PROLOGUE
Catherine Celia
Moving back into my parents’ condo at twenty-four was not exactly the plan. Neither was finding my boyfriend in an on-call room with a nurse four months ago. So, yeah. Here I was. Back in the guest room, living out of half-unpacked bags, pretending I didn’t still feel stupid every time I thought about Julian. It had been four months. Long enough that I should have been over it. Tonight, though, I had no time to be pathetic because my parents were out for dinner, and I was babysitting my siblings, Mila, age ten, and Jaden, age twelve. There was a massive age gap between us. My parents had me when they were still in college, back when my dad was just a D1 hockey player with a ridiculous amount of confidence, and my mom was working on her undergrad. Years later, after my dad retired from playing in the NHL, he became the head coach of the Dallas Blaze, and my mom got a job working in a hospital in Dallas.
“I’m bored,” Mila pouted.
If Mom had been home with her, Mila wouldn’t have expected her to do the entertaining, but because it was me, cute little Mila wanted all my attention.
“I’m bored too,” Isla Russell pouted.
She was Mila’s best friend. Her dad, Hunter, was the captain of the Dallas Blaze. He was almost a decade older than me, single, and the man I’d had a humiliating crush on when I was a teenager because he was older, gorgeous, intense, and completely off-limits. Not that anyone needed to know that. Ever.
Isla and Mila had been best friends forever, and since Hunter and my dad were close, Isla was always around. When I was doing my undergrad, I used to babysit Isla and Mila all the time. Somewhere along the way, Isla decided I was basically her big sister and started calling me CC like everyone else in my family.
“CC,” Mila said from the couch, “Jaden is breathing too loud.”
Jaden looked up from his popcorn. “It’s called being alive.”
“Can you be alive quieter?” my little sister asked with her ten-year-old sass.
“No,” Jaden deadpanned.
I walked into the family room with three cups of water and set them on the coffee table. “Let’s watch a movie.”
“I get to pick,” Jaden said.
“I’m not watching a boy movie,” Mila said.
Isla nodded in agreement.
“Fine. Let’s play a board game,” I suggested.
“Monopoly,” Jaden and Mila cheered at the same time.
“Yes,” I said, trying to match their enthusiasm.
Isla went along with it. “These two are so funny,” she whispered to me.
“Tell me about it,” I said, rolling my eyes playfully.
While Mila and Jaden started fighting over where they would sit at the table, Isla looked up at me.
“I want to have siblings too. I have no one to fight with. My apartment is boring.”
“That isn’t a bad thing,” I said to her. “You get all your daddy’s attention.”
“It’s too much,” she complained. “Besides, I was thinking, and I need Daddy to find me a mommy.”
I choked on my own saliva. “That isn’t so easy.”
“It can be. Do you want to be my mommy?” she asked just as I took a sip of water.
It went down the wrong way, and I really started to cough.
“CC is choking,” Jaden announced. “I need to give her the Heimlich.”
“No,” I choked out. “I…”