by Leslie North
Clarence shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Thanks for the wisdom, Clarence.”
Chase reached for his hand again. This time, Clarence’s grip had the strength of a solid connection. On his way to standing, Chase slipped two crisp bills out of the money clip in his pocket and buried them inside the right shoe.
“Sure thing, ball-chaser.”
He couldn’t be sure if Clarence recognized him. Something in the way the old man said it suggested he did. Chase dodged a bit of traffic on his way back to the cab.
Tarek pointed at Chase’s stockinged feet as they climbed into the van. “Those were Ferragamos.”
Fallon looked at him with a warped expression. A little like she had put butt glue between her perfectly-painted eyebrows. A little like he was a few buckets short of a win.
“Insane, man,” muttered Tarek.
Chase smiled. He had never felt saner.
Hands down, Willow’s Aunt Nonnie’s New Orleans gumbo was the best on the planet. She had spent the morning shopping at the freshest markets, making seafood stock, shucking oysters and peeling shrimp, steaming crab claws, and chopping veggies. The spicy scents filling Chase’s never-been-touched, chef-inspired kitchen were to die for. Add the buttermilk cornbread she had baked that morning, and the spread was fit for a Cajun king.
Or, at least, the entire lineup of Alloys players.
Early that morning, she had heard Chase come home after the team’s red-eye flight back from the west coast. Willow stayed in bed. Mostly, she kept herself from sleeping by wondering random things. Why was she planning a huge dinner when she should be looking for an apartment? Had Chase christened every bed in the penthouse? Did Gordon Ramsay drop F-bombs during sex like he did when cooking? When was Estelle’s prescription ready for pick up? Was there a television hidden in her room like in every other room in this penthouse? What if it was on the ceiling and had a camera and…Crap! Her thoughts had diverged into sweaty, brazen Chase-sex until she’d buried her head under a pillow as punishment.
Willow caught a shower before the team showed up. She chose a shirt Nonnie had sent her with a waving cartoon crayfish that read “Laws, yeah. I’m cray,” and wrapped a red apron around the waist of her yoga pants, sous chef-style. By six, the place was hopping with towering men whose visual feast rivaled her edible one.
“So this is where the Gordon Ramsay preoccupation comes from. You cook.” Chase entered the kitchen, snagged a pinch of cornbread from the platter, and popped it into his mouth.
Scratch that. Something else rivaled the cayenne-hot visual feast dotting the penthouse: Chase Holbrook’s orgasmic eye roll at her culinary skills.
“That’s really good,” he said around the crumbly bite. “If your gumbo is anything like your bread, you should open a place.”
She stared into the biggest gumbo pot and bit her lip. Should she tell him? To her parents, her idea had been one crumb on a rabbit trail through Indecisive Forest. Just another of Willow’s hare-brained ideas to keep from focusing on nursing school or any one thing that might give her a stable life. It had been her dream. All hers. And that held power she didn’t give away lightly.
“Actually…I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to open a pay-it-forward restaurant.”
“What’s that?”
“Okay, picture this…” She set her wooden spoon across the pot’s lip and hopped up on the counter, jazzed that he asked. “It opens somewhere between the trendy part of downtown and the neighborhood we drove through. There are no menu prices and every person who orders receives a check for zero dollars. They can pay for their meal by volunteering—working the organic garden on the roof, serving others, cooking, dishwashing—or they can pay for the next person or two or twenty who comes through the door. The walls are filled with messages of encouragement, left behind by those who have come before. I want to call it The Cordial Café…or something like that.”
She braced herself for comments she had heard before. From her father: Is that a sustainable business? From her mother: Oh, honey, it sounds nice, but what about being a nurse? From her brothers: Let us know when you wake up in the real world. From Estelle: What if one of the volunteers blows his nose in the food? Health department fiasco. Willow braced herself for Chase to fall into the same comfortable, teasing territory they had established regarding the Vega, but he flashed his devastatingly handsome but contradictory one-two combo of a head shake and a smile.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing. No, it’s great.”
“You’re shaking your head.”
“I’ve just never met anyone so passionate about helping others before.”
He picked up the wooden spoon and stirred the gumbo in a neighboring pot, right where she’d left off. Maybe he needed a diversion. Maybe he just liked having a hand in things. The domesticity of the small act was a thousand times sexy.
She glanced around at his well-appointed kitchen, a stark contrast from the olive-green stoves and cracker-box work spaces of her life.
“Too bad it’ll never happen.” She sighed.
“Who says?”
“Everyone. I can’t even figure out my own life. How will I ever run a business?”
“You know the food and the heart behind the idea. Get a partner who knows the restaurant industry.”
“You make it sound as easy as sticking to a celi-bet.”
Yep. Definitely a diversion. He tended the pot as if he expected the seafood to jump out and waddle back to the ocean. In profile, she saw his mouth twitch and flirt with his barely-there dimple.
“I heard you showed masterful control in the face of adversity on your date,” she teased.
Tiny droplets along his hairline held her attention. Steam from the rolling boil or perspiration? No matter the cause, sweat was, quite possibly, his best color.
“I held my own.”
“That’s what Tarek said.” She hopped off the counter and nudged him, shoulder to elbow. He had walked right into that innuendo, and she wouldn’t let him squirm out of it for anything. “Hey, thanks for the tow and the fix.”
The Vega had mysteriously shown up, alternator belt replaced, while Chase had been in L.A. A post-it note affixed to her dash read: Better than fishnets, -28. That Chase had signed his note with his uniform number was a testament to his intention. Their arrangement had always been, and always would be, a business transaction. Nothing more.
“No problem,” he said, absently, distracted, as if the money to fix her car had been spare change found at the bottom of his washing machine.
“What in the hell is this?” Tarek interrupted. He rounded the kitchen column, already the loudest at the party, holding the lust jar in his hand. Half a dozen other teammates gathered around.
Chase gestured for her to explain.
“It’s like a swear jar. For lusty thoughts.”
“Many of those floating around here?”
“Gotta be thirty bucks in there so far,” said Nunzio. “Count that shit, man.”
Wilcox did the honors.
“Thirty-six lusty thoughts.”
Thirty-six? Wait. She may not have an MBA in restaurant management, but she was queen of budgeting and watching every dollar. Thirty-six was four more dollars than she had contributed. Willow glanced at Chase.
Would the man never run out of pots to stir? Seriously. So what if they were four bucks aimed at Fallon the Talon? That he had engaged in the game at all quickened her pulse.
“That’s a lot of damned lust around here,” said Tarek, his suspicious gaze aimed directly at her.
Her turn to squirm. Too bad the gumbo had been stirred to oblivion.
“Well, his underwear ad is on the billboard visible from the terrace. I have a pulse, you know.”
Cat calls. Hoots. Assorted guy-animal noises. Platter of cornbread in hand, she headed out to the dining room to add it to the buffet. She really needed to stop being so hones
t.
The last of the team left near midnight. After they put away enough food to fuel the next three games and lobbed endless compliments her way about the food in the way only guys can—body noises and groans and enough curses to put Estelle to shame—they had put Willow in a recliner and formed an assembly line to clean up the kitchen. The spectacle was more entertaining than the impromptu sing-along Booth had started when the television accidentally landed on the karaoke channel. She giggled and sank into the supple leather and tried to take a mental snap of the moment. Before long, she would be living hand-to-mouth again because there would always be someone who needed money more.
When clean-up was finished, they had settled in for a competitive session of a pre-market NBA game on the video console. Four brothers hadn’t only prepared Willow for live hoops, but she had long ago mastered the art of digital sports games. She proved better at being Tarek than Tarek, himself, to the endless delight of everyone assembled. She, along with Wilcox and Rogers, took the Bill Walton-era Trailblazers to the finals. On repeated protests for a rematch, they trickled home a few at a time until Chase said the last of his goodnights and closed the door.
Willow curled up on the couch and yawned. The day had slipped away, stealthily and seductively comfortable. She reminded herself not to get used to it. Reality had a way of smacking her in the face when she took her eye off the ball. Or in her case, balls, all moving in different directions.
Chase settled beside her. After a day of raucous conversation and loud egos, the silence invited back an awkwardness that was only bearable in the ease of his body language. His knees were wide, relaxed; his movements were unhurried, comfortable. He picked up a controller.
“One more. I was holding back.”
“Really? And why is that?”
“Didn’t want the guys to feel bad. There’s a reason the company asks me to test. I slay.”
Absolutely zero ego. Straight up, she would have staked Estelle’s bingo money that he was flirting with her. By the time her mind had packaged that thought, she dismissed it. He was simply treating her as he had all afternoon—like one of the guys. The day Chase Holbrook thought of her as anything other than mascot girl, Hell would be importing matches.
“You’re on. You pick first.”
“I’ll be the Kings.” He scrolled through the menu and selected their checkerboard alternate jerseys.
“Feeling nostalgic?”
“A bit.”
Something in his voice gave her pause. “So long as it’s not regret. Just remember, you miss all the shots you don’t take.” She scrolled through the menus until she landed on her selection—current Alloy’s season line up, special-edition Latino jerseys—before she realized he had been watching her.
“What?” she asked. “I have a thing for rare jerseys.”
“No, it’s not that. Someone used to tell me that when I started basketball.”
“Smart someone.”
“Yeah, he was.” His tone was sad, reflective. He zipped through the menus until the starting buzzer sounded.
Willow won the tip-off. She pushed the button on her controller to call a time out.
“Seriously?” Chase said.
She bit her bottom lip. With a few deft menu moves, she traded number 28, Chase Holbrook, for some no-name scrub on the Miami Heat. Her attempt to keep from dissolving into laughter proved futile when Chase reached for her side and tickled her into near incapacitation. The controller slipped from her hand. She squirmed and writhed for her freedom, gasping for air around her hiccup-like humor fit, nearly sliding off the worn, leather fabric. He caught her before she reached the floor and scooped her back onto the sofa.
Under him.
Hands braced on either side of her head, knees astride her hips.
Breathing fast and hard.
They froze. She watched his expression fall, by measures, as the realization of their compromising position settled in his eyes. He made no move to release, to backtrack, to do anything but study her face as if he was looking for answers, encouragement, disgust, something.
Willow didn’t know what to give him; she wasn’t sure herself. Her body was as hot as a pot prepped for a crawfish boil, but her mind telegraphed a clear warning: Chase Holbrook, different woman every few days; Chase Holbrook, supposed to be celibate; Chase Holbrook, will hurt you.
Then he lowered his lips to hers and reason ceased to matter.
9
Willow had imagined Chase’s kiss before—strong and steady, not given to showy moves or unnecessary risks, his play on the court but better. He would taste exceptional, unattainable, like a forbidden fruit meant only for a select few, and he would show the same commitment to the moment as he did to his game. She had imagined his kiss before, but all those fantasies were pre-season.
Chase’s kiss was playoffs, final minute before the buzzer intense.
She answered him with thirty-six dollars and two years of pent-up longing. Arms looped around his neck, she parted her lips to welcome him inside her mouth. He might have seized the opportunity of her legs between his, her body completely at his mercy. He didn’t. The exquisite and thorough exploration of lips remained their only contact, as if he, too, was taking the time to convince himself this was real, this was happening, this could happen.
As much as Willow wanted him to unpin her and make better use of his hands, as much as she wanted him to find other, more desperate areas for him to kiss, as much as she had played this fantasy in her girly moments of self-gratification, Willow wanted to keep her word more. Her spoken word to Tarek and Chase that she would be a steward of her role. Her unspoken word to Dylan that she would ensure Chase Holbrook had the composition of a man, not an ego, and that the bet money would be hers so that it could be Dylan’s. Her internal word that she was nothing more than a geographically convenient diversion for someone like Chase.
Around his very deft, very sensual tongue, she whispered his name.
When he didn’t respond with anything but a more thorough lip-examination using delicious scrapes of his perfect teeth, she added, “There isn’t enough space in the lust jar for this.”
Humor was her last defense. But with each successive plunge of his tongue, her defenses subsided. Dear God, she was in trouble.
“Forty-four points.”
His kiss subsided like a changing tide, barely perceptible but for the recovery of his breath against hers. He broke contact and searched her eyes. She knew he was in a vulnerable place, wanting to save face, making this about anything other than what it was—a gross error in judgment on both of their parts. Again, she reached for humor.
“Next game, you’ll score forty-six points if you let me romp your ass in the video game instead of on your couch.”
“The bet.”
“The bet. A celi-bet, remember?”
“Right.” He rubbed his lips together, backed away, and settled in the crook of the cushion behind her legs.
She untangled her legs from beneath his body and straightened her T-shirt where it had ridden up in a glee-run for bra-fastener highway.
“I don’t make nearly enough as Bolt to cover the last three minutes.”
She was trying here. But he didn’t smile. He had the glazed look of a motorist who had just veered wildly to avoid a collision. So the jokes were misfiring. She took a stab at honesty.
“I’m here for a reason, Chase. I have to respect that and your hospitality. You’re you, and I’m me. Your world isn’t my world, and in a few games, you’ll be the leading offensive scorer in the NBA, and I’ll still be the mascot girl who smells like sweaty balls.”
This…this hinted at a laugh.
“I won’t let this—as Gordon Ramsay-esque as it was—stand in your way.”
Closer to a laugh, smile, something. She leaned forward, gave him a fast mini-raspberry on his cheek, and slipped away before she could change her mind.
On her way down the hallway, she had an epiphany. Loose on her tongue, she cal
led behind her, “Must have been the oysters.”
“Yeah. That was it.”
He sounded dubious.
Henry Lorenz had the worst layup form in the history of the game. When he didn’t look like he was fleeing a wildfire, the wrong knee would pop up or his body would topple wildly off-balance. But damned if his shot percentage didn’t rival Chase’s today. Henry’s game was on-point. Or Chase’s was off. Way off.
“Alloys gonna cut your ass if you play like this tomorrow,” said Henry, winded. He had the lumbering stance of someone who passed most of his days in a fight cage or humping a boxing bag, but he was the one from Sol’s brotherhood of three who remained closest to the streets, closest to keeping it real after their mentor had passed away. “Why you so distracted?”
Called out on his sub-par play, Chase fired his jets, passed the ball to himself via a bank off the backboard and attacked a rebound. Drain. End of discussion.
As much as Chase liked the team concept, basketball was never more alive than when he laid it out with Henry, two opponents, one goal. On the same outside post in which he cut his game teeth. Sol’s gym was Chase’s ultimate reset button. Most of the day, it had been about the kids—giving back, asking after them the way Sol would have wanted. Now? Forget it. The neighborhood, the team, the city, life simply dropped away. He wanted his game pure, untainted.
“Nothing, man. Let’s play.”
“Bullshit.” Henry hijacked the ball, wasting time on behind-the-back dribbles, probably to catch his breath. Guy was two-hundred percent lean muscle, but his cardio was shit. “It’s this bachelor crap. Pretty boy’s getting in his own way.”
Chase took the dis as an invitation to pretty-boy all over his ass. He stole the ball and dunked it. Henry went on.
“Serious. I can’t turn on one news broadcast without seeing your ugly mug. You got half the women in the city with damp panties. Bound to mess with priorities. You’ve worked too hard to foul out now.”
“It’s not like that. I went Father Arnaud last week.” Their code for no sex. Father Arnaud had been a French import of the Catholic Church in the heart of Pittsburgh when they were teenagers. While Sol had a drawer in his desk known to all the boys as the raincoat drawer, Arnaud tried in vain to convince them that their gifts were best kept behind closed zippers.
