Page 106 of Risky Game

For the first time ever, she flinched at my touch.

I held on tighter so she couldn’t run away.

“I haven’t meant to hurt you, and I’m sorry. Please, stay the weekend. I’ll talk to my parents. I’ll explain—”

My phone went off with Vanessa’s ringtone. I tried to ignore it, but Ruby stepped out of my hold and went back to packing.

“Take the call. It’s probably important.”

“You’re important.” There was a hitch in her movements. A moment where I thought she’d calm down and give me a damn moment, or a conversation to talk this through.

“And it’s the middle of the night wherever she is. Take the call.”

The ringer stopped. Good. This was… it started again and I sighed.

“Don’t go. Please don’t leave until we can talk,” I told her, pulling out my phone. Because she was right.

Vanessa wouldn’t call me unless it was important.

“Hey, Vanessa.” I answered her FaceTime call and immediately saw tears falling down her cheeks. Her cries filled the room loud enough that Ruby stopped her packing.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

And why was she calling me?

She cried into the phone. “Oh, Logan. I broke up with Renaldo and I think I made a huge mistake.”

“What?”

“I need to talk. You have time, right? Your game is done?”

It’d been two years since she’d even asked about my game. “Yeah. Hold on a minute, though, okay?”

She nodded through her tears, and I glanced at Ruby.

She too had tears in her eyes.

Awesome. I was killing life with the women in it. “I’ll be back,” I mouthed to Ruby.

She glanced at the phone, face paling, and shrugged.

As soon as I was downstairs in my office with the door closed, I unmuted the screen. “What happened? But also, remember I don’t want to hear anything about you and Renaldo.”

“It was dumb of me to come. Dumb of me to leave. I knew it. But after you left, I was so upset, and Renaldo swept in and made me feel so good, but he’s a jerk, Logan. An absolute jerk and he doesn’t even want me to be with Amelia at all when I come back. He said today he didn’t like kids. Never wanted them. Asked if I had to keep her, and I can’t keep being so far away from her, and…”

She kept going. My head kept spinning.

Upstairs, the woman I was falling in love with was packing to leave.

And the woman who left me, who I’d once loved with my whole heart, was… What? Why did I need to know any of this? Unless…

“Vanessa. Hey, calm down. Take a breath.” She was still rattling off about missing Amelia and coming back, still crying. I could hardly understand her.

“Vanessa,” I called her name again with more bite to it.

She paused then, sniffed, and grabbed a tissue to blow her nose.

“What? You think it would be good, right? To have me close to Amelia again? That would be best for her, right?”

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