it?”
That his wife was blonde, crazy, insecure, and camera-happy? Zoe would eat that gossip with a spoon. “How so?”
“That my ex was everything you’re not.”
His ex had a name. Nina Martinez. And she might have been blonde and crazy, but she was also drop-dead gorgeous. “See?” she said with false brightness. “A breakthrough already. Life coaching works.”
The waitress sidled up to the table with steaming platters, the delectable smoky tang of corned beef wafting along with her. As the woman set Jocelyn’s plate down, she glanced at her. And then did a double take.
Instantly, Jocelyn cast down her eyes, staring at the plate, but the grill marks on the sandwich swam in front of her eyes. Shit. Shit.
“Do I know you?” the waitress asked, forcing Jocelyn to look up and meet an unrelenting frown, the face of a woman digging through recent memory and about to come up with celebrity gossip.
“We used to be regulars here,” Will said quickly. “And that’s all we need, thanks.”
“Ohhh.” She drew out the word and looked from one to the other, but settled her attention on Jocelyn. “Well, I just started here, so, that’s not it.”
“Thank you.” Jocelyn said sharply, picking up her fork and knife despite the fact that she wouldn’t use either one on this meal.
The waitress got the message and left.
“Eesh,” Jocelyn said on a sigh. “How long will I have to hide like this?”
“Until you tell the truth.”
Which would be never. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand you’re protecting a person who has no compunction about throwing you under a bus.”
She set the silverware back down, lining it up perfectly, gathering a lot of possible responses and discarding most. “We all do what we feel is right regardless of what other people think.”
“More life-coach bullshit,” he said, picking up his sandwich and making it look petite in his giant hands.
“Is it?” she fired back. “I’m doing what I feel is right even though you don’t agree with it just like you’re doing what you think is right with my father even though I don’t agree with it. How are the two things so different?”
He just shook his head and took a bite. After he swallowed, he said, “There was one other thing about my ex-wife that’s different from you.”
Jealousy made a quick sting at her heart. “What’s that?”
“She’d have never let the issue of another woman drop. Don’t you want to know more about my marriage?”
She knew enough, actually. “Of course. How did you meet? How long were you married? Why did it end?”
He looked up just before taking his next bite. “Not ‘Was she pretty’? That’s what most girls want to know.”
Except this girl already knew his wife was on the cover of Fitness magazine once. “Last I looked, I was a woman, not a girl.”
“Sorry.” He looked at her and smiled, slow and bad and good all at the same time. The kind of smile that made Jocelyn’s whole insides rise and flutter and sigh. “You are a woman. A beautiful one.”
And flutter again.
She picked up a fry and nibbled the end. “We were talking about your wife.”
“Ex.”
“Semantics.”
“Incredibly important semantics.” He took a slow, careful bite, wiping his mouth with a napkin, drawing out the silence for a few seconds. “Well, let’s see. We met at the baseball field, we were married for three seasons, and it ended when it became painfully clear I wasn’t headed to the majors or a career in any kind of limelight, which was all that mattered to her.”
She smiled. “Most people count their anniversaries in years, not seasons.”
“She was my manager’s niece,” he said with a shrug, searching out his own fry. “It was definitely a baseball-centric marriage.”
“She was Latina, right?”
He whipped his head up at the question. “How do you know that?”
Damn it all. Why had she revealed that? “I saw something in the paper.”
“In Los Angeles?” Obviously, he didn’t believe her. “Sorry, but I didn’t make any papers outside of Florida.” He pointed a ketchupy fry at her, unable to hid the happiness that had just hit him. “You Googled me.”
She felt her cheeks warm, ate instead of answering.
But he laughed, a satisfied, bone-deep laugh. “You did. When? Recently? Yesterday? After you saw me last year?”
“A couple of years ago. And, really, this is supposed to be your life-coaching session, not mine.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up and I do.”
“I meant why did you Google me?”
She blinked, hovering between the truth and a lie. She