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

by Selena Kitt

  “I swear to God, I didn’t put that in there.”

  “Not my concern whether you did or didn’t. Shouldn’t even surprise me.”

  “So why are you mad at me?”

  Her cheek twitched and nostrils flared, but she didn’t seem to have a response beyond that. She kept digging and eventually found his wallet at the bottom.

  She dusted off the knees of her long black skirt as she stood and yanked up the V-neck of her stretchy shirt. He may have stared a little too long at that couple of inches of cleavage resting over the top of her collar, but it was a sight too damned sexy to ignore.

  Smooth, tanned skin he knew would be soft and silky, and a hint of lace that must have been from her brassiere. He tightened his fists around the grips of his crutches and swallowed hard when she thrust the wallet under his nose.

  “My face is up here,” she snapped.

  “Yeah.” He took the wallet and saluted her with it.

  Looking at her face didn’t give him the chilling effect she was probably hoping for. Does she even know what she looks like?

  He hobbled to the counter and set the wallet atop it. “Do you have a handicap-accessible room available?” he asked the clerk. “And coffee or something? I need to take a horse pill and I’d like to do it with something stronger than water.”

  The clerk hit some keys and nodded. “Haven’t had anyone in that room in a few days so let me run down and make sure it’s ready. Can’t always trust what the computer says. And there’s coffee over there in the lobby, but if you want something more substantial, the restaurant’s open until ten.”

  “I could eat.”

  She slid some sort of coupon across the counter to him. “That’ll get you breakfast.”

  “No one said anything to me about breakfast,” Edy said behind him.

  “You’re not together?”

  “No. I’m already checked in.”

  The lady shrugged. “You must have checked in with Michelle. She’s stingier with the coupons. Here.” She slid a pink slip like Al’s across the counter and put a yellow one on top of it. “Yellow’s for half-off dinner if you haven’t eaten already.”

  “Don’t I get one of those?” Al asked.

  She blew a raspberry. “Guy like you, Nance would make up a discount for. Nance is working in the restaurant tonight.”

  Edy leaned her elbows onto the counter and stared at the woman. “What kind of guy is he?”

  “Baseball player.” The lady pointed toward the Roosters team logo with #17 printed over Al’s pec. “She’s got a fetish, I guess. I need your ID and credit card, please.”

  Al nervously worked both cards out with his thumbs, hands shaking as he pushed them across the counter. He could say it was just the pain settling into him and radiating through his body and up to his brain, but really, he didn’t like being watched like that.

  It was one thing to be in a stadium filled with strangers watching him play in a game. He wasn’t the only person out there for them to focus on. It was another thing entirely to have Edy Wallace scrutinizing his every move and probably just waiting for him to fuck something up.

  “We’ve got express checkout,” the lady said as she swiped his card. “Are you gonna need a receipt in the morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll leave it under your door. If you’re gonna order room service or order pay-per-view, make sure you do it by four a.m.”

  “Once I get into that room, I don’t imagine I’ll be awake for long, so don’t worry about looking for any charges.”

  She slipped him the keycard. “Just leave it on the dresser on the way out. No need to stop by the desk unless you just want to say ‘hi’ and ‘good morning.’”

  “There won’t be very much good about it, judging by the way I’m feeling right now.” He shifted uncomfortably on his crutches and worked the room key and the rest of his stuff into his wallet. He eyed his bag, then the restaurant, and let out a breath.

  “Do you want me to just drop it into your room?” Edy asked.

  “It’s right there near the entryway to the hall,” the clerk said. “Turn left and it’ll be the first door on the left-hand side.”

  He slipped Edy the key. “Thanks.”

  She grabbed the bag without a word and carried it toward the hall, and he watched her walk. He loved the confident sway of her hips and the way her skirt pulled over her ass as she moved. It was positively hypnotizing, and he must have been entranced for sure, because a couple moved up to the counter, and the guy cleared his throat, ostensibly to get Al moving.

  So he moved, hobbling toward the restaurant and replaying in his mind Edy’s walk and how she looked as good going as she did coming.

  If Wallace ever found out Al had been looking, he’d probably try to take a baseball bat to Al’s good leg, and all Al would be able to say in his own defense would be, “Well, you should never have put me in her car. What’d you expect would happen? Have you looked at her? ’Cause I have.”

  Chapter 3

  Edy could tell the exact point when Al’s painkillers started kicking in because the cringe he’d worn throughout his meal softened and his eyes glazed a bit.

  He reached for his water glass, and she waited for him to bring it to his lips, but he just stared at it as if it were some new invention he couldn’t make out the mechanics of.

  She closed out of her email program, set her phone on the table, and leaned the side of her head against her fist, staring at him. She could have gone on to bed—and back to the book she’d abandoned when her father had called and insisted she get Al out of her car—but the guy was needy as hell.

  He hadn’t asked for help, but she’d broken enough bones in her life to know it’d take him a while to compensate for the body part that wasn’t working at the moment. The waitress acted like she would have volunteered to be Al’s personal slave for the evening, but he didn’t seem to catch on to the overtures. He was the kind of guy who would have, and who would have made a few overtures of his own in return.

  He had to either be in a load of pain or those drugs weren’t playing nice with his body chemistry.

  His eyelids drooped.

  “Al.”

  “Huh?” He opened his eyes. Green, the shade of pastel mints and baby blankets. Against his late-spring tan, it was a lovely contrast.

  “Pay your bill and go to bed. Or are you going to charge it to the room?”

  He grimaced and shook his head. “Nah. Gonna pay it now.” He waved to the waitress who literally dropped what she was doing. She tossed her cleaning rag onto the bar top and hurried over.

  “Anything else for you, honey?”

  “No, thank you. Can I have the bill, please?”

  “You sure? You don’t want dessert or nothing and maybe another cup of coffee? It’ll perk you up.” Her gaze tracked down his chest and landed on what Edy imagined was the crotch of his sweatpants.

  Be gone, succubus. Edy growled inwardly and thrust a credit card at her. “Just put it on that and bring me the receipt to sign.”

  “I got it.” Brow furrowed, Al patted his pockets.

  “Your wallet is in your duffel and I have your room key,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before I ordered?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m submitting the receipt for reimbursement, anyway. Maybe you can do your part in ensuring my timely reimbursement by calling Pop every so often and asking about it.” She fixed her gaze on the waitress who finally snatched the card and went away.

  Edy grabbed Al’s crutches from the neighboring booth and got him to his feet. “You should be in a wheelchair.”

  He scoffed. “It’d be even harder to get around. I’ll adjust. It’s only for a little while.”

  “Forced vacation, huh?”

  “Yeah. Guess I’ll have to find something else to do this summer.”

  She leaned Al against the bar top and scribbled her signature onto the receipt when the waitress walked it over.


  “Restaurant is closing, but room service is open all night,” the lady said to Al.

  He grinned, but there didn’t really seem to be much heart in it. “I’m going to bed. If I wake up in the middle of night wanting something, it’s probably going to be a controlled substance of some sort.”

  The lady giggled and rested her chin on her fists, batting her eyelashes at him.

  “Let’s go, Felton,” Edy said through clenched teeth.

  “Night,” he said to the waitress.

  “Night, doll. Make sure you call if you need anything.”

  He won’t need anything. Edy got Al moving before he could decide that he did.

  She walked him to his door, unlocked it, and waited for him to hobble to the bed.

  He perched on the edge and leaned the crutches against the wall.

  She set his key on the dresser and watched him work off his one sneaker. That was probably the most taxing thing he had left to do for the evening, so she was going to make her exit. “See you in the morning, Al.”

  “Might be slow. Need to figure out how to take a shower with this damned cast.”

  “You’ve never broken a bone?”

  He grunted. “Of course I have. Fingers. My forearm, once, in the fall of my senior year of high school. Didn’t matter if that was broken. Could still play soccer.”

  “Soccer and baseball?”

  He lay back and closed his eyes, his good leg still dangling off the side of the bed. “Went to college on a soccer scholarship.”

  “So why are you playing baseball now?”

  “Because it pays a little.”

  Oh.

  “I was on the US Olympic team the year before last,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” He laughed. “My school didn’t mind me ducking out early some days to make it to practices. I work for a private school, and they liked the publicity. But, your dad was sure pissed that I missed most of the season.”

  “I bet.”

  “I probably won’t qualify again. I rarely play anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “Busy. Teaching and hustling in the summers. And trying to get the house fixed up.”

  “What’s wrong with your house?”

  “It’d take less breath and fewer words to tell you what isn’t wrong with it.”

  “Ew. You bought a fixer-upper? I did that.”

  “Nah.” He draped his forearm over his eyes, and of course she used his temporary blindness as an excuse to size him up.

  She’d seen plenty of the reverse of him—strutting out to the field swinging a bat. It was hard not to look, and although she would have hated to admit it, Al had a special appeal. Maybe it was the smirk.

  Oddly, he hadn’t been doing much smirking since he’d woken up.

  He let out a breath and bobbed the knee of his good leg. “I got the mess passed down from my grandmother when she moved into a retirement community. My parents didn’t want it, and I guess my grandmother figured I’d do something with it. It’s old as hell and has…special needs.”

  Edy chuckled and shifted her weight. She hadn’t intended to stick around in his room for so long, but now she was curious. She liked shooting the shit about house stuff. She didn’t have anyone else to talk to about it. All of her friends lived in apartments or purchased brand new condos. They’d accused her of being obsessed with her little pile of bricks and sticks, but she couldn’t think of anything better to put some heart into. That house was hers and one day, it’d have some equity.

  “My house has special needs,” she said, “but probably not like yours. Mine was built in 1967. Most of my issues are aesthetic.”

  He chuckled and dropped his arm from his eyes, smiling at her. “Wallpaper got you down, honey?”

  She shrugged. “It had me down for a while. I bought the house a year ago when I was pretty sure my job was going to be a stable one. The house was such a great deal, so on a whim, I called the realtor and went to look at it during my lunch break.”

  “You just had to see if something was wrong with it.”

  “Yeah.” She took the seat by the dresser and smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt.

  Is sitting a faux pas? He hadn’t asked her to, but standing and running her mouth felt awkward—like she was talking down to him. Normally, she wouldn’t feel so bad about that, but the guy was obviously in pain and she didn’t want to add insult to injury. She did have a heart, after all.

  “Um. Pop didn’t believe me when I told him it was okay, so he insisted he come look at it, too, but he was at training camp with you sleazebags.”

  Al snorted. “Obviously, it didn’t sell before he got there.”

  “Of course it didn’t. It didn’t have a single other offer. If you’d have seen it, you’d understand why. The interior was, and maybe still is, seriously garish. I guess nobody else wanted it because they could have gotten something new or at least move-in ready for about ten thousand dollars more.”

  “But smaller.”

  “Yeah. Smaller lot, anyway. And whatever they bought was bound to be far less charming.”

  “Charming, huh?”

  “I think that’s the word my realtor used. Don’t worry—I knew the code.”

  “I was gonna ask.”

  “Yeah.” She shrugged. “I knew I had a lot of work ahead of me, but I made Pop see reason. He helped me out with the down payment in exchange for me actually showing up for the occasional Roosters game. I guess he was afraid you guys wouldn’t have anyone sitting on your side.”

  “Ah. That explains why you go.”

  “Well, I guess it was worth it. I have a really cute house on a good-sized lot in historic Spanish Town.”

  “I didn’t know you lived in Baton Rouge.” He tried to sit up, but quickly abandoned the endeavor. He was obviously too tired, and he was doing just fine talking to her from his back.

  Still, she moved from the chair to the bedside and sat tentatively on the edge. When he didn’t react any particular way, she continued. “That’s, uh…where my job pulled me.”

  “What do you do?”

  She let her lips sputter. “I headhunt.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Companies outsource that part of human resources to us, and I specialize in finding executive-level marketing professionals. Commissions are good, but the job is high-stress and I don’t see myself doing it long-term. I just want to pad my savings account a bit more before I even consider moving on to the next thing.”

  “Which would be?”

  “I don’t know yet. When I was a kid, I thought I’d hang out my own shingle and open a bookstore or something, but obviously that’s no longer a viable business model with everything going digital now.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t still do something with books.”

  “What, then?”

  “I dunno. You can’t expect me to have too many good ideas right now. I’ve got enough medicine in me right now that I might forget English soon. Unfortunately, it’s the only language I speak.”

  Yikes. “So, uh…tell me about your money pit.”

  “Two stories, old plumbing, old wiring. I probably would have been better off tearing it down and putting something pre-fab on the lot, but then the fuckin’ house had to go and get slotted on the historic places registry.”

  “So you can fix it, but not for cheap.”

  “And I have to fix it a certain way.”

  “Ah. Sorry.”

  He shrugged. “’Sall right. Maybe one day my grandkids will appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears I put into it. There’s enough of all of that staining the hardwoods right now.”

  She laughed. He was probably exaggerating, but the mental image the words evoked were incredibly cartoonish. “I could see where that would suck a paycheck dry. You should apply for some grants.”

  “I thought of that, but I haven’t had time. Every time I sit down to start looking, something comes up,
and I keep missing the deadlines.”

  “Would you like some help?” Edy had never been the volunteering sort of gal, but she could spare a few hours. Researching was fun and easy for her, and was a big part of her job. She was efficient at it, and could turn up leads like nobody’s business. Maybe it’d even give her some experience she might need for her next “charming” little house.