Free Agent

by Catherine Gayle

  “Hi,” I said warily.

  Blake got up and came over to my side. “This is Mia Quincey and her husband and kids. Mitch used to be one of my teammates.”

  Nodding but still confused, I asked, “Are you here to take pictures of Lil?”

  Maybe Blake wanted some pictures of the two of them together. Something he could keep long after she was gone? I honestly wasn’t sure, but that was the only thing that made sense.

  “She’s taking pictures of you, smarty pants,” Lil said from her bed.

  “Me? No.” I was already shaking my head and trying to back out of the room, but Blake reached for my hand as if anticipating my reaction.

  “Let’s go out in the hall and talk for a minute,” he said, and he nudged me hard enough that I stumbled and followed, with Mia not far behind us.

  “What’s this all about?” I demanded in a whisper, because the halls were more crowded than usual. It seemed like there was something big going on and we were probably in the way. I moved closer to the walls so we wouldn’t obstruct the path, folded my arms in front of me, and glared at Blake so he’d know I wasn’t amused.

  “It’s about— I just—”

  “He thought you might want to do a photo shoot,” Mia said when he couldn’t get the words out right. “With me. I do a lot of portraits these days.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  I hated having my picture taken. Always had. I looked bigger on film than I did in person, and I always saw flaws that probably weren’t even there. It was just part of being me, this aversion to having my photo taken. I dreaded school picture day every year and did my best to blend into the background of the class photos, allowing my students to shine up front.

  “Because maybe it’ll help you see yourself the way I see you,” Blake said. And darn it if he didn’t sound completely sincere and adorable when he said it. “I just thought… If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.”

  But he was wrong about that. Maybe no one would force me to have my picture taken, but it would eat away at me for a very long time if I didn’t at least hear her out.

  “What kind of photo shoot?” I asked warily.

  “The kind that’ll help you feel confident in your own skin,” Mia replied, a distinct arch in her brow that made her meaning very clear.

  “Oh, no. No, I can’t—”

  “I’ll do it with you if you want,” Blake cut in. “You and me. Sexy lingerie. Mood lighting…”

  “But you look amazing. And you have no problem letting people see you with your clothes off. That’s different.”

  He scrunched his forehead in thought. “How do you know I don’t care if people see me?”

  “I’ve heard about naked yoga in the locker room.”

  Mia appeared to be having difficulty keeping a straight face.

  “Oh. Yeah,” Blake said, and he had a grin that nearly knocked my feet out from under me. “I guess that’s kind of a giveaway. Who told you, though?”

  “Dani. Apparently all the guys were complaining about you.”

  “All of them? Colesy was into me…”

  “From what I understand, it was all of them. But Dani has been known to exaggerate on occasion.”

  “I offered to let Anne film me for Eye of the Storm, but she said it’s a family-friendly program and she’d have to blur me out. It’d be a lot to blur…”

  He winked.

  I blushed.

  Mia’s eyes were traveling between the two of us through this entire exchange, and she had the biggest smile brightening her eyes. “You two are hilarious together. I really want to do this.”

  I started to argue once again, but Blake spoke before I could get a word out.

  “We’re doing it. I want you to do it for me, even if you won’t do it for yourself.”

  “For you?”

  “I’ll be there, too.”

  “But we’ve already established that you don’t care if people see you.”

  “No one has to see you but me. And Mia, I guess, since she’s the one shooting the pictures.”

  Mia nodded. “And I have a makeup artist who’ll help, but she’s awesome and discreet. She can do your hair, help me with styling you… She handles my lights.”

  “No one else will ever see these pictures? Because I could lose my job over something like this.” Not to mention the way my family would react if they ever found out. That couldn’t happen.

  “They’ll just be for us. For you and me,” Blake insisted.

  “I don’t know…”

  He turned a puppy-dog expression on me, and I melted.

  With a heavy sigh, I closed my eyes and said, “What do I have to do?”

  BLAKE STAYED AT the hospital with Mitch, the Quincey kids, and his grandmother while Mia and Angie, her assistant, took me shopping.

  Lingerie shopping, to be precise.

  I’d never bothered setting foot in a lingerie store before. I mean, not a true lingerie store. Since my weight loss, I’d been buying my bras and underwear in stores that specialized in comfort and support, not in sex appeal, because that was what I intended to use them for. And before that, I’d only ever shopped in the stores like Lane Bryant and Catherine’s, ones that focused on making clothes for larger women that didn’t look like enormous sacks.

  Regardless of all that, I wasn’t sure I possessed any sex appeal. If, by some strange twist of fate, I did have a smidgeon of the stuff, I certainly didn’t know how to make use of it.

  Still, ever since going under the knife and losing weight, I’d been more focused on hiding my flaws and keeping everything tucked away that ought to be tucked away than I had been on flaunting anything. The thought of finding things to show off my various assets, if they could even be called that, was almost enough to have me breaking out in hives.

  This entire store already had my skin crawling with trepidation, and we’d barely been inside it for two minutes.

  “Bra size?” Angie asked, thumbing through a rack of silky things that had been put on clearance. “And what dress size do you wear?”

  “Twelve or large, probably, and I think I’m in a 38D.”

  “You think?”

  “It changed so much so fast… But I’m pretty sure that’s where it ended up.”

  “We’ll get someone to measure you,” Mia said decisively. She caught the eye of a store employee who had a tape measure draped around her neck and waved her over.

  Meanwhile, Angie was grabbing things off the rack seemingly at random other than checking the label for the size, loading her arms full.

  “Can I help you ladies?” the clerk asked a moment later as she bustled to join us.

  Mia angled her head in my direction. “She needs to be fitted for a bra. And we need you to open a dressing room for her. She’s going to be trying on all sorts of things.”

  “Of course,” the clerk said, reaching for the enormous pile in Angie’s arms. Then she hurried off to comply.

  “Now that I think of it, you and I should go with her,” Mia said to me, her eyes following the clerk. “You can start trying on the things we bring you while Angie keeps searching the racks.”

  “And I need your help for that?” I squeaked. Yes, she’d be photographing me in some of these things soon enough, but the entire situation was growing more complicated and uncomfortable by the moment, which would have seemed impossible only an hour ago.

  “I need to see what it all looks like on you.”

  I hadn’t ever had a problem with Dani seeing me while I was trying on her clothes, but this felt a lot different. And not simply due to my not really knowing Mia Quincey.

  Dani’s clothes had been specifically designed to hide all of my problem areas.

  These things, though? I took a negligee off the rack and held it up in wonder over what, exactly, the purpose of it might be, since there wasn’t enough fabric on it to cover my left boob. There’d be no way to hide while wearing anything sold in this store. “Yeah, maybe if
I find something that’s got enough covered…” I muttered.

  She quirked up a grin at my reaction. “I’ll stay out of the room, but you have to come out and let me see things unless they’re completely indecent, like you’re literally falling out of them or something.”

  “But if I don’t like it…”

  “You might not be the best judge of what looks good on you. Typically, we’re our own harshest critics.”

  “Hmph,” I muttered, but I headed back to the fitting rooms with Mia on my tail.

  FOUR HOURS LATER, the three of us were back at the hotel, and Angie had me seated in the desk chair so she could do my makeup while Mia fiddled with a bunch of portable lights she was setting up.

  “Close your eyes,” Angie ordered, reaching for a palette of shadows and another brush out of the bag she’d virtually emptied over the handful of empty spaces in the room.

  I tugged on the edges of the robe, drawing it closer around me, as I complied.

  “And stop trying to hide,” Angie murmured.

  “If only I could hide. That would be brilliant right about now.”

  “This is going to be an amazing experience for you,” Mia insisted over her shoulder. “You just have to give it a chance.”

  I scowled at her.

  “Give me a chance, then,” she begged.

  I huffed out a sigh. “This might be a lot of things, but I’m not sure I’m willing to call it amazing. Not yet, at least.” And until I’d seen the final results, I doubted I’d ever be able to do so. Most likely not even then.

  A knock sounded at the door, and I pulled on the edges of my robe even it was already covering me and I had the chosen lingerie on underneath, so it wasn’t as if I was naked.

  Angie scowled at me with a tsking sound as Mia went to answer it.

  “You ready for me?”

  I couldn’t see him, but I’d know Blake’s voice anywhere. While his presence might have comforted me in certain other circumstances, in my present predicament, it only made my pulse go through the roof.

  “Come on in,” Mia said. “What’re you going to wear?”

  “You tell me. Jeans? How dressed do you want me to be? I could do boxer-briefs…”

  “Depends on the boxer-briefs,” she replied. “Are they filthy?”

  He didn’t answer, but I could imagine him giving her an annoyed look in response.

  “You wearing them now?” she demanded.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are they clean?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I have a husband and two kids, one of them a boy. Yes, I’m serious,” she shot back.

  “They’re clean.”

  “And you haven’t worn them for so long that they’re all stretched out?”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “Like I already said, I have two males in my house. Don’t give me that. I know what guys are like.”

  “They’re fine,” he insisted.

  “Go into the bathroom and strip, then, and let me see if they’ll work.”

  “I could strip all the way…” Teasing laughter filled his tone, and I had to smother a laugh of my own.

  “Don’t even think about it. Keep the underwear on or you’ll be answering to my husband.”

  He grumbled something about how he wasn’t afraid of Q, or at least that was what it seemed like he was saying, but then the bathroom door closed and the sounds of him bumping around in there filled the small hotel room.

  “You’ve stopped breathing,” Angie murmured in a tone low enough the other two wouldn’t overhear.

  I took a deep breath to force my lungs into compliance as she brushed some more powder onto my eyelids.

  Blake came back out to join us.

  “Hmm,” Mia said. “What do you two think?”

  My eyes fluttered open. I blinked repeatedly against the glare of the bright lights Angie was using to do my makeup, but then I was finally able to see.

  He was gorgeous.

  Which, of course, I already knew. But I’d never seen him quite like this before. I’d felt him, but that wasn’t even remotely the same.

  He was all muscle, with a narrow strip of dark hair trailing down from the center of his chest and disappearing under the royal-blue waistband of his underwear.

  My throat went dry at the sight of him. He was like a male model, only he was standing right in front of me; he wasn’t just a flat image in the pages of a magazine.

  He was real flesh and blood.

  His body was perfection, and mine was stretched-out flab and lumps in odd places.

  “I can’t do this,” I croaked, but the words were mainly air and no substance.

  They all ignored me, assuming they had heard me at all, which they might not have considering how loudly my heart was pounding.

  “I like the blue as contrast against the coral,” Angie said, reaching for one of our purchases from earlier. “We should put Bea in this one to start with. And it’ll all pop against the white of the sheets.”

  “Yeah, but that bedspread has to go,” Mia said emphatically, wrinkling her nose in distaste at the brown-and-orange fabric.

  The next thing I knew, Blake had stalked over and stripped off the top layer of bedding, tossing the comforter to the floor. Then he took a seat on the end of the bed and stared at me with so much heat that I thought I might melt.

  “Close your eyes for me again,” Angie demanded, and I willingly complied. With my eyes closed, I could pretend for a moment that none of this was happening and it was all a dream.

  She dabbed a bit more on my eyelids, swiped a soft-bristled brush across my cheeks, and used a small brush to glide gloss over my lips. “All right. I think we’re good. What do you think?”

  “I think she’s perfect,” Blake said, and a tingle zipped up my spine.

  “Look up at me,” Mia ordered, and I opened my eyes again, trying not to blink under the scrutiny of three pairs of eyes staring down at me.

  Blake’s eyes, in particular, seemed to be calling to me.

  “Go a bit darker on the lips, but keep it nude. And tousle up her hair some more. But otherwise, I think we’re all set.”

  “If I kiss her, am I going to mess her up?” Blake asked.

  “Kiss me?” I spluttered, but they ignored me.

  “We can fix her makeup again if we need to,” Mia said. “That’s one of the reasons I have an assistant at the shoots—so we can fix hair and makeup as many times as necessary.” Then she arched a brow in my direction. “And yes, he’s going to kiss you. And touch you. And you’re going to be beautiful the whole time.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and reached for a bottle of water to soothe my nerves.

  “Put a little powder on him and let’s get going,” Mia said, and any hope I might have had of escaping was gone.

  GRANDMA PRESSED THE button on her bed to raise herself up somewhat when we headed back to the hospital later that evening. “When do I get to see them?” she demanded with no preamble.

  Bea tensed beside me—I could feel it in her hand. I squeezed to reassure her as Mia and Angie followed us into Grandma’s hospital room. Q and his kids were waiting for us there, with the kids busy playing games in the corner.

  “As long as it’s okay with Blake and Bea, I’m willing to show you the raw footage on my camera now.” Mia said.

  “Can I see them first?” Bea asked.

  They hadn’t shown her anything on the camera yet. You can’t see them until I edit them, Mia had told her, despite Bea’s objections. Not that she hadn’t asked multiple times—almost constantly, actually, for the first hour or two of the shoot.

  But eventually, she’d lost some of her inhibitions and become more comfortable with what we were doing. Her laughs had become more natural. Her smiles had felt less forced. Her kisses had gone softer, more sensual. Her touches had become bolder. And slowly—terribly slowly—she’d stopped tensing up every time I’d touched her.

  Every time Mia
had captured a particularly perfect moment, I’d known it right away—because her eyes lit up like fire. That was Mia’s tell, her sign that all her creative juices were flowing. There’d been a lot of those moments, too. Once Bea had finally let go and started having fun, it’d happened almost nonstop.

  But then I’d forgotten all about watching Mia’s reactions and focused instead on Bea. In those moments when she’d lost her inhibitions, I’d never seen anything more beautiful. I only hoped that this shoot was enough to convince her of the same.

  “I already told you,” Mia said patiently. “You can’t see them until I’ve edited them. But Blake’s grandmother is a bit of a special circumstance, don’t you think?”

  Bea scowled, but she relented, and Mia headed over to sit next to Grandma’s bed and show her the day’s work.

  “Thank you,” I whispered into Bea’s ear.

  “For letting your grandmother see them when I haven’t?”

  “For everything. All of this.”

  “I don’t know why you’re thanking me. You’re the one who arranged it all.”

  “And you’re the one who agreed to it,” I pointed out.

  She bit down on her lower lip, which made me want to do the same thing, but then she nodded.

  “I hope it helps you the way I think it will,” I said.

  “It already has,” she admitted, but she wouldn’t look up and meet my eyes.

  “Yeah?”

  “I couldn’t have done any of that if you hadn’t…”

  “Pushed you into it?” I offered.

  “Something like that.”

  “Are you upset that I pushed?”

  “I think I needed a good push. Your grandmother gave me one, too.”

  Now, that was a surprise. “What kind of push did she give you?”

  Bea tried to shrug it off, waving her hand around the room as if to indicate all the people around us. But the kids were playing their games, Q was in deep conversation with Angie, and Mia and Grandma had their heads close together, going through the images on Mia’s camera. They weren’t paying any attention to us at all.