Crown's Chance at Love (11 page)

“What’s wrong with my hair?” I ask. After Mike had left I had thrown it up into a messy bun.

“You should fix it. It looks better down,” he says frowning shaking his head. He walks over to the living room and starts putting on his shoes. I roll my eyes at him and glance at myself in a mirror in the hallway. Okay so maybe my hair is a little crazy looking, so I throw it down and run my fingers through it. It’s a little wavy, but doesn’t look horrible.

“Better?” I ask him and he smiles, then rolls his eyes.

“Yeah mom,” he says smirking in a way that reminds me of Sean.
God he looked so much like his dad
, my heart tightened a little as I watched him throw on his baseball hat and we head to my car in the garage as I smile and shake my head thinking
damn pre-teens
.

I drive us to our usually frozen yogurt place, even though I suggested we try out a new place, all three of them had complained and said they wanted to go to Tutti Frutti off of Colorado Blvd. I park us a little bit away so that we can walk off some of the frozen yogurt after we eat. As we approach the little shop painted in bright neon colors, I see a familiar face sitting on one of the bistro tables in the front of the frozen yogurt shop. My heart beat picks up it’s pace as butterflies start to flutter in my stomach.

“Hey,” I say as I look up at Mike, completely surprised he’s here.

“Mark mentioned you guys come here, and I finished my umm calls early,” he says quickly. He looked a little nervous. His pale blues first on me then looking at the kids.

“Really?”I ask softly, noticing the kids are standing quietly next to me grinning like little chimps. I bite the inside of my lip trying to hold my smile. The kids had set me up.

“Your calls, umm they weren’t too complicated?” I ask, but he knows what I am asking, I know he does because his eyes soften and he shakes his head.

“No. There a couple of things, but I think I can work around all of it,” he says smiling. He looks over at Mark taking out his wallet, and hands him a twenty.

“Hey Ace, why don’t you go in and help your brother and sister get their frozen yogurt and pay for the three of you. Your mom and I will be in there, give us a minute?” he asks and Marks smiles looking at me and I frown. Now it made sense why he wanted me to fix my hair.

“Sure Mike. Come on guys, let’s go.” I watch them go inside, Mark holding Chris’s hand as Penny stands next to Chris.

“Hey,” he says looking at me. His face looks a little worried, “Want to sit with me?”

“Mike…” I start to say and he grabs for my hand, lacing his fingers with mine and damn it if I don’t really like how his hand feels in mine. Safe. The only word in my mind is safe. Protected. something about that, makes me swallow hard,
how long had it been since I had felt that way?

“I don’t want an out,” he states confidently, but there is something in his pale baby blue eyes that makes me wary.

“Why do I feel like there is a ‘but’ in what you are going to say?” I ask.

“Because there is. Look I don’t want you to give me an out. I want to get to know you and you get to know me. But I don’t know where this will go. I’m the VP, but I’m single and I am usually the one they send off out of town at the drop of a hat. I’m almost forty and I told you I’ve been in a relationship for a decade, but honestly babe we were like friends, She didn’t need me around. Once we hadn’t seen each other in six months and neither of us had even noticed. I don’t know why that didn’t throw a red flag at us but it didn’t. Thinking about it now that should have been like a huge neon light telling me we weren’t meant to be together.”

“You guys had just grown accustom to each other. It happens.”

“Did it happen to you and Sean?” he asks softly and his eyes are warm and sweet, almost genuinely seeking an answer, and hearing Sean’s name on his lips doesn’t feel weird.

“Sometimes, maybe not six months or anything drastic, but yeah,” I answer honestly. I remember times that life got overwhelmingly busy and how easy it was to feel disconnected from one another at those times; how we always made it a point to talk to one another when we started to feel disconnected.

“So you think maybe we could try this out… I mean get to know each other, see where this thing goes?” he asks and I look inside the shop, watching the kids staring over at us, each of them with their own cup of frozen yogurt.

“You are sure you want to give this a chance? I mean, you know how busy I am, not just work wise, but family wise…” I start to ramble. Why am I pointing out reasons for him to say no? Why am I pushing him away?

“Sabrina. I get it. It’s a different situation than I am used to, but I want to get to know you,” he says his eyes clear and honest.

“Okay,” I say seriously. His face softens and we both smile. The earlier awkwardness disappearing as the familiarity we had started grew between us again..

“Okay,” he says as he takes a step closer to me, his warm fingers in mine. He leans in and kisses my forehead, his goatee lightly tickling my skin, but its his lips on my skin that make it feel as if I am somehow holding my breath, “Let’s go get some FroYo.”

“Okay,” I say grinning like an idiot walking into the shop with him.

Sabrina

Sitting at my desk, drinking my warm cup of coffee, I knew I was daydreaming, but I couldn’t help it. With a silly little grin on my face, I couldn’t shake all the thoughts in my head. I felt like a teenager with a crush. Trying to focus on the wedding invitations in front of me I dive into work, a discipline that impressed most. I hadn’t even realized it was almost three until my stomach growled at me. I had accidently worked through lunch without thinking. Picking up my huge bag I dug into it, taking out my phone and a granola bar. It was too late to go out and grab lunch. I had left my phone on silent and that was why I hadn’t been disturbed as I worked. Looking at my phone reading I had seven missed calls and eight text messages to return.

I returned calls pertaining to work first, then calls to make sure the kids were all at Emmi’s house, letting them know I would pick them up on my way home from work. I wasn’t sure what I would do without Emmi.

My office phone starts to ring and I leaned over to grab the headset.

“Ritz Events, Sabrina speaking how can I help you?”

“Hey,” a deep voice chimes and I smile, somehow breathing easier as I hear Nick’s voice.

“Hey stranger. I thought you forgot about us little people,” I say to him leaning back into my comfy office chair, extremely glad that the power-tool wielding construction guys fixing up our new offices have the day off.

“Shut up, “ His deep voice chuckling makes me smile. “I’m in Hong Kong closing a new deal on some new software. Miss me?” he asks and I smile shaking my head.

“You know I miss you. Kids were asking about you yesterday.”

“How did Mark’s game go?” he asks. I love my best friend. Even being half a world away doesn’t stop him from thinking or worrying about us. He is such a great guy.

“They won. He hit a double and a single and made two runs,” I share proudly. “ I’ll send you the video in an email.”

“Good. Tell him I will try to call him tomorrow,” he says sounding tired. “This time difference is killer.”

“I bet. So what’s new? Did you take your secretary with you?” I joke, because both Emmi and I think his secretary, Trish,  has the hots for him, but he is completely oblivious to it.

“Don’t start. Trish is my assistant, that’s it. Trust me, a girl like that doesn’t need a guy like me,” he says sounding a bit annoyed and I smile thinking
he doth protest too much.
He snaps me out of my matchmaking scheming thoughts when he continues, “Oh hey so, a friend of mine emailed me, he lives in LA and wanted to see if I knew any single, beautiful women I could set him up with. I was wondering…” I groan.

This is classic Nick. Trying to set me up on these horrible blind dates. It isn’t necessarily the fact that they were terrible men that he set me up with, it’s the fact that I bring a lot to the table and the men he sets me up with weren’t the types of men looking to date single moms.

“Nick!” I groan.

“What? he is a great guy… single, never married, loaded,” he starts to say but I just spit out what I have been wanting to tell him since I had met Mike.

“I met someone,” I blurt out.

Nick and I have a wonderful friendship. We have shared every bad and good thing in our lives since we were kids. He has been my constant. My rock. Especially with everything that had happened with Sean. I remember how he had made sure to drag me out of bed every morning the first month after the funeral to make sure the kids saw that I was okay, and then he would let me hide in my room until thirty minutes before they were home from school so that they never had to see their mom fall apart and broken. He had driven my U-Haul filled with everything we owned, without having to ask him to, when we had moved from Berkeley to Pasadena. He had been there for the kids in countless ways from: Penny’s dance recitals, to Mark’s baseball games to even Chris’ first day of kindergarten. Because of all of these reasons, and because of the thing that happened between us that we don’t ever talk about, I was worried as to how I would tell him. But me being me, when I am nervous, I tended to blurt things out instead of thinking out how to say them.

“You met someone?” he repeats slowly. I can hear him breathing, I can almost picture him stewing.

“Yeah Nick. I did.” After a bit of silence he finally speaks.

“When? How? Was it Dan’s co-worker Emmi said she was going to set you up with?” he asked.

“No. Last week I was walking into Starbucks, you know the one right by my office? Well I was searching for my phone not paying attention, because the stupid thing feel to the bottom of my bag…”

“I’ve told you before, you need to clean that thing up, or at least try and be a little more organized, or maybe get a new bag…” he chimes in. He is always on my case about my bag.

“I know I know, and no I am not buying a new bag, I love that bag…”

“Pick a designer bag, I’ll order it online…”

This was typical Nick. He was always worried about us. He always wanted to give us things. He knews I made good money, but he also knew that the kids are smart and I was setting up college funds for them. He knew all of this because Nick being Nick, helped me set them up. He is a really great friend. He was family to me.

“Nick! Focus!  Anyhow, I wasn’t looking and I walked right into him, like hard, and he held me so I wouldn’t fall back, and next thing I know he bought me coffee and we sat and in talking we found out that I put in a bid for a couple of the charity events his company hosts every year.”

I know I am rambling, and so help me I can’t stop rambling and Nick knows this about me and knows how to stop me, yet he doesn’t.

He stays quiet and lets me talk. I spill everything, from how we’d had lunch all last week to what happened yesterday when Mike came over, made meatballs met the kids and I had essentially kicked him out, to him finding us at Tutti Frutti for Frozen Yogurt.

“So what happened after you guys had frozen yogurt?” he asks, his tone serious and damn it if that doesn’t make a pit in my stomach.

“He came over, we watched the
Avengers
with the kids and then he left,” I say, trying not to smile. Nick would know I was smiling and figure out I was keeping something out.

What I didn’t tell Nick was that when I walked Mike to his car, he had pulled me up close to him, one hand around my waist, the other in my hair and had pulled me into him. Then Mike gave me one of the sweetest, hottest first kisses I had ever experienced in my thirty-six years of life.

I close my eyes and can almost smell his cologne, feel his hard chest against mine, his hands gentle and rough all at the same time, and oh my-my his mouth! His mouth had been hot and tasted so wonderful, like a little bit of the sweet chocolate from his frozen yogurt and salty from the popcorn. The way he kissed was beautiful. Confident. Dominating. Powerful. I accidently sigh at the thought of it.

“You like him,” he says.

“Yeah I do. He is a really good guy Nick. I want you to meet him. I mean if I am even talking to him still next time you are out here.”