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Abe’s hand found mine. “She’s not a reporter. I mean, yeah, but we grew up together.”
Ryan looked me up and down, and I wondered if he found me wanting. “Right. You. You’re with who?”
“Sports Today.” I couldn’t even muster a smile, so I stared up at the imposing quarterback with wide eyes.
He nodded. “Tanya?”
He said it without inflection, so I wasn’t sure it was a good thing that he knew her.
“You’re replacing the one with the—” He gestured at his head in an approximation of Jane’s angular haircut.
“Jane.”
We both turned to see a tall blonde with striking gray eyes. She shook her head thoughtfully. “I never liked Jane.”
Everyone stared at her like this was some kind of revelation. Dylan raised his brows. “Thought you liked everyone.”
She nodded, and then shook her head. “Yeah, but...I don’t know.” When everyone kept staring, she put down her drink with a burst of energy. “She was too... She tried to walk across a muddy field in high heels. Who does that?”
Mike O’Connor, the redheaded running back, smiled. “You just didn’t like her because she flirted with me.”
“A falsehood,” the blonde said. “Undoubtedly.”
Carter turned back to me. “Are you going to report on anything that happens here, or are we entirely off the record?”
I had a split second to decide, and it didn’t take that long. “Off the record.” Any connections I made here by bypassing a few newsworthy flecks would be worth a gold mine in the future.
Ryan turned to Abraham. “And you vouch for her?”
Abe stepped to my side. “I do.”
Ryan ran his eyes over the rest of his players. “Then I don’t see what the problem is.”
And that, apparently, was that.
Everyone went back to their own conversations, and Abe led me over to Mike O’Connor and the blonde. “This is Mike and Natalie.”
I knew who Mike was, of course, but I soon learned that Natalie was an archaeologist. They’d recently returned from a summer in Ireland excavating an ancient port. It sounded like a dream, something people did in fairy tales, but I was quickly realizing that everyone I met in this city came with their own strange tale.
Another woman moved to join us, and somehow the conversations split up by the sexes, leaving me facing Natalie and the stunningly gorgeous Briana Harris. She was even more recognizable than the star players, since she’d been part of the show Boomerang before dropping acting for grad school. She smiled at me, but it was a considering smile, not unlike Rachael Hamilton’s. “So you’re Abe’s friend.”
She and Natalie kept the conversation flowing so seamlessly it took ten minutes before I realized I hadn’t asked them a single question; I’d been so easily answering the ones they threw at me. They deflected anything about themselves, until I’d told them not only about my move to New York but my move to California a eleven years ago, and how I’d met Abe, and how we’d grown up together. I finally had to interrupt. “And here I thought I was the investigative journalist.”
Natalie’s lips quirked. “Maybe. But we’re equally nosy.”
“And while you might investigate their professional lives, we’re quite adapt at ferreting out the secrets of their personal.”
Natalie lived her glass in a silent toast to Briana. “You could say Bri’s even undergoing the most in-depth undercover investigation of the Leopards.”
Briana groaned.
I nodded, remembering now. “You’re getting married?”
She nodded. “In almost exactly one month.”
A smile played on Natalie’s lips. “Not that she’s panicking.”
“I’m certainly not panicking. But. Do you know how hard it is to plan a wedding when most of the guests are men who are terrible at organizing themselves? Like this one.” She roped Abe into the conversation as he came by and fell comfortably in at my side. She narrowed her eyes at him and spoke dryly. “You’d think it wouldn’t be so hard to drop a letter in the mail.”
