Page 29 of 7 Nights of Sin

Chapter 10

Kevin

O’ahu was beautiful. The locals were friendly, the food was amazing, and the beaches were gorgeous.

I'd found myself a nice beach house that was really more a sprawling villa than a house, and I'd rented it for a week and a half, just to have some time away.

I'd made a few friends, gone to and hosted some parties, chatted up tourists and signed some autographs. It was flattering that even out here, pretty much as far from New York as I could be and still be in the country, people knew who I was and admired my playing.

It made me feel a little bit bad about what I was doing, but I trusted Caro to take care of it.

I hadn't been able to stop thinking about what she'd told me at the disaster that was our non-dinner together.

She'd had a plan. She was in the middle of finals and graduating and trying to get everything together, and she'd had plan to keep us from having to break up.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Caro was the kind of person who didn't like to admit defeat. She only walked away from something when it was clear there was no other choice.

And she hadn't wanted to walk away from me. She'd wanted to keep me, to stay together.

That had never even entered my mind as an option, and I wondered what that said about me.

Either way, there wasn't anything I could do about that now. The past was the past, and all I could do was try to make some changes going forward.

After the media circus around my latest batch of being 'the bad boy of baseball' died down, of course.

The afternoon that the pictures were splashed all over the internet, I got a very angry call from Kathleen. Because of course I did.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" she demanded as soon as I picked up the phone. "Do you have a head injury? Are you going senile before you even hit thirty? If you are, please tell me, because I've been sitting here, wracking my brain, trying to come up with a reason why you've done this, and all I can think of is that you're a self-destructive idiot."

"It's going to be fine, Kath," I said. "I have a plan."

"You have a plan? You have a plan." She laughed, and it was a harsh sound. "You don't have two brain cells to rub together, apparently. You're so fucking stupid. And Carolyn has been working her ass off trying to clean up your messes, and here you are making her job harder than it needs to be. Do you have any idea how much we're going to have to pay her when this is done?"

"It'll be worth it," I replied.

She made a noise of frustration. "She's coming out there. To try and calm things down. I swear to god, Kevin, if you make this worse, I'm going to come down there, too, and you don't want that."

"No, I don't," I agreed. "I'll work with Caro. It'll be fine, Kath."

I said it with the usual confidence that Kath was used to hearing from me, but when I hung up, I sighed.

All I could think about was how Caro had looked at the restaurant. And how upset she'd been.

And when I wasn't thinking about that, I was thinking about wasted time and how if we'd stayed together, maybe we would have still been together. None of this media shit would have been an issue because I never would have married someone selfish and horrible like Christine. I could have been with someone who understood my ambitions and had her own and would have worked with me instead of against me.

At the time, I couldn't even picture something like that. I didn't know if I wanted it, even.

I had worked myself up to do things alone because I thought I had to. I thought that was how success worked.

But it didn't have to be like that, and thinking about it too much made me sad, so I shoved those thoughts down and thought about what I was going to do to fix it.

Caro had her task, and I had mine.

She showedup the next day, bag in hand, scowl on her face, and she was clearly pissed off.

I came out to greet her with a sheepish smile on my face.

"You're a fucking moron," was the first thing she said to me. "I can't believe you had so little understanding how this works. What were you thinking? I thought your career mattered to you! I thought you were willing to do whatever it took to keep it, but clearly if it means behaving for a few weeks, that's beyond you."