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Drew signed with MJ at his own kitchen table on January 2, with Tanner’s empty pizza boxes shoved off to one side and his dad on the speakerphone from Boston, asking about every line like he’d gone to law school. It wasn’t about Nicole. Drew had made sure of that in his own head before he ever picked up the pen.

Going in, he’d figured a guy who grew up in NBA locker rooms wouldn’t know shit about football. But MJ had spent the last few years working football deals, and growing up around Melvin’s contracts meant he knew exactly how a front office tried to lowball a guy and exactly when to tell them to go to hell. He knew GMs all over the league, and the shoe company behind Melvin Wright’s signature shoe took his calls, and the numbers he’d laid out in that kitchen were bigger than what the other agents had promised. And unlike every other agent who’d called, MJ hadn’t spent the last month kissing Drew’s ass, which was a point in his favor. He’d just told Drew what he was worth and what he could get, and then he’d asked him what he wanted. Nobody else had asked him that.

“Welcome to the family,” MJ said when it was done, and grinned. “Business family, I mean.”

Drew called Nicole after MJ left. She was quiet for a second and then said, “My brother is going to be insufferable.”

Drew slept in his own bed that night, in his own house, with the radiator ticking and Nicole seven hundred miles away. The Senior Bowl was in two weeks, and the draft was in April, and in April, according to the deal they’d made back in November, he and Nicole were supposed to let this end.

He wasn’t going to do that.

He didn’t know how it would work yet. He’d be in some NFL city, and she’d be here with two or three years of school left, since switching to art meant a whole lot of classes she hadn’t taken yet. And her mother was still trying to decide whether he could be trusted with her baby’s heart. But he knew he wasn’t letting her go. He just hadn’t told her, and he hadn’t told her he loved her yet either. He’d been going to tell her in New York, after the ceremony, win or lose.

Well. Everybody knew how New York turned out.

He’d tell her when she got back. He’d do it right this time.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Drew had a speech.

He’d been working on it every night since Christmas. He’d gone over it in her family’s guest wing at one in the morning with Nicole asleep on his chest, and in the team hotel in Orlando with Tanner snoring in the other bed, and again this afternoon on the drive to Birmingham with the radio off.

He’d never said I love you to anybody who wasn’t related to him, and he wasn’t about to blow it by just blurting it out. He was going to sit her down. He was going to tell her how it started, the magazine aisle and the deck and that first phone call that went past midnight, and how somewhere in there he couldn’t think about April anymore without wanting to put his fist through a wall. He was going to say it right, with his head on straight.

That had been the plan, anyway.

Then she’d come up the jetway in that long camel coat with her bag over her shoulder, spotted him at the window by the gate, and taken off. She didn’t walk fast, she flat-out ran, in heeled boots, right around a family with a stroller, and she hit him so hard he had to plant his feet to keep them both up. She kissed him right there in front of everybody, and an old man in a Crimson Tide jacket said, “Well, all right, then,” and kept walking.

She’d talked the whole drive home with her hand on his thigh. Five days of shopping with her mother, five days of her grandmother’s cooking, and somewhere in there, a meeting with the lawyers. They had the letter handled, she said, and Phallon’s side hadn’t made a sound since before New Year’s. And her dad was finally off the road. He’d picked her up Thursday and taken her to lunch in Georgetown, and the first thing out of his mouth when they sat down was how was Drew, and did he like the football, and did he like the tickets, and when was she bringing him by.

“I told him you almost cried over that football,” she’d said.

“I didn’t almost cry.”

“Baby, you absolutely almost cried.”

Drew had figured he’d say it after dinner. Then they’d made it through her front door, and she’d dropped her bag right there on the hardwood floor, and before he could even set her suitcase down and get the deadbolt turned, she had both hands up under his shirt. He’d quit figuring anything after that. Her coat ended up on the couch. His shirt was somewhere in the hall. Her sweater made it as far as her bedroom door. Fine, he’d told himself. After. He’d say it after, when he could think.

Now he couldn’t think about anything but being inside her.

The lamp on her nightstand was on low, and the rest of the house was dark. Nicole was under him with her knees up around his hips and her ankles locked behind his back, and he was up on his forearms, taking his time with her—long, slow strokes. Five days without her, and he wanted to make it last. He wanted to feel all of it, how tight she was, how wet, the way she squeezed him every time he pushed all the way in.

Every time he went deep, she made this soft little sound against his mouth. Her nails dragged up his back, and then her hands were in his hair, her fingers still cold from outside. She was warm everywhere else, her skin damp where it was pressed against his, and she kept rolling her hips up to meet him, holding him right where she wanted him. It was so fucking good he had to slow down.

She still had on the gold heart he’d bought her, and it moved on her throat every time she arched up into him. Then she opened her eyes and looked straight at him.

“Hi,” she whispered, all out of breath.

He laughed. “Hi.”

Her fingers tightened in his hair. She was so wet he could hear it every time he moved, and she kept making those little gasps that went straight to his dick. He pushed in again, all the way, and felt her tighten around him. “Drew.” Nobody had ever said his name like that.

“I love you.” It just came out. He hadn’t planned on saying it. He’d been thinking it for months, and then she said his name like that, and there it was.

He stopped moving, and he was pretty sure she stopped breathing. The heat kicked on, and that was the only sound in the house. Her hands had gone still in his hair.

Shit.