The Risk

by Skye Jordan

  What the hell? He rubbed his face, trying to force himself more awake, then pressed a hand against the nearest wall, drew a breath, and said, “Hello?”

  “Oh, you’re awake.” Her voice was as pretty as her feet. Already an improvement over the woman on his couch. Maybe his standards hadn’t fallen all that far after all. But her voice was also extremely clear and perky, which was highly annoying under the circumstances. “Sorry, I was trying to be quiet, but it’s getting late, and there’s a lot to do.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He rubbed his eyes again and focused on the counters, which were covered with crap from the cupboards. Another flash of annoyance singed his skin. “Who are you? And what the hell are you doing?”

  She peeked around the fridge. “It’s me, Julia— Oh. Wow. Nice look.” Her gaze took a quick scan of his body before she disappeared behind the fridge door again. “You’re taller than I expected. Aren’t most snowboarders smallish? Bet you have to compensate for a higher-than-average center of gravity. You’ll have to explain all that to me. But go ahead and get dressed first. I’ve got my work cut out for me here anyway.” She paused only a second before muttering, “Talk about toxic…”

  Noah’s mind was spinning into one hellacious knot. He’d barely caught more than a glimpse of dark hair and a slim face, one he didn’t recognize any more than that of the woman in his theater.

  Thud, thud, thud. Yogurt cups flew into the trash can.

  “Expired,” she muttered. “It’s a miracle you haven’t gotten E. coli from all the crap in here.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Christ, he didn’t want to deal with this now—but there was a stranger in his house, tearing apart his kitchen, and another barely dressed in his theater. And Noah didn’t know what the hell was happening.

  He limped into the kitchen and leaned against the counter opposite the refrigerator. With his hands braced on the granite, he took all pressure off his bad foot. But it was too late. The damn thing throbbed as if it were inhabited by an alien. Looked a lot like something off an alien too, puffy and discolored.

  This was seriously screwed. His body was a complete pile of shit. It had been almost four goddamned months since the accident, and he was done with this injury. He’d worked his ass off to heal, had made real strides. Now this?

  He pried his gaze from his foot and focused on strange woman number two. She was dressed in a blue-and-purple sport tank top and black, shin-length workout pants that hugged a sleekly curved backside. His gaze traveled over her tight ass, up to her sculpted shoulders, and paused on her dark ponytail. Noah immediately reassessed the ménage theory. This was a sporty chick, the kind Noah never chose to share his bed, or sofa, with. He got enough of the athletic type on the slopes. The woman in his theater, he understood bringing home. This one was—no.

  He thought back to the night before. Maybe she was a new member of the U.S. Snowboarding Team he didn’t know. Maybe she was some crazy-ass fangirl or groupie who’d tagged along last night.

  This Julia chick pulled Styrofoam cartons filled with leftovers from various restaurants and tossed them into the trash—most of which contained steak, lobster, or shrimp.

  “Whoa,” he said. “That’s all still good—”

  “You’re going to have to stop eating out.” She cut him off, her voice matter-of-fact but resolute. “Almost all restaurants cook with lousy oils. You’re getting way too many trans-fatty Omega 6s. We’ll have to beef up your Omega 3s. You’ll see a difference in a week from that change alone.”

  “What in the hell…?” he murmured, his mind beginning to open to the idea that she was a nut job on the loose. “How did you get into my house?”

  “Your garage door is open. I just came through there.” She pulled out the vegetable drawer and made a low, ugly sound in her throat, then proceeded to pull out plastic bags filled with produce and drop them in the trash as if they might contaminate her. “I figured you were still sleeping since you were out last night when Drake and I talked to you.”

  “Drake?” That was the key to this problem—Noah’s meddling agent. “I should have known. Are you his new girlfriend or something?”

  She cut Noah a glare. “As if.”

  Her attitude annoyed him. This was his house, dammit. “Answer me, or I’m calling the police.”

  She turned to face him with two jars of jam, one in each hand, and her front view was as impressive as her backside. Full, high breasts filling the Lycra fabric of her workout tank, a flat belly showing between the hem of her top and the low waistband of her pants, and smooth thighs filling the black tights.

  She was pretty too. A few years younger than him, she had a pixie-sweet face with smooth skin, high cheekbones, and wide eyes. The kind of face that didn’t need makeup to look great. Maybe there was something to the athletic type after all.

  “I was sitting in Drake’s office when you were on speaker with him last night,” she said, “so don’t try to pretend you don’t know anything about me.”

  He put a palm to one eye and rubbed at the pain throbbing there. “Yeah, well…last night is still a little blurry.” He dropped his hand with frustrating scenarios popping to mind. “Shit, please tell me Drake didn’t send you to teach me yoga or something equally stupid.”

  With heavy lids and an expression of disgust, she tossed both jars of perfectly good jam into the trash. “Yoga, my ass.”

  “What the…?” He fished the jam out of the trash and set it on the counter next to all the other food she’d pulled from his cabinets. “Would you knock that shit off? Look, I don’t know what Drake said, but—”

  “Are you still drunk?”

  “No,” he said, then closed his eyes, searching for patience. “I just don’t remember the conversation.”

  “Un-freaking-believable.” She let the fridge door close, turned, and yanked open a cabinet, then grabbed his Lucky Charms in one hand, his Cocoa Puffs in the other.

  “Uh-uh,” he said. “No way.”

  “Noah, baby…” The female voice coming from the opposite direction stopped him from grabbing his treasured boxes of cereal. He’d completely forgotten about the fling chick.

  He turned as she walked into the kitchen in exactly what she’d been wearing on the sofa, nothing but bra and panties.

  Fuuuuuuuck. He certainly wasn’t a prude, but he wasn’t interested in flaunting his poor judgment either.

  But there she was, standing in his kitchen, blurry eyed, big tits, curvy ass, long legs, bottle-blonde hair, and heavy makeup. She might look smeared and smudged now, but he was sure she’d looked damn flashy last night. At least that was what his morning-after brain was telling him. Now, though, there was no denying she looked about as good as Noah felt. Which reminded him he couldn’t look much better.

  He dropped his head and rubbed his eyes on a heavy exhale of defeat.

  What a clusterfuck.

  “Oh, hi.” Fling-chick—Noah still had no idea of her name—came to a sudden stop at the sight of another woman. She swept a look over Julia and cuddled up next to him. Noah kept his arms crossed but barely resisted easing away. “I’m Samantha.”

  “Julia,” she said, curt and direct.

  Samantha nodded, then turned her mascara-smeared eyes up to Noah. “She’s pretty. Is she joining us?”

  A sound scraped Julia’s throat, half laugh, half guffaw. She rested her palms behind her on the granite countertop and focused on Noah. “Way to be out there.” Then her gaze shifted to Fling-chick. “No, sweetheart. I don’t share my men, and I don’t want this one. I’m the woman who’s going to get ‘Noah baby’ back on the slopes. So, if you want to continue fucking a professional athlete, go home and don’t come back for at least six weeks. He’s out of commission until then.”

  This was turning from awkward into an avalanche of just plain wrong.

  “Whoa, hold on.” Everything Julia had said clicked in his mind at once. “You’re another goddamned physical therapist?�
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  “You tell her, Noah,” Samantha whined, “she can’t talk to me like that.”

  Julia shifted on her feet, cocked her hip, crossed her arms, and gave Noah a clear, one-wrong-word-and-you’ll-regret-it stare.

  If he had to pick his battles, he’d choose the one he could win here and now. He turned to Samantha, “I’ve really got to take care of some business here.” He put a hand at the middle of her back and guided her toward the theater. “Go ahead and get dressed. We’ll talk later.”

  “Like, six weeks later,” Julia added, earning a wicked over-the-shoulder glare from Samantha. But Noah kept her moving toward the theater, grabbed his jeans from the floor, pulled his phone from the back pocket, and called a cab.

  “What a bitch,” Samantha said, sliding into a slinky black piece of nothing he guessed should have been a shirt. “If that’s your housekeeper, you need to fire her.”

  Getting into his jeans again was much harder than getting out had been, and the throb in his leg had intensified by the time he was half-dressed. Pain always turned him from sensible and easy-going to a shit, and he could already feel his temper simmering just beneath the rage setting. It would get better once he got rid of the whining chick and confronted the bossy chick. He just had to hold on to his sanity until they were both gone.

  Samantha had already wriggled into skintight jeans and knee-high Uggs, and while she was in the bathroom off the theatre brushing her hair and washing her face, Noah collected her things. As he walked her past the kitchen toward the front door, he hung his arm around her shoulder to support his weight.

  He caught sight of the yellow cab coming to a stop out front through the big front window, which made him think about the night before again. “I hope I didn’t drive last night…”

  “Of course not,” she said as if the idea were silly. “Mercer gave us a ride back from the bar, and Finn followed in your car. He said he’d leave your keys in the visor.”

  “Oh, right.” As if he remembered. “Thanks.”

  He helped her into her jacket, and she looked over her shoulder at him with pleading eyes. “Call me?”

  “You bet.” The lie rolled off his tongue. When she turned and leaned toward him, he angled his head so her lips landed on his jaw instead of his mouth.

  Once she was in the cab, Noah closed the door and leaned back against it. He shut his eyes on a sigh. One down, one to go. And he was pretty damn sure the second one wouldn’t be as easy to get rid of.

  “Hope you had fun last night,” came from his kitchen, “’cause you won’t be doing that again until after the Games. Which is probably good for you, considering the lack of wisdom your friends showed leaving the keys to a hundred-thousand-dollar Maserati in the visor. Grab a shower while I finish in here, then we can talk. Where are your trash bags?”

  A fresh wave of annoyance blossomed. He made his way to the kitchen, where even more contents from his cabinets lay in piles on the floor.

  “Stop.” His demand made her glance over her shoulder with a frown. “Just…stop. Look, I don’t remember what I said last night, but I would never have agreed to this.”

  She turned, planted her butt against the counter, and crossed her arms. Her delicious breasts jiggled with the movement, and Noah nearly groaned at the sight. This morning, it felt more like he’d been celibate forty months, not four.

  “This is part of the whole program,” she said, gesturing to the kitchen at large.

  “What program?”

  “The one that’s going to heal that stump.” She tossed a hand toward his foot. “You are way worse off than Drake said. Worse than the earliest MRIs I looked at too. I’m going to have to use every trick I know and probably have to learn a few more to keep you from losing that thing.”

  “Who the hell gave you access to my medical files? And lose what? What are you talking about?”

  “Drake gave me access, and I’m talking about losing your leg. Who knows how much damage you’ve done? If you’re still limping after nearly four months—”

  “It’s always stiff in the morning.” His voice rose with anger, but he couldn’t keep it in check. “I just…had a rough night—”

  “I can see that. Excess alcohol and bedroom romping will do that to an injury. Your leg looks like it belongs on an elephant.”

  He frowned down at his ankle. “It’s not that bad.”

  “I can see half a dozen problems from here that didn’t show on your MRI, which means you’ve done more damage since the accident. You’ve probably got ligament, tendon, and cartilage damage. It’s a good thing we’re starting today. If you’d let this go on much longer, you might never have seen the top of Snowmass again, let alone in February—”

  He slapped the countertop hard. “I don’t need another goddamned babysitter.”

  “You’ve already started off the day on the wrong foot—no pun intended. Don’t make it worse with meaningless insults.”

  “I’m going to strangle that bastard…” He pulled his mind off Drake and his heavy-handed attempts to get Noah to toe the line the way he thought it should be toed, and shot for some diplomacy with Julia. He certainly didn’t want more bad press. And none of this was her fault. “Look, I appreciate you coming, but I don’t need—”

  “Judging by the state of your foot, you have no idea what you need. And even I won’t know until I’ve finished a full assessment.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, business as usual, no big. She yanked the full garbage bag from its plastic container and tied off the top. Then started pulling open drawers and lower cabinet doors. “Where are your trash— Ah.”

  She dragged a box of Glad bags from the cabinet beneath the sink and lined the garbage can again, then started throwing more food in—his Doritos, his Oreos, his Skittles…

  He opened his mouth to yell at her, but she spoke first.

  “So, let me just line things out for you. I’ll make it really simple so you don’t have to strain that shredded brain of yours too hard.”

  Good pun. He would have given her a point for the snowboarding metaphor if he weren’t so pissed off. He crossed his arms and watched, too tired to fight. He’d just let her burn herself out, take all the food back out of the bags, and have Teresa, his housekeeper, straighten it out later.

  “There are five components to my strategy,” she said, pulling can after can of SpaghettiOs off the shelf and tossing them into the garbage. “Nutrition, physical health, mental health, therapy, and training. Simple, right?

  “I can definitely see you need extensive nutritional training, but we’ll get to that. Based on the woman who just left, you’re probably also in need of a mental health overhaul. But right now, I just want to toss the crap in this place, which is, like, everything, and bring in all the good stuff. We’ll go to the grocery store together, and I’ll teach you how to read labels, find organic, choose your meat…”

  The trash can swallowed his beer, his soda, his frozen pizzas, his ice cream…

  “Hey.” He leaned forward and grabbed her wrist before she tossed the Ben and Jerry’s into the trash. “That’s a limited-edition pint. Named for me.”

  She turned the carton to look at the front. “Treasure Hunt?”

  “Yeah, Treasure Hunt, get it?”

  Heavy-lidded, sardonic eyes lifted to his. “No shit.”

  He pulled it from her hand. “This, right here, is vanilla ice cream with a caramel swirl and mini cinnamon apple pie Pop-Tarts scattered throughout. A favorite from my childhood. That’s the treasure.”

  One of her dark brows shot up.

  “I’m from Spokane,” he said. “Washington, apples. Caramel, apples. Ice cream—”

  “Apples,” she finished.

  He spread his hands. “Exactly. And the proceeds benefit charity. The Dyslexia Foundation.”

  “Well, at least it’s got that going for it. But it belongs in the freezers of the general population, not an elite athlete. It’s got to go.” Her voice remained level as she dug deeper into the
freezer and tossed his Bagel Bites, his Pizza Rolls, his Hot Pockets. “You’ll be sticking with fresh fruits and vegetables. Lean protein. Complex carbs. Omega 3s for your fat. And water. Lots of water. After I assess you, I’ll get you on a vitamin and supplement regiment…”

  She closed the freezer and opened the closest cabinet, grabbing a box of Pop-Tarts from a shelf. Noah launched forward—pain be damned. He snapped the box from her hand and bared his teeth. “Don’t touch my Pop-Tarts.”

  “Pop-Tarts and Ben & Jerry’s and all the other crap in this place is what got you into this mess.” Her gaze grew intense. “This diet is probably more than half your problem. If you don’t feed your body what it needs to heal—”

  “I’m feeding my body just fine.”

  “Do you realize how debilitating your injury could be? Not just now, but over the course of your lifetime? As many as half of all talus fractures lead to avascular necrosis, osteonecrosis, and arthritis. In layman’s terms, if you don’t rehab your ankle—the right way—chronic arthritis could put you in a wheelchair. If you lose blood flow, your bones disintegrate. You’re talking about a life filled with debilitating pain, possibly even losing your leg below the knee to amputation.”

  Ampu—what? She talked too damned fast, and his brain worked way too slow. “I’m really not in the mood to be bullied—”

  “Bullied? You think this is bullying? Has anyone explained the dangers of poor rehab practices to you? Because if they have, and you’re still limping, you’re not only naïve and ignorant, you’re downright stupid. If they haven’t, teaching you is even more important. You need to understand how your decisions now will impact the rest of your life. How you exercise, how you eat, how you train, it all impacts the big picture of your recovery.”

  With a disgusted sigh and a shake of her head, Julia dragged the garbage bag from the trash can and tied the top, then picked up the other. “Like I said, we’ve got lots to talk about, lots to plan. Where’s your trash?”

  Dazed from the barrage of information, Noah pointed to the front door, grateful for a moment to think without her hounding him. “Around the side of the garage.”