Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

“So what does my good luck charm do for a living? Wait, let me guess…”

As he spoke, Max reached across the table and wiped the corner of my lip with his thumb. He showed it to me—sugar from the rim of my lemon drop martini—before sucking it off with a devilish smile that caused a tingle between my legs.

I sipped more of my drink to cool off before answering. “This should be interesting. I’m curious to see what it is you think I do.”

His eyes dropped down to my outfit. It was now almost one o’clock in the morning. We’d walked across the street from the Garden to the nearest bar and taken the most private booth in the back corner, but I was still dressed in my work clothes, having gone straight from the office to meet my blind date, and then the game.

“Classy, yet sexy,” he said. Max leaned to the side and looked down at my feet. “Those hot-as-shit heels don’t look like they’d be too comfortable to stand in all day, so I’m going to guess you work in an office of some kind. You were able to get out pretty early to meet your date, so you’re probably the boss and make your own hours. You also dumped your blind date to come meet a guy for a hockey game—a sport you said you know nothing about—without knowing I was a player. So you’re either in a profession that takes risks, or one that requires you to be an optimist.”

I made a face that said I was impressed. “Go on…”

He rubbed the scruff on his chin, which had definitely gotten darker in the few hours we’d been apart. “I’m gonna say lawyer or advertising exec.”

I shook my head. “And here I thought you were doing so well.”

“Was I close?”

“Sort of. I do sit for the majority of the day lately. I also make my own hours, and I suppose starting my own company was risky. I own Eternity Roses.”

“Eternity Roses? Why does that sound so familiar?”

“Oddly enough, even though I’ve never been to a hockey game, I have advertised at Madison Square Garden. My company sells roses that last a year or more. Maybe you’ve seen one of our billboards.”

“The ones that have a guy sleeping with his head in the doghouse?”

I smiled. “That’s the one. My friend Maggie does all the marketing. She got the idea because her soon-to-be ex-husband was always in the doghouse and coming home with flowers.”

“I’ve sent your flowers to my sister-in-law. Last time I was at her house, my brother and I were goofing around and we broke a chair. She wouldn’t let me pay for it, so I sent one of those big, round, hatbox-looking arrangements. Your website is funny, too, right? I remember it had a page with suggested notes for when you were in the doghouse. I used one for the card I sent with the flowers.”

I nodded. “I used to pick all of those myself when I first started. It was one of the things I enjoyed doing most. But we update so often now, I don’t have the time anymore.”

“That’s pretty cool. But I gotta say…those things were expensive as shit. I think the big one I sent was something like six-hundred bucks.”

“Does your sister-in-law love them?”

“She does.”

“Well, regular roses only last about a week. If you buy four-dozen roses, the amount that comes in that large hatbox you sent, you’d have to spend a minimum of two-hundred-and-fifty dollars. In a year, that’s thirteen-thousand dollars for weekly roses. So six hundred is actually a bargain.”

Max grinned. “Why do I have a feeling you’ve said that a few hundred times before?”

I laughed. “I definitely have.”

“How did you get into that line of work?”

“I always knew I wanted to own my own business. I just didn’t know what kind. During college and grad school, I worked at a florist. One of my favorite customers was Mr. Benson, an eighty-year-old man. He came in every single Monday to buy his wife flowers during the first year I worked there. He’d been giving her fresh roses every week for their entire fifty-year marriage. Most of that time, he’d grown the flowers himself in a small greenhouse in their yard. But after his wife had a stroke, they’d moved to a retirement home because she needed more help than he could handle alone. After that, he started buying her weekly flowers at the store. One day he came in and mentioned he was going to have to cut back and only bring her flowers once a month because the co-payments on his wife’s new medicines were so expensive. He said it would be the first time in more than half a century that she didn’t have fresh roses on her bedside. So I started researching how I could extend the life of cut flowers, hoping I could find a way for Mr. Benson’s wife’s roses to last longer between his trips to the florist. I wound up learning a lot about the preservation process, and things just sort of took off from there. Eventually I opened an online store and started selling arrangements out of my house. It was a slow start until a celebrity with twelve-million followers on Instagram placed an order and posted about how much she loved them. Things snowballed from there. Within a month, I’d moved production from my living room and kitchen to a small shop, and now, a few years later, we have three production facilities and eight boutique showrooms. We’ve also just started to franchise the brand in Europe.”

“Damn.” Max lifted his brows. “You did that all by yourself?”

I nodded proudly. “I did. Well, with my best friend, Maggie. She helped me get it off the ground. Now she owns a piece of the company, too. I couldn’t have done it without her.”

He looked over his shoulder and glanced around the room. “Beauty and brains? There’s got to be a line of guys around here somewhere that want to kick my ass for getting to sit with you right now.”

He’d meant it as a compliment and to be funny, yet my smile wilted for the first time. The reality of why I was out on a date tonight hit me smack in the face. I’d gotten caught up in the excitement of the evening and hadn’t stopped to think that I’d have to tell Max about Gabriel. Frannie had filled my blind date in on my situation, so I hadn’t needed to consider how or when I would bring it up there. But I suppose the how or when with Max had just presented itself to me on a silver platter, so there was no time like the present.

I smiled pensively. “Well…to be completely honest, I am sort of seeing someone.”

Max dropped his head and lifted one hand to cover his heart. “And here I thought the arrow through my heart was Cupid’s. You’ve wounded me, Georgia.”

I laughed at his dramatics. “Sorry. It feels odd to bring it up, but I thought I should be upfront about my situation.”

He sighed. “Lay it on me. What’s the deal with this other dude whose heart I’m going to break?”

“Well, I…uh…” Damn, this wasn’t easy to explain. “I guess you could say I’m in an open relationship.”

Max’s brows rose. “You guess?”

“Sorry…no.” I nodded. “I am. I’m in an open relationship.”

“Why does it sound like there’s more to it than just you’re dating someone without a commitment?”

I chewed on my bottom lip. “We were actually engaged.”

“But you’re not now?”

I shook my head. “It’s kind of a complicated story, but I feel like I should share it.”

“Okay…”

“Gabriel and I met when I was working on my MBA. He was an undergrad English professor at NYU, and I went to Stern Business School there. At the time, he had just begun working on a novel. Gabriel taught to pay the bills, but he wanted to be a writer. Eventually he sold his book to a publisher, along with a deal for a second one he’d write someday, and we got engaged. Everything was going well until about a year ago when his book was published. It didn’t do well. In fact, it pretty much flopped—low sales and terrible reviews. Gabriel got pretty down about it. Not long after, he found out that the parents he’d thought were his biological parents were actually his adoptive parents. Then his best friend since childhood died in a car accident.” I sighed. “Anyway…long story short, Gabriel felt really lost and decided to take a visiting-professor position in England for sixteen months. He never even discussed it with me before accepting the job. He said he needed to find himself. With everything he’d been through, I understood. But then a few days before he left, I got another surprise: He told me he wanted to have an open relationship while he was gone.”

“And everything between the two of you was fine before that?”

“I had thought so. I work a lot—more than I need to or really should—and sometimes Gabriel thought it was too much and complained. That was probably our biggest issue. But we weren’t a couple who fought all the time, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Max rubbed his bottom lip with his thumb. “How long’s he been gone?”

“Eight months.”

“Have you seen each other during that time?”

“Just once. About six weeks ago. My company opened a franchise boutique in Paris. I went for the grand opening, and he met me there for the weekend.”

“And you’ve both been seeing other people since he left?”

I shook my head. “Apparently he has been, but I haven’t been too much.” I bit my lip again. “Adam was actually only my second date in many years. The first was a guy I met on Tinder two weeks ago, which lasted for coffee only. To be honest, I didn’t even want to go out tonight. But I’m trying really hard to make some much-needed changes in my life, now that I’m on my own. So I made a list of things I’d been putting off, and since dating was at the top of that list, I sort of forced myself to show up.”

Max’s eyes jumped back and forth between mine. “Did you have to force yourself to come to the Garden?”

“No, just the opposite. I was trying to force myself not to come.”

“Why would you do that?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

He stared at me some more. “When are you seeing him again?”

“We don’t have any more plans to reconnect in person until after he’s finished in London and moves back to New York. So I guess December, when he gets back.”

“Are you just looking to get even with this guy because he’s dating? Or are you really looking to see what else is out there for yourself?”

That was a damn good question, and one I didn’t really know the answer to. My relationship with Gabriel was a gray area, and I was a black-or-white type person. Lord knows, I’d spent enough time agonizing over decisions about that man, only to wind up now questioning every decision I’d ever made.

I looked Max in the eye. “I’ll be honest; I’m not sure what I want.” I cocked my head to the side. “Does it matter to you?”

A slow grin spread across his face. “Just want to know what I’m getting myself into.” He reached across the table and took my hand, weaving our fingers together. He looked up with a sparkle in his eyes. “But I’m in.”

I laughed. “You’re a hard sell.”

“I can’t help it. I want to know everything about you.”

I squinted. “Why?”

“I have no damn idea. I just do.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Anything.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “You said you sometimes work more than you need to. Why do you keep working if you don’t need to?”

I smiled sadly. “That’s a question I’ve given a lot of thought, since it was a source of contention in my relationship. I think I work a lot because I’ve always had to. I’m dyslexic, so ever since elementary school, I’ve had to put in extra time. A reading assignment that might take my friends twenty minutes could take me an hour or two, so I’m sort of trained to expect to do more. I also have a tendency to overanalyze everything to death, which can be time consuming, and I’m super competitive—at times obnoxiously so. But I love my business, and I enjoy watching it grow from what I put into it. That said, I actually did hire a director of operations four months ago, so I can work less if I want to. My mom is getting older and lives down in Florida, and I want to be able to go visit her more often. And I love to travel. I also thought it would make Gabriel happy, but you already know how that’s worked out.”

“Nothing wrong with working a lot if you love what you do. You probably wouldn’t be where you are if you didn’t put in the time. I definitely wouldn’t.”

“Thanks.”

“And being competitive is good. It pushes you to do better.”

I shook my head. “My friends won’t even play board games with me anymore, and I’m banned from the Easter egg hunt in my mom’s retirement community because of…” I raised my hands and made air quotes. “…an incident with a super-sensitive nine-year-old I accidentally made cry.”

Max grinned. “That bad, huh?”

I rubbed my finger over the condensation on the bottom of my glass. “I’m working on finding the right balance. I even went to a four-day meditation retreat a few months ago to learn how to relax.”

“How did that go?”

My lip twitched. “I left a day early.”

Max chuckled. “What about family? Lot of siblings?”

“No, I’m an only child. My parents had me late in life. They married at thirty and agreed to not have children beforehand. My dad had a vasectomy shortly after their wedding. Then at forty-two, my mom got pregnant. Turns out, a vasectomy isn’t a hundred-percent foolproof. They cut the man’s vas deferens, but in rare cases the pieces can grow back and reconnect. It’s called recanalization.”

“Holy shit.” Max shifted in his seat.

I laughed. “Did you just squeeze your legs together?”

“Damn right I did. Mention cutting anything down there and my body jumps into protective mode. How did your parents take that news in their forties?”

“My mom said it was a shock, but when she went to her first appointment and heard the heartbeat, she knew it was meant to be. My dad, on the other hand, wasn’t as elated. He had a terrible childhood and had his own reasons for not wanting a family. So he went off and had an affair with a woman who had her tubes tied, and my parents wound up getting divorced when I was two. I’m not very close with my father.”

“I’m sorry.”

I smiled. “Thank you. But there’s nothing to be sorry about, even though it may sound like it when I tell the abbreviated version. My mom is super mom, so I never felt like I missed much. She retired to Florida two years ago. And I did see my dad growing up. What about you? Big family?”

“I’m the youngest of six. All boys.” He shook his head. “My poor mom. We broke every piece of furniture at least once horsing around over the years.”

“Ah…like your sister-in-law’s chair?”

“Exactly.”

“Earlier, when I asked if you lived with your mother, you said you didn’t even live in the same state. So are you not from New York?”

“Nope. Originally from Washington state, but I haven’t lived there in a long time—left home when I was sixteen to live with a host family to play hockey in Minnesota. Then moved to the East Coast to play for Boston University, and then on to New York to play for the Wolverines.”

“What’s that like? Being a professional athlete, I mean.”

Max shrugged. “I get to play a game I love for a living. It’s pretty much a dream. People call Disney the greatest place on earth. I’ll take the locker room after a win any day of the week.”

“What’s the downside? Even the best jobs have one.”

“Well, losing definitely sucks. My team has done a lot of it the last two years. When I was first drafted, they were a team on the rise. We made the playoffs my rookie year, but between player injuries and bad trades, the last few have been tough. It’s called a team because you need more than a few guys to be having a good year. Other than that, the travel can be a lot. A season is eighty-two games, and that’s without playoffs. Almost half are on the road. I think I see the team dentist more than I do the inside of my own apartment.”

“Wow, yeah. That’s a lot of travel.”

Max had ordered a rum and Coke and a water. I’d figured he needed to hydrate after the game. But I noticed he hadn’t touched the alcohol yet, and we’d been sitting long enough for his ice to melt. Pointing to the smaller glass, I said, “You haven’t touched your drink.”

“I don’t drink alcohol when I have practice or a game the next day.”

My brows furrowed. “So why did you order a rum and Coke?”

“I didn’t want you to not order a drink because I wasn’t.”

I smiled. “That’s thoughtful. Thank you.”

“So tell me about your date tonight. Was he a total dud, or did he just pale in comparison to the first guy you met?” He winked.

“Real Adam was very nice.”

“Nice?” Max’s cocky grin widened. “So it sucked, huh?”

There was a napkin on the table in front of me. I crumpled it up and threw it at him. He caught it.

“I think it’s time for your turn in the hot seat,” I said. “Tell me about the woman you slept with recently. Is she someone you’ve been seeing?”

“It was just a hookup. For both of us.”

“Uh-huh.” I sipped my drink. “Let’s talk about that. Do those happen often? I mean, you’re a professional athlete and a good-looking guy—not to mention you spend a lot of time on the road.”

Max contemplated me. “I told you that if you gave me a second chance, I wouldn’t lie to you again. But I’d also rather not paint a picture of something you won’t like. So I’m just going to say I don’t have a hard time finding someone to spend time with, if I want to. But just because it’s easy, and I’ve lived a full single life, doesn’t mean that’s how it has to be. I’m sure you could walk into just about any bar in this city and leave with a guy, if you wanted to. Doesn’t mean you’ll do it if you’re in a relationship, right?”

“No, I guess not.” I shrugged. “But there must be something wrong with you. Tell me your worst qualities, Max.”

“Damn.” He blew out a deep breath. “You’re really looking for a reason not to marry me, aren’t you?”

“If everything you’re saying is sincere, you’re too good to be true. Can you blame me for waiting for the other shoe to drop?”

He rubbed his thumb over his bottom lip, then sat up and planted his elbows on the table. “Okay. I’ll give you some dirt. But afterward, I want to hear more of your dirt.”

I laughed. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

“Shake on it.” He extended his hand, and when I put mine in his, he closed his fingers and didn’t let go. “Awww…you want to hold my hand.”

I shook my head. “Out with it, Pretty Boy. What’s wrong with you?”

Max’s face grew serious. “I can be obsessive and somewhat compulsive. What normal people might call drive turns into overdrive for me. I can lose focus on everything else in my life, including my own health and all the people around me, when I want something bad enough.”

“Okay…well, I guess that makes sense, considering your career. I’ve never met a professional athlete before, but I have to imagine having a fervent drive is part of what helped you get where you are.”

“I also have an addictive personality. Hockey is my drug of choice. But it’s why I don’t drink much, and I keep away from drugs and gambling. In college, I ran up a debt of twenty grand to a bookie. My oldest brother had to bail my ass out, but not before he flew to Boston and kicked it.”

“Oh goodness. How big is your brother?”

Max laughed. “I’m one of the smaller Yearwood boys.”

“Wow.”

“So…did I scare you away yet? So far you’ve had me admit I had a hookup recently, got arrested while naked hula hooping, have an addictive personality, and sometimes forget the world exists when I’m focused on hockey. What’s next? Me telling you I have an irrational fear of lizards and that I once peed my pants when I was nine because my brothers brought home six chameleons and hid them in my bed?”

“Oh my God. Is that true?”

Max hung his head. “Yeah. But in my defense, you shouldn’t show a four-year-old Godzilla. It can leave scars.”

The thought of this enormous man being afraid of a tiny lizard was absolutely hilarious. But he’d won me over with the open way he’d answered my questions. He still had my hand locked in his, so I squeezed and decided honesty was a two-way street.

“You were right. I was fishing for a reason to not see you again.”

“And did you find one?”

I shook my head. “Flaws don’t scare me. You not knowing you have them or refusing to admit they exist would.”

“So does that mean we’re heading to Vegas?”

“Not quite.” I laughed. “Is it my turn now? To tell you my worst qualities, I mean? Because I’m not sure I stressed how annoying my competitiveness can be when I mentioned it earlier. Like, I threw that napkin at you, and you caught it, and it’s killing me that you didn’t throw it back so I could catch it, too. And now I also want to tell you all my other bad qualities so mine can be worse than yours. But I’m thinking maybe I should finish my drink before I continue with my laundry list, in case you make a run for it.”

Max shook his head. “Nah. You don’t need to tell me anything. I already know your worst quality.”

“You do, huh? I’m almost afraid to ask. What is it?”

Max’s eyes met mine. The intensity in them was undeniable, and it set off a fluttering low in my belly.

“Your worst quality? Easy. I believe you said his name was Gabriel.”