Focused: A hate to love sports romance(10)

She held up her hands. "Just saying."

"It'll be fine, even if he is the one they want to highlight." I licked my lips as I thought about the rest of my day at work. "I'm going to go meet with Beatrice before we talk to Amazon, and they start filming at practice. Because I will not let him ruin this chance for me."

"And if they do choose him?"

My lip curled into an uncharacteristic snarl when I considered what that meant for me. It meant my single chance at proving myself to my boss would rest in the hands of the one person in the Wolves organization who hated me.

Awesome.

I bumped her shoulder with mine. "Maybe you can come beat him up for me if he's mean again."

Isabel stood with a grin, holding her hand out for me so she could tug me to my feet. "You got it."

After I'd dumped all my stuff into my gym bag, I slung it over my shoulder. Iz held out her fist to me, and I bumped it as I passed.

"Go get 'em, tiger," she said. "I'd bet on you any day of the week."

"Damn straight," I muttered. Noah Griffin didn't know me anymore either, but he was about to find out exactly what I was made of.





Chapter Five





Noah





My reputation as The Machine preceded me, that much was evident. The guys were polite in their greetings but nothing effusive. No violent, back-pounding hugs, nothing outside of reserved happiness that my football talents were now wearing black and red.

There was very little in any greeting about Noah Griffin as a person, and that suited me just fine. Until I got out on the practice field and saw Kareem Jones, outside linebacker and one of my former roommates from U Dub. Before he so much as opened his mouth, I braced myself for the attention I'd been actively avoiding.

He hooted loudly when I cleared the doors, drawing the attention of every damn person on the field. I laughed under my breath as he barreled toward me and lifted me in a massive hug with arms as big as tree trunks. He was two inches taller than me, so my feet cleared the ground for a second before he dropped me.

"Damn, boy, what they been feeding you in Miami?" he said around a wide, happy grin. "The Machine got fat."

I shoved at his shoulder. "You're delusional, Jones. I'd still kick your ass at the line every time, and you know it."

His booming laugh thawed a bit of the icy wall of distance I'd stood behind since arriving. But I still found myself glancing around to see if anyone was watching with suspicion or distrust.

It was ridiculous to think they would. Drama happened in the locker room of every team in the league, and the reason for my hasty departure out of Miami, made up or not, hadn’t been fed to mainstream media. What golden boy QB wanted to admit that one of his teammates—bigger, stronger, and more established on the team—had a chance with his Playboy Playmate wife? Not the QB I'd left behind, that's for sure.

But still, common knowledge or not, it rankled that anyone might look at me and think it was the truth. It made me wish I could go back and not offer her a ride, that I'd called her an Uber or called her husband or another one of the WAGs who'd been at the event. A drunk woman wasn't my responsibility, even if she'd felt like it at the moment as I came upon her swaying dangerously in the parking lot as she tried to find her keys.

Kareem waved another teammate over to introduce me, and I took a deep breath. No one was judging me. No one was watching with narrowed eyes.

Except maybe Logan, I thought as I caught sight of him at the edge of the field, watching me carefully underneath the brim of his well-worn black cap with the Wolves logo stamped on the front.

Turning my attention to the guys who approached, I recognized a few but not all. They all smiled, made small talk, and joked around with Kareem. The kind of familiarity that typically grew between teammates.

Just not with me.

Sometimes, I hardly recognized that about myself, but I'd been that way for so long, it felt like a fool's errand to try to change it. Change myself.

"Relax, man," Kareem said quietly as the other guys started talking amongst themselves.

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, that's what I do best."

"You still a virgin? You know that's your problem, right?"

My whole body froze as he said it far too loudly. I leveled him with a glare, which made him crack up. "Kareem, you asshole. I'm not a virgin—"

His jaw dropped open as he caught sight of my face. "Seriously? You still don't have sex?" His head shook back and forth, slowly, incredulously. "I thought you were just being, like, moody or some shit in college."

"We are not talking about this right now."

He hooted again. "Yeah, we are." One arm came around my shoulders, and we separated from the guys. I wasn't ashamed of the fact that I chose to abstain from women. A woman was a distraction. Sex was not only a distraction but it also came with far too many possible complications. I didn't want kids. Didn't want anything in my life that would fight for the top spot in my life outside of football. "Man, come on, you're killin' me. How do you ... Aren't you angry all the time?"

That made me smile, just a little, because the way he said it made it sound like I was attempting an impossible feat. Climbing Mt Everest naked. Bungee jumping over a canyon full of glass with a frayed rope. Jumping from an airplane without checking to see if my parachute was attached to my back.