DIDN’T QUITE SEEM the same to Gia. December was supposed to be about ice skating at Rockefeller and watching the tree being lit while her mother complained about the crowds and her father pretended to hate following after them as they shopped. Mostly, her parents would spend their annual Christmas shopping trips with Gia telling her all about how the people she’d gone to high school with, or her younger— much younger— cousins had all gone off an gotten married or had babies. They never asked her when she’d get around to it, not directly. But her mother made sighing and acting morose about Gia being childless an art form.
She couldn’t do it this year. The decision came to her when her mother informed her that Aunt Angelica from Sicily would be coming in to stay with them through the new year.
“I know she’s not your favorite,” her mother had tried, stopping her excuses when Gia laughed.
“Mama, the woman started telling me I’d die an old maid when I was eighteen. Eighteen! It’s only gotten worse in the past twenty years.”
“She’s an old woman, set in her ways. Besides, you’ve accomplished so many things, dolcezza.” Gia’s mother could complain about her being without a family of her own, but she’d always promised to be proud of how hard her daughter had worked. Coming from a family of football fanatics helped sometimes.
“My career will mean nothing to Angelica and you know it, Mama. You have your visit. Enjoy her company. I’ll come to see you after she leaves.”
It had been a decision she didn’t regret. Not even when she heard familiar voices—her players’ voices, and Kai’s, all moving up and down her hallway, ambling into his apartment as he hosted a Christmas party to celebrate his daughter being in the city for a visit. Gia had only discovered that much info from Cat when she called her friend and hard-working assistant to invite her to Destin for the weekend.
“You should go to the party,” Cat had encouraged Gia. “Just say hi or bring over a bottle of wine to wish them all a happy holiday.”
“I wasn’t invited.” That had hurt more than Gia thought it would, but she didn’t think Kai would ever want her back in his place again. Not after their fight. Not after he’d discovered the Polaroids. They’d been cool to each other for weeks, and as the season progressed and everyone buckled down to play hard and work harder, Gia tried putting Kai out of her thoughts. She tried to tell herself she didn’t miss talking to him or doing more than nod at him in team meetings and in the lobby when they walked past each other.
But sometimes, she hated to admit it, she missed his obnoxious flirting. She missed calling him junior just to get a rise out of him. She didn’t miss him calling her granny to earn a glare. Kai worked hard on the field. He worked harder off of it and Gia assumed he’d moved on from whatever small infatuation he might have had for her. It seemed that way. He hadn’t bothered with a party invite or even a “Merry Christmas” at the team party the weekend before.
“It’s a five-minute wave through his place,” Cat had encouraged her. “Say hello to his kid. Greet Reese and Glenn. We’re heading into Wild Card. We’re probably going into the playoffs. Tell your team how proud you are of them and then you can disappear.”
But she hadn’t done any of those things. She didn’t want her players reminded of the hard work they still had to do to get to the playoffs. If she was honest, she didn’t want to give Kai the chance to kick her out of his home.
True, Reese would be there and she and Gia had managed to patch things up after their argument provoked by the bomb drop of the placekicker’s relationship with Ryder.
It had taken weeks for her temper to die down. It had taken even longer for Gia to not feel betrayed about being lied to. But, eventually, she had Reese’s back. They became friendly again, but Gia watched how closely her placekicker and her QB interacted. The past was the past and she hoped they’d kept themselves there.
So even if Reese had been at Kai’s party, Gia wouldn’t go. They were friendly again, not quite friends yet. So, Gia told Cat to enjoy her granny’s oyster dressing that her assistant swore she couldn’t miss, no matter