Running Back (New York Leopards 2)

He gave me the crooked grin I loved. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

I smiled apologetically. “Sorry I snapped. But I’m fine with my mom. Really.”

“Then how come you never once mentioned she spent ten years modeling all over the world?”

So, he’d done his research. Or at least read her Wikipedia page. “I’m not going to run around inserting her into conversations. That’d be awkward.”

“No, but you shouldn’t hide from it. It’s not a badge of shame.”

“Are you kidding?” I was hot and embarrassed and angry. “Of course it is.”

We stared at each other and I felt even sicker. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

“I won’t.”

I took a deep breath and collapsed on the swing. “How’d you know it was one of

my buttons?”

His arm brushed mine. “The first time I complimented your eyes you freaked out.”

What? No. When had that happened? “No way.”

He tilted his head.

I sighed. “It’s just weird, you know? Like, she thinks what I’m doing is so weird, and she doesn’t even realize how messed up her own career and life was.”

He didn’t say anything, so I let my thoughts verbally roll out. I didn’t talk about my mother often—with my brothers, I always felt like I had to defend her, and the same with Cam, though I knew my best friend only meant to be supportive. “She grew up in this small town in Eastern Russia, where the talent scout from Paris found her when she was only fourteen. It just seems so wrong—these scouts pluck these kids, who didn’t speak any French or English, and move them to model homes in France.”

“Did she like it?”

I flipped my hand over indecisively. “If you talk to her about it, she makes it sound like the best thing in the world. But she’s the least happy person I know. I can’t imagine she was ever that happy.”

“And she wanted you to model.”

Startled, I glanced up at him. “Did I say that already?”

“You said you were a bad doll.”

“Right.” My jaw worked and then I let out a breath of old, stale anger. “I did a couple times when I was a kid.”

For a brief instant, he looked uncomfortable. “I know. I saw them.”

No way.

He ducked his head. “I have powerful Google-fu.”

I shook my head. So he’d seen me as a twelve-year-old in pastel dresses and round curls. Fine. “Did you see the ones of my mom? The Goddess series?”

He shook his head.

I pulled out my phone. It didn’t take me long to find my favorite. “Most of them were fashion shoots, but this was the one that really made her famous. Happened right after she arrived in Paris, and she just went around seeing everything.” The series was my favorite, because for the only time in her career, Tamara Bocharov looked like an actual person—overwhelmed, lost and childishly excited.

“This one’s called The Gray-Eyed Goddess.” My mother wore a white, Greek-inspired dress, her blond hair bound back to intensify her gaze. From other photos, I knew my mother was posed around the Louvre, but this one focused on her face. “They used to call her that. But what’s funny—well, kind of stupid—is that they mixed their names. No one ever called her Athena, which is what gray-eyed meant. When they gave her a name it was always Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. Which was appropriate.

“I always thought that if I had to pick a Greek goddess to share attributes, I would be Athena. Wisdom and war. I understand that much more than love or Artemis and her hunting, or Hera, devoted to marriage and children.”

“Wisdom and war...” he repeated. “What about your dad?”