Tomboy

That wasn’t what had been happening. Fallon knew better. She definitely wasn’t the kind of supermodel girlie-girl who Zach Blackburn got worked up over. She was just the Crocs-wearing, scrubs-owning, cherry-Chapstick-is-my-makeup-routine woman he confusedly thought was his Lady Luck. And that was exactly why she’d sworn her bestie to secrecy.

“Tess,” she said with a groan. “You promised not to tell anyone.”

Tess sat back on her own stool and started back in on her zombie’s head. “We share a bestie bond with Gina. That doesn’t count as speaking out of turn.”

Fallon narrowed her eyes at the other woman, AKA her sister-in-law. “Don’t you dare tell Ford.”

“Are you kidding?” Gina shook her head and chuckled. “You and Zach Blackburn were all he could talk about after we got home from the Hartigan lunch the other day. If I told him this, the Hartigan family gossip bat phone would never stop ringing.”

Fallon’s gut sank. “I really need to move out of Waterbury. My life would be so much easier.”

Maybe there was an island somewhere that didn’t have cell phone reception or an airport that she could run away to in the dark of night.

“Are you kidding?” Gina snorted. “You’d miss Tess, Lucy, and me too much to ever do that. Now stop trying to change the subject and tell me everything about this hot kiss.”

Flames singed Fallon’s cheeks again. “There was no kiss.”

It wasn’t a lie. There hadn’t been. All of the snap, crackle in the air around them, the oh-my-God-yes reaction of her body, and the feel of him beneath her fingers. That had been all there was to it.

“My timing sucks,” Tess said with a sigh.

“Your timing was perfect.” And it had been. Really. For sure. One hundred and eleven billion percent.

After Zach left, she and Tess had hustled from the arena and out to the car amid cries of “Oh my God, there she is.” The whole experience had cemented her decision to never ever do that again—or go to another game until everyone forgot about Lady Luck, which was a crock of crap anyway.

“I’m sorry your work is being a bag of dicks,” Gina said, refilling their plastic glasses with wine from the bottle that Larry had just learned to leave by their painting stations. “That sucks.”

“So when are you going to another game?” Tess asked.

Fallon took a deep breath and turned all of her attention back to her painting, adding a little blue to the edge of the glacier. “I’m not.”

Yeah, this was exactly the conversation she didn’t want to have, not even with her besties, because the truth was, she wanted to go. She wanted to be the one who helped pull the Ice Knights—okay, specifically Zach—back from the brink. She couldn’t help it. It didn’t have anything to do with the kiss that wasn’t, no matter what her subconscious had tried to tell her during her steaming-hot, makes-you-come-in-your-sleep dreams last night.

Reviving people and bringing them back to who they were before fate had hit them with the bad luck stick was a simple definition of her job. It’s what she did. The problem was that she liked it a little too much, like she kinda wanted to just lose herself in that aspect of it, and that was a feeling she wouldn’t—couldn’t—give in to ever again.

“Is this about that girl,” Gina asked, her question soft and empathetic.

That girl. Fallon didn’t need more explanation than that. All three of them knew exactly who they were talking about, hence the concern in Gina’s question.

She put her paintbrush down in the water because she couldn’t hold it steady anymore. “Her name was Carson.”

“And you did everything you could,” Tess said, reaching out toward Fallon and then stopping, her hand hanging in the air between them.

Fallon let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, bracing herself for her friend’s sympathetic touch. It was the one thing she couldn’t take at the moment. It had always been so much easier to give comfort than to receive it.

Tess gave her a sideways smile as she dropped her hand back to her lap. “You can’t fight everyone’s battles for them.”

“But I want to,” she said, her shoulders sinking.

Gina gave her an encouraging, understanding smile. “If only we always got what we wanted.”

And that was the pain-in-the-ass factor of it all. If she could, then Carson would have gone to treatment the first five times Fallon had talked to the young mother at the Beacon clinic about her options. And if she’d done that, then Fallon wouldn’t have had to help as one of the ER docs at St. Vincent’s tried to save Carson’s son’s life after the toddler had found his mom’s stash. Sure, she wasn’t a social worker and couldn’t have done anything beyond advising Carson to go get help and having Child Protective Services open a file, but still, if Fallon could have fought that addiction battle for Carson, she would have. She would have fought that battle for Carson and her son.

Maybe things would have turned out differently, just like she was hoping they would this time with Zach. He might be lashing out in a different way, but he was hurting as much as Carson had—hence the self-destructive habits and snarly attitude. Fallon couldn’t shake the idea that maybe this time she could make a difference, she could fix this for him—and there was nothing scarier than that hope.

…

Zach padded around his big empty kitchen while two talking heads on the TV argued about whether his playing had turned a corner or if last night’s game was just a fluke. Really, he should be used to people talking about him like that by now. It came with the job—a sort of play on the genie in the kids’ movie who talked about his enormous power and teeny-tiny living space. But unlike the genie, Zach had no wish to break free of his bonds.