Warriors,Winners & Wicked Lies: 13 Book Excite Spice Military, Sports & Secret Baby Mega Bundle (Excite Spice Boxed Sets)

by Selena Kitt

  Al pulled his arm in just in time.

  “I’ll let him tell you,” Cameron said. “Suffice it to say it was a comedy of errors unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.” He chuckled, and walked away, turning his baseball cap backward on his head as he went.

  Pop sighed and crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “You want some gas money?”

  “Yeah.” She held out her hand.

  “Bill me.”

  “Pop.”

  “Gotta go through the team accountant. You know how to submit an expense report, right? Just save all your receipts or whatever.”

  She rolled her eyes and started for the driver’s side. “Remind me to never again be in the general vicinity of where you are.”

  “Aww, don’t be like that, dumplin’. At least I’m appreciative.”

  “The problem is that your appreciation often comes through on a delay.” She dropped into the seat and yanked the seatbelt across her body, adding, “of a decade or two,” through clenched teeth as she did it.

  Pop leaned into the doorway. “I could always ask your sister to do stuff, but you know how it goes.”

  “Which sister?”

  “Cordy.”

  “Oh, well of course, Cordy. Yeah, she’s too busy and you wouldn’t want to inconvenience the princess.”

  “Edy…”

  “Save it. I know the spiel. Ol’ dependable Edy, right? Just like Mom?”

  Pop’s cheeks went red as if someone had slapped him hard, but Edy wasn’t going to apologize—not for that. “Edy, listen, I—”

  I don’t want to hear it. “Pop. I need to get on the road, okay?” She tried to put a little sunshine in her voice, but she’d never been good at faking it. “I…um. My optometrist says I shouldn’t drive at night. Unless you want me to end up in a ditch with your little slugger back there, let me get on my way. Please.”

  Pop dragged a hand through his thinning hair and took a step away from the door. “All right, dumplin’. Call me when you stop for the night and let me know how he is.”

  “No. He’s your player. Why can’t you call him?”

  “Fair enough. Drive carefully.”

  “I always do, unlike some people.” Unlike Cordy. How many cars has she been through now?

  Edy plugged her aux cord’s jack into her phone, opened her GPS app, and input the address for the night’s hotel. It was only a five-hour drive to Shreveport, but the day was already late. She’d planned to get on the road right after lunch, but there went Pop in the team bus, blocking her in, and then escorting that idiot with the cast out of it—fresh from the hospital.

  She gave her father a wave, shifted into drive, and carefully backed down the driveway.

  “Bumpity-bumpity,” Al said.

  “I can make it worse if you complain, Felton.”

  “Gotta work on your bedside manner.”

  “Take it or leave it. And by leave it, I mean get out.”

  “Nah. Gotta go home.”

  “I’m sure your girlfriend would take you home if you called her.” Edy knew there was a girlfriend. She was typical for the kind of cleat-clingers that hung around the Roosters. The guys were known far more widely for what they were swinging between their legs than how well they swung on the field.

  “Girlfriend?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know my girlfriend?”

  “Sure. I’ve bumped into her once or twice.” Damn near run her over, actually, but that wasn’t hard. Kit probably weighed ninety pounds, and five of that was mascara. Edy had turned around and collided with her at the concession stand the previous summer, and she’d bounced off Edy like a stuntwoman who’d had a rope yanking her back to stage a dramatic fall.

  But Kit was always dramatic. Edy did her best to avoid her and all the other cock groupies, too.

  “What’d ya think of her?” Al asked.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Just curious. Cameron dated her first. They weren’t quite right, either.”

  “What do you mean either?”

  He didn’t respond. She looked at him through the rearview mirror and found his head lolled to the side, his lips parted, and eyes closed.

  “Hope he’s not dead,” she muttered. She cared a little, but not enough to stop driving. She hadn’t been lying about that night driving thing.

  She queued up a playlist on her phone as she paused at the turn to the county road, and took a long sip of cherry cola.

  Then she looked back again. “You’re alive, aren’t you Felton?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Ugh, Felton.” She drummed her fingertips on the steering wheel for a while, waiting for him to move or cough or something, but he didn’t.

  Grimacing, she wedged a finger between the toes left exposed by his cast and tickled his foot.

  He didn’t move.

  “Dammit.”

  She put the car in park, yanked up the emergency brake, and released her seatbelt buckle.

  “If he’s dead, I’m gonna kill Pop.” She stepped between the car and the trailer behind it, straddled the hitch, and then opened the wagon’s rear door.

  She put a finger under Al’s nose and felt the faint tickle of his breath. Just to be sure, she pressed a hand between his pecs and sought out the beat of his heart.

  Seemed strong enough. Steady, but slow. That could have been normal for him, or maybe the painkiller was doing a hell of a number on him.

  Her relief had barely settled in before anger chased it back.

  There was a calloused hand between her tits, trying to inch down her cleavage, and her nipples had perked up just that quickly in an embarrassing “Well, hello.”

  She knocked his hand away. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Thought we were feeling heartbeats. Yours is down there somewhere, I reckon. Want me to find it with my mouth?”

  “Oh my God, I was trying to make sure you were alive. I’m very much alive, by the way. I don’t need you to prove that to me.”

  “I’m feeling pretty alive right now, too.” His hand inched down his belly and settled over his crotch.

  “Don’t you dare.”

  He squeezed it, and sighed. “Life hurts. Make it stop hurtin’.”

  She closed her eyes and groaned.

  “Touch me some more,” he said drowsily. “Bend over me again. Nice view from here. I wouldn’t even mind if you suffocated me a little.”

  “Pervert.”

  “So? Tits are fun. I bet yours are real fun.”

  “You know who probably has really fun tits?”

  “Who?” He actually tried to sit up a little as if it were really crucial he learn that name.

  “Your girlfriend. Kit.”

  He let his lips sputter and put his head down. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Since when, two minutes ago?”

  “Since, like, November or something. Thanksgiving is in November, right? Or is that Christmas?”

  She furrowed her brow. “November.”

  “Yeah. Sounds right.” He folded his fingers atop his belly and his head lolled to the side again.

  “Why’d you break up?”

  “With who?”

  “Kit.”

  “I think she’s hung up on Cam.”

  “Oh.” Brow furrowed, Edy closed the gate and walked back to the driver’s side of the car. She got in, and got them moving once more.

  Al slept, and she let him. It was probably for the best that they didn’t talk.

  Chapter 2

  The throbbing in Al’s shin woke him up. His need to piss made him sit up, and that took a lot of effort. He was in the dark in some kind of uncomfortable-as-fuck enclosed space, and his broken leg was propped at an odd angle.

  “…the hell am I?”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed them. When he opened them again, the bleariness receded and he was able to make out shapes. The backs of the car seats. A windshield at the front. Windows on ei
ther side of him that had been left down barely an inch each.

  He was sweating like an escaped convict tromping through the bayou, and he had no freakin’ clue where he was.

  Hissing, he pulled his leg from between the seats and backed against the vehicle’s rear door. There had to be an internal release in there somewhere. He just needed a little air to clear his head.

  He patted around and found nothing and it was too dim to see if he was even patting in the right spots.

  He rooted in the pockets of his sweatpants until he found his cell phone. Down to a seven percent charge, but that would have to be enough. “Shit, it’s after nine. Sorry, Wallace.”

  He dialed out and put the phone to his ear.

  “That you, Felton?”

  “Yep.” Al lifted the hem of his T-shirt and dragged the fabric across his wet brow. “What’s going on?”

  “I should ask you the same thing. How’s your leg?”

  “Hurts like hell. I just woke up, and I’m in the back of a car.”

  “Edy’s car?”

  “Edy?” That’s right. Wallace had put Al into Edy’s car and she was supposed to take him home.

  “Don’t see her?” Wallace asked.

  “No. We’re parked somewhere, I…” Al squinted through the windshield at the boring brick facade of the building the car was parked in front of. “Is this a hotel?”

  “Probably, if Edy hasn’t moved in the past hour. She called me and let me know y’all had made it that far.”

  “She left me in the car for an hour? It’s hot as hell in here. Pretty sure I dissolved the inside of my cast.”

  “You’ll be all right. You’re an elite athlete, and I’m sure your momma left you in the car all the time when you were a kid.”

  Al rolled his eyes. His momma had been far too paranoid. “I need to get out. Gotta piss and find my pills before the pain comes back all at once.”

  “Right. The doctor said you had to stay on top of the dosing for the next few days. You’re probably an hour behind already. Call Edy and tell her you need help getting out.”

  “Okay, well, for one thing? I don’t have her number. For another thing, fuck you for putting me in this situation, Wallace.”

  “Excuse me? You were the one who said you wanted to workshop sliding into bases. Not my fault you and McKenzie got all tangled up.”

  “He’s a lumbering oaf with the balance of a three-legged bull and you’ve got him playing catcher. He stepped on my goddamned leg before he fell on me, Wallace.”

  “Find me a better catcher, then. If you can’t, quit bitching. Lock left big shoes to fill.”

  “Shit. If my leg mends the way it’s supposed to, I’ll play catcher myself, and will consider all the balls I take to the head my penance for being stupid enough to make baseball my summer gig.”

  “What the hell else are you gonna do, huh? I know what teachers earn. You need the cash and that coaching supplement your school offered you ain’t enough to get you through the summer. We had this same conversation last year, remember?”

  Al scoffed and bobbed his good leg nervously. “Get me the hell out of this car.”

  “I’ll call her. Bye.”

  Al tucked the phone into his pocket and waited.

  Waited and sweated, drumming his fingers against the blanket beneath him.

  He was going to piss himself, and that was all he needed to send his mood ever more downhill. He’d apparently gotten put into a vehicle with a woman who wouldn’t spit on him if he were on fire, and he didn’t even know what he’d done to earn the hostility. He would have understood it, maybe, if they’d dated before or something, but Edy didn’t date baseball players. She barely even tolerated her father’s bullshit. Not that Al could blame her. Wallace played pro ball back in his day and was rarely at home—just like Al’s dad.

  Back then, Al had thought it was a romantic kind of lifestyle, traveling from city to city and playing the game he loved, but being involved in the lifestyle now, he questioned the appeal. By the end of every season, he craved being able to sleep in his own bed seven days in a row. He craved his normal, small paychecks he earned from being a P.E. teacher. Those were good enough for him…at least until some big bill came through.

  Apparently that was why some people got married—so they’d have someone to split those household expenses with. If he sold the damn money pit he lived in, he could probably get by a little easier, but the guilt would never go away. That house had been in the family for a hundred and fifty years.

  The door behind him pulled away and he barely had a chance to slap his hands down to catch himself so he didn’t fall out of the car.

  “Fuck.”

  “Here are your crutches,” Edy said flatly. She slid them out of the cargo space and balanced them on their rubber ends.

  He looked over his shoulder at her. Her gray eyes held storms, her full pink lips were pressed into a line of warning, and even her hair looked angry. She normally did something so it swooped down toward one eye and was pulled back into old-school curls, but the curls had drooped in her rare ponytail, and she looked a little wild.

  Wild, angry, and so hot that if it weren’t for the state of his bladder, Al might have been worrying about other things his dick needed to be doing. She was a beautiful woman—always was, in spite of her frazzled state at the moment. She was the spitting image of her mother, which was good in one way and bad in others. Having a gorgeous wife hadn’t stopped Wallace from straying. Al was lucky his own father hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of the flesh while on the road. Maybe he’d been too afraid the good Lord was going to strike him down on the field or something.

  Al scooted back a bit, getting his ass lined up with the gate, then turned, put his good foot on the ground, and took the first of the crutches from her.

  Getting out of the car took a bit of advanced physics. He had to keep rotating and hopping as he crouched to free his leg of the gate. The last damn thing he needed was to bang it while exiting.

  She thrust the second crutch at him, waited for him to get it under his arm, and turned on her heel.

  “Edy, wait. I need my bag. I need my wallet and stuff.”

  “It’s upstairs in my room. The trailer’s lock isn’t secure, so I took everything out.”

  “Stairs.” His gaze locked through the hotel’s glass back door on the stairs leading up to the second floor, and he let out a ragged sigh. He’d need to get something lower, because there was no way in hell he’d be able to get up those stairs with any semblance of dignity.

  “There’s an elevator in the lobby,” she said. “You go start checking in or whatever and I’ll bring your bag down to you.”

  “Thanks.” He shuffled out of the way to let her close the gate and lock the car.

  She zipped up the stairs in the time it took him to just get to the back door of the hotel.

  He was sweating even more profusely by the time he got it open, and he might have been a little more disgruntled about his circumstances if it weren’t for the fact there was a bathroom right by the door.

  He yelped when the ankle of his cast got caught in the door, waited for the stars of pain in his vision to clear, then did his business.

  By the time he made it to the counter, Edy was waiting with her hands on her hips and her lush lips turned down in a frown.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t hold it.”

  “Is your wallet in that bag?”

  “Hope so. I didn’t pack up my stuff. I think Cameron did.” Al started to kneel to root through it, but the crutches got in the way, and he couldn’t work out the right angle to get into the bag.

  Shit.

  “Sorry to ask,” he said with a sigh. “Could you unzip that and look for my wallet? It’s black.”

  Grinding her teeth, she knelt and unzipped the thing.

  He cringed as she pushed aside jock straps, ointments, and unfamiliar reading material some asshole on the team must have thought he was in need of.r />
  She didn’t pull it out, but he could see what it was and what page it had been left open to. Full-page spread. Literally.

  Dammit.

  Edy rolled that beguiling gray gaze up to him and narrowed her eyes.