Millionaire Hero (Freeman Brothers 4)

When I finally escaped the bakery and rushed back to my car, I was running on adrenaline and I wasn’t sure why.24Nick“How could you do this to Nick?”

The voice coming out of the other room as soon as I walked into my house startled me so much, I didn’t even recognize it. I dropped the grocery bags in my hands and whipped around toward it. Lindsey was coming down the hallway from my kitchen, eating an apple and glaring at me.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“Having a snack while I wait for you to come home,” she said. “Which by the way, is getting later all the time. You really should try to prioritize your time away from the office. It isn’t good for you to become such a workaholic.”

“What are you doing in my house?” I asked. “How did you get in here?”

She looked at me like it was one of the stupidest questions she had ever heard. “With a key. The one you gave me?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, reaching down to pick up my grocery bags so I could carry them to the kitchen. “Why are you in my house? Where is Remy?”

“Remy is with his father today,” she said with a heavy dose of restrained disdain.

She really was doing her best to not utterly hate her ex. To his credit, Grant was putting in some sort of an effort with her now. For a while, there was only conflict between them. It was so rough, Lindsey didn’t even tell people around town she had a son. She ended up having to get a lawyer and prepare to fight in court when Grant threatened to take her son away from her completely.

In the end, she didn’t have to go through with it. Grant finally saw the true effect of what he was doing and called it off. Since then he had been trying to effectively co-parent their three-year-old together. The whole situation wasn’t easy on her. But it’s what brought her and Vince together, and what got her official visitation rights with Remy, so in those ways, it was worth it.

“Which brings me back to my original question of what the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“I came for an intervention,” she said.

“What are you intervening in?” I asked.

We got to the kitchen and I plopped the bags in the middle of the table so I could unload them. Lindsey came up to the side of the table and held the apple in between her teeth as she took boxes of pasta and canned San Marzano tomatoes out of a bag.

“You and Bryn,” she said.

“What about me and Bryn? I haven’t even spoken to her in over a week. She dropped off the seed money for her investments, and that was it,” I said.

“You might not have spoken to her, but your mother has,” Lindsey said.

I turned slowly away from the cabinet where I was putting cereal away. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah, apparently they had a deep and meaningful heart-to-heart at the bakery a couple of days ago. Vince was just getting over all the chaos with Quentin’s baby and Darren’s wedding and everything. Now we throw another pregnancy into the mix and we have your mother all in a flutter about you and Bryn,” Lindsey said.

“Who did you hear this from?” I asked.

“Vince,” she said sharply, taking a forceful bite out of the apple. “He called me from work because your mother couldn’t stop talking about how nice it was running into Bryn and how lovely a girl she is. Which, she totally is. I’m not going to lie. I really like her. But can’t you just have a normal beginning of your relationship?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “There is no relationship. Bryn and I are not together. We are not dating. We are not even talking to each other about potentially dating. There’s nothing but business between us.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Don’t you think that’s something I would know about? I’m fairly certain if I was in a relationship with somebody, I would be fully informed about it,” I said.

“Then you aren’t the person Bryn slept with about a month ago? A little bit more?” she asked.

I sagged into the refrigerator where I had been filling the vegetable drawer. “Oh, please tell me Vince didn’t hear that from Mom, too.”

“No. Vince heard that from me. And I heard that from a woman named Trish who was at my bar with Bryn. See how quickly things turn into one big-ass game of telephone when you don’t tell your best friend things?” she asked.

I closed the refrigerator and went back to the table for another round of groceries. The chances of me being able to relax and enjoy my plan to throw together a quick pasta primavera and eat in front of the TV while I didn’t think about anything were rapidly dwindling.