The Bromance Book Club - Lyssa Kay Adams Page 0,33

out,” Gavin growled.

“Maybe it was a test,” Yan said.

Gavin swiveled his head to stare at his teammate. “A test,” he repeated.

“Maybe she wanted to see what you would do if she told you to leave. Would you fight for her, or would you just walk away? You walked away, so . . .”

Gavin’s breakfast began to rot in his stomach.

Mack snorted. “There it is. There’s the lightbulb.”

He was too sick to his stomach to take the bait. Love isn’t enough. Was Irena right?

“Look,” Malcolm said calmly, “we never said this was going to be easy. In fact, you need to be prepared for Thea to make this as hard as possible. She’s going to resist you at every step at first.”

“She already is.”

“Which is why you’d better have done some more reading,” Del said.

He sighed. “I read some last night.”

“And?” Del prodded. “Anything stand out to you?”

Gavin glanced around the restaurant. He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Read it to us.”

“Here?”

“Unless you want to wait until Easter to save your marriage,” Yan said.

Gavin looked around again. A few people were still staring, but most of the other diners were absorbed in their own meals and conversations. Gavin dug into his coat pocket and pulled out the book. He splayed his hand wide on the cover so no one could see what it was.

Flipping to his current page, he read the paragraph he’d underlined last night. “‘More than anything, she feared that she would awaken some morning and realize her entire life had passed her by,’” he read. “‘That at some point, she had become less than. Less than w-w-what she used to imagine. Less than w-wh-what she used to hope for. Nothing more than a silent accessory to a man. Nothing more than her own mother, a passive face at a glittering table.’”

Gavin set the book down and waited for something smart-assy from Mack. Instead, he heard silence. Glancing up, he found all of them staring. “What?”

“You tell us, bro,” Del said. “Why did that stand out to you?”

Gavin felt hot. He shouldn’t have read it out loud. He should have chosen some stupid-ass, meaningless paragraph just to satisfy them. He knew exactly why it stood out to him. Because at some point during their three-year marriage, Thea had changed into her own version of less than. Gone was the carefree, impulsive woman he’d fallen in love with—the woman who would wake up at all hours of the night to paint, the woman who once kissed him so passionately in his car that they’d ended up in his back seat down a dark road, the woman who once handcuffed herself to a bulldozer to protest the removal of a century-old tree, the woman who picked fights with him just for the makeup sex.

And the worst part was, he’d been so preoccupied with his career that he hadn’t noticed the changes in her until it was too late. Until the night it happened, when it had been so long since they’d picked a meaningless fight with each other that the real one was too big to come back from. “Y’all need anything else?” The waitress appeared out of nowhere. Gavin jumped in his chair. The book fumbled in his hands and fell, cover up, in his eggs.

“Oh, I love that author,” the waitress gushed.

Gavin grabbed the book, wiped it with a napkin, and started to stammer. “Present for my w-w-wife,” he said.

The waitress raised a single eyebrow and smacked down the check. “Whatever floats your boat, honey. I won’t tell.”

She sauntered off, and Gavin dropped his elbows on the table. He dragged his fingers through his hair and stared at the cover of the book. Lord Smugness was too busy ogling Irena’s cleavage to offer advice.

But maybe he already had.

“And if I refuse to do your bidding?”

He took a deep breath and played his last card . . .

Gavin surged to his feet. Lord Boob Man wasn’t the only one with another card to play. He dropped thirty bucks on the table and shrugged on his coat.

“Dude, where are you going?” Mack said.

“To up the ante.”

“Excuse me?” Del said.

“I have some conditions of my own.”

“Hey!” Mack yelled as he stormed off. “Can I have the rest of your bacon?”

CHAPTER NINE

The street outside the girls’ school was at a dead stop in a pre-holiday traffic jam. Even with the extra twenty minutes Thea had built in for just that reason, she was still barely on time when she finally found