Balls: The Complete Players Collection (Sports Romance Box Set) Page 13

  I cry out, lost in the bliss of my fast-approaching orgasm.

  “Come for me.” I moan, louder and louder. “I want to come together.”

  Kieran erupts, filling me up. My pussy clenches one last time and then I’m in freefall, my body ravaged by the most intense climax I’ve ever had.

  The rest is a blissful haze.

  I fall into a deep sleep as I stroke my new wedding ring, knowing I’ll always, no matter what may come, treasure this night.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  KIERAN

  It’s the thirst that wakes me up. It has to be. My mouth is coated with a mixture of cotton and a horrible, tongue-stiffening aftertaste of alcohol. Even swallowing is difficult. My eyelids feel like they’re loaded with lead. It takes superhuman-levels of effort to force them open.

  That’s to say something of the full-on throbbing in my brain, which compromises my ability to think. My head pounds. Throwing a pillow over it doesn’t help. I groan, but the throbbing only intensifies.

  “Kieran!” yells someone.

  I twist in bed and groan again.

  “Kieran!”

  I hate the abyss between dreamland and the real world. My body is powerless to the shouting of this semi-lucid dream—more like nightmare—I’m having. All I want to do is press the snooze button and go back to sleep.

  “Kieran, get up!” A loud slam against a hard surface reverberates in the room.

  And again.

  And then one more time.

  Joey stirs beside me, mumbles something, and shoves me off the bed.

  That wakes me up for good. I scan the room, disoriented for a second, when I hear the thumping at the door again.

  “Kieran! Kieran, get the fuck up!” It’s Baylor.

  Not a dream after all.

  “Coming,” I croak.

  I amble to the door lazily, rubbing my face as I do so. I pick up my boxers and slide them on. I unlock the door and crack it open, allowing only a sliver of the outside light to come in. Baylor sees this less-than-inch and barges in to take a mile.

  “Holy shit, I thought someone had died in here.” He’s panting. “It took a pro athlete tackling your door to wake you up. Do you have some kind of sleeping disorder? Fuck, man.” He massages his shoulder. Winces. Stops.

  “What’s the emergency?” I ask robotically. I glance at the clock and see it’s not even eight yet. If memory serves, our transport won’t leave until noon. “What the fuck, man? You should have let me sleep in. Jesus fucking Christ, Baylo—”

  “I can’t find Joey,” Baylor blurts. “I’ve tossed her room. She’s not there. I’ve called every single one of our teammates and personally knocked on all their doors. Nothing. I called Coach Allen. He hasn’t seen her.” He widens his eyes at me and continues listing off some missing-person checklist he must have conjured. “Do you have any idea where she is?”

  “Dude—”

  “Fuck, Kieran, I thought you were going to take care of her, or I never would have gotten blitzed last night. Please tell me you know where she—” Baylor cuts off.

  I turn to see Joey looking startled as all fuck, her head popping out from under the blankets.

  Baylor stares at her.

  Looks at me.

  His gaze returns to her and his mouth hangs open.

  A long, awkward silence follows. I can almost hear the wheels whirring in his mind as he pieces it all together. That Joey is in my bed. That we were both in my bed. That we were both asleep until he woke us up.

  He glances at the pile of discarded clothes strewn on the floor.

  “Baylor,” Joey starts to say. She sits up, barely missing the blanket that’s keeping her naked body covered. She wraps it tightly around herself and moves to get up.

  Baylor holds his hand up, signaling for her to stop dead in her tracks. Which she does.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Baylor snarls, low and menacing. He charges toward me, arms raised and face wild. “What the fuck is Joey doing in your bed?”

  “Baylor, no! Stop!” Joey pushes her way between the two of us. “This is none of your business. Please leave and we’ll discuss this later.”

  He stares at her with an expression of utter astonishment. “Are you kidding me? You think I’m going to just wait for you two to get dressed so we can sit around the dinner table and discuss.”

  “Baylor, get the fuck out,” I tell him. I walk around him, open the door again, and gesture for him to leave. “Joey and I have to talk.”

  “You are my best friend,” Baylor hisses. He approaches again, wagging a finger at me. “My best fucking friend and you do this? Have some drunken one-night stand with my sister? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

  “Baylor, I’m a grown-up,” Joey says. “You’re making a fool of yourself, so would you please get out?” With a softer voice, she adds, “Please, Bay. I really don’t have it in me to hash this out with you right now.”

  “I don’t understand,” he says, befuddled. “I truly don’t. How could you let this happen?” He’s talking to me, and not in an inside voice. “How could you do this? You know the one thing I ever asked of you was to keep your hands off my sister—”

  “I’m a big girl,” Joey interrupts. “I can take care of myself. This really isn’t any of your business.”

  “This is my best friend,” Baylor says again. “My teammate. You work for the team. Holy shit, you two are unbelievable. I can’t even…”

  Light bounces off the gold band on Joey’s ring finger.

  Knots form in my stomach. Joey’s eyes meet mine.

  She averts her gaze quickly and sheepishly stares at the floor.

  Small sequences from last night flash through my mind. A judge. Dolly Parton. Elvis. A fucking discotheque in the chapel.

  As discreetly as I can manage, I run my thumb over my ring finger.

  In the midst of this commotion Baylor’s making, it nearly slipped my mind Joey in my bed is relatively minor in comparison with the other bit of news.

  I clench my fist. My own wedding ring digs into the skin of my palm. I hate that we’re parsing through all of this, that I’m combing through what is dream and what is a memory of something that actually happened—in front of fucking Baylor.

  I’m hungover. Next to naked. Staring down the barrel of Baylor’s anger.

  I should be kissing my wife good morning.

  “Get out, Baylor,” I tell him in a tone that conveys I’m done fucking around or humoring him.

  Baylor catches his breath. “Is that—” He stops short. Looks at me again. At my finger. Then he glances back up and stares at me, this time like he doesn’t recognize me at all. “What is my sister doing with a wedding ring on her finger, Kieran?”

  Joey intervenes. “Baylor, please let us—”

  “No, I want him to answer.” Baylor drops his attack stance. “I want to hear why it is the two of you have matching rings that suddenly appeared during our trip to Vegas. A city where that kind of thing implies… Well…”

  “We got married,” I tell him.

  All the blood drains from Baylor’s face. He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Again. Again. Again. He looks like a fish. I count down in my head, waiting for the words to register to him.

  “You two got—” Baylor’s voice cracks, like it’s really so unexpected after he basically said so himself before I interrupted him. “Married?”

  I turn to look at Joey. She’s shrinking into the blanket that’s clothing her. I hold my hand out for her to take. She accepts it feebly. I find myself basically propping her up. I squeeze her hand as an attempt to comfort her. I’m not sure it’s reassuring to her but it’s the best I can do right now as I stand here, wearing nothing but boxers in front of her absurdly overprotective older brother. Who’s just found out in the worst possible way that I—in what I imagine will be his words as he rages on about this later, just before he sucker punches me—“bedded his sister.”

  I can picture this playing
out in a shitty sitcom. My comeback would be, “At least I put a ring on it.” Or, “At least I made an honest woman out of her.”

  Which, if my very sparse memory of the events from last night serves, I actually did say at some point.

  Maybe it’s better not to dwell on all that.

  Especially with Baylor’s impending implosion.

  “Answer me.” Baylor comes nose to nose with me. “You owe me at least that much.”

  “I won’t argue with that.” I push him back because I’m on my last nerve. My head kills. I haven’t even had the opportunity to kiss Joey, who is my wife, on the day after we married. My own indignation rises like bile in my throat. “But right now, you need to get the fuck out of our room.”

  Baylor starts to protest, but I grab the collar of his shirt. Just as I begin dragging him out, he flinches, and exits of his own volition.

  “You and I are going to talk about this,” he warns me.

  “I’m sure we are.” I don’t roll my eyes because that would be inviting too much drama into an already tense situation, but it takes all my self-control to resist the urge. “Just not right now.”

  I slam the door closed and lock it.

  Tears stream down Joey’s face. I immediately circle my arms around her, drawing her close. The need to protect her surges in me. I tighten our embrace, kiss the top of her head.

  “It’ll be okay, Jo,” I murmur. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  She freezes in my arms, hiccups, and starts crying harder.

  “What’s the matter, Jo?” I ask. I attempt to look at her, but she resists, keeping a firm hold on me. She squeezes me. Her tears fall on my chest. “Hey, hey. Look at me.”

  Joey sniffles, takes a deep breath, and looks up.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her again, mustering all my sincerity and offering it to her on a silver platter. I need her to know that.

  She returns my gaze with a stricken expression.

  Then it hits me. She thinks I regret what the wedding rings represent.

  “Hey, hey. Not like that. I’m not sorry I married you,” I say.

  She scrutinizes my face through a curtain of hair that falls in front of hers.

  “I mean, I would have liked to have been sober while I made my vows to you,” I quip, trying to lighten the mood.

  It backfires. She starts shaking like a leaf again. Quickly, I’m fastening my arms around her again. I sway her from side to side and try to calm down her mounting nerves. “Hey, Jo.”

  “God, I’m like a leaky faucet,” she says softly.

  I take a step back, put my finger under her chin, and nudge her head up again. I wipe her tears away and tuck a few loose strands of her hair behind her ears. “Babe. Look at me.”

  She does, her face tear-streaked and red.

  There’s a sharp pain in my chest. She’s so beautiful. She’s everything.

  And I hate seeing her like this.

  “I love you,” I tell her.

  The tears spill anew. She fights back for as long as she can but then the sobbing takes over her entire body. Her shoulders droop.

  “I love you,” I repeat, embracing her again. “I want you to know that. To trust that. It’ll all be okay. Baylor will come around. Everything will be okay, Jo.”

  “I love you, too,” she tells me, her voice strained.

  “And that’s all that matters,” I whisper.

  Joey clings to me for a long time before she’s ready to let go. Even then, she says nothing. She goes to splash some water on her face, leaving me clueless and frustrated with my impotence to solve what is fast turning into a serious fucking situation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  JOEY

  “You know, I really tried to get you to like me,” Rachel says.

  I take a deep breath and exhale slowly. So much for my plans to have some alone time so maybe I can sort out how I feel.

  And rationalize the horrible thing that I’ve done.

  It was supposed to be simple, really. Baylor is too busy fuming over Desmond but putting up a front of a guy who doesn’t give a damn. Of someone who’s over it.

  Or maybe he is over it, but he doesn’t feel comfortable being in the vicinity of the guy who was fucking his fiancée not a full twenty-four hours ago.

  I can’t say I fault him for it.

  Regardless, the end result is that Baylor isn’t focused on me or my unexpected marriage to his best friend. That solves my Baylor problem.

  As for Kieran, he and I both have a vested interest in keeping our private business out of public circulation. We both work for the team, so that’s a no-brainer. After we left that hotel room, we promised to only talk about anything related to us, the married entity of us, when we are away from prying eyes.

  Obviously, that can’t happen on a bus, so he sits a couple rows in front of me. Sometimes he’ll steal a peek at me, and I’ll flash him a discreet smile, but that’s the extent of our interaction during the ride home.

  However…

  I didn’t think about Rachel. Mostly because I assumed she wouldn’t be riding home with us. I waited until the last possible minute to come on board, mostly so I would not have to deal with Baylor in case Desmond unilaterally decided not to come. By the time I climbed on board, all the seats except for the one next to Rachel and the one next to Desmond were taken. And they also seemingly purposely sat as far away as possible from each other, leaving me in quite a bind.

  I immediately pivoted, got off the bus, and went to find Coach Allen to ask him why the hell Rachel was on the bus.

  “Her father, also a war veteran, mind, very respectable fellow,” he noted, “personally called me prior to this trip to ask for my guarantee his daughter would be safe while traveling with a rowdy bunch like the team. Now, I don’t know why your brother ended their engagement, but underneath all the bluster and bravado is a very decent young man. I assume he had his reasons. However, I cannot simply leave her in Las Vegas when I promised her father she would be safe.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t know anything about Miss Canne’s private, home life, but the impression I got from my brief conversation with her father is that she has two very loving, very doting, and very overbearing parents.” Coach Allen lowers his shades. “I don’t doubt their intentions, but… Growing up in an environment like that, Joey, is a complicated thing. It can clip a person’s wings, take away their freedom, make them feel like they need to be secretive and sneaky to do the things they want.”

  I gulped. Well, that took a turn for the jugular.

  He doesn’t know about Baylor and Kieran and your history with them, Joey. Keep your cool.

  “Look, I understand all that,” I reiterated. “But, honestly, isn’t this an insurance liability at the very least? She has nothing to do with anyone on the team anymore and—”

  “Joey.” Coach Allen placed a hand on my shoulder. “Unless you want to give me a reason—a real reason, not based on some whim—that justifies booting Miss Canne from the bus, I’m not going to. On top of the promise I made to her father, which is not something I take lightly, there is also the very real concern that if she returns alone, with the implication being she was unwelcome to return with the team, there’ll be consequences. What do you think happens? Don’t you think that sends a very powerful message to her folks, who are already way too involved in her life? I understand it’s not optimal to have a former fiancée sit for hours near you so soon after a breakup, but let’s be pragmatic here. Your brother is the one who invited her along. He opened the door to this.”

  “Point well taken, sir, but honestly—”

  “We will not leave her stranded here, Joy-Lynn Torrence.” Coach Allen removes his hand from my shoulder. “And in the future, you will not muddy the waters with personal shenanigans. I expect better from you. On a personal level, I have to say I’m a little disappointed at your immaturity. No one, not even Baylor, sought me out, held up the team, kept us here
to defy my decisions and question my judgment. Now, are we going to get on that bus and go home or do you want to take another stab at convincing me to dump someone with no other means of getting home off to the side of the road in a city she’s unfamiliar with?”

  After I’d applied the necessary mental burn cream after Coach’s shakedown, that left me two options: sitting next to Rachel or sitting next to Desmond.

  The seat next to Desmond is close to where the rest of the coaching staff is sitting, so Coach Allen took it for himself.

  And that’s the story of how I ended up sitting next to Rachel.

  “I saw you,” she continues. “When you came on the bus. You scowled, marched back out, and went to convince the coach to kick me out, right?”

  I massage my temples and sigh. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Wow, honesty from a Torrence. For the first time ever.” She mimics applause. “Hooray for you.”

  “That’s rich coming from a cheater.” But I recall what Coach Allen said about her, about the impression he got from talking to her father. It makes me have a little sympathy for her—a tiny, measly sliver, sure, but sympathy regardless.

  That is, until I remember she cheated on my brother and tried to play it off like we’d walked in on them mid-assault rather than a cheap case of coitus interruptus.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Rachel, but let’s not pretend you have any moral high ground. You cheated on Baylor.” I inhale sharply. “I won’t pretend I know all about your relationship with him, but from where I’m standing, you are a grown woman, the same age as Baylor, and you are a liar.”

  “You—” she starts.

  “No one forced you to accept his proposal. No one forced you to accept this acceleration of that proposal. No one forced you to stay in your relationship with him. You could have left and gone on to fuck however many guys you wanted to, but you chose to lead him on while you went behind his back and pursued his teammates,” I hiss. I take a second to get my emotions in check. “You tried to make it seem like Desmond assaulted you. You are disgusting and I’ll be glad to never see you again.”