Page 92 of Family Bonds- Emma & Warren

“Nope,” Mike said. “We can come over here and watch or I can escort Emma to her seats.”

His mother and sister would be there soon, as they were coming later.

Emma and his sisters had a great time last night at his house laughing and telling stories.

Stories of her childhood and his.

They were nothing alike yet she brought humor to it all.

She made his sisters feel like they were close and could confide in each other for their first time meeting.

There was this air about her that never came off as snotty or stuck up. That could be why he was so drawn to her when she was pretending to be a bartender over four months ago.

“She can wait,” Warren said. “Then go up when the game starts.”

He leaned down to kiss her. He knew she was going to be taking some notes and it’d be better for her to get this view.

He found it funny that she wanted to write a story about a football player. Not a quarterback, he said. There was no way he was going to worry he’d be compared to a hero in her book.

It was already hard enough to live up to the status the public put him on, let alone where his girlfriend’s mind went when she thought of him.

He ran out to the field and joined his teammates doing stretches and warmup exercises.

If his eyes went back to Emma a few times, he couldn’t be blamed. He was concerned that she might feel out of place.

He wasn’t sure why though, as she fit into every situation perfectly.

He should have realized that for a woman who had no problem jumping into a job she’d never done before to just learn how to do it so it came across as more authentic in her books.

Even in the past two months, she’d said she’d spent time with her cousin’s girlfriend who was a pharmacist to get an idea of how the job was done.

Then she did another ride along in a police car. When she told him she’d sat in a jail cell for four hours, he’d thought it was a joke.

It wasn’t. It just made him laugh at the lengths she’d go to for her readers to know she was giving it one hundred percent.

Maybe he was a little jealous he didn’t always feel she did the same in their relationship.

Then he had to get out of his head because she was coming to him now.

He shouldn’t expect her to do it every weekend. Hell, he wasn’t even around on the weekends now and anyone else he could be dating would have a job during the week.

It proved she was putting in the effort since she had come to him so much.

“You’ve got a little cutie over there,” Gus said. Gus Vanderroyal was one of his receivers. Been on the team for years but didn’t play the full game. He was getting toward the end of his career too and the two of them seemed to talk more than he did with other players.

“She is that,” he said.

Other players made more derogatory comments about Emma being hot or smoking once they noticed her.

Gus saw what he did.

Emma was in baggy jeans that fit her well at the waist and hips but then fell loosely to the red canvas sneakers on her feet. She was wearing his number on a fitted Patriots T-shirt. She always looked comfortable to him but stylish at the same time.

The girl next door.

“Not that I know much about her, but she at least looks like the type of woman that Caroline would get along with.”

Caroline was Gus’s college sweetheart. They’d been married for ten years and had two kids.