Fireside Susan Wiggs (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📖

She’d been assigned to look after a second-string rookie, Calvin Graham. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he was being hounded by the press about the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood of New Orleans, where he’d been born and raised. Seeing him floundering, she’d stepped in. Within a week, Calvin Graham was serving as honorary chairman of a relief effort, raising money to help people rebuild. He’d never had much of a career in the NBA but he’d gone on to create a foundation that, to this day, provided low-interest loans to Katrina victims. Kim had found her role incredibly gratifying.

In time, however, she forgot how much she liked her work. Well, not forgot, exactly. The role of mentor got lost as she was assigned to other players. She found herself saying things like “Get your drunk ass out of bed” and “Learn to verify a girl’s age before you sleep with her.” She missed guys like Calvin. She missed the good guys.

“Sounds like a cool job,” Daphne remarked.

“Sometimes, I have to admit, the work was so satisfying. A lot of people with a God-given athletic talent are brilliant to work with. It was my job to smooth the rough edges.”

“How rough?” asked Daphne.

“I worked with guys who were fearless at facing a wall of defensive linebackers out for blood, but who tended to crumble in front of a microphone. I helped them with that part of their career. It went well most of the time. But something happens when you work with people like that. It’s hard to describe. You’re working with clients on a strangely intimate level, even though it’s just a job. I never let things get too personal—until Lloyd.” She shook her head, remembering. “The two of us just clicked—at first, anyway.” She felt again the bittersweet joy of falling for a guy while doing media training with him. It was like a second-rate romantic movie—if she succeeded in grooming him, then that meant losing him, because once he had mastered the art of handling the press, he would move on.

Except that didn’t happen with Lloyd. Her mistake was in letting herself believe it could work out for them. She wouldn’t be that stupid again.

Six

Bo woke up early, shivering from the cold as he groped for his comforter. Then he remembered he’d given it to AJ last night, and that thought caused him to sit up instantly, squinting through the morning light.

There, the lump on the sofa confirmed it. His kid was staying with him. His son. Bo waited to feel…what? Paternal? Not happening. The kid was his flesh and blood, and Bo was going to do everything in his power to reunite AJ with Yolanda. But fatherly feelings eluded him.

He yawned and stretched, tried not to make any noise as he got out of bed and headed for the john. He never got up this early unless he was in training. It was funny, how easy it was to get up in the morning when he hadn’t sucked down a bunch of beers the night before. Well, not funny ha-ha, but funny as in, he might ought to consider doing it more often.

Call me, read a message scribbled on a Post-it note stuck to the bathroom mirror. Chardonnay—and her phone number. The message was punctuated by a lipstick kiss. It was kind of depressing to realize he had actually dated a woman named Chardonnay. That was really all he remembered about her.

Bo snatched the note and stuck it in a drawer. Then he changed his mind and stuck it in his pocket. In the drawer, he spotted a box of rubbers. Whoa. He shoved the box in the cabinet under the sink, back behind the pipes, then gave the place a once-over to make sure there weren’t any other sketchy things lying around.

He didn’t consider himself the kind of person who kept secrets, but for the time being, there was a kid in his life, and he had to make room for that. The sudden responsibility felt crushing, but what was he going to do? Clean up his act, for one thing.

When Bo himself was a young boy, his mother had shielded him from nothing—not the late-night visitors, not the laughter or the fighting, not the strangers he encountered in the house when he got up in the night to take a leak. Things like that had taken a toll on him, made him a distrustful and cautious child, who had grown into a distrustful and reckless man.

He had enough sense to know there were some things a kid just didn’t need to see. At least until someone other than Bo could explain them.

Although Bo and his brother, Stoney, had grown up without a father, they’d had a lot of uncles. Not uncles by blood, of course. “Uncles” was a euphemism for whatever shit-kicker or oilfield trash happened to be banging his mother.

So even though he didn’t know a damn thing about raising a kid, he understood that you didn’t put stuff in their face before they were ready to deal with it. He remembered lying awake too many nights, feeling sick to his stomach as he listened to the low voice of a stranger through the thin walls of the trailer where they lived. One of his earliest memories was hearing his brother say, “I swear, if you piss the bed again, I’ll pound your face. Swear to God, I will.”

He and Stoney had taken to peeing in empty Coke bottles rather than getting up in the night and risking an encounter with Uncle Terrell or Uncle Dwayne, or whoever else was keeping their mama from getting lonely that night.

That was how she explained the visitors to her boys. “It keeps me from feeling too lonely.”

“I can do that,” Bo used to tell her, when he was really little and didn’t understand. “I can keep you from getting lonely. I’ll sing to