by Avery Wilde
I did. He was absolutely right.
Truth be told, as desperate as I was to see Allison and as much as I wanted to spend an uninterrupted evening in her company, the idea of leaving my great teammates to do it did bother me a little. It wasn’t so much that I was worried about how it would look to the media—which seemed to be what Brian’s concern was—but I was worried about hurting the feelings of the men whom I thought of almost as brothers. We’d been through something together, yet throughout the season, the papers had singled me out as the star who’d gotten the team to where it was. That had always been a little embarrassing, especially when coupled with Brian’s insistence that I behave like an arrogant prick, and to abandon them now would cement that opinion.
It was bad enough that the papers tomorrow would be full of my goal and would barely mention Malcolm Brady’s earlier goal, which had been less spectacular but just as vital in our win. That was the price the team paid for having me in their locker room, and they’d always been okay with it because, in private, I’d always made it clear how much I respected and admired their contributions—we were a Team with a capital T.
But if I didn’t celebrate with them, then it was as if I was denying that; there was the team, and then there was me—separate, distinct, better. I didn’t want that. I could see Allison for a little while now before celebrating with my teammates, and then I could see a lot more of her tomorrow, and the two of us could privately celebrate then.
Hopefully, we’d be celebrating an engagement as well as the Premiership victory.
I nodded to Brian. “Fair enough. I’ll tell her.”
Brian smiled. “Good. You know it makes sense. We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said. “I think this could be the start of a new chapter in our partnership. I’m actually glad you said those things a moment ago—shows me just how much you’re growing. I…I’m actually quite proud of you, Liam. Never thought I’d say that.”
I nodded, grinned, and jogged up the stairs.
Allison was waiting for me in the now-empty media lounge, the other reporters having quickly left to file enthusiastically-worded reports. She stood as I entered, a beaming smile on her face, and she ran to me.
“You were amazing out there!” she said, eyes shining with adoration.
I grinned back at her. “Thanks.”
“I can’t believe how long you made me wait.”
“For the goal or up here?” I asked with a wink.
“Both!”
We kissed, and for a moment I considered abandoning everything I’d just said to Brian and spending what was sure to be an electrifying evening with Allison. There was certainly no way I’d rather celebrate and no one with whom I’d rather celebrate. But then my teammates entered my mind once more and my resolve stiffened.
It wasn’t the only thing that had stiffened, but that would have to wait until tomorrow…
“I can’t stay in here very long,” I said before taking a deep breath and considering the easiest way to break the news that I couldn’t spend the night with her.
“Well, I didn’t think we were going to do it here,” Allison replied. “Although we could,” she added wickedly.
We both chuckled at her dirty joke for a moment, and I finally opened my mouth to speak again, but she gently placed a finger on my lips. “Before you say anything, just let me say this first—I know we planned on celebrating together, and as much as I want to, I think you should go and be with your team for a while,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows. “You do?”
“Yes. You played together, you won together. You have to celebrate with them.”
I could see the genuine understanding in her face, and I loved her all the more for it. She’d been around sports her whole life, and she knew the bond that existed between team players and understood that it wasn’t about putting her second, it was just about this one special night.
“Go,” she urged. “I’ll see you tomorrow. We can wait one more night.”
I arched a brow. “If you were serious about doing it up here then I’ve probably got time for a quickie.”
Allison laughed and shook her head. “I didn’t wait all this time for a quickie. If we’re doing it, we’re doing it properly. Tomorrow.”
“It’s not either or,” I pointed out hopefully. “Quickie now, do it properly tomorrow?”
Allison moved so close to me that I could feel her hot breath on my face. “If we started now, could we really stop at a quickie?”
“Probably not,” I admitted, my cock throbbing in my pants. “You little tease...”
“Come round first thing tomorrow.”
“I’ll try not to be too hungover.”
Allison winked. “If you are, then I know a good cure.”
We kissed and said our brief goodbyes.
“Tomorrow will be perfect,” Allison said.
I thought about the beautiful custom-designed ring in the little box in my locker. “Yeah, sure will.”
It really would be….as long as she said yes.
Chapter 21
Liam
Even for someone who wasn’t a big drinker, it would’ve been tough to stay sober at the party which my team threw that night. For me, who was an epic drinker, it was a task of Herculean proportions.
The first problem was that everyone knew I was a man who liked his drink and, since I was ‘man of the match’, they all wanted to buy me a drink or two…or several. The second problem was that I really wanted to drink. It wasn’t that I needed alcohol to enjoy myself or any such cliché, it was just that since I’d reached the legal age—and in fact for many years before that—I’d commemorated happy events with alcohol. It was a big part of my life to have a nice toast with mates, and much as I wanted to be a different man—and specifically be one without a slamming hangover tomorrow morning—it was a hard thing to quit drinking on the greatest night of my life.
I’d had an ecstatic phone call from my brother and Lauren, who were currently in Thailand, congratulating me. I also had the Premiership trophy on the table before me, and I was planning to propose to the woman I loved tomorrow. If tonight wasn’t the night to have a few cheeky drinks, then when the hell was? Nevertheless, I was dedicated to remaining merely nicely drunk, as opposed to ‘falling down and doing something stupid’ drunk as I used to get when I was a teenager.
It was actually quite a pleasant level of tipsy to be, and I wished I’d known about it years ago. I was drunk enough to enjoy the buzz of alcohol and chuckle at things that normally wouldn’t even raise a smile, but not so drunk as to lose track of reality or where my feet were. I also got to watch everyone else drunker than me with an indulgent smile and a little smugness. Plus I got the satisfaction of knowing that none of this was going to hurt in the morning.
All in all, and although I was sorry that Allison and I had had so little time together today, I was having a really good time.
“Liam!” Brian flopped down beside me, another man who had chosen not to get too drunk. “Enjoying yourself?”
I nodded.
“Well, you earned it. What are you drinking?”
I looked at my empty glass and then at my watch. Yeah, one more wouldn’t hurt; I was pacing myself well.
“Guinness,” I replied.
Brian smiled, nodded and got up to head for the bar, returning a few minutes later with the pint.
“To Liam Croft,” said Brian, raising his own glass in salute. “Whoever the hell he is.”
“The King is dead, long live the King,” I replied jokingly. It was somewhat true, because tonight the old Liam Croft would be buried, and tomorrow a new man would rise…one who was more respectful than arrogant, one who focused on his training, funded local charities, and of course, one with a girlfriend.
In fact, one with a fiancée.
The most beautiful fiancée in the world, I might add.
I drank deeply.
The evening spun on. And, suddenly, ‘spun’ really did seem to be a fitt
ing word. I knew that I could hold my liquor—I had years of evidence to back that up—and yet now I was struggling. I knew I hadn’t had that much, and yet the room refused to stay still and the people before me began to blur as they walked. They looked strangely funny, and I laughed and laughed and laughed.
Somewhere beneath the giggling imbecile I seemed to have suddenly become, there remained a thin layer of lucidity, now shot through with concern. It wasn’t concern that I was drunk—I would rather not have been, but it was no big deal if I was. The concern was that I didn’t feel drunk. The room spun, the world blurred, my thoughts fuzzed…and yet it didn’t feel like drunkenness as I’d experienced it in the past.
I felt…weird. And I didn’t like it. Not one fucking bit.
The room began to dim and I looked around to see if the lights were actually being turned down. I wasn’t sure. Honestly, I wasn’t sure of much at this point.
I looked to my left, and for a second, I thought I saw the overly-Botoxed blonde model from the car show the other week approaching me. Who the hell invited her?
I blinked, and the last thing I remembered before I sank into disjointed unconsciousness was the face of my manager, staring at me from across the table with an expression of undiluted hatred.
Then it all went black.
Chapter 22
Allison
When I got back to my hotel room, there’d been no good reason for me to put on the very special lingerie that I’d bought the other day, yet I’d gone ahead and done it anyway. I wasn’t seeing Liam until tomorrow morning, but I wanted to get the most out of the pretty underwear set, and once Liam arrived, it wasn’t going to last long. I might keep them anyway; they could look even sexier when ripped, but it was still nice to see them on me in pristine condition.
I didn’t think that I was a particularly narcissistic person; I knew I wasn’t bad looking, but still felt that I paled next to someone like Lauren, who inhabited her stunning body with such confidence. Nevertheless, in this lingerie, teamed with a pair of high heeled shoes, I thought I looked pretty damn sexy!
I paraded up and down in front of the mirror, then tried striking a variety of poses on the bed. Whether or not I would have time to try these poses in front of Liam tomorrow, I didn’t know, but it made me feel good. Looking in the mirror and seeing that sexy woman looking back filled me with a confidence I was quite unaccustomed to.
Of course it wasn’t just the lingerie that was doing that, it was Liam himself. To be loved by a man like Liam, to know that he found me attractive and irresistible—that was worth a whole shop full of lingerie and stilettos. With Liam beside me, I would never be insecure again. It was a wonderful sensation, and I took a moment to examine my real depth of feeling for him. It had all been so damn unexpected. I hadn’t even thought that I’d like the man when we first met, and yet I felt a great deal more than that now.
It wasn’t so much that I could imagine spending the rest of my life with him, it was that I couldn’t imagine not spending the rest of my life with him.
After the excitement of the day, sleep was simply not an option, or at least not yet, so I got out my laptop again. I’d already written up my report of the game and, while it might have lacked some of the salient details, it contained an extraordinary description of Liam’s goal. I still felt as if I could see that ball curving through the air in slow motion and could describe every millisecond of its nerve-wracking and yet inevitable journey. Now I decided to log on to Twitter and catch up on the facile world of social media. I grinned as I glanced at the trending topics—there was Liam’s name; that goal still the talk of the Twitter-sphere. I clicked on his name, feeling a strange rush of pleasure as I did so, keen to read other people’s reactions to his astonishing performance.
At first, I thought that what I was seeing was indeed about that incredible goal: ‘LIAM CROFT DOES IT AGAIN!!!’ the top tweet declared.
Then I saw the pictures.
My heart turned cold, my stomach contracting and a clamminess stealing across and throughout my body. They couldn’t be recent pictures…they just couldn’t. He had a bad boy past—I knew this—and surely these pictures were from months ago, taken during his drinking and womanizing heyday. He’d changed since then; he’d changed since meeting me. He had.
These pictures couldn’t have been taken tonight.
But there, in the background, just behind the blonde head that nestled so cozily into Liam’s neck, I saw the Premiership trophy. These pictures could only have been taken tonight.
What they showed was Liam, clearly drunk, his eyes vacant, his mouth a clownish gape of a smile, sprawled across a leather sofa in the private room of an underground club. He was accompanied by the aforementioned blonde girl, wearing a skirt so short that it was barely worth wearing it at all.
Another wave of shock swept across me as I realized I recognized the woman—it was the blonde model from the car show…the one who’d claimed to be involved with Liam.
And right now she was definitely involved with him.
She had her hands on his belt, industriously undoing it, while Liam threw his head back and relaxed on the sofa. That was the first picture. As they went on, taken one after another at five to ten second intervals, I could see a second and then a third girl join the little party. I watched as Liam’s belt was removed, swiftly followed by his pants. I watched as one girl unbuttoned his shirt, another kissing his chest as it was steadily revealed, leaving him only in his boxer briefs. I watched as the girls themselves undressed, helping each other, while Liam stared with wide eyes, and I watched as one girl sat astride him, pouring champagne down his throat.
No…please. No, no, no.
The last picture was the hand of a bouncer closing across the camera lens, signaling the point at which the photographer had been ejected from the private room, but it wasn’t hard to guess at what had happened next.
With a shriek that even I hadn’t known was coming, I hurled the laptop across the room and heard it break against the far wall before burying my face in my hands and trying as hard as I could not to cry. But the tears came anyway—hot, angry tears that scalded my cheeks.
How could I have been so pathetically stupid? A bad boy like that didn’t change. Men like that obviously couldn’t change…especially in just a couple of weeks, which was how long I’d known Liam for. And if anyone was foolish enough to love a man like that, then they’d always be left alone and crying in the stupidly expensive lingerie that they’d wasted their money on because they’d thought he might actually care.
Suddenly the lingerie itself became a mockery to me—a symbol of Liam’s betrayal and my own idiocy. With unrestrained violence, I tore it from my body, lace ripping, until I stood naked in my hotel room, choking back gut-wrenching sobs. Then I crawled beneath the covers of the bed and cried like a baby. I wished that I wouldn’t; I wished that I didn’t care. But I couldn’t help it.
My heart was broken.
I couldn’t have said how long I stayed there, curled up in self-loathing, but I was forced out of it by the buzzing sound of my cell phone. My first thought was that it must be Liam, calling to tell me the perfectly reasonable explanation for all this—I hated myself for that thought. Although I didn’t want to speak to anyone right now, I also desperately wanted a distraction, so I checked the phone to see who was calling. It was Alan Granger.
Right now, work seemed like the most important thing in my life, so I answered, trying to keep the tears out of my voice.
“Hi, Alan. The match was fantastic. I’ve emailed you my report.”
He ignored that. “Are you sleeping with Liam Croft?” he asked.
I almost dropped the phone. How the hell could he know? It couldn’t be the photos making the rounds on the gossip sites right now; if anything, they suggested the opposite.
“What? Um...”
In my fragile state, lying did not come naturally to me.
“Is it true?” Alan pressed. “Is that why you�
��ve been staying out there all this time?”
My heart sank.
“Yes.” The word was out of my mouth before I could even think about it. I didn’t want to lie anymore, and I wasn’t even sure that I had the capacity. “Yes,” I repeated, and then burst into tears again. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I finally managed to get control of myself again and waited for Granger’s response.
“I think you’d better get yourself back here,” he said.
I couldn’t quite gauge how angry he was from his tone, but I knew he was. He had to be. The minute I returned home, I was no doubt going to be fired.
Crap, crap, crap.
The worst part was that I had no one to blame but myself for my predicament. I’d deceived my boss in order to stay here and be with Liam, and now it was all blowing up in my face.
“Okay,” I said in a timid voice. “I’ll arrange the flight.”
“All right. We’ll talk once you’re back in the office. I got your email, and it was a good write-up of the match, by the way. You sure can write. But you really do need to come home, Allison.”
He was right. It was definitely time for me to leave England.
There was nothing left for me here.
Chapter 23
Allison
“You been crying, love?”
In a strange way, I was glad to be back in Mikey’s cab again as I headed towards the airport. It was a curiously comforting place, and there was always a friendly and understanding ear for me to confide in. In a strange way, he was the best and most trusted friend I’d made during my stay in London.
“I’m okay, Mikey. By the way, how long did you say you’d been with your wife?” I asked.
