Girls' Night Out (Bad Boys) by Susan Arden Page A

snatched it up, fumbling it to his ear. “Brett?”
    “Yes?” he said, his voice hoarse and gravelly from drinking a trough of liquor “Darn, you sound…hold on for your mom.”
    He recognized a pair of familiar voices arguing.“ Estella? How—,” he was interrupted by his mother’s greeting.
    “Hi, Brett,” his mom said in raspy voice, strained from being on a ventilator. “Happy holidays. Are you still coming?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Two o’clock and I’ve a date with my favorite fan.”
    She laughed. The sound was good. One he didn’t hear on a regular basis. After his mom had been diagnosed and unable to continue acting, they’d settled outside of Arlington with his grandparents when he was a teenager. Come back to his mom’s hometown where he’d enrolled in high school. The first real school he’d ever attended and it had been a chore. His mother, for all she’d tried to home school him, didn’t have the ability to deal with his learning disability. That fact seemed to trouble her even today. Even after he’d found out he was dyslexic after getting testing as an adult and the mystery of why school had been so frigging difficult was finally solved.
    “Oh, I’m thrilled! We watched your game yesterday and then replayed the recording. Estella likes to fast forward to all the parts where you’re featured. You’re looking strong out there, son.”
    “I feel good,” he lied. The flaring pain in his shoulder ratcheted up in intensity because of not icing it as he knew he should have after the game.
    During high school he’d made the football team after a ten-minute tryout. A natural, his speed and agility perfect for a hybrid tight end position, his coach had said. Weighing in at two hundred forty-nine pounds and standing six foot six, he was a rarity. Then, and apparently now considering what his agent said. For every door God closed, he cracked open a window where light entered if not streamed. For Brett it had been in his being able to run like a mad dog, turn and catch a football, never breaking stride. His coach and the other high school coaches in the area, even the college recruiters, said he was exceptional in how he functioned for his size.
    Unfortunately, his college test scores were on the opposite end of the spectrum, right in the area of dismal. But it didn’t seem to matter to the schools who courted him with promises of cars, apartments, and parties. He had the choice to accept a full ride scholarship to several universities or go directly into playing in a minor league. He picked pro ball in Canada and no classes. No more grades and worrying about the fact that he just didn’t understand why the words on the page didn’t match the words in his head.
    Some sort of dysgraphia, and had he been given something as simple as a laptop, his educational life would have been made far easier than trying to copy nonsense from a whiteboard in class.
    “Shall I bring you anything special?” he asked, knowing his mother enjoyed when he brought baked goods.
    “How was your evening?” she asked, suddenly distracted.
    “I stayed in and rested for my big day today,” he said, lying again. Crud, he closed his eyes, hating the feel of this conversation. Then, from some unknown place, the words jumped out of his mouth, “I met a girl yesterday.”
    “Brett, how nice. Are you bringing her with you?”
    His heart raced in his chest. “No. Not like that. I mean, we talked.”
    “It only takes a bleep to open the door,” she said. His mother had always told him, the moment she’d met his father she’d known he was her soul mate. Well, hell, he knew one thing for sure: Corinth McLemore was not his soul mate. More like a burr he couldn’t untangle from his thoughts.
    “You haven’t brought a girl around since—”
    “Mom, it was a brief conversation. Nothing more. I don’t know why I even mentioned it,” he interjected.
    She sighed. “You’re thinking about her. Aren’t you?”
    We are so