Harlequin Superromance May 2016 Box Set

by Janice Kay Johnson

  The thought sent a shiver of excitement up her spine.

  She wouldn’t do anything with the knowledge; she’d stopped dating jocks in high school. But it was still nice to be noticed by a man like Jonas.

  “The interview.”

  Brooks’s breath caught in her throat. “I get the interview when you get the coverage for the charity camp.”

  “It’s not a charity, these kids deserve better than pot-holed streets disguised as basketball courts or football fields.” Finally, Jonas joined the conversation, although he still wasn’t looking directly at her. Instead, those deep, deep eyes were fixed on something just above Brooks’s head.

  “Again, not my assignment. I’m the beat reporter assigned to report on your team, not your charity work.”

  Jonas clenched his jaw. “You can report on the charity work or you can deal with a locker room full of men who won’t give you the time of day through to early February,” he said. “Assuming we’re playing for the championship.”

  “You can’t shut me out.”

  “Oh, you can walk that fine ass into the lockers any time. Finding someone who will talk to you, that’s a whole other subject.”

  “Jonas.” Earl’s gravelly voice held a hint of warning this time. Jonas shrugged his shoulders and turned his gaze back to the corner. “What we are suggesting is an exclusive. You come to the camp for a couple of hours each day, and at the end of camp you can have your all-access interview with Jonas. Location of your choice, no topic off the table.”

  Brooks’s heart beat a little faster. All-access was good. All-access was what she needed to really make a splash in this program. “Is there a reason you want to delay this all-access interview for a couple of weeks?” She caught the look that passed between coach and player and her belly clenched. Yes, there was most definitely more to the Jonas Nash injury than the Kentuckians had reported up to this point. Neither man said a word, though. “My focus still has to be the whole team.”

  “Of course, of course.” Earl laid on the charm, leaning across the desk and clasping his hands. “Several of the players, coaching staff and trainers will be in and out for the duration of the camp. A woman with your background has to know how important youth sports are to the healthy development of our kids. Physical fitness, sure, but we’re talking about social responsibility, team building, leadership. All of which can be taught on the football field.”

  “My father believes the traits learned on the football field translate into the lives athletes lead off the field,” Brooks offered. “After reporting on professional sports for the past few years, I’m not sure I agree, but I’ll say that I think the football camp you’re talking about is a step in the right direction.”

  “Why don’t you drive out there with Jonas this morning? He’s putting the finishing touches on the field and the first of the kids will arrive this afternoon.”

  “Thursday is when we start really working with the kids—”

  “Today is good, actually,” Brooks interrupted before Jonas could come up with a reason to keep her off the field and out of the locker room. “And I’ll have full access to Jonas at the end of the camp, correct?”

  “Interview, mic him during practice, whatever you need.”

  “Great.” Brooks picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot in five. I’ll bring my cameraman.”

  “I’ll bring repellant.”

  “No need, you do just fine with that all by yourself,” Brooks said, putting as much sugar into her voice as she could.

  * * *

  JONAS PACED AROUND the small office, stealing a look at Earl from time to time. Since Brooks had walked out two minutes before, he’d been trying to put into words exactly how many ways this plan was wrong.

  All he’d come up with was throwing the small coffee table against the wall and somehow, while it might succinctly tell Earl just how much he didn’t want this project, he didn’t think it would change the outcome. Earl would still expect him to be downstairs in—he checked his watch—one hundred and eighty seconds.

  “You about done wearing a hole in this fine carpet?”

  “The carpet’s crap. Just like this assignment is crap.”

  Earl just looked at him for a long moment. “You’d rather sit through twenty minutes of ‘how’s the shoulder’ and ‘where will you be playing next season?’ Because I thought we were trying to A) correct your image problems and B) keep the press off your shoulder radar for a couple more weeks.”

  “I just...why her? Why this reporter?”

  “Because she’s the one sniffing around and I don’t think she’s got her eyes set on becoming the next Miss Thang Dating Jonas. This girl could not give a fig about what you have to offer off the field, but you’ve got the chance to make her care.”

  “I don’t want to make her care.” Jonas folded his arms over his chest as he leaned his good shoulder against the wall. He didn’t, he insisted to himself. What Brook Smith thought of him was completely and totally beside the point. She was after a story, his story, and he hadn’t told anyone his story since Earl sat him down more than ten years ago and asked what he wanted out of life.

  Jonas had wanted the hell out of Texas, that was what he wanted. Away from constantly falling short of what his mother expected of him. Away from the boring prep-school life he’d been leading. To be anyone and anything other than Jonas Nash, son of renowned particle physicist Beverly Nash. The woman who did everything absolutely right: she chose the paper-perfect candidate to be his father, she swore off caffeine and alcohol and even chocolate while she was pregnant and didn’t even inhale if someone had fish nearby. She vaccinated him according to the rules, never did the baby-talk thing and enrolled him in a fancy preschool by the time he was two. She didn’t cuddle. She read to him from her textbooks.

  Only to find out before he even hit the fourth grade that he would never be a scientist. His brain didn’t work that way. Build a replica of New York City from LEGO bricks? No problem. Set him up to discover the secrets of string theory or dark matter and his brain shut down.

  Named for a brilliant scientist, she would tell him, and you can’t even get the dosage for Tylenol right.

  At seventeen, he’d been a wreck drinking Maalox by the carton diagnosed with his second bleeding ulcer. On a whim he followed the other guys in his class to the football field where he met Earl. From the moment he stepped onto the field he’d felt calm. As if football was something he could control, maybe even excel at. He’d excelled, all right, straight into the headlines of everything from fashion magazines to sports weeklies. Now his shoulder was a visit to the doctor away from junk, and the woman he couldn’t stop thinking about wanted the story that could ruin the one thing that made sense in his life.

  God, his life was so freaking messed up right now.

  “I don’t want her here. Not on campus and not with the kids, I just want all of this to go away.”

  Earl was quiet for a long moment and when he finally spoke, Jonas knew he understood. “It’s this way or have her digging through every last second of your life. Do you remember what I told you that day at the college clinic?”

  Jonas shook his head. One more lie couldn’t hurt anything.

  “Bullshit. I told you that you have the tools. You can be great with the talents you’ve been given or you can wreck your whole life trying to be something you’re not.”

  “And I chose football—my talent—and look where it landed me.”

  “Boy, you’re more hardheaded than a mule.” Earl shook his head and threw his pen down on the desk. “You let all the cameras and girls and fluff stories about how hot you are change your focus. You got an agent talking you up to Hollywood instead of figuring out a decent football slot, and a handful of teammates who want to ride your coattails to the next Sexi
est Athlete Alive cover story. Women break into your house on a weekly basis because they’re convinced you’re the bad boy their momma always warned them about.” Earl took a breath. “And until I got here three weeks ago, the Kentuckians’ management were so wrapped up in your college legend that they kept drafting for defense, thinking your ability to see and run the field will win them games. We can fix the football, and I’ve seen the X-rays. Your shoulder will come back. But, buddy, if you want the whole package, your image is the next item up for bid.”

  His image. Jonas snorted. His image was parties in the Caribbean, mansions in Dallas and Los Angeles and anything else superficial that kept people at a distance. Until five months ago, he had been mostly content with the image. Sure, it chafed now and then, but what image didn’t? Now, though, it felt as if he was wearing shoes that were two sizes too small. “I don’t like people poking around in my business.”

  “Didn’t say you had to like it. Said you had to run with it.”

  Run with it. Jonas sighed. Hadn’t he tried that? Drafted to a badly managed team and he’d figured out a way to keep the players’ morale high. Of course, high morale didn’t lead to championships.

  “Think she’s still waiting downstairs?”

  “I’d bet your next paycheck on it.”

  Jonas paused at the door. “Maybe I should just give it up.” He rubbed his shoulder, and while the touch didn’t hurt, it still felt off. “I gave it a good run. I’ve got more money in the bank than I can ever spend. I don’t want to be one of those old players who can’t walk because of bad knees or who can’t shower themselves because of shoulder pain.”

  Earl was quiet for so long that Jonas had to turn around. The coach stared at him for a long minute. “Is that what you really want?” His voice was quiet in the room, but Jonas could still hear the censure.

  “No.” God help him, he wanted more than to live off the millions in his bank account. Wanted more than to be an asterisk in some football trivia book.

  “What is it that you want?”

  “I want the championships.”

  “Because you want more headlines? More fluff stories about the fabulous life of Jonas Nash?”

  Jonas shook his head. “Because I want to leave a legacy. I don’t want to be the asterisk.” Earl had made him great in college. Maybe the coach could work that magic again in the pros.

  “I can’t make the legacy thing happen, you have to do that. It starts on the field, but what you do off the field is just as important.”

  * * *

  “WHY ARE YOU doing this?”

  Brooks wasn’t one to look a proverbial gift horse in the mouth, but she was still caught up on the why of this whole arrangement. Especially after Jonas let her cameraman, Kent, shoot him from every possible angle, but refused to be hooked up with a mic for even a quick “this is what we do here” interview. Instead he pawned her off on the head groundskeeper and a scintillating ten-minute interview about the benefits of field turf.

  Most of the athletes Brooks had come in contact with couldn’t wait to crow about who they helped and why. Most because they were so excited to give back to the communities that raised them; a few because of the status their charities offered.

  Jonas looked along the football field at the vinyl-covered Styrofoam numbers marking the yard lines on the grass. He studied the area they’d been walking for a long moment. Finally she was going to get a real answer. Brooks’s fingers itched for her notebook and pen. The same notebook and pen Jonas insisted she leave in the truck along with every other piece of equipment save the actual camera and a single tape.

  “Well, from four o’clock this afternoon through noon next Friday, we’ll have fifty ten-and eleven-year-olds on this field. If the work isn’t finished this morning, I have to do it in the afternoon heat. We princes melt in ninety-degree weather,” he added with a waggle to his brows and laughter in his voice.

  “You’re no prince,” Brooks muttered.

  “And you’re no princess, Princess,” Jonas retorted.

  “Because I don’t wave my pom-poms in your face?”

  “I wouldn’t mind your pom-poms in my face, come to think of it.”

  Brooks blushed, glad Kent had taken the camera back to the truck a few minutes before. “Why do you keep bringing up princess movies? I thought boys were all about SpongeBob and Transformers and things.”

  He watched her for a long moment. “You don’t remind me of a square yellow sponge, and your curves are way more enticing than even the sleekest of metal robots,” he said, and the expression in his deep brown eyes made her swallow. Hard.

  There was a bit too much honesty in his gaze for her to shrug this off as another attempt to keep her off balance.

  “Besides, I like old movies.” Jonas shrugged. “The westerns, the romantic comedies, animated stuff. I’ve watched it all at one time or another.”

  “A connoisseur of film?”

  He half smiled, but she had a feeling the expression was more self-deprecating than fond memory. “Something like that.”

  “My dad and I used to watch old football films—not the game-tape variety.” She followed him down the line as he adjusted first one and then another line marker, seeming to ignore her. “I think my favorite was Knute Rockne-All American.”

  “And I’m the Gipp to your Rockne? I’m not dead or dying, Princess,” he said, his voice flat. But his spine was straight and sparks of anger flew from his gaze.

  Brooks blinked. That wasn’t what she’d meant at all. She just liked the movie. Mostly she liked that she’d watched it eating popcorn and drinking soda with her father on a sultry summer night when she was too young to really understand why Gipp was sick and what that meant. “No, I—” she took a breath “—I just like the movie, watching it with my dad. You like movies, and—”

  “And you thought we’d bond over an old black-and-white about a dying football player? Dream on, Princess.” He turned his back on her to adjust another line marker. Brooks hurried to keep up with him.

  “If you don’t want me here why did you invite me?”

  “I didn’t, remember?”

  “You didn’t object.” He raised an eyebrow. “Too much. You didn’t have to go along, but you did. Why?” she asked, hating the fact that she needed to know the answer so badly. Hating even more the fear that he would say he didn’t want her here because he didn’t like her. Physical reactions couldn’t be faked, but people were physically attracted all the time and couldn’t stand the people they were attracted to.

  “Why are you so focused on ruining...never mind,” he said as he adjusted the last marker. Jonas positioned it just so in the grass, still not looking at her.

  “You think I’m here to ruin your little side project?”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” he said and the flatness of his voice was like the scrape of fingernails over a chalkboard. She would never hurt a child, and she had a feeling Jonas knew that and was needling her. Trying to make her walk out so he’d be alone. Well, damned if she would do that.

  “It was your coach who came up with this idea. All I wanted was an interview.”

  “So you could report on what big, bad Jonas got up to during the off-season.”

  “So I could ask big, bad Jonas if he completely dislocated his shoulder on that last play. And, if he did dislocate it, did that lead to a complete labral tear or only a partial?”

  Jonas whirled on the field. “Who told you I dislocated my shoulder?”

  “I watched the video tape. Even we princesses know how to operate Play and Rewind on our own. Also, the team held a press conference, which you didn’t attend, and the old coach mentioned surgery.”

  “Yeah, well, he was mad about being replaced by Highland.”

  “He didn’t lie, though, did he?” She put her hand
on his arm, ignoring the flare of heat that coursed along her fingertips as she did so. “Fifteen million people saw you get hit. At least ten football analysts have gone on record with shoulder dislocation as the reason for your surgery. I’m one more, but I’m not just asking about the injury. I want to know what happens next.”

  “And if I don’t know?” Was it her imagination or was there a rawness to his voice?

  “A lot of people don’t know what happens next.”

  “You seem to have that all mapped out. Weren’t you in the spotlight a month or so ago because of your relationship with a steroid supplier?” Imagination, she decided, because his Texas drawl was decidedly pompous.

  Brooks blushed. “No, I broke the story of steroid abuse at a program.”

  “A program that was headed up by an ex-boyfriend.”

  “Wrong. But I can see you’ve been doing your research on me. Funny, I thought I was the reporter.”

  “So you weren’t dating him?”

  “I don’t date football players. Or coaches. Or team executives. I have very strict rules about that. But, we did go to dinner. Twice, with mutual friends.”

  “And now you’re here in Kentucky looking for your next big scoop?”

  “I’m in Kentucky because this is the assignment the network offered, and it’s a good one. Don’t think I haven’t thanked my lucky stars—”

  “And your father’s connections—”

  Brooks crossed her arms over her chest. “His connections are less than you’d imagine, but yes, I am the daughter of a Kentucky football legend. I grew up on a football field, remember? I’ve probably attended more games than you’ve played in, wrapped my share of jacked-up ankles and wrists and was seriously considering a degree in sports medicine before the journalism bug bit me.” She took a breath. “I just want to tell your story. Your way.”