The Long Game (Long Game, #1)(69)

“Have a go at it, darling.”

I lifted the thing in obvious offering and watched her mouth near the small mound of ice, tongue out, gently grazing the top before really digging in.

My pulse sped up. And a voice inside my head said, You horny bastard. But yeah. There was no denying it. I was turned on. By Adalyn, not the ice.

“So, Coach Cornfield,” María’s voice cut through the haze. “How are the curmudgeons on your butt?”

My eyes, which had been on Adalyn’s mouth, widened. And Adalyn, who had a mouthful of ice, snorted.

It was a shockingly loud sound, and it propelled some of the pink and blue mix out of her nose. Adalyn’s hand flew to her face, covering the colorful mess dripping down her nose and chin.

A second of charged silence ensued.

Then, one of the kids said in what was, without mistake, awe, “WHOA. That is the coolest thing I’ve seen in my whole life.”

Adalyn, who still had all my attention, seemed shocked by the kid’s words.

But when Chelsea added, “Yeah, Miss Adalyn. That was supercool. Do you think you can teach us?” The rest of the team agreed, and something else filled the face of this woman who seemed able to continuously catch me off guard like nobody else ever had.

Pride. It was pride.

And as my curmudgeons were quickly and luckily forgotten, the team’s mood picked up, and the cones disappeared, my eyes remained on the woman sitting by my side. This usually exasperating and outwardly prim woman, who had just snorted ice out her nose and looked thoroughly pleased after getting the kids’ approval. The tug in my gut intensified, pulling so tight that I had to catch my breath for a second. Something in my chest shifted. Warmed. Making me…

I froze.

“Fuck.”

Her head turned, and she looked at me with that somewhat sheepish, somewhat happy look on her face. Jesus, she’d never looked more beautiful than right now. “What’s wrong?”

“Huh.” I cleared my throat. “What?”

“You said the f-word,” she answered simply. Had I? “Did the ice get to your head?”

Definitely not the ice. “What do you mean?”

“The ice,” she explained, taking a quick sip of tea from the cup. “It happens to me when I order iced lattes. It gets to my head if I drink too fast. But never mind. I guess manly men’s brains don’t freeze with sno-cones.”

“That’s what you think of me?” came out of my mouth. “That I’m some impressive manly man?”

“I didn’t say impressive.” She rolled her eyes, but fuck, the corners of her lips turned up again.

“What else do you think of me?” I asked, nudging her shoulder with mine. Something came over me. Something caused by the turmoil inside. I lowered my voice. “Anything that keeps you awake at night?”

Adalyn’s mouth parted. Her tongue snuck out. And I thought, Go on, love. Throw me a bone. Because I wanted her to tease me. And I knew she wanted to, too. I could already taste the words coming out of her mouth, I could already feel them on my tongue.

But then, her gaze moved behind me. Her expression changed.

And just like that, all hell broke loose.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE



Adalyn


For a second, I’d thought I was wrong.

That I had to be wrong.

Because how unlucky did I have to be? How very unlucky was I that on the day I was somehow having a breakthrough, on the day I wasn’t feeling like the failure I was—the embarrassment, the total and complete castaway—a reminder had to be flung back at my face?

One moment I was looking at Cameron, getting a little lost in the way his eyes were roaming around my face like he was seeing something, a little part of myself, perhaps even me, for the first time. Sitting there with the tea he’d asked Tony to get me because he remembered I didn’t drink coffee after noon. A warmth that had nothing to do with the tea or the nearness of his body surging, breaking through me.

And the next, poof. Everything was gone.

At first it had been nothing more than a flash of color. A shape I’d told myself not to think anything of. But then, the guy moved, as if his intention was to approach us. His chest faced me, and I knew just how wrong I was. How foolish.

He wore a hoodie with the exact image I’d seen on the energy drink website. The can. The doodle of my face. The slogan: CHOOSE ENTERTAINMENT OVER DIGNITY.

It all came back to me then, the fact I’d never gotten an update from Miami. That I didn’t know when or if they’d taken legal action. What I knew was that there was a guy with my enraged face on his clothes. In North Carolina. So I panicked. My heart dropped to my feet, I felt all my blood leave my face, and I did what I should have probably done that day I arrived in Green Oak, right after I pulled the pin and made my orderly, neat life implode.

I ran.

Or I tried. Because instead, I whirled on the bench I was sitting, tripped over the water keg, and plunged into the ground, managing to squeeze the take-out cup so hard, the lid flew off and the contents spilled all over me.

It wasn’t pretty, and I was sure I’d gone down with a scream.

I should have been mortified, humiliated, really, because I’d been doing a lot of falling and tripping and I was, frankly, sick of it. And yet, even as I went through that hurdle, I kept thinking, Well, at least Cameron will look at me. Not at the man in the hoodie. At least the one person in town who hasn’t seen that horrible video won’t find out this way.