Wrapped Up: A Triple Threat Sports Romance

by Lexi Cross

  “Yeah. And it’s not good. Remember when I mentioned doing a prenuptial agreement?” she asked me.

  “I remember, but I thought we had moved beyond that agreement.”

  “Well, it didn’t feel necessary anymore, and I was honestly just going to let it slide,” she admitted, letting her voice trail off.

  “I feel like there’s a but in here somewhere,” I said, urging her to continue talking.

  “We’re going to have to sign a prenup because my father continues to add stipulations to the marriage condition. If I could prove that it was added recently, after our initial conversation, I wouldn’t be worried about any of it anymore. My lawyer would be able to take him and the board down for it, and I would have the company all to myself,” she explained without actually telling me anything of what was bothering her.

  “Okay, what’s the new condition he’s put on you?”

  “You already know I can’t get the company unless we get married. Now, I won’t even really get the company. My shares will actually be split between us, between you and me, except they won’t be split evenly. I will be handed the position of CEO, which is pretty much where I am right now in all but title. But you will be given the majority ownership of the company, technically putting you above me and definitely putting most of my company in your hands,” she explained fully.

  “So what does that mean for us on the prenup?” I asked. I sat back, letting what she’d just told me about the shares sink in.

  “I’m including an amendment to state that once we divorce, your shares transfer to me,” she said nonchalantly, like she expected me to just go along with her without considering what my ownership status meant for me.

  “I don’t know, Brooke,” I said.

  “What do you mean you don’t know, Jake? There’s nothing to know. There’s nothing to consider. The company is mine, and I’m not going to get married if I have to hand my ownership over to someone else, especially someone who has never worked for the company, especially after I’ve worked there on my own as the fucking CEO for the last five years while my father pretended he was retiring without giving up any of his authority or his position.” She was raising her voice steadily as she talked, drawing attention to our table.

  “Look, hear me out, Brooke,” I said, lowering my voice to let her know there was no reason for us to be shouting.

  “Yeah, I’m listening,” she said in a confrontational tone.

  “Once I leave the game, I could be a good face for your company. I don’t want to step on your toes. It’s yours to run. I won’t use my majority ownership to overrule you on anything, but I’m not going to give up my ownership either. I think having someone like me by your side will help. Besides, I think your father’s company will be a good move for me once I get off the field,” I explained.

  I didn’t tell her that I was probably going to have to get out of the league once I left the team because of the guys in the network. I still wasn’t completely sure that my injury wasn’t actually related to backing away from the guys to pursue her plan for marriage. I wasn’t sure how to approach that topic with her. So far, the only people who knew about the network were the people involved with it, and that was how it really needed to stay. Unless I decided to tell Brooke, of course.

  “So now you’re looking out for yourself,” she said, nodding. “Just like everybody else, you think you can fuck me over whenever you feel like it just because you stand to benefit. You know, I don’t have to do this. I want the company, but I want the whole company. I don’t want to get married so my father will think I’m worthy of inheriting what’s already mine just to turn it over to my husband.” She shook her head.

  “Just think about it, Brooke. Have your lawyer draw up the prenup, and let’s talk about it a little more before we sign anything,” I said calmly, trying to calm her down.

  “No. No, we’re not going to sign anything. I’m just going to call it off and let my father know I don’t want any part in his bullshit. He can hand the company over to someone else if that’s what he wants to do, but I’m not going to play this little game with him. Or with you. I’ll get my stuff and get out of the house,” she said, getting up from the table.

  “Whoa, wait a minute, Brooke,” I said, following her out to the sidewalk.

  “No, don’t wait a minute me, Jake. You came into this just to stage our marriage because you needed to show your boss that you could maintain a steady relationship with someone. I needed someone to marry me so I could inherit the company. This wasn’t supposed to be a plan for when you’re a used-up former pro athlete. It was supposed to be a simple staged wedding to make everyone happy. Once they were all pleased, we were supposed to get a divorce, and that was that. It would all be over, and we would just go our separate ways.” Tears were streaming down her face while she rambled.

  “Brooke, baby,” I said, reaching to put my arms around her.

  She pulled away and put her hands up. “Don’t baby me, Jake. No. This is over. No marriage. No fake wedding and staged divorce to set everything right. No more sex to confuse the issue. No more pretending that we’re trying to pick up where we left off in high school so that we don’t feel guilty for using each other like this. No. No more. I’m sorry, Jake.” She put her hands down and looked at me with a pitiful, hurt look in her eyes.

  “Brooke, don’t do anything rash,” I insisted. “I’ll take the rest of the day off. We can sit down with your father, with your lawyer, my lawyer, whoever we need to consult to fix this.” If she turned around to walk away, I knew I stood to lose so much more than just the business opportunity of owning part of her father’s company.

  Part of me was tempted just to go ahead and agree to the new terms of the nonexistent prenuptial agreement. But I couldn’t do that. There was no way I could do that. Agreeing to the prenup meant that I was agreeing once again to divorcing her once everything was settled for both of us. I wasn’t about to do that. I was going to try to turn our staged relationship into something real.

  “I’m sorry, Jake. We tried.” She turned around and started to walk away, leaving me in the middle of the busy sidewalk, staring after her as she walked off, for good this time.

  I shook my head and turned to leave. I wasn’t going to stand there and watch after her. She wasn’t going to make a fool out of me. I was going to keep it together, because it was just a staged relationship anyway. I was going to go find someone to help me forget her, just like I always did, and I was going to return to doing things my way.

  I should have paid someone to pretend to be my girlfriend. I didn’t have to put myself through all the shit I had with Brooke, all the back and forth and uncertainty. I wondered if it had been a business proposal from day one or just an excuse to get me to agree to marry her.

  Her father had certainly seemed to regard her motives with suspicion.

  No matter what I told myself or what I tried to think, I couldn’t convince myself to think less of her. I couldn’t convince myself that I felt any differently than I did. I was not happy to see this relationship end. I was actually pretty upset, surprisingly enough. I had been completely prepared to go along with her arrangement for our marriage and divorce. I was going to leave our fake marriage and find someone to take me back to my old life.

  What the hell had happened along the way? Why was I feeling so horrible? Why did I want to call her and ask her to reconsider? Why was I actually considering signing off to agree to a divorce just so she could keep ownership of her father’s company? So many questions rattled around in my head. I didn’t have any answers for any of them.

  I got back in my car and had my driver take me to the house. I wasn’t going to return to the office after that conversation. I was going to go home and drink it off. In fact, I was going to do better than that. I was going to get the guys together and go out drinking with them.

  The three of us out at the bar or at a club always led to good times. I’d show her. Or rather, the tabloids would show h
er in the morning. She’d see me with another girl on my arm, a girl I would take home.

  Hell, if she came back that night or in the morning to get her things, she’d probably run into the other girl. That promised to be an entertaining situation. I could just imagine Brooke coming in all high and mighty from deciding to take the higher ground and not accept her full position at her father’s company, just to find someone I had brought home with me from the club.

  We could even be waiting for her in her bed. There was so much I could do to get back at her, and it would have been beautiful just to enjoy myself with another woman, a woman who wouldn’t make me feel guilty for sleeping with her multiple times, a woman who would be willing to do everything I wanted to do to her in one night.

  The thought started to disgust me. If I had been honest with myself, I would have known I didn’t want another woman. I only wanted Brooke. Why in the hell was she thinking about not getting married? She was going from sacrificing some of her ownership to letting go of all of it by not getting married!

  I needed a drink, if for no other reason than to just silence my thoughts for a little while.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Brooke

  “Can you believe him?” I shouted into my empty car. “Can you fucking believe him?”

  I couldn’t believe Jake would just all of a sudden be so interested in ownership of my father’s company. After everything! The original agreement had been that we would get married so that the company would be given to me and he would have a steady girlfriend on his arm to impress the paparazzi. He had even been reluctant to agree to that at first because he just wanted a steady girlfriend. He didn’t want to agree to be my husband.

  Hell, I didn’t want to get married either, but I needed to so that my father would give me the company. Then, that asshole decided to give the company to my husband after my marriage. What the hell was happening to my life? I was slowly losing everything because of this deal.

  I drove around the block a couple of times, letting everything roll around in my head a little more. If I got married, I would have to split my ownership unevenly with my husband. I would have to get him to sign over ownership upon divorce, which didn’t seem too unreasonable, regardless of how Jake felt about it.

  If I didn’t get married, which was what it was starting to look like after walking away from Jake and telling him I was going to call off the wedding, I stood to lose everything. I was even in a position to lose my job if the board decided to let me go for not getting married to take over and take my rightful place as the new CEO.

  “What the hell are you going to do, Brooke?” I asked myself. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I didn’t want to give my company over to my new husband, but losing it altogether because I wasn’t getting married was worse.

  I wished there was a way to just take the company away from my father. There probably was, and there was one person who could probably help me. That was Hollie.

  I called her.

  “Brooke, are you okay?” she said as she answered.

  “No, I’m not, Hollie. I need your help.” I realized I was crying while I was talking to her.

  “Okay, come on by my office. I’ve got the prenup ready, and we can look everything over again to make sure it’s all legal. If there’s even the slightest possibility we can get you out of this without losing the company, we’re going to go after it,” she assured me.

  “Thank you so much, Hollie. That’s exactly what I needed to hear. I’ll be there in a minute.” I hung up the phone and started driving to her office.

  I parked and went in, greeting the girl at her front desk. I didn’t want to be buzzed into her office or for her receptionist to ask me to have a seat in the front. I walked right past the front desk and knocked gently at her door as I opened it.

  “Excellent. Come in, Brooke. Have a seat and look over the prenup to make sure it’s what you want,” she said.

  I sat down and picked up the paperwork in front of me. Everything was exactly how I wanted it, but I didn’t want it that way if it didn’t have to be. I set it back down on the desk and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, as if she thought I was disheartened with something she put in the paperwork.

  “Do we have to stage a divorce to make this transfer happen?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily. You mean the transfer of ownership, right?”

  “Right. That’s it exactly.”

  “We can set something up along the lines of having his shares transfer over to you after six months, a year, something like that, whatever he’ll agree to. Are you thinking about not divorcing him now?” She cocked an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know. I told him I was going to call the wedding off, but I want to wait until I figure out exactly what it is I’m going to do about all of this. I don’t want to not marry him, but I don’t want to give him my part of the company,” I told her.

  “That’s not exactly what I was asking. We can do damn near anything we want with this prenuptial agreement, so I’m not worried about that. In fact, I can sit down with both of you and go over options if you think that will help. No, no, what I was asking was if you were thinking about making the marriage more permanent by not divorcing him. Are things getting more serious, Brooke? I’m asking as your old friend, not as your lawyer. Girl, you look like a wreck.”

  “I don’t know, Hollie. I just don’t know what’s happening,” I admitted.

  “Have you been sleeping together?” she asked in her lawyer voice.

  I started bawling. “Yes, we’ve slept together. Twice. He even made it sound like we made love last time.”

  “You still have feelings for him, don’t you?” she asked in her normal tone, dropping the cold, formal tone she normally used as my lawyer.

  All I could do was nod at that point. Words were beyond me. She passed a box of tissues to me from the corner of her desk. I dried up the best I could while I sat there.

  “I’m sorry,” I said once my voice returned.

  “It’s okay. You guys had a pretty intense history, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yeah, we did,” I told her. Even back in school, I had felt that Jake really was the one. I was using the marriage condition from my father as an excuse to marry him really. There wasn’t anyone else I would have even considered asking to marry me.

  Still, it didn’t matter how I had felt about him at any point in our history; I wasn’t about to turn over my ownership in the company to him just because my father thought I needed to. I had to find a way to fight it without calling off the wedding and without agreeing to divorce him just because the wedding was supposed to be staged anyway. We were beyond just staging everything.

  “Well, look, like I said, we can sit down, the three of us, and go over all of your options on this prenup. There are a lot of things we can do, and honestly, whatever he agrees to, once it’s signed, it’s as good as gold. He’ll have to work pretty hard to challenge anything he agrees to and signs,” Hollie started.

  I nodded. “I understand.”

  “But there’s something else we can do that won’t affect your relationship with Jake in any way.”

  I looked up at her then. “I’m listening,” I said in a stuffy voice.

  “We can attack your father’s credibility,” she said bluntly, with the straightest face I had ever seen on Hollie in all the years I had known her.

  “We have actual grounds to do that?” I asked, amazed to hear that what I really wanted to do was even a possibility.

  “Oh yeah, I’d say so.” She pulled out a file folder and slapped it down on the desk.

  “What’s this?” I asked, turning the cover and looking at the paperwork filling the folder.

  “This is everything my staff was able to come up with to help us go after your father and show that he is unfit to continue his involvement in the company. We will also be able to show that he is in no shape to make demands like he is doing.”

  “And
this will hold up in court?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” Hollie said slowly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we present this to the board to convince them to vote him down and allow you to take over without having to go through all his little stipulations and conditions. I also have a full copy of the company’s charter. If your father is proven unfit, they are required by their charter to disregard things like this condition stating that you have to get married to inherit the company. They can basically rule it invalid.”

  “Hollie, you’re my hero,” I gushed. I wanted to come across the desk and hug her neck.

  “We haven’t done anything yet,” she said cautiously.

  “Okay, where do we start, then?”

  “Why did your father go ahead and retire? He didn’t do it because of his age. He could have continued working for a few more years until he was old enough to be forced into retirement,” she said.