Real Fake Love (Copper Valley Fireballs #2)(19)

“Twenty million in a year?”

“Anything over a million in a year is overkill for the average person. Besides, I get so much more than money out of my job. I get personal satisfaction, and that’s priceless.”

“Are you a phone sex operator?”

“No, I write paranormal romance novels.”

Her frown is getting frownier, but the frown isn’t making her face any wrinklier. She must have some kick-ass face cream. I’ll have to ask her about it once she’s convinced I’m harmless.

She taps her fingers on her biceps. “So you come from money and get to pretend your hobby is a job.”

Good gravy. She sounds like my father. If you can’t have a real job, you should get a husband like your sister and make something of your life. Oh, right…we’ve tried that, haven’t we? “I haven’t taken money from my family since my third book took off. I make my own way.”

She squints at me.

I smile brightly and pretend we’re not talking about how many weddings my father has paid for, though for the record, I’m on a payment plan to pay him back. “Do you have baby pictures of Luca? I love baby pictures.”

Her squint goes harder.

I’d match her intensity, except if I smile any harder through this, my cheeks will fall off and then I’ll not only be Henri of the Five Failed Engagements, I’ll be Henri Who Shows Her Gums All The Time. That won’t go so well for the next time I do a live video for my fan group. “Anyway, I need to get to work, because these books won’t write themselves! And I have readers waiting for the next installment of Confucius’s book. I’ll go get him and my laptop and get out of your hair for a few hours. And I do love your hair. It’s the best.”

I hold my smile until I get to the top of the stairs, and then it all blows out on a huge breath.

TikTok Nonna is a tough cookie.

And I don’t think she likes me.

That can’t be good. It’s also as unusual as vampires being real, because parents always adore me.

She’ll come around. She probably needs some space to recover from her ziti going up in smoke, though I swear I heard her cackling when I came back inside to get Luca’s clothes and my keys before I took him to the park.

Maybe later I’ll ask him for some tricks to get into her good graces, since he basically needs me to become his grandmother’s favorite person.

But right now, I need to escape. And so that’s exactly what I do.

For a while, anyway.





9





Luca



I can’t stop checking my junk.

Hell, I can’t even get off this couch in the lounge. I didn’t tell Nonna to go to hell like Alonzo did, but I don’t know that disrupting her Eye ceremony and lying to her about having a girlfriend is better.

If anything, it’s worse.

Which means I’m probably in danger of getting hit by a runaway floor waxer or buried under an avalanche of balls if I leave this spot.

“Are you sure he hasn’t moved at all?” a familiar voice whispers in the doorway.

I open my eyes and pull my hand out of my shorts and glance at the small crowd watching me.

There’s Cooper. Francisco. Brooks. Max Cole.

And Mackenzie.

Brooks’s fiancée.

“Mackenzie! I need you.” I bolt off the couch and hold out my hand.

Brooks leaps between us. “Don’t touch my fiancée with your junk-hand.”

“It’s shrinking. My grandma put The Eye on me, and it’s shrinking.”

“Your hand?”

“My junk!”

All of my teammates—and Mackenzie, who’s a pretty blonde with a superstition problem—look at my crotch.

Brooks looks back at my face first. “You can get your own girlfriend to help with that.”

“I did!”

“You got a girlfriend?” Francisco’s raised brows say what everyone else is thinking.

Luca Rossi doesn’t date.

And not the same way that Cooper Rock doesn’t date. Cooper dates. Cooper dates all the time.

We don’t call it dating, because dating implies some level of intent to see the same girl again.

I shake my head. “My girlfriend isn’t superstitious, so she can’t help with this. Mackenzie. What do I do to get The Eye off me?”

Max plops down in the broken recliner across the threadbare carpet. It doesn’t collapse under him, so he leans back and adds a tally mark on the wall.

Yeah. How many times we can flop in that thing before it breaks is a game too.

“We need to talk about you having a girlfriend,” Max says.

“What are we, old grannies? We need to talk about breaking curses.”

“Man, all our curse-breaking energy is going on the field.” Cooper starts to sit on the couch relatively close to me, eyes my hand, then my junk, and sits at the far end instead. “We don’t have any curse-breaking left for your junk.”

“We still have the dildo cover,” Francisco says.

All of us except Mackenzie make shut up noises at him, because we don’t talk about what we all did together during spring training to start the curse-breaking for the team.

“Dil—” she starts, but Brooks covers her mouth.