From the quick glimpse I got, though, I could clearly see a smaller chunk of mug in the bottom of my right foot, and the large dropped one in the bottom of my left.
“Oh, holy mother of pearl.”
Here was the other problem, I was a big wussy. Heck, I hadn’t even gotten my ears pierced until four years ago when I was twenty, and I don’t think I’d changed them out of the ones they’d pierced them with since.
Lunging, I tried to pull the smaller piece out of my right foot but missed by a mile.
Chewing on my lip, I looked around for where I’d put my cell when I’d come in, groaning when I saw it on top of the counter furthest away from me. Of course that’s where it’d be.
Then a sound that filled me with hope came from behind me—someone was typing in the code on the keypad to the kitchen door. Only a handful of people had that code: me, Hayden, the cleaner and he who shall not be named.
Looking hopefully over my shoulder, I almost cried when I saw it was the latter of the list.
And the shithead was laughing.
Taking in my position, his brows shot up. “You okay down there? I mean, not that it hasn’t been hilarious watching you try to do whatever it is you’re doing, but still.”
Unwilling to say it out loud—seeing as how he’d know immediately where the new ceramic piercing in my body had come from—I scooted around on my butt and held both feet up for him to see. His chuckling stopped immediately.
“Oh, what the fuck?” he groaned, crouching down and wincing when he saw it up close. “Didn’t you clean it up?”
Breaking my silence is golden policy, I ground out, “Yes, I did. I vacuumed twice and I’m still finding pieces of it.”
“So are your feet,” he pointed out unhelpfully.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
Rolling his eyes, he leaned in closer to my right foot, and before I could blink or tell him not to, he was holding the piece from it between his fingers. “Here’s that little bugger.”
The shard was freaking tiny. “It felt bigger.”
“That’s what she said,” he murmured distractedly, his focus now on my left foot. “I think you’re gonna need a doctor to get that piece out.”
The news almost made me cry. The insurance from my new job hadn’t come through yet, so this was going to drain me dry. Oh, and let’s not forget the huge amount I was going to have to pay the charity for my stupid bid last night that I didn’t even have.
Sighing, he picked me up like I weighed nothing, and then started walking toward the door that led up to my apartment, avoiding Able who was excitedly wagging his tail at the newcomer.
I knew what I was saying was a lie, but I said it anyway. “I can walk, you know?”
“No, you can’t,” he murmured. “Your right foot’s bleeding, and if you put pressure on the other one, you’ll push that iceberg deeper in.”
He had a point, but one thing stuck out. “I’m bleeding,” I squealed, jerking my foot up to see and almost making him drop me.
Sure enough, there was a trail of blood down my foot.
It wasn’t like I was gushing, but it was bad enough for a wussy like me to faint. Which was exactly what I did.
“Thanks, man. I’ll make sure she stays off it,” Kip assured the doctor that he’d brought me to see, who incidentally was one of his friends.
“I know he’s irritating as hell, but try not to throw anything breakable at him again,” Josh advised me. “Go for heavy and unbreakable.”
Seeing as how I was still being carried around by the big oaf, I had to concede that his advice was smart.
“Thank you for patching me up.”
Here’s some irony for you. The shard that was in my right foot had come from the mug I’d thrown. The shard in my left one, though, was from a color changing mug that went from plain black to a picture of a naked woman.
Ask me how I know.
Because, as Josh had pulled it out, he’d found that the bit that’d been inside my foot had turned into a nipple.
A photo of it was texted to Hayden, and he’d shared that it’d been a gag gift from one of his team, and he’d laughed so hard when he’d seen what it changed into that he’d dropped it. Apparently, though, that’d happened five weeks ago, so it was just bad luck that I’d found the piece that’d escaped five weeks of cleaning. Oh, and that it was the boobie part. That nipple had resulted in five stitches in my foot that wouldn’t come out for a week. My other foot needed two days of no weight on it, and then I could just hobble.
Basically, I was screwed.
Thinking about how shitty my luck was, I wasn’t listening to what Kip was saying until he said, “He can’t install it until next Tuesday, though, so you’ll stay at mine. It’ll make it easier to help you out with your feet.”
“Wait, back up. A, what’s being installed next Tuesday? B, why would I need to stay at yours?” The last word came out squeaky due to the fact that his arm around my back had shifted to hold a lot more of my butt, and his knee lifted to rest under the other part of my booty while he looked for something in his pocket.
I figured out it was the keys to his SUV when I heard the locks click on the vehicle beside us. What can I say, blood loss made me stupid.
“Hayden doesn’t have a security system in his house, and the guy who does the best work according to him is away until then. For your safety, and so you don’t hurt your feet even more, you’ll stay at my house.”
“Why does Hayden need security?”
It might sound like a dumb question, but if he hadn’t had it installed before now, maybe there was a good reason? Like the area being safe.
“Because he’s a well-known figure, and you’re staying there on your own.” He refrained from adding a ‘duh,’ but his tone didn’t.
Then, he carefully placed me on the passenger seat and put my belt on me—even though I had zero injuries to my hands—and then walked around the front of the vehicle to get in behind the wheel. If I’d gotten in on my own, I’d have had to boost myself into the seat, but he made it look easy and did it almost elegantly.
Stupid smug footballer.
Yes, I was being unreasonable, but I was in the midst of a moral dilemma here. I avoided unnecessary interaction with sports players at all costs with good reason—some childhood memories left deep scars. And here he was being all nice and genuine and I couldn’t get away from it. I also owed a lot of money to a charity for him that I was certain I’d have to ask my brother for and then pay him back with my firstborn.
And I couldn’t freaking just run away from him because I couldn’t even walk.
I stayed silent, focused on the view out of my window, as he reversed out of the parking space and then drove us home. It wasn’t a pissed off silence, more a frustrated one.
“You being this quiet is making me nervous,” he muttered as he navigated us toward our homes.
“I’m thinking.”
“I’m more used to verbal rants and anger,” he admitted, shocking me into looking at him. “My ex used to do that if I did something to piss her off. Come to think of it, she used to do it for everything.” The last bit was said quietly, almost like he was saying it to himself.
For some reason, him letting down that wall made me drop my own, and I offered up something I never spoke about—my ex.
“Mine was the same, but he also liked to push me around while he did it.”
Taking his eyes off the road for a moment, he asked incredulously, “Your ex hit you?”
“Not hit, per se. Just pushed when he wasn’t getting his own way.”
“Does Hayden know?”
“No,” I snorted. “He’d lose it and beat the shit out of him. I wouldn’t give Cam the satisfaction of Hayden losing his Sounders contract. It was bad enough when he found out he’d cheated on me and then followed me here.”
There was a tense silence, then he asked, “Did they ever get along?”
“Nope, which was why Cam would be ecst
atic to get the chance to mess his career up.”
We were just pulling up in front of his gates when he stopped altogether. “Wait, are we talking about Cam LaValle? The guy who tried to sue the Sounders for not signing him?”
“One and the same,” I sighed. “That was after we’d broken up, obviously. I wasn’t meant to find out he’d cheated on me, and when I did and moved here, he followed and set his sights on the Sounders. He thought being linked to Hayden would give him an automatic in, but when that didn’t happen, he got his lawyer to sue them for discrimination.”
“Didn’t he try to sue his ex for ruining his career?”
Yes, yes, he had.
“Neither legal cases lasted long. Basically, his lawyer sent the letters to us, and then told him he didn’t stand a chance and to give up or ruin his career forever, so he gave up.”
“Douche,” he muttered as he resumed driving through his gates, pressing the button on the black box attached to his visor to close them behind us.
When we got to the garage, he came around to pick me up and carried me inside. “Make a list of what you need from your place, and I’ll go get it.”
To an outsider, it might look like he’d dropped the subject of my ex, but the tense set of his jaw and gleam in his eye as he tapped on the screen of his phone made me suspicious. Still, when he saw that I wasn’t making the damn list, he raised his brows and nodded at me to get on with it.
I’d still blame the shock from my injury and the fact I’d needed needles inserted into my body to fix the damage for the fact that I didn’t argue with him about going through my stuff to get what I needed. The truth was, I was still recovering from being in his arms and how kind he was being.
Shit, I totally liked the footballer.
Chapter 5
Kip
Biting my lip to stop myself laughing, I passed her the bag I’d packed and unclipped the little dog who’d been asleep on her bed from its leash. Apparently while I’d been away, she’d realized what sort of stuff I was going to find at hers, and she was now sitting with her hands over her eyes.
Before I could say anything, she squeaked, “Say nothing.”
I tried. I really tried not to, but on my next breath out I started laughing so hard that I almost dropped to the floor.
“Your panties say Ministry of Magic on the back of them,” I wheezed.
“It was a printing mistake. They were meant to put it on the front,” she snapped back, making me laugh even harder.
“And the glittery pig dressed up like Harry Potter with Hairy Porker ones?” I needed to know how and why they existed.
“They were a gift.”
“The Little Hairmaid?”
“I get a lot of gag gifts,” she mumbled.
She had at least nine pairs of panties like that, and then there were the t-shirts. When she got ready for bed tonight, she’d be sleeping in one that said: Not a basic witch, just a total bitch.
And then there was the other thing…
Seeing that I was still laughing, she sighed. “You found it, didn’t you?”
“I know not of which you speak,” I choked out this time, lying badly.
Yes, in fact I had found what she was talking about, and it was that bad that I knew exactly what she was talking about.
She also knew that I was lying.
Under her panties had been a Tickle Me Elmo vibrator. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was, but I’d knocked the switch on the bottom of it and it’d started moving violently in my hand scaring the shit out of me. It wasn’t until I’d found the box that went with it that it’d all clicked for me. Apparently, the vibrator had five speeds and it claimed it would ‘tickle the hell out of your tickle spot’. Who came up with that, I didn’t know, but as someone who’d loved the character as a kid… it’d been hilarious, but traumatic.
“I’ve never used it,” she whispered, still hiding behind her hands. “I took it out of the box and felt like I’d violated the poor guy.”
I could understand that. I’d only held it and I felt the same way. Still, it was too funny to drop. “If you say so.”
“I haven’t,” she hissed, her hands finally dropping back into her lap.
Biting down on my bottom lip, I hit the screen of my phone to play what I’d found for this moment while I was putting things in her bag. The sounds of Elmo giggling and telling whoever he was with to tickle him played loudly in my living room making the blush on her cheeks deepen.
I only just managed to catch her as she launched herself at me, and fell down onto my back on the ground, making sure she didn’t put any weight on her feet.
She might have been trying to tickle me under my arms and down my sides—something I hated—but she was laughing at me at the same time so I rolled with it.
And that’s when it hit me. This woman was different to any of the ones I’d met before now. She made me laugh, she didn’t get angry when she was embarrassed, I actually looked forward to spending time with her, I never knew what to expect but I knew I’d end up feeling good after it… she was like Will’s Meg.
Apparently needing ‘open foot surgery’ meant that Ashley needed Pizza to ‘get her strength back’. So, regardless of the fact that I normally followed a strict diet, I was currently sitting on the floor with her, watching Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw with her and getting what she called ‘pizza wasted’.
“I don’t know, if Idris Elba came up to me—bad guy or not—I’d probably just jump him. In fact, if I close my eyes and listen to him and Jason Statham arguing, it’s like soft porn with their accents,” she told me, throwing her crust back into the box.
Normally, that would be a problem for me. I had issues with people touching my food, and that included a half-eaten crust knocking against a piece of pizza. Looking at the slice in question, I waited for the nausea that normally hit me when this happened, but nothing happened.
“Are you okay?” Ashley asked, bringing my attention back onto her.
“Yeah, sorry. I have this thing about things touching my food, and I was waiting for my normal reaction when your crust touched that slice of pizza,” I pointed at the slice, not seeing the point in lying about it.
Following where I was looking, she winced. “Sorry. I didn’t even think.”
Waving my hand and making a point of picking up the piece, I leaned back and took a big bite.
“Normally I’d feel sick, and the fact that a kitchen of people I don’t know touching the food with their hands to make it would hit me, but I’m okay.”
There was silence from her, but then she reached across and picked up a napkin from the stack on the coffee table and discretely spat the food in her mouth out into one. “Gross!”
Seeing what I’d described to her clearly in my mind now, I followed suit and then grabbed my bottle of water and gargled with it.
“Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have shared that with you,” I admitted. “It’s also why I usually make all of my meals. The only reason I was okay at the charity dinner was because I know for a fact that the catering company are almost religious about wearing gloves and hats when they prepare and serve the food. I’m kind of a mess about it, to be honest. I never know where their hands have been, and all I can picture is bacteria and shit.”
Staring sadly at the leftover pieces of pizza, she muttered, “You’ve ruined my favoritest thing in the world. I don’t think I’ll ever eat pizza again, and it’s a main food group.”
Bursting out laughing at how disappointed she sounded, I got up to go to the kitchen to get her something I knew would make her feel better, and tore one of the crusts up for her dog to eat having been reassured earlier he wouldn’t have the same reaction as he did with cupcakes.
He was as close to a toddler as a pet could get. He got bored with walking easily and would demand to be picked up as soon as it happened, refused to sit on the floor, only drank filtered water, and had issues with boundaries like closed doors while you were going to the
bathroom, but I kinda liked the little guy.
Getting the surprise out of the freezer, I nabbed two spoons and went back to where she was engrossed in the movie again. Not saying a word, I sat down beside her and lifted the lid on the box, licking my lips at what was inside it.
While she’d been in the car waiting for me to pick up some stuff from the store, Will had picked up a Baskin-Robbins birthday cake and dropped it off before we’d gotten back. I knew for a fact they had enough hygiene rules there to appease my phobia, so I was going to make up for the pizza fail.
I’d only just touched the top of the ice cream with my spoon when she gasped. “You dirty little bluebird. If you’ve got the holy grail in your home, you announce it the second someone walks through your door.”
Setting the box between us on the floor, I passed her the other spoon. “Pizza wasted was a fail, but this kind of wasted is a go.”
When she just blinked and looked back down at it, not digging in like I’d expected her to, I explained, “I used to work there when I was in high school. Gloves are a must for everyone, and their hygiene policy is strict, so it’s all good.”
The grin that she gave me left me momentarily stunned, and then she was digging in, getting a huge spoonful and groaning when she bit into it.
“I’ll take that as it’s good,” I snickered, eating the chunk on my spoon.
Going back to watching her movie, we ate the cake in companionable silence, giving me time to think over my Ashley Wilkes epiphany from earlier.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how little I actually knew about her.
“Hey, Ash, how old are you?”
“Twenty-six, why?” she asked, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. Eyes that I only just realized had different shades of blue and green in them. The main color was definitely a mid-blue, but there was a green ring closer to her pupil. They were unusual and gorgeous, and totally perfect for her.
Out of Bounds: A Quick Snap Novella Page 3
