“This is not the time to be cute with me, you little shithead,” my father continued. “It’s all over the goddamn papers. I told you to stay away from her!”
I felt something in my gut tighten at that reminder.
My father, as well as Steel, had been telling me to stay away from her for eight years now, and I was so goddamn pissed about it that it wasn’t funny any longer.
At first, I’d given in because she was young—barely sixteen when I first met her. Then I’d continued to concede when all that shit had gone down with the Bear Bottom Guardians MC.
But Conleigh was an adult now.
There was no goddamn reason in hell I couldn’t pursue her if I wanted to.
“…saw a picture of her on the back of your bike. How many freakin’ times do I have to tell you to have safe sex?” my father continued to rant.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
My brain was too oxygen-deprived to process it, though, not to mention I was getting angry at my father for butting in—again.
“Listen, I’ll call you back when I get back home from my run,” I grumbled.
Now just wasn’t the time.
This was my time. The time where I did what I wanted while I thought about nothing but the goddamn audiobook I was listening to.
I’d made it another hour before I decided that I’d run far enough.
Tonight, I’d hit the gym, and I didn’t want to be too tired to do the leg work out that I planned to do, and if I pushed myself any harder on the run, I might very well get to that point.
Slowing down to a walk for the last mile, I breathed deeply and waited for my heart rate to go back to normal.
My phone pinged again in my ear, but I ignored it.
Messages and calls were a normal thing for me.
They were certainly normal when my publicist was trying to get me to agree to give interviews that I didn’t particularly want to give.
It was getting to the point where I was about to tell her not to call me for at least two weeks because she was aggravating me so badly.
Then again, everyone was fucking annoying me at that point.
Everyone but one woman who refused to answer my texts.
A woman who had a very good reason to.
A woman I’d screwed over—badly—once upon a time, but was determined to make something happen with somehow, someday.
If I could only get her to talk to me…
Surprisingly, miracles did happen, even for already lucky guys like me.
Because, when I got home from my run, Conleigh was standing on my front porch examining my bushes, and I forgot everything that I was supposed to do that morning.
Calling my father back was put on the back burner. Answering the twenty-five emails that my publicist had sent while on my run was pushed to tomorrow. Oh, and going to the clubhouse for a party? That was definitely put off as well.
“Uhhh.” I hesitated at the bottom of the drive, unsure what to say. “What’s up, Conleigh?”
I didn’t want her to leave because I said something stupid, so I settled for something that wouldn’t make her go for my throat.
She looked over at me. “Are you aware that our houses look exactly alike?”
I grinned as sweat dripped down the length of my face. “Yes. I noticed that when I came over to take you to lunch and you blew me off, remember?”
Conleigh flushed bright red. “So…about that.”
I started up the driveway and walked—stalked—toward her.
When I got to her, I stopped and crossed my arms over my bare chest, very aware that the move put the muscles of my arms on display.
She didn’t disappoint. She looked, and she liked what she saw.
Then again, our attraction to each other had never been one of our problems.
We wanted each other. Badly. But both of us were too afraid to admit it.
It was the other stuff that didn’t come as easy. Like the fact that she hated what I represented—a rich man who wasn’t easy to push around and who didn’t like that she was trying so fucking hard to do everything on her own when it would be easy for someone like me to help her.
The stubborn little shit.
“Can we go inside?” she asked, her eyes warily scanning around my neighborhood.
The area where I lived was a quiet neighborhood in Bear Bottom, Texas—about a forty-minute drive from where Conleigh lived in Kilgore.
She was looking around like someone was going to pop out of the bushes and take a picture of her, plastering her all over the papers.
“Conleigh,” I laughed. “Nobody is going to take your picture again.”
I say again, because it had happened before.
A few days after I was drafted number one by the first team that I played with, I’d gone to see Conleigh at her work.
I’d been excited, and I’d wanted to share that with her.
Unfortunately for me, I’d literally just became the hottest commodity to women everywhere because of my pretty face and muscular body—not to mention the promise of that big paycheck I’d be bringing in.
All it took was one single picture of the two of us together, with me hugging her tightly to my body, and she was labeled as a poor girl that I had befriended because she was on the outs with her parents.
From there, my diehard fans began doing their own research.
Females, ages eight to sixty-three, dragged poor Conleigh through the mud, and it was all because of that one innocent picture.
“About that…” She snatched the keys out of my hand before I could even head in the direction of the door. “We need to talk.”
My brows rose as I watched her use my keys to open the door and then followed her into my house. I winced when I saw how dirty it was.
I’d slacked since we’d lost last week, and I felt bad about it now.
I hadn’t wanted my housekeeper to come in and clean it because I didn’t want to talk to my good friend’s wife when I still couldn’t hide how damned disappointed I was that we’d lost.
She’d force me to talk, and honestly, I was not in the mood to talk to anyone.
Well, anyone except the girl looking around my house as if she was having a moment of déjà vu.
“It’s creepy, isn’t it?” I laughed as I threw the door closed. “Even the same paint colors.”
At least from what I could tell.
When I had been standing in front of her house as she’d opened her door, I could see inside, and I noted that her paint colors seemed to be the same neutral beige as my house, and the floor plan—at least what I could see of it—seemed to be the same as well.
“Wow.” She shook her head. “You even have black furniture like me, too.”
I had black furniture because it was the easiest thing to match. That, and black was one of my favorite colors.
Not that I didn’t want to talk to her about the floor plan, or how eerie it was that our houses were so similar, I wanted to know why she was there.
Between the way she was acting and her cryptic comments, I was beginning to get a bad feeling.
“So…” She hesitated. “I don’t know how to say this.”
My brows rose. “Say what?”
She looked down at her fingers and played with her fingernails for a short few seconds.
“Conleigh,” I growled, walking past her into the kitchen. Once I got there, I grabbed a bottle of water off the counter. “Just tell me.”
She followed me inside, and then took a seat at the bar where she folded her hands primly out in front of her.
I leaned my sweaty ass against the counter and watched as she gave me a slow perusal.
She stopped and stared a little longer than she should have at my dick, which caused it to twitch despite my near exhaustion.
She smiled, and her eyes finally met mine.
Those beautiful eyes had always captivated me, even w
hen she was a sixteen-year-old hell-bent on convincing everyone that she was able to take care of herself.
“I don’t know how it happened, but at one point yesterday at work while I was trying to avoid the doctor that I went out on that date with…and, somehow, well…he now thinks that I’m pregnant with your baby,” she blurted.
I stared at her for a few long moments before I burst out laughing.
That explained all the calls this morning.
That also explained why I’d gotten over twenty emails in one hour from my publicist.
Whoops.
Damage control couldn’t be implemented if I wasn’t around to tell her what was going on.
What if Conleigh really was pregnant with my child, and I was happy about it? She couldn’t implement damage control if she didn’t know what damage she was controlling. She’d never issue a statement on my behalf saying that I didn’t love Conleigh and that she was a lying piece of shit—something she would never say regardless since she was much more professional about how she worded things than I was—if I hadn’t answered any of her emails to fill her in on the situation.
“I got a weird call from my dad today,” I admitted. “I had no clue what he was talking about, and I just thought it was due to my being oxygen deprived because of how hard I’d been running. He’s probably freaking the fuck out.”
Conleigh bit her lip in frustration—something she’d always done since I’d first met her.
“My mom was the one to call me,” she admitted. “She saw the picture of us on your bike going to that other restaurant. We were laughing in the picture, probably when we saw that guy pumping gas in his underwear. Underneath it, there’s another picture of me in the hospital with Tyson standing in front of me.”
She pulled up the photo on her phone and slid it across the counter to me.
It would’ve dropped to the floor had I not been quick and caught it before it could teeter over the edge.
I stared at the photo with amusement.
“How, exactly, does something like this come up?” I asked with laughter tinging my voice. “Did you just blurt out that you were having my love child?”
I kind of liked that it had happened.
I’d been contacting Conleigh for months, texting, calling, stopping by her old place, and not once had I gotten any sort of reaction out of her. She’d been awesome at hiding behind her walls—and I had a feeling that a lot of that had been because my team was the wildcard in playoffs, and we were in the media’s eye.
She wanted nothing to do with the media at all and hadn’t since it’d nearly ruined her chances at some scholarships that she was going for during her first year in college.
“Well…it started like this…” then she went on to tell me exactly what had happened the previous day at work, and how it’d all been a joke.
Except, her coworkers hadn’t realized that it was a joke, and some of them had spread the rumor far and wide. So far and wide, in fact, that word had traveled to just the right ears, and the lie was now spread to the media—and the rest of the entire goddamn world.
This. Was. Perfect!
“Huh,” I tried to hold in my elation. “That’s unfortunate.”
Conleigh gave me a worried look. “What do we do?”
I tried not to smile, which I just barely accomplished by the skin of my teeth.
It wouldn’t do for her to know that I was actually quite entertained by any of this. She also didn’t need to know that I was enjoying that fact she’d made such a large faux pas.
“I guess now I gotta get in touch with my publicist,” I finally said. “But she’s hours ahead of me since she lives in the UK, so she’s probably sleeping now. That’s why I get the emails instead of the phone calls. I’ll have to email her and wait for her to call back.”
“Why do you have a publicist that lives in the UK?” she asked me what everyone asked me.
I shrugged. “Honestly? Because I started asking around with a few of the guys, and they all recommended somebody completely different from the next person. Rome recommended Elouise’s—that’s her name—husband, Bryant. But Bryant wasn’t taking on any new clients, but he said his wife was. She is British, and little did I know that they were in the process of getting divorced at the time that I needed a publicist…anyway, long story short, she lives in the UK. She’s really good though, so I keep her. If it was something huge that she had to deal with, I have her number and I can call her so we could work it out. But this isn’t that big.”
Conleigh blinked at that lengthy explanation. “That’s quite a story…I assume you must really like her. You’re not the type to do anything all willy-nilly.”
I found myself grinning at that. “Willy-nilly? No, I’m not the type of man to go all willy-nilly and do shit without first thinking it through. You’re right.”
I felt a trickle of sweat start down my temple, and I pushed off the counter. “How about you hang out for a minute and let me go get in the shower. Maybe we can order a pizza?”
Her brows rose. “You eat pizza?”
She looked at my body, letting her eyes skim up and down the length of me, before settling her eyes back on mine.
I snorted. “It’s the offseason, Con. I can do a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t normally do. Such as ride my bike without a helmet.”
She frowned. “Why can’t you do that during the season? Not that I want you to or anything. Do you know how many motorcycles are hit every day? A lot. People just don’t pay enough attention. Anyway, I had a young patient last week, all of eighteen, who got hit by a sedan. He was bruised up pretty bad. Had that sedan been a truck or going just a little faster? He’d have been dead.”
I waited for her rant to be over, and then waited a couple seconds more to make sure she was actually through and then explained.
“I signed a seasonal clause on safety. During the season, from the start of pre-season workouts to post-season, I will not, under any circumstances, participate in any extreme sports. That includes riding a motorcycle without a helmet—though riding a motorcycle was part of the clause that my lawyer got thrown out since I was part of a motorcycle club before I’d even signed my contracts with my old team, a contract which the new team also honored.”
“What else does it include?” she pushed.
I shrugged and turned my back on her to wash my hands in the sink behind me.
I turned my head and explained over my shoulder. “I can’t ride without a helmet. I can’t skydive. Play any pick-up games of football with full contact. I can’t play any sports, really, that require more than light physical activity. I can’t get into any fights. I can’t go to concerts and stand in a large crowd…there’s a bunch of shit.”
She snorted. “Didn’t I see that you went to a Garth Brooks concert in Vegas not too long ago?”
I grinned as I shut the tap off, and then reached for a sheet from the paper towel roll. Once my hands were sufficiently dried, I blew my nose into the towel.
Once it was in the trash, I turned to find her frowning at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You just washed your hands, then blew your nose. You’re not planning to wash your hands again, are you?” She curled her lip up at me.
My lip twitched. “No.”
She made a gagging sound. “That’s gross.”
I shrugged. “It’s my house. I can do what I want.”
She snorted. “I’m sure that you do what you want, when you want, wherever you are.”
That was true.
I started walking out of the room. “Call the pizza place and order us something. I want cheese.”
“What do you mean you only want cheese?” she called. “I thought that you liked pepperoni.”
That was true…at least she thought it was.
It made me sound less manly when I told people I only liked cheese. I’d never really gotten better as I aged. Eating healthy was really hard
for me. I loved fruit, but I fuckin’ hated vegetables with a vengeance.
Unfortunately for me, I choked those bitches down because that was how you fueled a body like mine.
But during the offseason? I ate what I fucking wanted, and that was that. Kind of. I ate what I wanted within reason.
I also worked out twice as much because I ate fucking pizza when I should be eating vegetables and white fish.
“I only got pepperoni because you like pepperoni, and I didn’t want you thinking I was a little bitch for only liking cheese,” I shot over my shoulder before closing my bedroom door behind me.
I heard her laughter through the closed door and smiled like a loon all the way to the shower.
I was trying really hard to control my raging hard-on as I stepped into the scalding water—being this close to her reminded me of the past – before I was warned away from her. Glaring at my dick reacting to her laughter, I heard a hesitant knock on my bedroom door.
I ignored it, staring down at my traitorous dick as I willed it to soften.
It didn’t.
Damn, but Conleigh had a way of always making me want her.
All she had to do was curl that lip at me in disgust, and I was hard.
It didn’t matter that it was me that she was disgusted with.
What mattered was that she was there, in close proximity, and I was reminded of that one time that we’d almost gone too far.
It’d been the best I’d ever had, and that was saying something since I’d had a lot.
The knock came again, this time at the door to my bathroom.
I turned around so my ass was facing the panel of glass instead of my hard dick and called out, “Yeah?”
She opened the door, just like I knew she would, and I heard her low inhale. “Shit, sorry.”
The door didn’t close, though.
I chanced a look over my shoulder to see her eyes downcast, and a flush staining her cheeks.
“It’s fine. It’s not like you haven’t seen my ass before,” I pointed out.
She’d seen my dick, too.
It’d been when we were about to take that last step when we’d been interrupted.
She groaned. “Must you always bring that up when I see you half naked?”
Talkin' Trash (The Bear Bottom Guardians MC Book 2) Page 4
