Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 69794 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69794 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
My parents had four children—Lysander, Seraphina, Sonja, and myself.
As the middle child, I’d always hung at the back of the party, observing and doing the exact opposite of my oldest sister, Seraphina.
Seraphina was everything that I wasn’t.
She knew how to be the billionaire. She went to the parties and wore the fancy clothes. She spent the money, swooned at appropriate times, laughed at jokes that weren’t funny just to appease, and ultimately knew how to live rich.
Meanwhile, I’d figured out young that I didn’t want to have anything to do with the parties or the money grabs. I just wanted to live a quiet, simple life.
I’d joined the Marines at eighteen—much to my parents’ dismay. Spent twenty years there doing what I loved, then retired to become a science teacher who loved that job just as much as his first one.
Lysander, the baby of the group, had just been along for the ride.
He worked at the hospital in town as a radiologist.
He was somewhere in between my live simply lifestyle and my sister’s high life only one.
My sister was a snob who hated anyone who didn’t have money, looked down on you if you worked somewhere she didn’t deem “acceptable” and treated everyone like her servant.
And our parents just let it happen because Seraphina was their child. And their children were their everything.
I couldn’t pinpoint a time when I realized that I didn’t like my sister very much, but one day I’d come into the kitchen and realized that it’d been a really long time since I looked at her like a sister. Someone that I loved.
Honestly, on a good day, I could barely tolerate her.
She was every stereotype you could conjure up when thinking of a stuck-up rich asshole.
I’d felt like that about her since I was old enough to understand, and it’d only gotten worse after she’d killed Sonja in a drunk driving accident. Then gotten off with not even a slap on the wrist.
So, when my father had told me that Serphina was running their beloved company into the ground, I’d reluctantly agreed to turn it around and make it profitable again. When the season was up, he agreed to sell it.
With one caveat—Serphina wasn’t allowed anywhere near me or the Cowgirls.
She couldn’t have any part in any business decisions. She couldn’t show up at the field. She couldn’t even call me.
The most contact I wanted with her was at family dinner on Christmas.
She had to stay so far out of my field of view that I didn’t have to think about her.
Mom and Dad had somehow managed to make her stay away.
For seven and a half months, I’d been running the Cowgirls professional soccer team.
But my sister had really done a number on the team.
She’d embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars, fired anyone who was worth a damn, gotten rid of quality players, and destroyed the team dynamic so thoroughly that the players that we’d managed to keep on had hated each other.
I still had too much work to do, though.
Not even the two star soccer players, Magnolia Baker and Nettie Windsor, could perform miracles and pull us out of our hole.
I’d even managed to score Eddie Grant as the head coach.
Things had truly been looking up.
But my wait time was over.
My sister was allowed to come back in two weeks, and she would likely destroy all of the progress we’d made.
I hated that my father had conditions when I took this particular job.
He’d said he would give me eight months—one whole soccer season—before he let Serphina come back in in the vice president capacity.
If I managed to win the NWSL—National Women’s Soccer League—championship, Dad would finally sell.
But we’d taken too long to find our mojo.
In the beginning, we were battling uphill, trying to piece our team back together.
When we finally did—a lot of thanks to Magnolia for her effort—it was just too late.
Which meant my sister was about to be back in my life, unless we performed some miracle in the next few games.
Though that likely wouldn’t happen. We would need the first-place team to lose both of its last two games. We’d need to win our last two with shutouts. Something so highly unlikely that I wasn’t holding out hope.
The only good thing about all of this was that I got to spend time with Magnolia on a daily basis.
Though we’d mutually agreed that we couldn’t have anything more together than what we’d shared, that didn’t stop me from wanting her. From craving her touch.
It was plain torture to see her out on the field every day. It was even worse to see her in the training room, soaking wet from an ice bath. Or lying flat on the massage table while a masseuse worked kinks out of her tired muscles.
“Are you even listening to me?”