Page 205 of Branded
She wasn’t just the GM’s wife and lawyer for the team, she was also well-known for her yearly gardening challenges with the team.
They involved her hubby’s big, bad hockey players keeping a plant alive for the season.
The most successful one received a prize.
Which was considered a prize only in the loosest sense of the word. The winner—chosen by Lexi, who looked at each of the plants’ growth and health (and truthfully, for some, that meant sadly dumping the pot’s contents into the compost bin)—received a Fuggler.
Some combination of cute and ugly—but mostly ugly—it was fuzzy blue, wore tighty whities, and had maniacal eyes and life-sized plastic human teeth.
I’d seen it on Marcel’s shelf one time, and that was enough to imprint the frightening image on my mind.
Forever.
“How do you do in the plant competitions?”
He nodded to the corner of his counter…and I laughed at the stringy and slightly dry-looking flower shoved to the side.
“Not a winner this year.”
Thank God I wouldn’t be coming across Mac, the Fuggler, in his house.
“Wasn’t feeling like doing much except focusing on the bad shit and making myself feel miserable.”
And shit, now I felt guilty.
I stilled. “Raph,” I murmured.
His fingers drifted across my cheek. “Took me a while to stop feeling sorry for myself.”
“Monica was?—”
“It wasn’t her, honey. Like I said, or not all her anyway. It was me, too. Losing faith in myself, hating that I hadn’t seen her for what she was.”
My heart squeezed tight. “Raph,” I whispered again. “I think it’s normal to feel that way. It was a big lie and the death of a future you’d imagined.”
“Yeah.” A breath then a deliberate change in subject. “Want to see the rest of the house?”
He’d given me space in the car. He’d noticed that my pain lay deeper than what I wanted to share, but he hadn’t pushed, hadn’t prodded at the weak spot. He’d given me space, allowed me to regroup.
So, I gave him that change, that space, that time to regroup and come to terms.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I do.”
A step back, his hand taking mine.
And then he led me into a large great room with cozy furniture, a huge TV, and shelves filled with gaming systems. I’d been around enough, had spent enough time at Oliver and Hazel’s and Marcel and Pru’s places to see how the boys could be with their video games (hell, they’d nearly had a brawl during a round-robin Fruit Ninja competition one night over pizza, beer, and margaritas), so Raph having a full setup didn’t surprise me either.
It did make me smile, just like the furniture—nice and expensive, but not fancy, definitely sturdy enough to hold a bevy of hockey players—made my heart warm.
This was a home.
A place for friends and family to be at home.
He led me on, through bathrooms that were the height of luxury, a master bedroom twice the size of mine, a huge gym with a treadmill, a Peloton, and lots of free weights. He walked me through an office with full bookshelves and bright windows and a big desk that I could imagine Raph sitting behind.
All of it was beautiful and positively sumptuous.
But it wasn’t stuffy.
