Sure Shot Read online

  Sure Shot

  Sarina Bowen

  Tuxbury Publishing LLC

  Get the Bonus Content!

  Don’t miss the Brooklyn Bruisers extras! There’s a deleted scene, two bonus epilogues and a short story. Grab your copy right here.

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarina Bowen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover photo by Wander Aguiar, cover design by Hang Le. Editing by Edie’s Edits.

  Contents

  1. Cinderella Gets into a Limousine

  2. In the Backyard of a Billionaire

  3. Creamed Spinach and a Proposition

  4. People Will Write Anything on the Internet

  5. Cinderella Makes a Bad Decision

  6. The Cave Man in Action

  7. Employee of the Month

  8. Remember Me?

  9. But You’re a Woman

  10. 99.9% Identical

  11. That Really is the TV

  12. Big Hunk of Kryptonite

  13. Your Number One Fan

  14. Everyone but Aunt Gertie

  15. What the Girl Wants

  16. That’s a Lot of Muscle

  17. We Tried

  18. They Don’t Call Him the Tank for Nothing

  19. From: The Puckraker’s Blog

  20. A Day Late and a Dollar Short

  21. Who’s with Me?

  22. Bad Juju

  23. That’s Not an Ax

  24. I Want Tex-Mex

  25. The Trouble with Grumpy Defensemen

  26. Woo Woo Shit

  27. Normal is a Stretch

  28. No Picket Fences

  29. What If

  30. Big Ideas

  31. Queso is Magic

  32. Another Epiphany

  33. Room 412

  34. I Did Not Get Out of Bed

  35. Glass Slippers and Everything

  36. Everybody Likes Sweet Potatoes

  37. Plant Killer

  Also by Sarina Bowen

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Cinderella Gets into a Limousine

  Bess

  September

  When the black limousine slides to a stop in front of me, I feel a familiar tension right behind my breastbone.

  Limos always have this effect on me. The same thing happens in expensive hotels and fine restaurants. For a moment, I feel like there’s been some mistake—that this girl from the wrong side of Detroit doesn’t belong here.

  When the driver’s side door opens, I half expect one of Cinderella’s footmen to get out. But it’s only Duff, my friends’ bodyguard. “Hey, Bess! How are you?”

  “Great, Duff. I can open doors by myself, though.”

  “Just doin’ my job,” he says, halfway around the hood of the car already. He unlocks the door with a key fob and then opens it with a flourish. “Happy Friday.”

  “You too. Thanks for picking me up,” I say as I duck into the back of the sleek car.

  “It’s our pleasure,” my friend Alexandra says, waving to me from one of the two long leather seats. Her ten-month-old daughter is beside her, strapped into a car seat. When Rosie sees me, she babbles a greeting and stretches out her short little arms to me.

  “Hi, gorgeous!” I coo, seating myself directly in front of her. “How are you both?”

  “We’re great,” Alex says. “Except one of us is teething. Watch that pretty dress if you hold her at the party.”

  “Oh, what’s a little drool between friends?” I glance down at my sundress and wonder if I should have worn jeans. The party is in a backyard. A billionaire’s backyard. I never get dolled up, but my sister-in-law talked me into buying this dress, and it would be a crime to just abandon it in my closet.

  Alex is wearing a beautiful outfit, too—a flowing skirt and a stylish matching top. She always looks like a billion bucks. That’s because she has a billion bucks. If we carry this Cinderella metaphor a little further, Alex is the princess who’s used to finery, and I’m the villager who spent her childhood in rags before traveling the kingdom to find her own fortune among the knights and thieves.

  The baby makes a little noise of complaint, so I take Rosie’s small hand in mine, and rub my thumb over her chubby wrist.

  Honestly, I’m far more envious of Alex’s baby than I am of her Mercedes. I need to snuggle this baby. Although it’s rude to unclip a child from her lifesaving car seat just to fulfill one’s own hormonally driven baby-snuggling needs. So I have to be content with holding her hand and staring deep into her brown eyes.

  “Tell me everything,” Alex says. “How was your vacation? How was Vermont? Did you really spend ten days offline?”

  “I totally did. It was about as weird as you’d expect.”

  “Did you experience any withdrawal symptoms?” Alex wrings her hands.

  I narrow my eyes at her. “You know I only gave up my phone, right? I wasn’t secretly at rehab.”

  She laughs. “I know. But going ten days without my phone would be a real challenge. I don’t like what it says about me. As if the world would stop turning if I’m out of reach for a few days.”

  “Right? I felt ridiculous every time I reached for my phone, and it wasn’t there.”

  Then again, Alex runs a billion-dollar tech corporation with over a thousand employees. People depend on her. I run a company with exactly two employees—myself, plus Alex’s boyfriend Eric Bayer—but it feels like more, because my thirty-five clients are accustomed to calling day and night.

  That’s why Eric challenged me to unplug for a whole week’s vacation. “You hired me so that you could get away from your job sometimes,” he’d said. “What are you waiting for?”

  He was right. So I scheduled my vacation and left my phone behind.

  Across from me, the baby babbles loudly, and I don’t need a translator to know what she’s saying. Please take me out of this infernal five-point harness. And when I make no moves to free her, she starts to complain.

  “Just a few more blocks,” Alex says, stroking the wispy hairs on her daughter’s head. “Then we’ll see Daddy, and you can crawl around on the grass.”

  “Speaking of Daddy,” I say. “Where the heck are Eric and Dave?”

  “Eric and your brother finished up early and headed over to the party. They’re meeting us there.”

  “Okay.” I hesitate. “So you don’t, um, have my phone, right?”

  “Nope!” Alex says cheerfully. “You’ll have to wait five more minutes to get your baby back. Eric left this for you, though.” She reaches into her laptop bag and pulls out a big manila envelope. FOR BESS, it reads. These are the big emergency items from your week away. Do not open this until after the party! No cheating! We have a deal.

  When I squeeze the envelope, I realize it’s awfully thick. I lay it down on the seat beside me while the limo inches forward in traffic.

  I last at least ten seconds before I grab it off the seat and slip my finger under the flap, tearing it open.

  “Uh-oh,” Alex says. “I thought you weren’t supposed to—”

  “Shh!” I hiss. “Don’t rat me out, okay? Girl code.” I pull the pages out of the envelope. The top one says. GOT YOU! And when I flip to the one beneath, it reads, THERE WEREN’T ANY EMERGENCIES. And the one beneath that says, NOW YOU OWE ME A SUSHI LUNCH.

  “Goddamn it!” I squeak. “Your man is such a jerk!”

  “What did he… Oh my God.” Alex covers her mouth and laughs. “I’m sorry. That is so rude.”

  “This is entrapment,” I sputter. “This would ne
ver stand up in court.”

  “Oh, Bess,” Alex says. “How did you not see that coming?”

  I drop the envelope onto the leather seat in disgust. “That’s just mean. I didn’t even cheat on this vacation. I didn’t look at my email, or even at the hockey news.”

  For the first time since I’d started my own business six years ago, I’d left it all behind for ten days in Vermont with my brother and sister-in-law. It was time for me to make some changes in my life, and the vacation had been a first symbolic step.

  Alex grabs the envelope and shoves it back in her bag. Then she pulls out her phone. “I’m texting him to tell him that we’re almost there. And also—as referee—that I consider this an illegal maneuver.”

  “So illegal.” I pout.

  She tucks the phone away and smiles at me. “Don’t be mad at Eric. He’s on your side.”

  “I know,” I admit. “And you can take the boy out of the locker room, but you can’t take the locker room out of the boy.” Pranking people is a basic life skill in professional sports.

  “Eric will have to make it up to you. Ask him for something fancy for your birthday. Are you doing anything special tomorrow?”

  My birthday. The big 3-0. Honestly, I’m trying not to dwell on it. “My brother is taking me out for dinner. And then he’ll head back to Vermont the following day.”

  “Make Dave take you to a musical,” Alex suggests. “The Book of Mormon is funny.”

  I laugh out loud. “Can you imagine my brother sitting through a musical?”

  “Then you definitely should ask. I mean—it’s your first birthday in New York!”

  Except it isn’t. And this is the other reason I’ve been trying not to think about my birthday. Right after college I’d lived in Manhattan for three years, before moving back to Detroit to start my own business.

  One month into my fledgling New York City career as a sports agent, I’d turned twenty-one. The night of my birthday had been magical and unexpected. It began at a business dinner and ended in the well-muscled arms of a sexy stranger.

  Every year on my birthday I remember that night, but this year the memory really haunts me. I’m turning thirty, I’m still single, and I’m starting over in New York. So I’m feeling extra wistful. I’d been such a starry-eyed little optimist at twenty-one. I had thought my life was going to be a long montage of fancy dinners and passionate kisses.

  Actually, the fancy dinners still happen. I’m on my way to a billionaire’s backyard party right now. My life is amazing.

  The passion, though? That turned out to be short-lived.

  But I’m working on that, I promise myself. I’m making some changes already. I’ve moved to Brooklyn and hired Eric, for starters.

  The rest of the changes aren’t so easy to pull off. My business is flourishing, but my personal life is stunted. That’s why I spent part of my vacation drawing up a new five-year plan for my life. It’s indexed and color-coded. I’m ready.

  “Here we are, ladies!” Duff says from the driver’s seat. He glides to a stop in front of Nate Kattenberger’s mansion on Pierrepont Place.

  Eric Bayer opens the limo’s backdoor immediately, leaning in to smile at us. “Hey! All my favorite women in one place.”

  The baby goes into spasms of joy at the sight of his face.

  “Look who’s Mr. Popular.” Alex snorts. She unclips her daughter from the car seat.

  “He’s not that popular with me,” I complain, even as I take Eric’s hand and let him help me onto the sidewalk.

  “You fell for it, didn’t you?” His chuckle is gleeful.

  “It’s entrapment,” I complain.

  He laughs and then takes the baby from Alex and hoists her into the air, where she gives him a big, chubby grin.

  “Oh, sure,” Alex says. “You’re all smiles for him.”

  And I’m a puddle of goo. Watching Eric play with his baby always knocks me flat. It’s the same with my brother and my niece. I’ve never been a crier, but when Rosie smiles at Eric, or when Nicole smiles at Dave, I just about lose it, every time.

  Getting old makes you more emotional, I guess. Yay.

  “Let me take her,” Alex offers. “You two have some catching up to do. I’ll find Nate and say hello.”

  Eric kisses his girlfriend. Then he kisses the baby. And then he turns to me. “Welcome home, Bessie. You look great by the way. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  “Why? Because I don’t have my phone stuck to my face? Hand it over, by the way.”

  “No, because you’re wearing a dress. Wowzers.”

  “Oh, stop it.” I feel heat on my cheeks as I involuntarily glance down at the blue batik sundress. Zara had made me try it on when we’d gone shopping last week in Montreal. “Stop buying dresses for your two-year-old niece and buy one for yourself,” she’d said. “My kid has enough clothes to meet the queen. But you wear the same Red Wing’s T-shirt everywhere.”

  She wasn’t wrong. But now I feel self-conscious.

  “It’s a good look,” Eric says. “And congratulations on making it ten days away from the office. Are you sure you don’t want to go for eleven? Except for that little slip-up just now, you’ve turned yourself into a woman of leisure.”

  “There was no slip-up! That was just you being a weenie. Now hurry up and give me my phone back. And fill me in on what I missed. Is it possible that none of my players got traded, injured, or arrested while I was gone?”

  He laughs. “You think I’d hide something like that from you?”

  “No. But it’s kind of wild how quiet everything was.” On any given week, someone has a major upset or a nervous breakdown. It’s as if I have thirty-five high-strung children in my care. Somebody is always breaking something.

  “Nobody got arrested. But Nifty Silva had a tiny run-in with the town of Buckhead, Georgia.”

  I stop in my tracks. “Omigod. What did he do? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because I handled it.” Eric laughs. “And I enjoyed every minute of it. Nifty had outstanding library fines of eighteen hundred bucks. Ask me why.”

  “Why?” I gasp. “That man makes five million dollars a year.”

  Eric chuckles. “Five years ago he took a copy of Field of Dreams out of the library. Apparently the nice librarians of Buckhead fine you a dollar a day on DVDs.”

  “And he was too busy setting records to return a fucking movie?” I swear to God this job is like teaching kindergarten but with a better paycheck.

  “Not exactly. Right after watching the film, he threw his first no-hitter. So he didn’t—”

  “—return it. I get it. He’s a superstitious crazy man. So how do we smooth this over? Did it hit the press?”

  “It was going to. He called the office in a panic. But I handled it, Bess. I had a nice chat with the librarians. I told them that Nifty would donate ten bucks for every dollar he owed, but I suggested she let the fines keep running.”

  “Oh, Eric!” I burst out laughing. “That’s perfect. That’s exactly what I would have done.”

  He hip-checks me on the sidewalk. “I know, boss. And I had a blast talking to that librarian with her adorable southern accent. It’s all good.”

  “Thank you,” I say as we walk around to the side of Nate and Becca’s mansion. They’re the only people I know in New York who can throw a big backyard party. Because they’re the only ones with a big backyard. “Thank you for letting me have all that time off.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” he says. “People take vacations all the time. Get used to it.”

  I wonder if I ever will. My childhood was perilous. Dave and I were too busy avoiding my father’s fists to notice that nobody ever took us to Disneyland. Or camping. Or any of the things that families do. Summer break had only meant too much time with our angry father.

  College was better. But I’d been too busy working my butt off to relax. And after graduation, my dream job kept me busy. And it still does.

  “What else?�
� I demand of Eric. “What other weird calls did you get?”

  “There’s that rookie who just showed up for training camp in Ottawa. Rollins?”

  “Yeah?” My blood pressure jumps. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine,” Eric says quickly. “But he panicked his first night there. He locked himself out of his new apartment, and he didn’t know what to do.”

  “Aw.” Rollins is only nineteen. He comes from a town in Canada with more cows than people. “Did you help him find a locksmith?”

  “Of course I did. I was home with the baby that night, just flipping channels before he called. So I put my earpods in and sat down in the rocking chair with the baby. And I talked to the rookie for ninety minutes while he waited for the locksmith. The kid just needed someone to tell him that it was all going to be okay.”

  “Wow. Thank you. Bonus points for sure.”

  “It was great, Bess. It made me understand what this job is for, you know? Negotiating contracts is only half the story. He’s just a kid in a strange city. I’d forgotten what that part was like. The only two things he knows how to cook are fried eggs and spaghetti.”

  “Jeez. Next time I see him, I’ll make sure he eats a salad. Anything else? Any gossip? If not, I think I hear a glass of sangria calling my name.” Rebecca Rowley-Kattenberger—the new owner of the Brooklyn Bruisers—makes a great pitcher of sangria.

  “Oh, there’s gossip.” Eric chuckles as he finally hands me my phone.