Stealing Home(36)

“I didn’t mind a bit. Boy problems?”

Luke exhaled. “Always. It’s kind of the norm when I have three little sisters in their teens.”

I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup, debating my next question. Just because I didn’t know all things Luke Archer didn’t mean I hadn’t heard some things. “You’re their guardian now?”

If he felt conflicted about what my question was alluding to, he didn’t express it. “Guardian, mother, father, big brother, pretty much all of it.” He stared into his coffee cup, contemplation creeping into his expression. “Anne has been our saving grace though. She’s an old friend of the family, but now she’s kind of like a live-in nanny. However, if I call her that in front of the girls, they give me ‘the look.’”

“The look?”

“You know, The Look.” He waited for me to process that. “The one the female species has created to turn specimens of the male species into piles of ash. The Look.”

“Oh yes, that one,” I said, playing along.

Archer grinned, spinning his coffee cup in his hands. “Anyway, Anne takes care of everything when I’m on the road during the season, and I do my best to fit in visits during home games and occasionally fly them all out to an away game.”

“And take them shopping and out for junk food. The hardships.”

He chuckled a couple of notes before his expression became serious. “You know what happened to my parents?”

Inhaling slowly, I nodded. “Only what I read in the papers a few years ago.”

I might not have known much about Luke Archer’s life before a week ago, but I did know about his parents being carjacked and murdered on their way home from celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The whole nation knew that story as that had happened right when Archer’s career was taking off. The media ate it up, printing headlines about The Slayed Parents of Luke Archer. Sensationalizing the whole tragedy by highlighting facts of that night that should have been respected and left alone. Details about how Mr. Archer had shielded his wife with his body while an entire magazine had been emptied into them. Or how their wedding bands had been ripped off their dead bodies. Or how their hands were found tangled together, even in death.

The media had bled that story dry, and I’d guessed it was part of the reason Archer had seemed as closed off as he had. At least as he had at first, because now he didn’t seem closed off at all.

Luke continued to stare into his coffee like he was seeing something in it no one else could see. “The girls were only ten, twelve, and fourteen at the time. We had family they could have gone to, but it would have meant relocating from Oceanside, and I wanted to keep as much normalcy in their lives as possible. I wanted them to stay at the same school, with the same friends, in the same activities, you know?” His forehead creased deeper for a moment, then his whole face cleared. Like he’d just come from the dark into the light.

Lifting his cup, he took a drink of his coffee. “I applied for guardianship, and we’ve done our best to put the pieces back together. That’s part of the reason my career is so important to me. I’m responsible for three human beings, and I want them to have any door they want open to them. I want them to be able to go to the best school in the country if they want to. I want them to be able to major in something that will pay them peanuts if it makes them happy. I want them to have a totally over-the-top wedding if that’s what makes them happy.” Almost looking vulnerable, he looked at me. I wasn’t used to seeing vulnerability on him—it was a look I doubted more than a few people were used to seeing on him. “I just want to take care of them the way our parents would have.”

My eyes were stinging from fighting tears. When I’d gotten up this morning and agreed to breakfast with Luke Archer, I hadn’t known he was going to open up like this.

Luke Archer was so much more than a player setting batting records. So much more than a skilled lover. So much more.

“You really are amazing,” I said.

Archer twisted his hat back around and leaned across the table a little. His expression was playful. “Well, I know that, but would you mind passing that on to this girl I’m really into? I’m not sure she’s aware of that yet. She kind of busts my balls. When she’s not icing them.”

That made me laugh. “I think she knows.”

“Good, and while you’ve got her on the line, would you mind asking her how I’m doing on our first date? I just spent the majority of it on the phone with a heartbroken sister and bringing up my dark past. I think I’m bombing it.”