“It was ugly,” Cole said, closing his eyes, remembering some of the horrible things he’d said that night. “All he was doing was trying to get me straightened out, to make me see how my attitude was screwing up my future. I’d blown my chances for a baseball scholarship in a three-minute exchange with my coach.”

“Junior year? Just like that?” Sierra asked.

“I might’ve been able to recoup senior year. Coach told my dad he’d take me back if I got my act together.” He shook his head, his jaw rigid, regret so deep he could feel it in his marrow. “I told my dad what he and Coach could do with it—” His voice cracked with emotion and he backed off the story.

“And then the next day…” Sierra set her food and the ice pack aside and awkwardly moved to his end of the couch, putting all her weight on her good leg in the process, her injured foot resting on the floor.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” he said, glad to have something to break up his memories.

“I’m fine.” She sat at his side, only a couple of inches between their legs, shoulders touching. “I can only imagine what hearing about your dad’s accident did to you.”

Grief rolled through him, heavy and slow, like some kind of insidious mercury spill poisoning him cell by cell. He couldn’t have spoken at that moment if he had to.

Sierra apparently understood that. She rested her head on his shoulder, and he closed his eyes, breathed in the feminine scent of her shampoo and soap, putting all his attention on identifying the vaguely familiar aroma. Vanilla, he thought, with hints of something sweet and fruity. Citrus or orange. There was another note of something in there but he couldn’t figure it out, quit trying, just kept inhaling, letting it, letting her level him out.

After some time had passed, a couple of minutes, maybe more, Sierra shifted her arm, laid her hand over his, and wove their fingers together. Their interlocked hands rested on his thigh, and the sight of them together—his large hand covered by her small one, his skin rougher and a darker suntanned hue than hers—afforded him another distraction from the ugly stuff in his head and his heart. Until she spoke again.

“How does working construction fit into all of this?”

He scoffed at himself. “It was expected, mostly unspoken but expected, that we’d all eventually work for the family business. It’d grown into multiple locations plus a corporate office, had expanded into a full spectrum of sports gear and supplies, not just baseball. Mason was already out of college and moving up at corporate. Gabe was about to graduate and join him. I was supposed to follow in their tracks.”

She angled her head to look up at him from the side. “No?” she guessed.