Keeping Score

by Sara Rider

  “You listening to me?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Late night. I’m happy for you.” It was Ricardo’s dream to run his own physiotherapy practice, and after a couple of false starts and bad investments, it looked like it might finally come true. He’d been working with Weaver for almost eight years, hoping to prove himself worthy of the business when the time came. But right now, all Alex could think about was getting to the lobby before the continental breakfast closed.

  “I said I want you to be my partner.”

  Alex pinched the bridge of his nose. He did not have the fortitude for this conversation right now. They’d talked about owning their own practice for years, until Alex discovered the world of professional sports physiotherapy. He’d been on the road ever since.

  “I can hear your heavy breathing, bro. That kind of creepy shit is the reason you’re still single.”

  “How much?” It always came down to this.

  Ricardo shamelessly rattled off a number that would consume every last bit of Alex’s savings. When they were younger, everyone in their family assumed he’d follow his older brother into the business and they’d open a practice together. When he fell in love with professional sports physio, they said it was just his rebellious way of stepping out from Ricky’s shadow.

  “Don’t answer now, just think about it. It’s an investment in your future. Steady hours. Good benefits. A real salary. Underlings.”

  “A patient roster that’s ninety percent office injuries and old age.”

  “You’d get a hell of a lot more respect.”

  Well, shit. There wasn’t much Alex could say about that. “I’ll think about it, okay? Anything else? Bus is leaving in . . .” He pulled the cell from his ear and checked the time. It was 7:57 a.m. “Three minutes.”

  “Yeah.” Hesitation in his brother’s voice pulled at the word, stretching it like an elastic band. “You read the sports pages this morning?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Aw, hell. Just read them and think about my offer, okay?”

  Alex ended the call. Whatever his brother was hinting at would have to wait. He grabbed the last remnants of his gear and raced to the lobby. His only priority at that moment was catching the tail end of the continental breakfast so that he wouldn’t be stuck on a crowded bus with sixteen rowdy women and no coffee for the next four hours.

  He stepped out of the elevator and jogged to the small conference room doubling as breakfast hall. A server was whisking away the last tray of pastries, but the coffee urn was still there. He tucked his stainless steel travel mug beneath the spout and pressed the lever down. A single drop splattered inside the mug. Then nothing.

  Fan-fucking-tastic.

  He raked a hand through his hair, causing his kinked neck to spasm. He just couldn’t win, and it seemed fate wasn’t quite done screwing with him yet. He spun around to head to the bus and nearly beaned Jaime in the head with the duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

  “You look like shit,” she chirped. “Late night?”

  He glared, not sure he had the patience to deal with her today. He sure as hell didn’t have the patience to deal with his body’s reactions to her right now. No matter how much he tried to repress it, a small part of him wanted to jump up and down like a puppy whenever she was around.

  A slight blush crept along her checks, as though she were reading his thoughts. She thrust an extra-large disposable cup in his direction. “Here, black and bitter like your soul. It’s getting cold, so drink fast.”

  “Thanks.” He transferred the coffee to his travel mug, too relieved to worry about her motives.

  She watched him chug half of it in one gulp, a bemused expression on her face. “I snagged a bagel for you, too.”

  “You’re a goddess.” He reached for the cellophane-wrapped bagel in her hand, surprised when she moved it just out of reach. Instead, she held her other hand out expectantly.

  “Ah-ah. Not only am I the goddess of caffeine and carb loading, I’m also the gatekeeper of room keys. Pay up.”

  “Right,” he said, digging awkwardly into his pocket for the plastic card, nearly spilling his coffee in the process. Jaime had volunteered for the role of team secretary, one of the many essential members of a traveling team that the Falcons couldn’t afford to staff properly. Early on, he’d pegged her as a party girl, and while it was clear after a few months with the Falcons that the woman did like to party, she also surprised him with the level of responsibility she took on. She was always one of the first players on the field for warm-ups and last off after cooldowns. She was the team’s cheerleader, mom, and troublemaker all rolled into one chimeric little package.

  He pulled out his room key and offered it to her. “By the way, I meant it last night when I said everything would be okay.” Bringing up anything to do with last night was probably a bad idea, but it needed to be said.

  She reached for the card, fingers brushing his. She lingered for the briefest moment, then snatched the card away and cleared her throat. “Any damage to the room? Did you attack the minibar last night?”

  He shook his head.

  “You promise there are no worn-out ladies of the night or severed horse heads still up in the bed?”

  He cracked a smile in spite of himself. “I’d have woken up in a better mood if I’d had that kind of a night.”

  “Don’t take it personally. You’d be surprised how many times someone has said yes.”

  She spoke with such a strong poker face, he could never tell if she was serious. But he was steadily gaining some insight into how to read her. Her flippant jokes were a means to keep people at a distance. A distraction from whatever she was hiding. And after last night, he knew she was hiding something big. Something he would uncover eventually.

  Wry grin on her face, she pointed to the hotel exit. “Bus is out front around the corner. You’re the last one. All aboard the rocket of destiny.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Rocket of destiny?” How the woman managed to maintain her bizarre sense of humor this early in the morning, he would never know. Then again, she probably didn’t stay up until all hours of the night with a raging case of blue balls.

  She covered her mouth with her palm in mock horror. “Oh no. Is that what you call your penis?”

  “Christ, Jaime.” He looked around the room to make sure no one had overheard. Aside from the front desk clerk trying not to laugh at his expense, the lobby was empty.

  “What, then?” Her devious smile told him he wasn’t going to get out of this easily. “Excalibur? Mr. Happy? Goodtime Joe?”

  She pushed his self-control to the edge. And he was the sucker that couldn’t resist taking the bait. He wrapped his fingers around her upper arm and pulled her flush to his side. The lavender scent of her thick hair was sexy as hell as he leaned in to whisper in her ear,“My cock, Jaime. I call it my cock.”

  She gasped. He took advantage of her shock to swipe the bagel from her hand and headed to the bus.

  He loaded the gear in the luggage compartment below the bus and climbed into the third row behind the driver, respecting the strict yet unspoken hierarchy of team seating arrangements. Within a few minutes, Jaime had boarded and declared them good to go.

  Needing to get his mind off her, he took out his iPad to follow up on his brother’s reading suggestion.

  It was right there in the front headline of the first sports page he opened:

  MARTIN DANIELS, ONETIME COLLEGE BASEBALL STAR, HITS THREE HOME RUNS IN HIS FIRST GAME IN THE MAJOR LEAGUES

  It was pitched as a heroic comeback story of a kid who clawed his way back as a walk-on at the open tryouts four years after an unexpected injury nearly ended his career before it began. But Alex knew the truth, and it was a truth that could destroy both of their careers.

  JAIME PLOPPED INTO THE seat near the front of the bus next to Lainey Lukas, t
he Falcons’ captain, and settled in for long drive to Washington, DC. It took every ounce of her willpower not to stare at Alex seated across from her in the next row up and undress him with her eyes.

  My cock, Jaime. I call it my cock. He had wound her up so tight, she was ready to explode. It was bad enough when it was his butt she couldn’t get out of her mind. Now she was going be stuck on this bus for another four hours with the tantalizing feeling of his fingers biting into her arm and those words repeating in her mind on an endless loop.

  Maybe she’d finally learn to quit teasing him, because she clearly wasn’t woman enough to handle what he threw back at her. She definitely needed to lay off the sexual innuendos, which would be tough considering she had a sense of humor dirty enough to make a sailor blush. All she’d been trying to do this morning was erase the awkwardness and get things back to normal. Or at least somewhere in between the extremes of pissing each other off and turning each other on.

  She pulled a pen and notepad from the backpack wedged beneath the seat in front of her. “What should we do about dinner tonight?” She prodded Lainey, who was in the middle of her visualization-meditation thing, with her foot for an answer. The two women couldn’t be more different. Lainey would easily spend countless hours doing nothing but picturing herself scoring goals with the quiet discipline of a monk, whereas Jaime’s skin felt itchy if she didn’t have a conversation with someone every fifteen minutes. Yet, somehow they’d managed to develop a solid partnership as captain and assistant captain, and an even stronger friendship off the field.

  “Italian,” Lainey said without opening her eyes. “Everyone likes Italian.”

  “We’ve done Italian the last three nights. We’re going to have a revolt on our hands. Camilla’s been homesick lately. It might be nice to do Mexican. What do you think?”

  “Lynn hates Mexican. Says it gives her indigestion. How about Greek?”

  Jaime bit the edge of the already well-chewed pen. “Do you think that’ll take a long time? The Wi-Fi in the hotel last night wasn’t working, so Lynn and Nadia didn’t get to Skype with their kids.”

  “Sushi, then?”

  “Huh. We’ve never tried sushi.” Jaime scanned the bus, trying to guess who might object. Her eyes landed on Alex. She had no idea what kind of food he liked. Actually, other than the fact he took his coffee black, she knew nothing about him. Heck, until this morning, she didn’t even know he wore glasses. And damn, did he ever look hot in them.

  “Why are you staring at Alex?”

  Jaime’s heart leapt into her throat. “I thought your eyes were closed.”

  “And now they’re open.”

  Jaime sighed. “I just realized we’ve never checked with him about our dinner plans.” Gina, the Falcons’ assistant coach, was outspoken enough to make her likes and dislikes known, and Head Coach Victor Labreilla hated everything by default, so they pretty much ignored him in making plans. But it was like no one ever remembered Alex existed beyond his role as team physiotherapist. He showed up to the group dinners and ate silently with no complaints.

  “Hard enough getting sixteen women to agree on a meal.” Lainey relaxed into her seat, closing her eyes once more and folding her hands across her lap.

  Organizing the team dinners was indeed a monumental task, but she and Lainey had realized early on that it took a lot of effort to keep up morale during these long road trips. So far, the rule of having meals as a team at least five nights out of the week while on the road seemed to be working for the Falcons. “We can try it tonight, and then tomorrow do Mexican for Camilla’s sake. That way, Lynn’s tummy has time to recover before the next game. Sound good?”

  “It’s going to be a long two weeks,” Lainey said. “So, are you going to tell me why you’re staring at Alex again?”

  “Do you have to be so persistent?”

  Lainey smiled. “Yep.”

  “He looks . . . tense.” The vein along his forearm bulged, like he was taking out some unspoken aggression on the armrest, the rest of his body ramrod straight. Had she caused him to be this angry? She didn’t think so, but something had set him off during the last few minutes.

  “Not just him. Everyone’s on edge this morning.”

  Jaime swiveled to look at the rest of her teammates. Lainey was right. It felt like a wet blanket had landed on everyone’s shoulders. “Road trips get everyone down. Maybe we should plan something special. Some kind of party to get everyone’s spirits up?”

  Lainey gave her the side eye. “I meant it when I said no to a bridal shower.” Lainey had asked Jaime to be maid of honor for her upcoming wedding to Gabe Havelak, former star of the Seattle Surge, but didn’t actually want her to do anything that a maid of honor was supposed to do. Jaime knew that showers and bachelorette parties weren’t Lainey’s style, but it was still a tragic waste of her untapped party-planning abilities.

  “Fine, but we still need to do something.”

  “How about we celebrate your Bodies of Sport photo shoot?”

  Jaime felt her eyes bug out. “How do you know about that?” It wasn’t that she was planning on keeping it secret forever; she just didn’t want to jinx it. Plus, she wasn’t sure how to bring it up with her teammates. There was already a huge divide between allocated players subsidized by their national teams and those who were picked up from the drafts. As female athletes, they all struggled to earn respect, and she knew some of her teammates would think she was selling out when it came to the photo shoot.

  “So it’s true? You were talking in your sleep again. Can I just say that you also need to do something about your pent-up sexual frustration? I can’t take any more of your depressing dreams.”

  Jaime gave her teammate a playful shove, glad she didn’t seem to be putting two and two together with regard to the source of her sexual frustration. “They want to do a whole bikini-on-the-beach thing. Do you think it’s a bad idea?”

  Lainey swiveled to face her. “It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks if you’re confident in your decision.”

  “Are you just saying that because you love me?”

  “Do I have to answer that?”

  “Would you do it if it were you?”

  “Not a chance. It’s debasing and distracting.” She shook her head without a millisecond of hesitation. “But that isn’t going to make you change your mind, is it?”

  “Nope. I want to show the world I can be strong and powerful and sexy.” There were a lot of people in her life who didn’t take her seriously as an athlete because she had a healthy appreciation for mascara and body lotion. She wanted to use the Bodies of Sport shoot to prove to the world that it was okay to be all of those things.

  Lainey slipped her arm around Jaime’s shoulder and pulled her in for a quasi-hug. Jaime let her head linger on her shoulder, milking the rare moment of physical affection from her teammate for all its worth.

  “Uh, just to be clear, we’re talking about the photo shoot, not sex, right? ’Cause I like sex.”

  A chuckle rumbled in Jaime’s chest. “Just promise me you won’t say anything yet, okay? The magazine said they try to keep the list of athletes a secret until the issue comes out.”

  “No problem. So what are we going to do to shake off the road-trip blahs?”

  “We need something everyone can get invested in. Something to work toward.” Jaime’s head popped up. “I’ve got it! We can throw a baby shower for Jo. A sexy baby shower! It’ll be perfect.”

  “A sexy baby shower?” Lainey repeated the words like they tasted bitter on her tongue. “I don’t think that’s a real thing.”

  “It is now.” She jotted party ideas down furiously in her notepad as Lainey when back to meditating. It was the perfect distraction from wayward thoughts of Alex Martinez. Time passed quickly as she let her imagination run wild with possibilities for themes, venues, and games. Most of which were too
expensive and over the top to even consider, but the fantasy was almost as much fun as the real thing.

  A slow-building ache had crept into Jaime’s hand as she scribbled. She ignored it, chalking it up to the awkward angle of her notepad. Just as she made a note to herself to look into where she could buy leopard-print streamers in DC, the joints in her knuckles seized, feeling like they were wrapped in barbed wire. She sucked in a breath with a wince and glanced around the bus to see if anyone had noticed.

  Of course Alex was watching her. And not in the sexy, mentally undressing her way that she now knew those dark black eyes were capable of. He was studying her like she was a clinical specimen. Man, what was wrong with her that she wanted him to look at her like she was a cherry-flavored lollipop?

  She broke eye contact and settled into her seat, deciding to take a page out of Lainey’s book. She let her thoughts wander to the photo shoot while trying to breathe through the pain. It still didn’t seem real. Her mind flashed back to a memory of her and her sister and sitting on the floor of their bedroom when they were about eight years old, flipping through one of their mom’s off-limits glossy magazines. She could remember Chelsea proclaiming that one day she’d grow up to have her picture in a magazine just like the models. How could she have known at the time that they were blessed with the genetics to grow up to be the height of an adult meerkat?

  Jaime’s chest tightened. Thanks to cancer, Chels never got the opportunity to make her dream come true, but she was getting the chance and wasn’t about to let anything stand in the way.

  4

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in his career, Alex walked into a pregame meeting with the coaching staff having no clue about what he was going to say. His meticulous notes and charts would be useless the moment someone asked about Jaime Chen. No matter what his answer, it was going to be the wrong one.

  Gina and Victor were already dueling with their dry-erase markers as Alex entered Victor’s hotel room midmorning before the game against the DC Dragons, leaving a display of circles, arrows, and squiggly lines on the portable whiteboard perched on the table.