Backfield in Motion (25 page)

“Especially Bruiser.” Mac planted the bait
and waited for Shanna to bite.

“Look, I don’t talk about my brother to just
anyone. He might seem like a public person, but he’s not, not one
damn bit. He lets people see what he wants them to see and no more.
But I think you’re different than his usual girlfriends.”

Mac opened her mouth to dispute the
statement but Shanna stopped her cold. “Hear me out. You’re good
for him. You ground him, and God knows he needs that. He’s ten
times smarter than those bimbos he dates, but you’re his equal.”
Shanna studied her in the mirror, tapping her scissors on the
chair.

“What happened to his twin? I know he was in
an accident and then—”

Shanna held up a hand to stop her. “We don’t
talk about the
accident
. If you want to know, he’ll have to
tell you. But I will say Bruce lives the life he believes Brice
would have lived, as if Bruce doesn’t deserve to live his life for
himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Growing up, Bruiser was the quiet, studious
one. Brice was the daredevil, attention seeker, and athlete of the
family. Not that Bruce wasn’t athletic—of course he was, but not
like Brice. Brice overshadowed everything Bruce did. Our parents
never hid the fact that Brice was their favorite. After Brice’s
accident, Dad couldn’t deal with Brice’s injuries, nor could he
look at Bruce because he was a constant reminder of what Brice used
to be. So Dad left. And Mom, well, she blamed Bruce—not directly,
but she has her ways. She reminds us every chance she gets of
Brice’s absence in our life. I think she tortures Bruce for living
because she doesn’t know how else to deal with the grief.”

“That’s awful.” Mac couldn’t imagine a
parent holding such guilt over a child’s head. Or maybe she could.
Maybe in a way her father did that same thing.

“Yeah, it took me a long time to forgive Mom
and Dad. They’re superficial people; their lives and their
livelihoods depend on appearances. Neither of them could bear
looking at Brice. He did look pretty hideous, the stuff of
nightmares, but he was their kid.”

Mac wiped an unexpected tear from her eye,
getting a yank on her hair in return.

“Don’t move,” Shanna chastised Mac. “Anyway,
Bruce found Brice after he’d shot himself. After that it was weird.
Bruce took on his twin’s personality. He became Brice, but it
didn’t matter to our father, and Mom just buried herself in the
business. I think it was too painful to look at Bruce and see the
mirror image of the son she’d lost.”

“Are you saying that Bruiser has been his
brother all these years?”

“I’m saying that he’s been the person he
imagined Brice would be for so long that I don’t think he knows how
to be Bruce anymore.”

“Wow.” Mac couldn’t seem to wrap her head
around how screwed up his whole situation was. Her heart was
breaking for him.

“He hates doing all those endorsements,
especially the modeling. I mean, he despises modeling. But every
penny he makes on endorsements goes to his charity for burn
victims.”

“I assumed he spent it on designer clothes
and stuff.” When she thought about it she realized with all the
money he made he had to be doing something with it besides buying
clothes. She’d bought right into the image he’s sold to
everyone.

Shanna laughed. “Bruce is a tight-assed
bastard. He hoards money. Most of his clothes come via the
endorsements or he gets them on sale, or they’re last year’s
designs. He wears them so well no one notices.”

Mac shook her head in amazement. “I never
knew.”

“No one knows. He needs to maintain his
man-about-town persona.”

“He has terrible nightmares.”

Shanna locked eyes with her in the mirror.
“And you know this how?”

Mac’s face turned bright red.
“I—uh—well—”

“Hey, don’t fret it. I know how he is with
women. Never met one yet that could resist him when he turned on
that boyish charm.”

Mac hated being just one of his many women.
Brett was wrong. Bruiser couldn’t miss her. Maybe the sex, but not
her.

“Funny, I thought you might be different.
That’s why we invited you to Sunday dinner. You’re real, and Bruce
needs a real woman, not some piece of arm candy without a brain in
her fucking head. He’s so damn gun-shy when it comes to women.”

“Gun-shy?”

“His divorce. Surely you know about that
one?”

“I know he’s divorced and the marriage
didn’t last long.”

“I never liked the bitch. Let me put it this
way—she was looking for a man who’d be somebody, so she latched
onto him in college. She was smart, clever, and devious. He never
saw through her. Totally fell for her. They married their senior
year, lived in student housing, and she worked two menial jobs,
which she thought were beneath her. When she caught the team
quarterback’s eye, they had an affair.

Bruce didn’t find out until his QB buddy
went higher in the draft and signed a bigger contract. She threw
Bruce to the curb and never looked back. It devastated him. He was
so busy finishing his degree he didn’t see it coming.”

“Bruiser has a degree?” She’d known he
played college ball, but she figured he got drafted into the pros
and left school.

“Yeah, in business and finance. He graduated
with honors.”

Mac shook her head. She felt shell shocked.
She hadn’t a fucking clue. Everything she thought she knew about
him was a misconception.

And just maybe there was one more. Maybe he
was a man with the ability to commit long term.

Who the hell was she kidding? The guy
carried more baggage than the cargo hold of a Boeing 787, and the
last thing he needed was a commitment to a woman who had her own
cargo hold full of matched luggage.

* * * * *

Beady little blue eyes bored into Bruiser’s
back as he sat at the bar. He could feel them. He swung around and
came face to face with the team’s asshole quarterback. When the
jerk continued to stare without saying a fucking thing, he turned
his back on Harris again and faced the bar, but the quarterback’s
laser-sharp gaze still seared his skin as if he held a
blowtorch.

Bruiser whipped around again. “What?”

Tyler shot him his trademark smirk, an
expression he’d honed over the years. “You are such a fucking
tool.”

“You would know.” Bruiser would never
understand what Lavender saw in this guy.

“Hey, I make it my business to know anything
that might remotely affect the team. You’ve been moping around like
a pansy-ass about to turn in his man card because of some
female.”

“You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

Harris’s cronies gathered around the bar,
pulling barstools from other locations. So much for a quiet night
to think things over.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Harris threw
back his head and laughed so hard Bruiser swore he’d snort up a
lung. Finally, wiping his eyes, Harris got a hold of himself. “What
would we know about that, right guys?”

Derek seemed to find this hilariously funny,
too, along with Zach. Brett half smiled and buried his head in the
bar menu, which after all this time frequenting this place, he
should have memorized.

Bruiser didn’t get it, not one bit. Other
than they were annoying the hell out of him. “I don’t know what you
mean.”

“One word, dumb shit. Mac.” Tyler’s superior
smirk pissed Bruiser off, but then Tyler loved to piss people off,
it was part of his M.O. If he knew he got under Bruiser’s skin,
he’d burrow in deeper and heckle Bruiser until hell froze over.

“Mac?” Bruiser played dumb. He was blond,
after all.

“Yeah, you’ve fallen harder than a kicker
trying to throw a block on a lineman.” Zach snorted beer through
his nose. After a coughing fit, he quickly wiped his nose with a
napkin. Kelsie
had
taught him a thing or two.

“I don’t
fall
for women—not Mac, not
anybody.” They knew about Mac?

The three idiots shared a private look and
burst into another fit of annoying laughter, while Brett’s pinched
expression made him look constipated.

“Yeah,” Harris said. “That’s why you’re as
shit-faced cranky as Lavender when I took away her Nordstrom’s
credit card.”

Bruiser exercised epic denial. “It’s not
about Mac. Not really.” And it wasn’t, at least not in total.

Another fit of laughter, then the idiots
grinned like a pack of hyenas after a wounded antelope. These
assholes were seriously pissing Bruiser off.

“Yeah, sure, then who’s it about?” Harris
challenged.

“Elliot.” Bruiser deflected the Mac
questions to a safer subject though just as equally troubling.
Thinking about the kid’s circumstances made Bruiser sick to his
stomach. He’d been visiting Elliot regularly. The boy’s Aunt Ruth
made no bones about how much the kid inconvenienced her and her
brood of “normal” children. All the while, she played the martyr
role to the hilt for her church friends. After all, she had taken
in this difficult orphaned child of a former sister-in-law.

Bruiser disliked the woman and her husband.
They didn’t want Elliot but appearances were everything to them.
After all, what would people think if they sent the kid back to the
foster care system? Bruiser researched a possible guardianship, but
The Joneses were adamant that his situation didn’t fit Elliot’s
needs. He grudgingly had to admit they were right to a point.

“Is Elliot the kid from the burn unit?”
Derek’s smile faded and his brows drew together. Even Tyler’s glee
over needling Bruiser turned off faster than the power in a Maple
Valley thunderstorm.

“His aunt showed up and took him home a week
ago. She’s a real bitch. Can’t even look at him she’s so horrified
by his burns. Her husband is a fat, lazy slob who sees Elliot as
his personal slave so he doesn’t have to get out of his La-Z-boy.
Elliot wants to live with me.”

Four pairs of eyes stared at him as if he’d
announced he was hanging up his cleats to take up quilting.

“Crazy, I know,” Bruiser admitted.

“I don’t think that’s crazy. You have lots
you could offer someone like him.” Of course Derek would say that.
Derek saw the best in everyone.

“Even if I tried, no one would give me a
guardianship. I’m single, gone a lot, and not in a stable home, or
so the aunt says.”

“That’s what you needed Freddie’s number
for?” Harris asked. Freddie was Harris’s take-no-prisoners attorney
sister.

“Yeah, I asked her to look into my options.”
Which hadn’t been very encouraging. The aunt and uncle hadn’t done
anything to lose custody. They fed and clothed Elliot, kept him
clean, and he showed no signs of any physical abuse. Essentially,
he had what he needed except for love, and the courts only
considered the observable elements of caring for a child.
Apparently love couldn’t be measured. Bruiser knew better.

And he had promised.

“She’ll help if anyone can. Man, I’m scared
as hell of my sister.”

“So far, the bitch aunt isn’t having any of
it. She doesn’t want the kid. I think it’s all about getting her
hands on the insurance money from the accident, which should be put
in trust for Elliot until he turns eighteen. Plus, their entire
social life revolves around their church, and they have this image
to uphold. How would it look if they relinquished this orphaned
child to a known playboy bachelor with a reputation for
partying?”

“You could solve the money concerns by
offering them some kind of stipend for their trouble.” Harris
always worked the angles on any problem.

“Yeah, if the only problem was greed, it’d
be simple. I’d donate to their church, which is as good as putting
money in their pockets since the uncle is the pastor. I’m sure
they’d like to send the kid packing, but how would they justify it
as a selfless act? Especially to such an inappropriate choice as
me? After all, and I quote, ‘my life is not stable.’”

“Marriage shows stability.” All heads turned
toward Zach.

Marriage-phobic Harris had the same
horrified expression Bruiser suspected was on his own face.

Zach shrugged. “Well, I would know.”

“You think I should get a wife just so I can
get custody of Elliot?” Bruiser rubbed his temples as his brain
beat itself against his skull, giving a new meaning to the word
headache.

“Yeah, if Elliot means that much to you.
Marriages have been made over less than that,” Zach said.

Bruiser shrugged, conceding that point.
Hell, for him love didn’t work the first time around, why should it
be a valid reason for marriage this time? Not that there’d be a
this
time
.

“I’m a great believer in marry first, and
she’ll fall in love with you later.”

Derek and Harris gaped at Zach like he’d
just suggested they join a knitting circle at the senior citizen
center.

“Ignore him; he’s a moron,” Harris snorted.
“Marriage is just a piece of paper, doesn’t mean a fucking
thing.”

Derek rolled his eyes and gave his cousin a
disgusted look. “Yeah, really? How’s that working for you? Rachel
tells me Lavender’s getting restless. You might just find an arrow
in your heart one morning or an empty bed.”

“Or both.” Zach grinned, as if the thought
conjured up some interesting possibilities. “You could try living
with a decent woman, but I’m guessing this aunt would consider that
a sin. So it’s marriage or take your chances.”

Brett, who’d been quiet during this entire
crazy conversation, finally spoke. “I could see you and Mac
together. I think you might have staying power.”

Bruiser turned to look at his friend like
he’d just proclaimed all football be a non-contact sport. “I’ve
been down the aisle once. No way am I going down that devil’s path
again, even with Mac. Especially with Mac. There has to be another
way.”