then she began to blossom, her brothers’ friends began to notice, and everything changed. They stopped allowing her to follow. She would catch the tail ends of arguments between her brothers and their friends that included the words
hands off
. She became acutely aware of those same friends as their gazes all began to drift downward to her chest when they talked to her. The day she got her first period at thirteen, she cried with the injustice of it. It could no longer be denied that she was viewed as different, and she resented it. To distance herself from the
D
theme her parents had created for her brothers Dominic, Damian, and Dante, she insisted on being called Ella. She endured countless lectures on what boys were really looking for, which led to advice on how and where to kick those boys when they stepped over the line. Of course, the few girlfriends she had held very different opinions, and there were times she was certain those girls were only friendly to get to the dark and handsome Carrino boys. She listened to them pine with adolescent longing and watched them make fools of themselves to get her brothers’ attention, often heartbroken as the reward for their efforts. By the time she was fifteen, she had determined that hormones and boys in general were not worth the trouble. She had too much firsthand knowledge about the species to be blindsided by romantic notions. And her parents instilled in her that she should never settle for a man who was only interested in her body. If he loved her for her mind, he would always love her. Beauty fades, they told her.

All that changed the day she laid eyes on Tyson Palmer.

She had been trying to earn some extra money while in college. Even with her scholarships and her parents picking up the slack with her tuition, there was nothing left to spare. She wasn’t eligible for the RA program until her junior year, and it seemed impossible to find a job off campus that would fall in line with her classes and leave her weekends free. She was already working for the school paper in the hope of earning the coveted football team reporter spot by the time she was a senior. When she applied for a position in the tutor pool, it seemed like a logical choice. When she got the call that she was going to be tutoring the team’s star quarterback, it was impossible to not look at it as a sign from the universe that she was on the right path. Now she would have someone to talk football with, someone with the ability to put in a good word for her with the newspaper’s sports editor.

The first time Dani met Tyson, her breath unexpectedly left her in a rush. It wasn’t just that he was handsome, although he certainly was. It wasn’t that he looked like he was wearing shoulder pads, even when he wasn’t, or the way his jeans were held up by his sexy backside. It wasn’t the swagger in his walk. It was the mischievous twinkle in his deep blue eyes, his playful sincerity. And the way his face would light up whenever she mentioned his most recent game, which she always attended. He remained kind and respectful even after she was sure her crush became obvious. Her heart thumped so loudly around him, she was certain he had to have heard it. The more time she spent in his presence, the more all her old beliefs became challenges. Her heart would race when he talked to her and she would feel tingly all over.

Even when people were kissing his arse and she was an ignorant underclassman, he took the time to make her feel . . . special. He always gave her a quick wave, like he was genuinely happy to see her, shouting out hello sometimes from across a courtyard on campus, even when he was busy dashing from one task to another, which he usually was.

Dani had convinced herself that his flirting was all in her imagination, until the kiss.

It had been right out of every schoolgirl’s dream. It was soft and romantic, and he was embarrassed for a minute after she broke the bad news that she wasn’t that kind of girl.

But when it came to Tyson Palmer, she wanted to be that kind of girl. She wanted to be uninhibited and sexy, like the women who always seemed to follow him around. But she also wanted so much more. She wanted to be the one girl, out of all the others, that he remembered. But she knew it was too much to ask. She just wasn’t that extraordinary, didn’t devote her life to being pretty. She soon became another face in the crowd. Everyone knew he was destined for greatness, and they were rooting for him, as was she. The semester ended and her services were no longer required. Without having booty call status, her number was dropped from his phone.

But instead of watching his rising star shine, she bore witness to his steady decline and eventual breakdown. Her heart ached for him on a weekly basis, even as her brothers joked about how, thanks to her, at least he knew sentence structure. But she had already seen firsthand a taste of what his life was like and the kind of pressure he was under, even back in school, when he had to mix his education in with a grueling schedule. It wasn’t a question of if but when the constant stress would take down his devil-may-care, happy demeanor. Dani never outgrew the crush and continued to love him with her nineteen-year-old heart.

She would fantasize about him, concocting elaborate scenarios of a chance meeting, where he would recognize her and they would reconnect. He would confide in her, and she would listen. She would be his rock and he would gather and regain his strength from her.

And in her dreams, she would do all the things to him that she wanted to after that first kiss. She would love him so much that he couldn’t imagine a life without her.

And in a moment of serendipity, Dani got that chance. She never expected to see him at homecoming. She had never gotten the job to report from the sidelines either. She swallowed that bitter pill and watched another dude rattle off stats and high-five players all season. Word had come down from the alumni office that Tyson hadn’t been invited. They didn’t need to voice the reasons why. He had become an embarrassment. While waiting for the elevator at her dorm, she overheard students talking to each other about having sighted Tyson at the Bunker. The more they laughed at what a hot mess he was, the more resolved she felt.

Dani believed she had manifested her own fate. This was her chance to be Tyson’s rock—to pick him up, dust him off, and show him how much he deserved her. But sometimes fate is fickle.

In the months that followed, when she could no longer hide her expanding belly, she began her career in deceit and told her first lie. She tearfully told her parents about a party she went to and after having one too many, she made a bad decision with a handsome nameless stranger. They only had one question: Had it genuinely been her decision? After assuring them she hadn’t been assaulted, they were nothing but supportive. Her parents laughed and sang while they converted Damian’s old room into a nursery. They all showed up and clapped with pride as she waddled up to receive her master’s diploma in media and communications, telling her that she could be anything she wanted to be. She thought about Tyson every day, worried about where he was and reflecting on how it was probably for the best that her baby never know his father as a drugged-out mess. On the very day she woke up and promised herself she would spend this day and every day thinking of nothing but how to be the best mother possible, Clinton Barrow held a news conference. The kind designed to set the football world on fire. From the press room at Maverick Field, and with all the frenzied pomp and circumstance he could manage, Barrow made the announcement.

Tyson Palmer was making his return.

It only took hearing his name spoken out loud for Dani’s heart to start racing. She watched from her parents’ couch with her feet up to minimize the swelling in her ankles as Barrow trumpeted his new acquisition, flanked by stone-faced coaches doing their best to look optimistic. Sitting in the middle, next to his new boss, was the man himself.