My mother didn’t know how to hold a grudge.
It didn’t matter that twenty years ago the damn woman she’d been hugging had been the reason for her losing her job and our house.
No, all it mattered was that Mavis had, at one time, been a girl that she used to care for.
Well, it didn’t matter if my mom couldn’t hold a grudge.
I sure the hell could.
And I would continue to until my last dying breath.
“Mom,” I said when she stayed where she was, smiling. “Can you give us a moment?”
Mom smiled. “Sure, I’ll let you two catch up.”
The last fucking thing I wanted to do was move back to Paris, Texas.
The problem was, this was where my heart doctor was located.
And when you had problems with your heart, it was easier to be near said doctor.
The woman currently standing in front of me was the very reason that I hadn’t wanted to come back.
I knew it would be inevitable that I’d run into the Popes.
I just hadn’t figured that I’d do it on the first day that I was open for business.
“I can’t believe it’s you, Alessio.” She shook her head, a small smile coming over her face. “When I saw your mother, everything clicked into…”
“Listen,” I said carefully. “I don’t like you. I’ll never like you. You’re the reason that we were kicked out of our house, lost our insurance, and I had to start working at the age of thirteen just so I could help my mother make enough money just to put food on our plates. You can smile and be pretty all you want, but it’s not going to change anything.”
When we were kicked out, my mother had debt up to her eyeballs.
All because of me and my stupid fucking heart.
Getting kicked out of our home wouldn’t have been a problem had my mother’s credit not been completely destroyed as she tried to keep me alive, and us fed, while working, and me being in and out of a hospital room many times over the course of my short life.
It took us over two years to be able to find a place to stay, and even then, it’d only been because we’d used my social security number to get it.
Mavis blinked. “Smile and be pretty?”
“You know you’re beautiful,” I said. “You’re just better at using it to get what you want now.”
Her hand dropped to her stomach, and it was then that I realized that Mavis was pregnant.
Disgust hit me and I stepped back. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. What did you want when you stopped in?”
Mavis blinked, clearing the fog from her eyes as she seemed to gather up her composure, wrap the aloofness around her like a cape, and then say, “I wanted a mechanic’s opinion on the car I was going to buy. But I think that I’ll just leave.”
She started to head to her car in the next moment, and I felt like a dick.
“What kind of car were you wanting to buy?” I asked.
She looked at me over her shoulder, then turned back around without another word.
“Buy American,” I told her. “Parts are easier to get.”
She ignored me and dropped down into her car, then rolled up the window once she had it started.
She didn’t reply.
Nor did she take my advice.
The next time I saw her she was driving a minivan.
One made in a foreign country.
CHAPTER 2
Practice makes perfect. But since nobody is perfect, why practice?
-Mavis’s secret thoughts
MAVIS
2 weeks later
I was scared to go to the class after seeing who’d just walked through the doors ahead of me.
In fact, as I stared at the doors to Madd CrossFit, I contemplated starting my foreign-made van up and peeling out of the parking lot.
But, since this class was the only damn class that I could attend today or tomorrow, I reluctantly got out of my van, slid my fancy-ass back door open, and grabbed my bag.
I groaned at the weight.
I’d added new lifters to the bag, and they were a whole lot heavier than I’d thought they would be.
That, or maybe I was turning into a little bitch the more pregnant I got.
Not that that was possible to do. You were either pregnant or you weren’t. There was no ‘more’ possible.
Maybe a better phrase would be ‘how far along’ I was.
I was now a total of five months.
Weeks wise, I was twenty weeks, officially halfway to the finish line.
If I was lucky, I’d make it thirty-eight weeks and get to finish my finals for this semester before I went into labor.
But knowing my luck, that would never happen.
I’d probably pop three weeks early and have to beg my sister to watch my newborn while I got through the rest of my classes and clinicals.
Not that she would ever say no. My sister was my best friend. My ride or die. The one woman that I could count on no matter what. My person. My love went to only one person in this world, and it was her.
“Hey, girl!”
I looked up to see a woman that I rarely got to see because she frequented only the early classes—classes that I avoided if I could help it seeing as I hated getting up early.
“Alma!” I cried. “Hey! How are you?”
Alma smiled her sweet smile to me, her face a ray of sunshine despite the early hour. Oh, and the no sun thing.
“I’m doing well. What are you doing at this class? I thought you avoided anything before seven am like the plague?” she snickered.
I sighed. “I do. I wish I could still. But I have a clinical today from seven in the morning until seven this evening. As well as an even earlier one tomorrow. So if I want to get a workout in this week, it’s going to have to be today.”
She groaned. “Well, I hope that you brought a portable shower. Coach told me he did this one last night to test it out, and he was so sweaty afterward that he needed a hose down.”
I groaned as I walked in, my eyes automatically going to Murphy, aka Alessio, in the corner who was talking to Madden.
My eyes skipped right over Madden and stayed on the man that was sitting on a box slipping on his tennis shoes.
I looked away when Alma once again drew me into conversation.
“When are you due?” she asked.
I was so focused on her, and getting ready to workout, that I hadn’t realized how close Madden and Murphy had moved until I heard Madden say, “You’re pregnant?”
I rolled my eyes.
Where the hell had he been the last five months?
“Yes,” I said. “Something in which I told Sophia, in front of you, three months ago.”
Sophia was Madden’s daughter. Madden’s adult daughter that looked too old to be his kid, yet that was something that I’d never dug too far into seeing as it wasn’t my business.
Madden was hot—and when I say hot, I mean holy cow I blushed when he gave me direct eye contact hot—but he wasn’t my current object of fascination.
The scowling, pissy man beside him was.
It’d only been two weeks, but that two weeks I’d obsessively focused on everything that had to do with Alessio Murphy Romano.
I’d googled him—and found out that he’d won the fucking lottery.
I didn’t know anyone that had won a scratch off, let alone the damn lottery where they won millions of dollars.