His Secretary's Surprise Fiance

Mostly, he thought back to that electric shock he’d felt when he’d looked into her eyes and the earth shifted. He couldn’t write off that moment when he’d never experienced if before with any other woman. He had feelings for Adelaide. And that was going to complicate things in more ways than he could imagine.

“Dude.” Jean-Pierre strode into the den behind him. “You’re getting old when that passes for a drink. I come to town once in a blue moon. You can do better than—” he held up the bottle to read it “—coconut water? You’d better turn in your man card.”

“I get the last laugh when I live longer.” Dempsey set down his drink to give his brother a light punch in the stomach, a favored family greeting that their grandfather had started when they were kids.

Jean-Pierre returned with a one-two combination that—while still mostly for show—made Dempsey grateful he maintained a rigorous ab workout. Of all his brothers, he was closest to Jean-Pierre, making him the only one in the family he still punched.

“You’ll be a hundred and five and wishing you’d had more fun in your life,” Jean-Pierre joked, going straight for the scotch decanted into cut crystal. “I’ve got transportation home tonight, so I don’t mind if I crack open the stash Gervais likes to hide at the back of the cabinet.”

“You have no idea where I hide my real stash.” Gervais stalked out of the media room, where game film seemed to run on a continuous loop during the regular season. “I leave the swill out when I know the hard drinkers are coming.”

Gervais hugged their brother.

“Did someone say swill?” Henri ambled out of the media room, where he must have been already watching film with Gervais. “Sounds like my kind of night—as long as I don’t have to drink with any holier-than-thou New York players.”

Even as he said it, he one-arm hugged Jean-Pierre. The two of them were more competitive with the rest of the world than each other. It had always made Dempsey a little sick inside to see them go up against one another on the field, since he genuinely wanted both of them to win. They were incredibly gifted athletes who, in a league full of gifted athletes, walked on a whole different plane.

“Sit,” Gervais ordered them. “You are busy and it’s rare we’re all together. I’d like to deal with the issue at hand first so we can relax over dinner.”

“Relax?” Jean-Pierre lounged sideways in one of the big leather club chairs arranged around the fireplace in the den. “Who can relax while Gramps is struggling to remember his own grandsons?”

The mood shifted as they each gravitated toward the spots they’d always taken in the room from the time they were kids and Theo would call them in for talks. Or, more often, when they had run of the house because their father was on an extended “business trip” that was code for a vacation with his latest woman.

When the house had still belonged to Theo and Alessandra, most of the rooms had been fussy and full of interior-decorator additions—elaborate crystal light fixtures that hung so low the brothers broke something every time they threw a ball in the house. Or three-dimensional wall art that spanned whole walls and would scrape the skin off an arm if they tackled and pushed each other into it.

The den had always been male terrain.

Now Dempsey got them up to speed on his exchange with Leon at the Brighter NOLA fund-raiser.

Silence followed, each one of them ruminating on the possibility that Leon was in the early stages of dementia.

“You do take after Dad the most,” Henri offered from his seat behind the desk, Italian leather shoes planted on the old blotter. He lifted a finger from his glass to point at Dempsey.

His shoulders tensed. Every muscle group in his arms and back contracted.

“Henri,” Gervais warned.

“Seriously, he looks more like Dad. He has his walk, too. Grand-père might have been—”

“I am nothing like our father.” He had to loosen his hold on the cut-crystal glass before he shattered it.

He’d done everything to distance himself from Theo from the moment he’d arrived in this house as a teen. He could count the number of drinks he took in a year on one hand. As for women? He’d had contractual arrangements with every single one but Adelaide, and the time frames had never overlapped. There would never be a surprise child of his who would be raised alone. Separated from family.

“I know, man. But you’ve got the whole drama with the model going on the same week you get engaged. Maybe Leon just got a little muddled and—”