The Daddy Box Set

Our first dinner together. Jet skiing and walking on the beach. Talking until the sun either set or rose, depending on which memory I pulled up.

The way that he knew my body better than I did. Lunch at the Spanish place. His complete support and constant pep talks about law school.

A hundred different moments. A hundred different memories that would haunt me for the rest of my life. Not to mention how much I would miss the feeling of being wrapped up in those sculpted arms. Seeing his eyes light up at a joke. Hearing his voice on the other end of the line.

The more distance that I put between myself and James, the angrier I became. The worst thing was that the anger wasn’t directed at him. I was pissed off at myself.

I channeled the rage instead of the pain. I would deal with the pain when I got home.

Until then, I berated myself for ever letting my heart get involved. For allowing myself to fall for him despite everything that I knew about football players. Players in general. I fucking knew better. I did.

In a cruel twist of fate, perhaps a fitting one, a popular song blared through my speakers about a girl knowing that a guy was trouble when he walked in, but how she fell for him anyway.

She was right about one thing: the blame was on me. I had known that he was trouble the moment he walked into my father’s office on that first day we met. I had known that he wasn’t looking for something serious.

What we had was never even a real relationship.

That pain that threatened to split me open and consume me in a blaze of fire? The pain I would never recover from? It was all my own damn fault for allowing myself to fall so hard for James in the first place.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

James

There are a few defining moments in a man’s life.

Moments when you don’t fully understand the ways your life is about to change, but you know that from that moment forward, shit is going to be awesome. I had one of those moments when I signed my first pro contract. I had another when I made the decision to man up and be a dad to Harper.

Then there are moments when you know that shit is never going to be as good as you had it the day before. I had one of those moments when I lost my parents. Then there are moments where you know that you’re fucked or that you fucked up. Royally.

I had one of those moments in Richard’s office when I denied that anything was going on between Gabrielle and me. The words weren’t even out of my mouth, weren’t even cold yet, and I knew I had fucked up. Royally.

I had walked into that office thinking that I was about to have one of the best moments of my life. Instead, it turned out to be in the top three worst days of my fucking life.

It took me awhile to figure out why, but watching Gabrielle drive away from me clarified things. I’d never felt pain like that before. It was different from losing my parents, of course. But it hurt like a son of a bitch nonetheless.

That’s when it hit me, like a knockout punch from Mike Tyson himself. I was in love with Gabrielle. I fucking loved her like I hadn’t ever thought it was possible to love a woman. Like I had never loved anyone before, because I hadn’t. Not like that.

Instead of stepping up like a man, I’d thrown her away with both hands. The expression on her face when I denied our relationship to her father and his reception bitch, the agony that I saw there when I caught up to her car, it told me that she might just have felt the same way about me.

Before I’d ripped her heart out and stomped all over it like a one-man marching band. It haunted me all night. I didn’t get one minute of sleep.

All that I could think about was that I had to make this right. If she wanted to have nothing to do with me after, so be it. I had to tell her that I loved her. I had to face Richard and tell him that I loved her.

If he chose to revoke the offer, that was the price I would have to pay for making the biggest fucking mistake that I’d ever made.

I would leave Miami and never look back. I would work my way up with another team and give Harper the future that she deserved.

I would throw myself into work every second that I wasn’t with Harper and resign myself to the fact that I’d fucked things up with the love of my goddamn life. That I was damned to be lonely forever as a result of my own actions.

The plan that had taken me all night to come up with wasn’t exactly rocket science. Although, from what I’d heard, rocket science wasn’t exactly rocket science. The plan wasn’t necessarily complex.

It wasn’t the big romantic gesture that Gabrielle deserved. It was all I could come up with through the blinding pain that wrecked me from the inside out.

It started with Richard. I had to come clean to him first. When I told Gabrielle, I had to be able to tell her that I’d been entirely honest with Richard. That I wasn’t asking her to go behind his back again.

If she chose to forgive me, to be with me, we’d be doing it right. It was the only way to take a real shot at having a real relationship. No sneaking around, no doubts about what we were to each other, or why we were in it.

All of which relied on my not having entirely misread her the day before, and she would actually want me after what I had done.