occurred to her that he had avoided looking directly at her since she walked into the gym. She couldn’t read him. What was he thinking? Why was he here? Had his brother or his sister called and chewed him out? Or had her own lecture pounded its way through his cranky skull?
That possibility made her smile.
Lucca worked with the team, as a team, until five minutes to five when he spoke to Hope for the first time in half an hour. “Are you scheduled to end at five?”
“Actually, it was four-thirty.” Hope wondered if anyone else noticed the way he seemed to sag in relief just a little.
“Hit the showers, men.”
With that, the cloud of awe that had surrounded the team dispersed, and the boys broke out in excited chatter. Soon, only Lucca and Hope remained in the gym. As she fumbled around for something to say to him, she had a memory flash of the school’s former coach, Frank Gowdy, standing beneath the basket. He’d been a lovable, balding teddy bear with a beer belly and a constant smile. The contrast with Lucca Romano couldn’t be bigger.
He looked handsome and hard and just a little bit angry. Gazing at him, her knees went weak.
He dribbled the basketball then passed it to her. “You have a mess on your hands with this team.”
She bounced the ball twice, then threw it back. “They’re enthusiastic.”
“True.” He turned and took a shot at the basket. Nothing but net. Hope jogged to retrieve it, then sent it back to Lucca. “The Mitchell kid. He’s raw, but he has something to work with.”
“Yes.” Hope drew in a bracing breath, then cut to the heart of the matter. “Will you work with him? Will you help us, Lucca?”
Rather than respond, he took the ball up the court to the opposite basket and put up a jump shot. Hope’s heart sank. After watching him with the boys, seeing how he’d related to them, she’d had her hopes up that this was more than a onetime deal.
Lucca took two more shots at the basket, then captured the ball and tucked it beneath his arm. When he met her gaze, his own was steady and sincere. “I need to grovel for a minute or two, Hope. I want to apologize for my remark at lunch. I felt cornered by your request, so I struck out at you. That’s not an excuse, but an explanation. I’m very sorry I said what I did. It was crude, and I was an ass. Honestly, Saturday night was just about as nice a thing that’s happened to me in ages.”
Once again, Hope was flabbergasted. She did not, however, want to discuss Saturday night, so she simply said, “Apology accepted.”
He nodded. “Thank you. So, do you have something else you need to do here, or are you done for tonight?”
“I’m done. Finally. It’s been a long day.”
“Seems to me like we’re the last people in the building.”
“I’m sure the janitor is still here,” Hope replied, eyeing the trash can at the entrance to the gym. “He starts to work in the kindergarten wing, then works his way around here.”
Lucca set the basketball in the ball rack. “I stuck a six-pack in the fridge in the athletic office. Why don’t you have one with me? We probably need to talk about this whole coaching thing going forward.”
“A six-pack?” Hope repeated, pulling up short. “As in beer? You brought beer onto a school campus? You can’t bring beer onto campus. You absolutely can’t drink beer on campus.”
“Sure I can. I don’t do this very often, but today I’m pulling the Coach Romano card. I coached practice this afternoon. I get to have a beer. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen to me? The powers that be can forbid me from ever coming back? Guess they could try to have me arrested, but the sheriff would simply sit down and have a brew with me.”
Hope didn’t know how to respond to that. He was right, but she wasn’t going to admit it. She understood that he had faced down a demon today, but honestly. Some things just weren’t done.
She followed him to the athletic office but shook her head when he pulled a beer from the dorm-sized fridge and held it up to her. “Tea?” he asked. “Water?”
“Water.”
He handed over a bottle, then sprawled on the brown microfiber sofa that Coach Gowdy had left behind when he quit his job. Hope perched in the armchair beside the office door and sipped her water while Lucca took a long pull from his beer bottle. “Just promise me that if anyone walks in here, you’ll hide that?” she asked. “Please?”
“Not much of a rule breaker, are you, teacher?” he asked, grinning.
She sniffed.
He stretched his leg to kick a large cardboard box filled with T-shirts over in front of him to serve as an ottoman, then he propped up his legs on the box and crossed his feet at his ankles. He sighed heavily and dragged a hand down his face. “Am I glad that is over. I took a drive earlier this afternoon and ended up at a lookout above town. Celeste Blessing stopped while I was there. She’s an interesting woman. Gave me the strangest advice—that somehow made a lot of sense to me. When I left the overlook, I knew I needed to make this practice today.”
“Because of something Celeste told you?”
“That, and I figured a bouquet of flowers just wasn’t a good enough apology considering the scope of my jerkhood at lunch today.” He took another sip of beer, then rested his head back against the sofa and shut his eyes. “Celeste says that peace is a process, that finding it is the result of a bunch of little decisions rather than one big one. I think that maybe you are part of those decisions, Hope. I was lost in this funk when you knocked on my door Saturday night, and today at lunch your request sent me right back into the weeds. I know you know about the wreck that killed two of my players and put another in a wheelchair. I’d like to tell you the rest of it. Will you listen?”
Though she really, truly didn’t want to discuss Saturday night, it sounded like he wanted to open up. Based on things that Gabi and Maggie had said, she knew he never opened up. The fact that he’d do it with her surprised her and, frankly, made her wary. She sensed that something more was going on here than what she understood. Nevertheless, she couldn’t say no. “Yes, I’ll listen.”
“Good. You might have to be a little patient. I don’t know how fast I’m going to be able to get this out.”
Compassion filled her. This obviously wasn’t going to be easy for him. “I have nowhere else I need to be.”
He held his beer bottle with both hands propped on his belly. He stared down at the scuffed toes of his wellworn sneakers. “What I need to say … well … I’ve never said the words aloud. Admitting it makes me feel like a pansy-ass loser.”
He exhaled a heavy breath and flatly admitted, “Last spring, I had a good old-fashioned mental breakdown.”
Hope waited, watching him, feeling for him. He looked just miserable. “Oh, Lucca. I’m so sorry. You don’t have to say any—”
“I do. Just let me get it out.” He darted a quick glance her way, then refocused on his feet. “I’ve always been known for keeping a cool head. On the court. In life. But that day something … I don’t know. Something inside of me just snapped. I can’t explain why. I don’t have a clue what triggered it. I just … went off. Went nuclear. It was ugly. I threw things. I broke things. I scared everyone around me. When I stormed out of the field house that day, I swore I’d never set foot in a gym again. Honestly, I didn’t think I could. Just thinking about it made me break out in a sweat.”
“It was because of the accident,” Hope suggested. “A delayed reaction.”
“Not only the accident, but what came afterward—the professional success. I felt like such a fraud. What sort of a man capitalizes on death? It disgusted me.”
He unfolded from the sofa and stood and began to pace. “I couldn’t deal with that, Hope. I tried to ignore it. I tried to deny it. I tried every mental exercise I could come up with. Eventually, it destroyed me. At least, that’s what I believed last spring.”
“But you don’t believe it anymore?” she asked.
“Let’s just say that ever since I let my siblings hitch me up to their tow truck and drag me to Eternity Springs, well … I’ve been learning to deal. Celeste talked to me about the GPS of life and stop signs and school
