Page 28 of Game On

“Ohmigod! Can you imagine?” Carly laughed as she stirred cream and sugar into her mug. “Julianne would hunt him down and castrate him if he had!”

Shane chuckled as he took a sip of his coffee.

“How’d you and Julianne meet anyway?” he asked.

“Boarding school,” she said wistfully. “Molly likes to think it was a scene out of The Parent Trap, but nothing could be further from the truth. The headmistress put us together because we had both lived mostly in Europe—Julianne’s father is an ambassador—and we’d both recently lost our mothers. Aside from that, though, we had nothing in common. She is artistic—which is a polite way of saying she’s a bit of a slob to share a room with. And she was the ultimate party girl in school. She knew everyone on campus and they all loved her. I, on the other hand, just wanted to bury my nose in a book and have everyone ignore me. I’d been homeschooled by my mom as we traveled around for her work, and boarding school was my first real exposure to the whole school experience.” Carly took a sip of her coffee, her mind drifting back through the years.

“Julianne is a force of nature,” she said with a grin. “She wasn’t going to let me hide out in our dorm room. The other girls weren’t as friendly, really cliquey. I was kind of the odd girl out with a very different life experience. The other girls weren’t quite sure what to do with me and I didn’t really have the social skills to stand up for myself. Julianne took me under her wing. I think I was her first pet project. She didn’t care about what the other girls said about it. That’s when I realized that Julianne was her own person and always would be. I’ve been devoted to her ever since.”

“Your friend was speaking Italian in Cabo. One of the bartenders at the resort claimed she was from a mob family. Was he telling the truth?” he asked.

“No,” she laughed. “Her brother is a U.S. senator! I think Julianne secretly wished she was a Mafia princess. Her way of dealing with her mother’s death was to create a whole fantasy life. It’s what makes her such a fabulous designer today.”

Carly looked up from her coffee at Shane. His eyes were dark and contemplative. She almost asked him how he had dealt with his own mother’s death, but given his track record of avoiding all conversations involving his family, she decided against it.

“It helped that we both bonded against our evil stepmothers. Her father remarried a twenty-seven-year-old flight attendant from Brazil. She’s only a year younger than Julianne’s brother. Can you imagine?” she asked.

“Is she hot?” Shane asked, a lopsided grin on his face. Carly rolled her eyes at him.

“Of course!” she laughed. “Why else would we hate her?”

“Hugh and your stepmother aren’t hard to hate either,” he said. His face had hardened again.

“Yeah, well, you can’t really blame them.” It had become second nature to Carly to defend them. “They weren’t exactly looking for another kid. They’ve mostly let me be.”

Shane shook his head and huffed.

“What about your dad?” she asked in an attempt to change the subject. “Do you see him much?”

He stiffened in the chair. When he raised his eyes to her, they were black as night. Too late, she realized that her attempt to change the subject had only increased Shane’s ire.

“No,” he said. Draining his coffee, he set the mug down on the counter with a thump. “He’s not a part of my life and I’m not a part of his.”

“Why?” She regretted asking as soon as the word left her mouth. This wasn’t a safe topic. She could feel it.

Abruptly standing, he paced a circle around her small living room, running his hands through his hair as he walked. When he turned to her, his face was taut with strain. He seemed to be debating something with himself. But then he spoke, his voice soft but lethal.

“The other day, you asked me if I had a problem with my dad.”

It was a statement, but Carly heard the question implied within. She tried to swallow, her mouth becoming suddenly dry, not sure whether she should let this conversation continue. Her curiosity got the better of her though and she nodded.

Shane let out a brief snort. “The Bruce Devlin the media portrays is a fake. The real-life version is a rotten SOB who abandoned his family when they needed him the most.” He paused to run another hand through his hair. When he spoke again, his eyes looked everywhere but at her. “My dad tried to escape the only career option open to him. He didn’t want to spend his life as a coal miner. So he worked hard at the one thing he knew. He threw a ball.”

Carly’s body tensed as Shane spoke. She knew he and his father weren’t close, but the vehemence in his voice was a bit startling. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know the reasons Shane obviously hated his father.

“I’m not sure how,” he continued. “Luck, I guess, but he got a scholarship at a small university. It was an hour away from where he grew up, but to him it may as well have been a continent away. He was the big man on campus from the day he arrived. The dean of the school worked the media like a Madison Avenue professional to get attention for my father and the school. If they only knew what he would turn into.”

Carly stifled a shiver at the force of his words. She was familiar with Bruce Devlin’s story, having read the synopsis of the elder Devlin’s bestselling biography when the team was considering signing Shane. Clasping her hands in her lap and waiting for rest of the story to unfold, she knew Shane’s version of events would differ from the book.

Shane’s voice was a flat monotone as he continued. “When my dad knocked up a local townie, the dean was the one holding the shotgun at the wedding. My dad had enough sense to do what was asked. He knew football was his only means of escaping the life of all the Devlins before him.”

As he began to pace again, Carly’s hands gripped the seat of the bar stool.

“He married my mother, but that was it. They were like two kids playing house when I was born. He won the Heisman, got drafted in the top three picks, and promptly set my mom and me up in a house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I’m not even sure he ever lived with us. He showed up for photo spreads and Christmas card pictures, but not much else. He was just going through the motions with us.”

Shane looked at her then. She opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it. Her heart ached for the little boy Shane had been. It was a childhood she could easily relate to.

“Yeah, I know what you are thinking,” he said, his tone clipped and bitter. “He was just a kid. But so was I. So was my mother.” His voice softened as he spoke of her. “She was great. She took me everywhere. She did everything with me. When I started school, I think it broke her heart to have me gone all day. Of course, this was around the time my dad blew out his shoulder. Instead of coming home, he began the drinking and the drugs. My mother got sick when I was in the second grade. She suffered through two years of chemo while my father boozed and snorted his way around the country feeling sorry for himself. He showed up a couple of weeks before she died.”

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