by Erin Hayes
“Are you going to go in or just stay out here?”
I glanced to the right to see a big man leaning against the wall, puffs of smoke rising from a cigarette between his lips. He was silhouetted in the darkness, so I couldn’t get a good look at him, but I could tell that he was massive in size.
At least I learned my lesson earlier to not assume that he was anything but a football player. I was his boss, so I needed to act that way
I plastered on my business smile as I put my hands on my hips. “It’s so nice out here, I was debating on it.”
It wasn’t entirely untrue. Even though it had been blisteringly hot for the end of July during the day, the night was a nice seventy degrees.
But the man smiled nonetheless and nodded toward the sports bar. The light caught his features, and I was struck by his crop of straight black hair, dark eyes, and tanned skin. He was gorgeous.
Shit. Where did all these hot men come from?
“These kinds of places aren’t really my scene,” he said.
“Sports bars?” Goddammit, my voice was a little strangled.
He chuckled mirthlessly. “Public places. Especially here.” He gave one long drag on his cigarette. “Even though the Hammers suck, everyone always asks for autographs and pictures. A man can’t go have some damn chicken wings in peace.”
So I’d been right about him being a football player. I fought the urge to high-five myself that I was avoiding the same mistake I’d made with Andre the night before. Which meant not finding him attractive. Or getting drunk and falling into bed with him.
Now that I knew he was on the team, I could avoid that with a ten-foot pole. I could do that.
“What is it with Birmingham and smoked chicken wings?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “Have you tried the white sauce?”
“No.”
A smile. “Then you’re missing out. Come on, I’ll introduce you to the guys. And to some white sauce.”
That shouldn’t have sounded sexual, right? I laughed uncomfortably and hoped he couldn’t see my blush. “Well, you haven’t introduced yourself, yet.”
“Ah, right.” He placed the lit cigarette between his lips and held out a big hand for me to shake. “Rodney Nguyen.”
“Nice to meet you, Rodney. Madison Harte. I’m the, uh, new owner.”
“I know.” He stepped back and blew out a plume of smoke to the side. “I saw you on the field earlier today.”
Oh. Right. Like any awful first day of work, everyone knew the new girl, but I was terrible at remembering names or faces. So now every player knew who I was and what I looked like, and I had no fricking clue about any of them.
“So what do you do, Rodney?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
He regarded me for a moment, an amused smile on his face. “I play football,” he said slowly, as if enjoying the fact that he was drawing out this torture for me.
I nodded. “Yes, but what do you do? As in…” My voice trailed off as my brain flipped through the pages of the idiot’s guide. Please, please, please let there be something in there. I’d been a good student growing up, but for some reason, this football stuff wasn’t sticking with me. “What position do you play?”
He crossed his arms with a smirk and a flick of the cigarette. “Running back.”
Like I knew what that was, but at least I’d asked the right question. I made a mental note to look up what a runner back was once I got back to my hotel. Alone. Tonight.
Rodney sucked on his cigarette once more.
“You know that’ll kill you,” I told him mildly. Maybe not the best thing to say to your runner back, but he only chuckled as he tossed it on the ground and smashed it underfoot.
“Yeah,” he admitted, almost sheepish as he stuck his hands in his pockets. “A bad habit I picked up in high school. I’ve been trying to quit. The athletic trainers have been bugging me to for years now.”
“Well, good luck,” I said. Uncle Dusty had smoked his entire life, and I remember him smelling like ashtrays every time I saw him. I couldn’t imagine how hard it was to quit.
“The team needs more luck than I do,” he muttered under his breath. He opened the door to the bar and gestured for me to come in. “Ready?”
No.
“Sure,” I said, squeezing by his big bulk. I caught a whiff of his cologne, which smelled like cinnamon and citrus combined with something deeply masculine—and, I suspected, not from a bottle at all. I guessed that men who worked out as much as they did always had an underlying smell of sweat, which wasn’t unpleasant, but also marked them as...well, them.
Inside, The Clucky Cowboy was noisier and felt like an assault on my senses. I stopped in the doorway, blinking at the shouts as one sports team scored, and people cheered and thunked their pint glasses together. Every screen played a different baseball game, which in itself was mind boggling.
I never did have the patience to pay attention to baseball. Even if the players looked dashing in their baseball outfits.
“This way,” Rodney said, taking me by the elbow. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying not to get weak in the knees.
I knew I was in trouble.
He quickly led me through the crowd, and I realized why he was ushering me so fast. People would turn around in their seats to gape at us as we walked by them. They all looked at Rodney like he was a god.
I mean, he had the body of a god. I wasn’t so sure about him being one though. Although I could believe that he fancied himself one. Which instead of coming across as arrogant just came off as...confident.
We headed toward the back of the bar, where there was a separate room. And as I looked at the room, I could almost smell the testosterone of the men packed wall-to-wall in there.
There were a lot of them. And they all turned to look at me. Two dozen, three dozen...at least fifty men. How many men did you need for a football team?
And why were they all so good-looking?
“Team,” Rodney said with a dramatic twirl of his hand, “this is Madison Harte. The new owner.”
So many eyes on me. So many good-looking men. I needed a cold shower back at my apartment. Stat.
I gave a weak wave. “Go Hammers!”
I wished I sounded more confident. My little war cry for the team elicited a few chuckles from the men on the team, and it eased me just a bit.
Until I saw my first familiar face pop up from the table, and that area between my legs tightened at the sight of him.
“You made it,” Andre said warmly as he came up to me. He didn’t look once at the big man at my side, which was punctuated by Rodney’s irritated huff.
“Well, it’s my team,” I told Andre in a breathless voice. “It would be rude not to show up.”
His brows rose at that. God, I need to learn how to speak around him. The unexpected flash of what we did last night didn’t help either, and I could feel myself get weak in the knees.
“I found her outside during my smoke break,” Rodney told him wryly. “Where she was thinking of being rude.”
Fuck, Rodney needed to shut up. I gave him a glare, and he chuckled softly as he moved away to sit at a table with a group of guys who managed to be even bigger than him. The thing was, they were, for the most part, as beautiful as they were huge. Of course, I was only 5’3”, so maybe they only seemed enormous to me...but I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking they weren’t gorgeous.
I managed not to gape. But just barely
“Well, glad you weren’t rude,” Andre said with a sigh. He shook his head after Rodney. “Sorry you had to deal with Rodney’s cocky ass.”
“He wasn’t so bad.”
Truthfully. And his ass was really nice. But from the set of Andre’s jaw, I could tell that there was some tension there. A bit of friendly competition between the two of them? Or not-so-friendly? I couldn’t tell.
“Let me introduce you to the guys,” Andre said, taking my hand and sweeping me across the room. What happened over
the next twenty minutes was a lot of awkward introductions to football players whose names I immediately forgot. Each one was slightly boozed and jovial, cracking jokes. They all knew who I was and had great things to say about Uncle Dusty.
I guess it wasn’t that bad, being the only woman among such a large group of men. And, after a time, rather than feeling like the black sheep, I started laughing and smiling and giving great comebacks for their jokes. I could tell that Andre was enjoying this.
He was enjoying showing off their new owner. And I found myself enjoying being their new owner.
I could, however, sense the immediate change as Andre brought me over to Rodney’s table of six, where the runner back looked up at Andre with disinterest. “So glad you could remember us, captain,” he said thinly.
Ah, so there was some sort of powerplay happening between them. I made another mental note to look up what a football captain did.
Andre rolled his eyes. “Introducing fifty-three players takes a while.” He exhaled loudly through his nostrils. “Madison, you’ve already met Rodney, a running back.”
Rodney gave me a brilliant smile, which was such a departure from the skeptical look he gave Andre earlier. “We sure did. Has our fearless leader been treating you right?”
If only he knew. “Yeah. I didn’t realize there were so many players on a team.”
That got me a good-natured chuckle from the whole table. I don’t think they knew I was being serious.
“Yep,” a man with a heavy Southern drawl, drawing my attention to him. “There’s a lot, for sure.” He had dirty blond hair cropped close with a tanned face from being out in the sun, and kind blue eyes. There was something innocent about him, something that I couldn’t put my finger on, even though he was probably the largest man at the table in height and in muscle mass. I doubted he had any fat though.
None of these guys did. They were just big. And handsome.
Andre pointed around the table, introducing me to the group. The same as the others, I forgot their names as soon as I learned them, but they all waved at me, and I made sure to grin and wave back.
At the end, though, I immediately remembered one name. But that was just because it was so...unique.
“And that’s Clancy Drew,” Andre said, pointing out the Southern man who had spoken earlier. “A linebacker.”
Clancy gave a good-natured wave to me. “Please to meet you, Miss Harte.”
I blinked. “Clancy...Drew? Like the main character in the mystery novels?” I used to read them like a fanatic when I was younger. But I couldn’t imagine anyone more opposite than that character than the man before me.
Instead of getting angry, Clancy chuckled. “Yeah. My momma was a fan. If I were born a girl, I’d have been a Nancy and my pa would have still put me in football.”
“Clancy is the only one of us born and raised in Alabama,” Rodney said, pouring more beer into his pitcher.
“Opelika,” Clancy added.
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“Just outside of Auburn,” he said.
I just nodded. Note to self: buy a map of Alabama and memorize it. I apparently only really knew where Birmingham was. Centralish, if I remembered correctly.
“He comes from southern football royalty,” Rodney added. “You see, all the other football players from the South get drafted by the good football teams. Clancy decided to stay.”
“Can’t take me out of the South,” Clancy added with a nod. “I’ll live and die here. The Hammers got me for life.”
I decided right then that even though Clancy and I were on opposite ends of the spectrum for life experiences, that I really liked him. Not that anything would come out of it, but he seemed like he was good-natured and even-keeled.
“We can be a good team,” Andre said dryly. “We just haven’t had the chance.”
“Sure,” Rodney said, and I figured it out right then where that tension was coming from. Rodney knew exactly how to push Andre’s buttons. And while it could have been entertaining from afar, these guys were supposed to be a team.
I’d been to enough team-building exercises to know that they were supposed to work together.
“Here.” Rodney scooted over a chair and patted the seat. “Sit down. I’ll let you try some of my white sauce.” His eyes gleamed playfully, and I knew for certain that he meant for there to be a sexual connotation with his choice of words. Andre stiffening up in anger confirmed it.
Holy shit.
“I still need to introduce her to—” Andre started, but Rodney tsk-tsked him, shaking his head. He leaned back and draped a massive arm over the back of his chair.
“After a long, hard day,” he said before taking a sip of his beer, making us wait to hear the rest of his words, “I’m sure she just wants to sit down and have a nice relaxing night. She can get to know the rest of us better while eating.” He nodded to the rest of the guys at the table, and they nodded.
“Rodney,” Andre said in a warning tone.
Rodney held up a chicken wing, and sure enough, it was dripping in white sauce that made my stomach growl. “Don’t you want a taste?”
Goddammit, if my mouth didn’t water just then. After making fun of chicken wings my entire time here, they looked damn delicious.
“Yes,” I sighed, sitting in the chair he offered, and he gave me a wink as he slid the basket of wings my way. I didn’t hold back as I grabbed a wing and bit into it. Sure enough, my eyes nearly rolled into the back of my head.
Fuck, they were better than sex. Well, almost. At least I knew I’d remember these in the morning.
“Whoa, easy there, Sally,” Clancy said mildly as I tore into my wing. “We can order you more.”
“Can you get us more beer?” Rodney asked Andre, and I felt the entire table freeze at the implied power play. If there was one thing I learned from meeting all these football players, it was that Andre was treated like their boss. None of them would ask their quarterback to get them more beer.
Except Rodney, who looked up at Andre with an expectant smile. He knew exactly what he was doing. And how it was affecting Andre.
But in the end, common courtesy won out, and Andre let out a sigh. “Sure,” he said thinly. He turned his gaze on me, and I wondered if I had white sauce dripping down my mouth. “Madison, I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time,” Rodney drawled as he turned back to the table. Andre was barely out of earshot when he muttered under his breath, “Fucking prick.”
I stared at him aghast.
Clancy chuckled darkly as he picked up what remained of his beer. “That’s not very nice, Rodney.”
“It’s the truth.”
Clancy leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. “Whatever feud or rivalry the two of you think you have,” he said mildly, “you need to fucking drop it. Because you’re going to split the team apart.”
“Well, maybe with real leadership,” Rodney said, “we could turn the team around.”
“That’s what we got Miss Harte here for,” Clancy said, giving me wink. “She’ll lead us to a win this season.”
Nothing like putting the pressure on me like that to make me feel like shit.
The entire table laughed. It took me a moment to realize that they meant winning a single game. Not winning the playoffs or anything. I guess a losing streak is as stressful on a team as maintaining a winning one.
Tensions were high. And I didn’t know enough or had the authority to be able to fix it.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. My team was already splintering apart, and I hadn’t done anything yet. Well, except sleep with the quarterback.
Shit.
And if these guys knew that I had slept with Andre, would they still be laughing and smiling at me?
It felt like my relationship with Jacob all over again. I learned the hard way not to mix business with relationships, because everyone assumed that I was just a hussy who was gold-digging her way up the ladder. No matter that I was the one who st
arted the damn business. And that ended up in my startup being bought out and Jacob taking everything I’d worked so hard for.
No, that wasn’t going to happen here. I wouldn’t let it.
“Miss Harte?”
I blinked, and it took me a second to realize that Clancy was speaking to me. How long had I been sitting here with my mouth gaping like an idiot? I bet football owners never did anything like that.
“Sorry, jetlag,” I said, giving him a pretend yawn. Which turned into a real yawn, so I had to do it twice.
“What’s the weather like out in California?” one of the other players—I think his name was Tony?—asked. He was sitting backwards in his chair, with his arms on the back. Like Slater in Saved by the Bell. It would have looked too try-hardy if he didn’t look so damn cool doing it.
I was surrounded by gorgeous, cool men. Stuff like this didn’t happen in real life.
“The weather was great when I left,” I told him.
“I miss it,” he sighed. “I used to play for the Chargers.”
“The what?”
I realized that I’d committed yet another party foul, because the whole table laughed. Maybe not at me, but they certainly thought they were laughing with me. All except Rodney who watched me with an amused expression, his eyes twinkling.
Damn if that didn’t do funny things to my insides.
“So are you all baseball fans?” I asked, nodding toward the TV, where nothing was really happening.
Rodney shook his head. “Nah, not really. But it’s the only game that’s on until the preseason.”
“Then these TVs’ll all be on football,” Clancy added.
I bit my tongue to keep from asking what a preseason was. Everyone kept talking about it, so I could guess from the context. Not much of football vocabulary could be gleaned from context. Like “quarterback.” Or “hut.”
I started on another chicken wing to keep from saying something stupid. Goddamn, they were so good. I stifled a moan, although Rodney’s lips curved up. He knew what these wings were doing to me.
I was a convert.
“I used to play baseball,” another player said with a shrug. “Problem was, I wasn’t cut out for it.”
“That’s all good,” Clancy said, clapping the man’s bicep. “We wouldn’t have you here if you were.”
