The Strength of the Pack (Suncoast Society #30)(11)

Tilly snorted. “No. It’ll be a double-date though. Probably Wednesday night. I’ll confirm those details. You said you’re not working Wednesday night, right?”

“Right.”

“Good.” Tilly pushed off the counter and headed out of the kitchen.

“Shouldn’t I at least get a chance to agree to this?”

“Nope,” Tilly called back. “Just go with it.”

Waiting for the coffee to brew, Eva knew she couldn’t be aggravated at her friend. Likely, whoever Tilly matched her up with wouldn’t be someone she’d feel any attraction toward. Basic odds said that much.

Would she humor her friend?

Absolutely. Especially after all Tilly had done for them.

By the time Eva had Laurel ready to leave, Tilly had packed up and headed home. Eva drove Laurel to school, dropped her off…

And returned to a completely empty house.

She knew this was something she should be used to by now, but it still slammed her new reality home.

The guys had their own life and jobs. Jesse had school as well as work. Leo was trying to recover his health and work at the same time. They all had Laurel.

What did she have?

A lot of introspection, which she was doing a piss-poor job working her way through.

She sat on the couch and tried to breathe through it. Her counselor had warned her about times like this. Being alone wasn’t a bad thing.

Hell, there were times she’d been alone, while still married to Leo, where she’d been fine.

She’d also had a thick blanket of denial swaddling her, too.

Grabbing one of the throw pillows, she pulled it into her arms, flopped over onto her side, and had the good, hard cry she’d denied herself for over a week. The kind of cry she didn’t dare have while the guys or Laurel were around for fear of them hearing her.

Not even a bad cry. One to get the loose and accumulating garbage out of her system. Twenty minutes later, she sat up and reached over to the coffee table for a tissue from the box there to blow her nose.

With that out of the way, she started a load of laundry before she got herself a shower. If she didn’t do it now, she wouldn’t by the time Laurel was due home from school. And today she had to go pick Laurel up, anyway.

I can do this. I will do this.

She started the shower. “And if I trip and fall flat on my face,” she said to herself, “I’ll get up and try again.”





Nate’s Monday morning started with a run and went like clockwork. A far cry from his scattered Saturday.

He didn’t even mind that he thought about Eva again while he ran.

He didn’t understand what it was about her that had drawn him in, but she’d floated through his mind quite a bit as he spent Sunday doing chores and cleaning the house.

That wasn’t normal.

Well, the cleaning was perfectly normal, but having lingering thoughts about someone he’d worked on, outside the course of actually working with them, was very odd.

Especially for him.

And even more especially when he wasn’t romantically linked to that person in any way.

Trying to focus on his day, he continued with his usual Monday routine, comforted by it. As always, Cherise had beat him to the office by minutes and was getting things opened up. While all the other people there had keys and full access, they usually didn’t start seeing clients as early as Nate did. He had a few regulars who came in on their way to work.

Cherise juggled calendars for the office, his well-organized little sister having separate Google calendars for each professional, making them use the app on their phones as well so they could access or change appointments as needed. It’d only taken her two double-bookings by different tenants for her to lay down the law and mandate the change to everyone.

It also meant she could access all of them from her phone if she was at lunch or had to run errands and the office was closed. She could forward the office calls to her cell and still run the business.

Nate fully recognized Cherise was the backbone of the operation. If it wasn’t for her, he’d still be working out of a spare bedroom, or renting space from someone else. She’d been the one to research office sharing and figure out how to monetize leases the best way to pay for her own salary as well as office expenses. She’d taken some bookkeeping classes to help her run the business, but she hadn’t gone to college despite him trying to talk her into it.

She also knew nearly as much as he did about what he did, but, again, she wouldn’t go to school for it and get certified.

Fortunately for him, she was perfectly happy doing what she did, and they got to work together and see each other nearly every day.

Not all siblings could deal with that. Since she was his little sister, and his only real family, he was fine with it.

He smelled French vanilla coffee brewing as he walked down the hall to his office. “I love you,” he called out.

“Love you, too, Doc,” she said, already walking up the hall from the kitchen area with his prepared mug. She handed it off. “You’ve got one in ten, Mr. Stoker, and he’s usually right on time.”

“Thanks.”

Nate pulled up his notes on the tablet he used to keep track of clients and prepared for the session, pushing thoughts about Eva out of his mind.

Thoughts about her stayed out of his mind until Cherise knocked on his doorway while he was eating lunch. “Line one for you.”