I’d slacked since we’d lost last week, and I felt bad about it now.
I hadn’t wanted my housekeeper to come in and clean it because I didn’t want to talk to my good friend’s wife when I still couldn’t hide how damned disappointed I was that we’d lost.
She’d force me to talk, and honestly, I was not in the mood to talk to anyone.
Well, anyone except the girl looking around my house as if she was having a moment of déjà vu.
“It’s creepy, isn’t it?” I laughed as I threw the door closed. “Even the same paint colors.”
At least from what I could tell.
When I had been standing in front of her house as she’d opened her door, I could see inside, and I noted that her paint colors seemed to be the same neutral beige as my house, and the floor plan—at least what I could see of it—seemed to be the same as well.
“Wow.” She shook her head. “You even have black furniture like me, too.”
I had black furniture because it was the easiest thing to match. That, and black was one of my favorite colors.
Not that I didn’t want to talk to her about the floor plan, or how eerie it was that our houses were so similar, I wanted to know why she was there.
Between the way she was acting and her cryptic comments, I was beginning to get a bad feeling.
“So…” She hesitated. “I don’t know how to say this.”
My brows rose. “Say what?”
She looked down at her fingers and played with her fingernails for a short few seconds.
“Conleigh,” I growled, walking past her into the kitchen. Once I got there, I grabbed a bottle of water off the counter. “Just tell me.”
She followed me inside, and then took a seat at the bar where she folded her hands primly out in front of her.
I leaned my sweaty ass against the counter and watched as she gave me a slow perusal.
She stopped and stared a little longer than she should have at my dick, which caused it to twitch despite my near exhaustion.
She smiled, and her eyes finally met mine.
Those beautiful eyes had always captivated me, even when she was a sixteen-year-old hell-bent on convincing everyone that she was able to take care of herself.
“I don’t know how it happened, but at one point yesterday at work while I was trying to avoid the doctor that I went out on that date with…and, somehow, well…he now thinks that I’m pregnant with your baby,” she blurted.
I stared at her for a few long moments before I burst out laughing.
That explained all the calls this morning.
That also explained why I’d gotten over twenty emails in one hour from my publicist.
Whoops.
Damage control couldn’t be implemented if I wasn’t around to tell her what was going on.
What if Conleigh really was pregnant with my child, and I was happy about it? She couldn’t implement damage control if she didn’t know what damage she was controlling. She’d never issue a statement on my behalf saying that I didn’t love Conleigh and that she was a lying piece of shit—something she would never say regardless since she was much more professional about how she worded things than I was—if I hadn’t answered any of her emails to fill her in on the situation.
“I got a weird call from my dad today,” I admitted. “I had no clue what he was talking about, and I just thought it was due to my being oxygen deprived because of how hard I’d been running. He’s probably freaking the fuck out.”
Conleigh bit her lip in frustration—something she’d always done since I’d first met her.
“My mom was the one to call me,” she admitted. “She saw the picture of us on your bike going to that other restaurant. We were laughing in the picture, probably when we saw that guy pumping gas in his underwear. Underneath it, there’s another picture of me in the hospital with Tyson standing in front of me.”
She pulled up the photo on her phone and slid it across the counter to me.
It would’ve dropped to the floor had I not been quick and caught it before it could teeter over the edge.
I stared at the photo with amusement.
“How, exactly, does something like this come up?” I asked with laughter tinging my voice. “Did you just blurt out that you were having my love child?”
I kind of liked that it had happened.
I’d been contacting Conleigh for months, texting, calling, stopping by her old place, and not once had I gotten any sort of reaction out of her. She’d been awesome at hiding behind her walls—and I had a feeling that a lot of that had been because my team was the wildcard in playoffs, and we were in the media’s eye.
She wanted nothing to do with the media at all and hadn’t since it’d nearly ruined her chances at some scholarships that she was going for during her first year in college.