"Well, breakfast is right down that hallway and to the left," she told him, pointing with one finger - although her eyes lingered on his bare chest. "And don't worry - you paid for everything last night and left your card on file. Let me know if you need anything else."
For a moment, Chase considered stepping back behind the counter and letting her drop to her knees and blow him. His stomach lurched again, however, and he decided against it. "Thank you," he said, flashing her one last rogue's grin before heading off to breakfast.
In the hotel's breakfast area, Chase wolfed down at least two plates' worth of food, loading up on the bacon and ignoring the "please take two pieces only" sign. Not bad for hotel shit, he considered, chewing a mouthful and swallowing.
It wasn't until halfway through his second plate of bacon and eggs that Chase finally looked up at the clock mounted in the breakfast area. "Shit," he cursed as the numbers on the clock swam into focus. "Mother fucking shit."
He jumped up, leaving the plates behind, and dashed out into the lobby once again. Ignoring the shy little smile and wave from the front desk receptionist, he hurried out to the front of the hotel. He waved his hand wildly at the nearest cab, parked in the hotel's drop-off turnaround.
"Get me to the stadium," he ordered the cabbie as he piled in. Thankfully, he found the lump of his wallet in his pocket, and he pulled out a couple of crumpled bills. "And step on it - double if you run the red lights!"
With a squeal of tires, the taxi peeled away from the curb. Chase thumped back into the backseat, grabbing around for the seat belt.
Actually, he reflected as he looked up over the center console at the clock on the cab's dashboard, he was already late. What was wrong with another couple minutes?
"Change of plan," he told the cabbie. "There a decent fast food place around here? I want some food."
Ten minutes later, the taxi dropped Chase, and his bag of McDonalds, outside the stadium. Doing his best to not choke on the rest of the double cheeseburger in his hand, he hurried into the stadium's employee entrance.
The security guard on duty grinned at him. "Morning, Mr. Chase," he called out. "Better hurry - they're doing a meeting in the locker room, and the brass is here. Some new hire, meeting everyone - you'll want to make a good impression!"
Chase rolled his eyes. It seemed like the owners were bringing in new employees just about every other week, doing whatever they could to fill seats. Chase didn't care about any of it - he just played, aiming to win. In the end, he knew, none of the owner's other actions would matter, if Chase didn't win.
"Any chance of a lift, Jim?" he asked the guard.
The guard's smile broadened. "Yeah, you got it, Mr. Chase. For you only, you realize."
"Thanks," Chase replied, as the guard pulled around the little golf cart at the security checkpoint. "I owe you one."
"You owe me a hell of a lot more than one, by my count," the guard replied, grinning as Chase clambered into the back of the golf cart. "But someone's gotta look out for you, given all the shit you get up to. What was it this time?"
"The usual," Chase replied, as Jim the security guard mashed the accelerator to the floor and the golf cart roared down the inner hallways of the stadium. "Here, check this out." He dug out his phone, pulling up the picture of the naked, sleeping stripper.
"Whoa, now, I'm a married man!" Jim protested, although he certainly took his time in handing the phone back to Chase. "She looks like a very classy lady."
Chase shrugged. "Fake tits and robbing me blind in the strip club? Fuck her."
Jim clucked his tongue. "One of these days, Mr. Chase, you're going to meet some woman who turns your whole life upside down," he commented. "And oh man, I hope that I'm there to see it."
Smiling, Chase held his tongue. Jim always made comments like this, and for some reason, Chase just couldn't bring himself to pop the security guard's little bubble of optimism. Besides, it was always good for him to have a friend on the staff.
The golf cart pulled to a screeching halt in front of the home team's locker room. "Here we are, Mr. Chase," Jim announced, as Chase climbed out of the back of the cart. "Remember, don't scare off the new employee yet, we need to fill the stadium if we want to earn our salaries!"
"Thanks, Jim," Chase called, as the golf cart pulled away with a squeal of tires.
He headed into the locker room, running one hand through his messy hair. Maybe, if the meeting was going on out on the green, he could grab a shirt from his locker and maybe gargle something for his breath-
No such luck, he realized a second later, as two dozen faces turned to look at him as he entered the locker room.
Some of those faces wore grins - those were the faces of his fellow players, many of whom had been out with him the night before. Chase saw DeShaun openly laughing, his dreadlocks shaking as he shook his head in mock judgment.
Most of the faces, however, wore frowns of irritation or annoyance. Among those frowning faces, Chase spotted one especially broad and florid one. "Morning, Jed," he greeted that face.
Jed Benson III, the third in a line of billionaire industrialist tycoons, just sputtered something unintelligible in response. The man had owned the Hawks for over a decade, and in that time, Chase had never seen him anything but red-faced and irritated. Even when they won games, the man always seemed to have a bee sting on his balls.
"Chase, where the hell have you been?" Benson spat out. "We've all been here except for you! This kind of unprofessional conduct-"
"Look, I overslept after celebrating how we won our last game," Chase cut in, emphasizing the word 'win.' "But I'm here now. What's going on?"
As Benson tried to sputter out some kind of response, Chase ran his eyes over the other faces standing in the group. He recognized some of them, and his mind vaguely identified them as team managers, assistant coaches, water boys, and other administrative additions to the team. Most of them looked mildly annoyed, more that this meeting was taking up their time than that Chase had dared to show up late, shirtless, and stinking of alcohol.
But there was one face that Chase didn't recognize. He blinked, focusing in on the newcomer.
No, she was definitely new, he thought to himself as he took her in. He would remember her if he'd seen her before.
Short, quite so. Pale skin, wavy brown hair escaping a ponytail, perky figure, a pair of green eyes sparkling behind black plastic glasses that Chase guessed were more for appearance than for sight issues. She looked young - he pegged her as no more than a year out of college. And she looked far too excited for this early of an hour.
"Anyway, now that you're finally here," Benson finished, "I'd like you all to meet Kaylie Tense, our new social media manager."
He waved a hand at the young woman next to him. "And I expect," Benson continued, glaring around at the players, "that you will treat her with respect and courtesy."
Chase didn't bother to conceal the roll of his eyes.
Social media. As if this woman could do anything to help this team's social media presence.
Chapter three
Oh god, Katy, keep it together, I thought to myself desperately. You can handle this. This is just the start of a new job, just like every other job. You've got this. No problem.
My mental platitudes, however, didn't do much to calm my rapidly beating heart or help my shallow breathing as I looked around at the massive, hulking men standing around me.
Who was I kidding? I couldn't even convince myself that I could handle this.
I, Katy Tenner, brand new college graduate and just a little over five feet on a good day, was totally out of my depth!
Right. Don't look at the men. The boss guy, Benson, whatever his name is, is talking. Try and focus on that.
God, why couldn't I focus? Why was my heart pounding so fast? Why did I have to feel so scared and nervous??
With a supreme effort that probably could have won me the Superbowl if I played football, I dragged my attention back to the prese
nt. Benson was still speaking, and I tried not to stare at how red his face looked. He punctuated his every word with a wag of his fingers, and I could see little droplets of spittle and spray flying out into the air. I tried to take a surreptitious step back to avoid being caught in that disgusting mist.
Unfortunately, my movement seemed to draw the man's attention. "And this, finally, is our new social media manager, Kaylie Tense," Benson shouted out, his hand reaching out and wrapping around my shoulders.
I considered struggling, but the big football team owner's grip felt as strong as iron. "Uh, Katy Tenner, actually," I corrected gently, trying to smile around at the men standing in the circle around us. God, why were they all so big and muscular and bulging? It was like I was back in high school all over again!
Benson didn't give any indication that he heard me speak. "She's going to be working to try and correct some of our shitty-ass image," he thundered, glaring around at the football players. "So you sorry lot had better cooperate with her, or else she'll smear your tiny dicks all over our fan pages! Won't like that, will ya?"
I grimaced as two dozen pairs of suspicious and untrusting eyes turned to me. "Really, it shouldn't be too bad," I piped up, aware of how high and breathy my voice sounded. "I'll just be writing little articles to endear you to fans, posting some semi-candid pics, getting more fan engagement, stuff like that. I'll try not to get in your way..."
My voice trailed off as my eyes moved over to one of the men currently regarding me with a skeptical expression, his arms crossed on his broad chest. I knew him, of course, and not just because he'd stumbled into this meeting a good fifteen minutes late.
There was no way, not in a million years, that I'd fail to recognize Seth Chase.
I'd followed his career, his meteoric ascent - first with amazement, then with despair, and then with a slowly growing sense of awe at his sheer resilience. The man embodied every single public relations disaster I could imagine, and yet he never seemed affected by any of the chaos swirling around him! The tabloids loved him, the reporters hounded him, and Seth Chase never seemed to care in the slightest about changing his ways.
Oh, and I'd heard somewhere that he was actually pretty good at football. I didn't bother with any specifics, but I assumed that he had to be halfway decent, or else the Hawks wouldn't have put up with him for so long.
He, I knew, would end up being my biggest problem.
At least, that's what I told myself that I should be thinking, as I looked back at him, trying not to give the impression of a deer in the headlights.
Inside my head, however, another voice had suddenly popped up, making a comment in the way that fashion designers sometimes do while they tap one finger against their chin, their head slightly tilted to one side and with their lips pursed.
He's kind of cute, in a manly, all-American sort of way, that voice inside my head pointed out to me. He's got those big shoulders, that light hair, those blue eyes that always seem to grab you. And you've seen his dick enough times in the papers to know that he's pretty loaded down there, too.
I bit down mercilessly on that voice. Those tabloids were exactly the reason I'd landed this job. After seeing his players' names splashed across the headlines of the celebrity pages too many times, Benson finally agreed that the Hawks needed a publicist, someone with enough social media savvy to spin the constant flood of embarrassing images into something that could actually seem positive.
And thus, me. Little, green, untrained, nervous-as-all-hell me, working my very first "grown-up" job after college.
Oh god, Seth Chase was looking at me. Why was he looking at me?
Sure, the rest of the team was looking at me, too. Some of them looked considering and open to the idea of getting mentioned in the papers without having the word "drunken debauchery" in the same sentence. But most of them looked resentful, as though I was here to bring an end to their partying.
Which was true, in a way. Sort of. As soon as I figured out how to tell someone a foot and a half taller than me and weighing two and a half times as much as me that he can't go to the strip club and take shots out of the girls' belly buttons.
Chase, however... He was looking at me with a different expression, one that I couldn't quite interpret. I kept on finding my own eyes drawn back to him, although I hastily pulled my gaze away each time.
I didn't want to give him any ideas, after all.
Benson had started roaring on again as soon as I'd stopped talking, but he finally sounded as though he was winding down. "And so, I'll leave you with Kaylie-"
"Katy," I muttered softly, although no one heard me over the bear of a man beside me.
"-so that she can take your pictures, or whatever it is that she needs to do. Maybe she'll make you pose with cute furry animals, or something like that. Try not to fuck this up, you assholes."
And on that lovely, uplifting note, Jim Benson III let go of me and stomped off towards the exit from the locker room. His assistant, a tall, willowy thin, very quiet and nervous looking blonde, sashayed after him, her heels tottering on the thickly carpeted floor.
A minute later, I found myself standing alone, surrounded, both horizontally and vertically, by football players.
"So." The comment came from a huge man, easily three hundred pounds, every inch of it muscle. "What're you gonna do?"
The other players remained silent, waiting for my response. I took a deep breath, trying to find a single nerve that wasn't frayed, before turning to the massive giant of a man.
"Well, I'm mainly going to try and post things on the social media pages that show your fans the qualities that we want them to see," I began, managing to muster up a bright smile that hopefully didn't crack to reveal my nervous interior. "Take some pictures of you handing the game ball off to a sick child, pictures of you posing with fans, comments from you about how you can't wait to go get some good ol' Philly Cheesesteaks after a game in Philadelphia, that sort of thing. Basically, I want to convince your fans that you aren't drunk and balls deep inside someone every second that you're off the football field."
"Yeah, if only!" another player piped up, eliciting a rough laugh from the men.
That joke, lame as it was, apparently broke up the meeting. As if on some unseen and unheard signal, the men turned away from me, heading over to their lockers. Evidently, it was time for practice, as they started changing into uniforms right in front of me.
No, seriously, right in front of me. I hastily averted my eyes as one man dropped his pants right in front of me, his member hanging down and wiggling! As I pulled my eyes away from him, I saw him grinning, clearly aware of the discomfort he'd caused me.
I turned away, thinking that I could duck out of the locker room before I caught sight of any more testicles - and nearly collided with Seth Chase, standing barely a foot behind me!
"Oh!" I exclaimed, as I bounced off his hard chest. For a moment, I felt myself teetering, on the verge of tumbling backward-
-and then his hand reached out and caught me, as easily as he caught a football out on the field.
I brushed my hair out of my eyes as he pulled me back up to my balanced equilibrium. "Uh, thanks," I said, blinking as I looked up at him. Man, he really did have nice blue eyes. I risked a smile.
Chase didn't smile back. "So, you're here to fix me," he said, his gaze pinning me in place.
"I'm here for the whole team, actually-"
He waved a hand dismissively. "We both know who's usually on the front page of the papers, whose picture is in the racy tabloids. I knew that Benson would get annoyed, but I never imagined the old boar would do something about it - not when he's this close to a Superbowl win. So, you're the watchdog that he's got nipping at my heels, huh?"
Chase paused, although I had no idea what he wanted me to say here. He was right - I already knew that one of my biggest challenges would be trying to find a way to keep him out of the paparazzi cameras - but I didn't want to admit it to him.
So I just
shrugged, risking another smile. "Looks that way, doesn't it?" I said weakly.
For a moment, Chase just stared back at me. I wondered whether he had any rule against hitting women. I then remembered the story a couple months ago, about how he climbed into the ring at an all-woman ultimate fighter cage match, and decided not to bet on his chivalry.
And then, out of nowhere, he smiled.
He had a hell of a smile, the small little part of my brain that wasn't totally dazzled observed calmly. With a smile like that, I could see how he convinced so many women to hop into his pants, even when the cameras were flashing and aimed at them. Something about it just looked so deliciously naughty, almost magnetic.
"We'll see how long you can last," Chase said.
It took me a moment to process that statement - and by the time it had set in my head what he really meant, he was already gone, on the other side of the locker room.
Chapter four
"Seriously, this job is going to kill me!"
On that declaration, I tilted back my glass of beer, taking a deep gulp before setting it back down on the bar in front of me. I knew that I probably looked like an idiot with a little beer foam mustache, but at the moment, I felt just too angry to care.
"I still don't get what you're complaining about, Katy," spoke up Miranda Lawson next to me. She lifted her own martini glass and took a small little sip before carefully, calmly setting it back down on the bar next to my own drink.
I turned to look at her, raising my eyebrows. "Yeah, well, you're perfect and everything always somehow works for you, so of course you don't see any problems," I replied, trying to remember to fight down my anger, to not blow up at my best friend.
I looked at Miranda as she blushed a little from the compliment. Tall, with long, slender legs that poked out appealingly from inside her pencil skirt Miranda looked every inch the sexy professional. Her every movement made her soft curls of red hair bounce around a face that had just the lightest little spattering of freckles, just enough to be alluring without overpowering her delicate features.
SACK: A Football Bad Boy Romance Page 2
