Free Can't Buy Me Love by Molly O'Keefe Page B

when they were kids. Too clumsy. I know that … I see …” He stopped, his eyes bone dry, but wretched nonetheless.
    “Luc is leaving tomorrow,” she said, smoothing a hand down his cheek. “You can’t make him stay.”
    “He’ll stay.”
    “Lyle—”
    “For his sister he’ll stay. For his sister he’ll do anything. And she’ll stay for the money.”
    She patted his chest. “All this conniving cannot be good for you.”
    “You know what would be good for me?”
    “You can’t have a cigar. Or a steak.”
    “Scotch.”
    “You can’t have that either.”
    He lifted her hand and pressed dry, feathery lips to her palm. “Then let’s live dangerously and start with the pudding.”
    Luc sat up, the dark night swallowing every detail of the room. A headache pounded hard behind his eyes.
    Christ, where—
    The pounding wasn’t in his head. It was coming from the door.
    He was in Texas. His old bedroom. And it was themiddle of the night. The digital clock on the bedside table said four in the morning.
    The knocking continued, growing sharper and harder.
    “I’m coming,” he snapped, flipping the blankets off his body. He slipped into a pair of jeans, zipping them as he walked across the thick carpet.
    “What?” He yanked open the door.
    Tara Jean stood there. Diamond-bright eyes set in a face ravaged by tears.
    “He’s dead.”
    “What?” He blinked.
    “Your father is dead.”

chapter

6
    When Pauly Sovtka , Luc’s Junior A coach, died, Luc had cried. He’d cried during the service, while carrying Pauly’s coffin out of the church with the rest of his teammates; he’d cried while they lowered the old man into the ground.
    Like a child lost at a mall, he’d cried. And half his team cried right along with him.
    His grief had been so deep, so consuming, he couldn’t pretend that his heart wasn’t breaking. There was nothing he could do to stop the tears and he didn’t care. Pauly was dead. And his world suffered for it.
    His dad had seen the footage on ESPN and he’d made a special phone call just to tell Luc he was a crybaby. A disgrace to the Baker name, blubbering all over national TV like a girl.
    It had been a real special father-and-son kind of moment.
    Now, standing beside his father’s grave, his sister’s warm hand tucked into his elbow, he couldn’t care less. If he tried, and he wasn’t about to expend the energy, he doubted he could muster up the slightest bit of grief. A scrap of regret or sadness.
    Maybe he shouldn’t have started the day with that whiskey.
    He definitely shouldn’t have had the second one.
    But Lyle Baker was only going to be buried once. A toast to the dawn seemed in order.
    But now he was numb to the hundred people who were here to pay their respects and was instead totally preoccupied with Bimbo Barbie. Or rather her very conspicuous absence.
    “Where’s Tara Jean?” he whispered into his sister’s ear while a white-haired minister kept calling Lyle a “complicated man of strong belief.”
    That must be minister talk for “total asshole.”
    Vicks shrugged, her pale face and thin body so perfectly suited to bereavement black, it hurt a little to look at her. To see all that his sister was, swallowed up.
    “I haven’t seen her in three days,” he said, “not since she told me about Dad.”
    “She probably left, since he died before they could get married.”
    “Yeah, you’re—”
    Beside him, his mother, Celeste, pinched him through the sleeve of his black jacket.
    He glanced over, only to receive her steely blue-eyed censure. Victoria tensed and snapped her eyes forward, too quickly to absorb any of Celeste’s displeasure. And he stood between them, sweating in a thousand-dollar suit in the late-May Texas sun.
    I should have made that last drink a double
.
    The minister droned on and Luc, without being too obvious, tried to find Bimbo Barbie in the crowd. Why he cared, he wasn’t sure; maybe he just wanted to rub her face in all she’d