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“What the hell was that?”
“Me being grateful.”
Noah touched his mouth. “You can’t just say ‘thank you’?”
“Like you said—actions speak louder than words.”
I licked my lips, attention still focused on his, and goddamn but I wanted to kiss him again. Longer this time. More tongue. My hand cupping his clean-shaven cheek and my thumb stroking his soft skin. Fingers sliding into his thick, dark hair. But I didn’t.
He was startled, frozen in front of me, and I was struck with the realization that I not only wanted to fuck my hot assistant. I liked him. Sex was the farthest thing from my mind. Right now I just wanted to kiss the hell out of him, and try to get him to like me back.
Ten years of fucking my way through jersey chasers with fast-and-dirty hookup after fast-and-dirty hookup, and I was reverting to the adolescence I’d never had. One where I wanted to hole up somewhere and make out with the person who made me feel something other than lust.
“Look, Gavin—”
Two words and voice full of trepidation was all it took to propel my ass into gear. Not to him, but away from him and his looming rejection. I got tons of letters a week from fans who would screw me in any position I demanded, but of course Noah would turn me away after a single kiss.
I strode out of the pool house, but he didn’t follow. I didn’t know how to feel about that. Luckily, there was no time to dwell on it. The repeated wailing of a horn blasted through the property.
The guys were here.
***
Jasmine and Noah had outdone themselves, and I was fucking pumped.
It was a perfect day for football. Crisp autumn air with sunlight streaming through the multicolored leaves, and my lawn transformed into a football field rather than over an acre of pointless grass. The lines were on point, and they’d even done the end zones in different colors. I didn’t even complain that they’d invited both Joe and Mel. Or that Joe had come through with a video camera before instantly dumping it on Jasmine.
All I cared about was playing a game.
We didn’t have pads and helmets—just full-on, old-school shirts versus skins. My team went skins, mostly because Jasmine stated it would look better on video if I was half-naked. The team guffawed at that, laughing and flirting with the only female in the vicinity, until Marcus gave them the evil eye and shut them down. She completely ignored him, despite blushing, and it was hilarious.
The camera turned on, we flipped a coin to see who’d have the ball, and I made sure Noah was watching before launching myself into the game.
It was the most enjoyment I’d had in weeks. Fuck that, months. Maybe even years. Normally, I played ball to channel my rage into bursts of speed and ferociousness that resulted in me obliterating the defense. It was a release, like the sweetest orgasm ever because it lasted three hours instead of about eight seconds. But today it was more than that.
It was a release, but also a lot of goddamn fun. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had this much fun playing football. Usually I spent the entire game angry as fuck, because aggression was the only way I could railroad the dudes on the other team. The only way I could ignore the pain radiating through my body, and rush yards as if my head wasn’t ringing and my body wasn’t aching. Now, I spun out of the way of guys storming at me, bounced off tackles, and ran across our makeshift field with a grin on my face.
At one point, I mimicked Marcus’ trademark backflip into the end zone, landed on my feet, and actually laughed when Gerald Mays—our center—yanked me into a hug.
“It’s good to fucking have you back, Brawley,” he shouted, lifting me off my feet.
“It’s good to be playing,” I rumbled in his ear. “Thanks for coming, man.”
Gerald let me down and clapped a large hand against my shoulder. “Any fucking time.”
We launched ourselves back into the game, and we played hard. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Jasmine had shoved the camera back at Joe so she could watch without holding his multi-thousand-dollar device. She wound up shouting plays at my team while Mel positioned herself on the other side—two makeshift coordinators who were hard-ass enough to give the Barons’ multitude of cranky-old-bastard coaches a run for their money. The thing about coaches was that there were two types of them—the ones who had played professionally and had nothing to prove besides their own focus on winning to the point of driving us into the ground if we fucked up, and the kind that had never played professionally and felt like they had everything to prove so they drove us into the ground regardless.
