by Serena Bell
“You ready for us, Coach?”
It’s Coach Cross at the door, someone in tow behind him, and all at once, I realize where I last spotted the beautiful woman sitting in Coach’s office—on TV, coaching on the sidelines of a San Francisco game.
Chapter 3
Iona
I’ve seen the look on Ty Williams’s face about a hundred thousand times before.
If I had to put words to it, they’d be: WTF? It’s the same look I’ll see on the face of every guy at the press conference Wednesday. The same look that every player in San Francisco wore pretty much the whole time I was a coaching intern there. WTF? A woman?
I’m actually relieved that Williams is on script. Because it lets me be annoyed with him. Which in turn allows me to ignore my first reaction to him, the one I had when he stepped into Coach Thrayne’s office fifteen minutes ago.
Holy shit.
Obviously, I knew Williams was hot, long before my girls drew attention to the fact. He’s a linebacker—big enough to hold his own against running backs, agile enough to sack a quarterback, and fast enough to drop back into the secondary to cover receivers. All that adds up to one heck of an amazing body. Big but lean, strong, able to be rough if the situation calls for it, good hands—
But usually, like I told the girls, when I get up close, down to brass tacks, whatever, usually, my coaching brain takes over and shuts down all the other chatter.
That’s not what’s happening here. Inside I’m studying the angles and planes of his face, the smooth dark skin molded over bones and the hewn muscles of his forearms and bare calves, the sculpted mouth and unsettling golden brown eyes. And feeling an unwelcome prickle of awareness all over my body.
So much for armored football-player-proof panties.
Luckily, however, he is giving me the WTF look. And even if he weren’t, there is no danger that my unwanted admiration for the up-close Ty Williams will be the remotest threat to our working relationship, because there is no danger that my admiration is reciprocated.
Men like Williams admire my athleticism. They respect my play. They appreciate what I contribute as a teammate or coach. But they don’t lust after me.
Just doesn’t happen.
So.
As inconvenient as my full-body recognition of Williams as male and straight and eminently doable is, it will not be a problem.
To give Williams credit, the WTF? expression has left his face. Now it’s just blank.
“Ty, I want you to meet your new coach. She head-coached the Women’s Pro Football Association Baltimore Night Vision to their first division title. She’s also been a running back, linebacker, and linebacker coach for the Houston men’s indoor league team—”
Grudging admiration flickers in his expression.
“And you probably know her best as a coaching intern for San Francisco a couple of years ago.”
“I remember you,” he says. “The guys liked you.”
I stick out my hand and he sticks out his, and we shake.
Yeah. Good hands. By which I mean, of course, that I can see how those hands can intercept even the most well-thrown pass.
I groan inwardly. So inconvenient.
Because everyone knows there’s a world of difference between visually admiring a good-looking guy and that crazy buzz you get off someone whose pheromones jump-start your hormones. And just the brush of his skin over mine, let alone the crush of his fingers, starts the chemistry humming.
I shake it off and sit down in the seat next to his. Coach Cross comes back with a folding chair and sits behind Ty.
“You told O yet?” Williams asks.
The two coaches exchange wary looks. Williams, no dummy, says, “What?”
Coach Cross opens his mouth to explain, but I preempt him. “I’m going to switch some things up.”
Williams shoots me a look that should kill. Instead, it does something not quite kosher to my girl parts.
“I’m starting Diaz instead of Ohalu at middle linebacker.”
“No fucking way,” Williams says. Coach Thrayne makes a hissing sound, but Williams ignores him. “You can’t do that. His contract—”
Thrayne cuts him off. “No requirement in the contract that he start.”
“I knew that agent was shit,” Williams says to the room at large. Then he fixes his attention on me. “O’s gotta play. O’s the best. O and I—we’re like PB&J.”
I shake my head. I’ve been watching film, and film doesn’t lie. “Ohalu doesn’t look like a leader out there. And you guys don’t have a pass rush.”
A muscle tightens in Williams’s chiseled jaw. “It’s because Dave Brogan made him jumpy.”
“Film says it started before Brogan.”
“What? Show me that fucking film.”
He’s glaring at me defiantly. A look that scares the shit out of quarterbacks and running backs.
A look that’s probably told quite a few women they’re in over their heads.
But not me. I’m not afraid of Ty Williams or his ginormous shoulders or his big, bad glare.
“This isn’t a debate, Williams,” I say quietly.
He opens his mouth and I watch him get up a head of steam, ready to rumble. Two hundred fifty pounds of coiled muscle and those strange light eyes burning into mine, and I should be at least a little intimidated, but what I really want to do is get in his way to feel what it would be like to collide head-on.
“You think you can—”
“Ty.”
Coach’s voice, cutting across Williams’s, is quiet, but his posture is a warning. Williams shuts his mouth and drops his gaze from mine, and I’m sorry. I liked him better staring me down. Now he’s not meeting either of our eyes as he mutters, “I don’t like it. And the guys aren’t going to like it, either.”
He raises his gaze again and meets mine, and that flash of defiance is still there. His eyes are dark and fierce.
My stomach gives a little dip. And I know it’s not because I wish he’d look away.
It’s because I can’t stop looking back.
Chapter 4
Ty
Tuesday morning, early, I head to McElroy Athletic Center, also known as Grizzlies Training Central. Tuesday’s my day off, so there’s no official reason I have to be here. I tell myself I’m just going to work out for a few hours, but by the time I’m headed in the front door, I already know I’m lying to myself. I’m here to talk to Coach Thomas. I’m here to pick a fight with her.
There’s a walled-off area where the defensive coaches have their desks. It’s not even an office. Coach Thrayne has his own office, but Coach Cross works in the shared space. Across the hall, there’s a corresponding scrum where the offensive coaches gather. We call them the D pit and the O pit.
Coach Thomas is unpacking the contents of a small cardboard box onto the surface of Dave Brogan’s old desk. There’s not much, or not much I can see. A few photographs, a travel coffee mug, a couple of Hall of Fame bobbleheads. There’s nothing at all to signal that it’s a woman’s desk.
Just like, technically, there is nothing about the way Coach Thomas is dressed to signal that she’s a woman. Today she’s wearing a Houston indoor league T-shirt and athletic pants. But she can’t hide her assets. Not by a long shot. Sure, if you didn’t know she was under there, your eyes might skate past her because of the sporty clothes. But I do not seem to be able to let my eyes skate over Coach Thomas. They get stuck. They get stuck on the curves she can’t hide under that shapeless T-shirt and pants, on the cheekbones that won’t quit, on that hair that wants my hands on it, and on a very strong desire to bend her over that desk and fill my palms with her tits while I—
It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just an outlet for the anger and frustration I can’t express any other way.
I shake off the thought train and lift my gaze. She’s watching me watch her.
Caught.
“Can I help you?”
“Don’t fuck with the corps.”
I blurt that out, mainly because I’m hoping to distract her before she thinks too much about what I was staring at.
She doesn’t seem fazed, one way or the other. Not by the staring, not by the sudden verbal assault. She just cocks her head to one side and searches my face like she’s trying to get a read. Her eyes are not just a uniform dark brown. They have streaks of gold and maybe even green in them.
“How do you think Coach would feel if he knew you were in here arguing with me?”
I can’t tell if she’s curious or threatening me, so I blurt the truth. “He’d be pissed.”
She nods. “Don’t fuck with the corps? Or don’t fuck with O?”
The question totally catches me off guard. And it bugs me that she’s asking that, like she’s trying to get inside my head.
“You can’t just come in here and carve out the heart and soul of the linebacker corps and expect everyone to nod and smile.”
“Technically, I can do whatever the fuck I want.” She shrugs. “As long as Thrayne and the front office like it, and as long as we win games.”
She tilts her chin up defiantly. The gesture bares her neck and throat, and I want to sink my teeth into her skin.
It’s fight or flight, that’s all. It’s just adrenaline and frustration. If I can’t argue my cause, I’ll shake her into submission.
“This is going to win games? Marching in here and sacking O—”
“I’m not sacking O. He’s got a job.”
We both know she’s full of shit, that if she takes away his start, O’s as good as done with the Grizzlies.
“So it is about O,” she says.
“I don’t give a shit what you do with Diaz and Haight. But O and I are good together.”
“Not good enough.”
I glare. She glares back, and the challenge in her gaze hits below the belt.
She’d be so fucking hot in bed.
She’d give as good as she got.
Shut the fuck up and concentrate, Ty.
“Look,” she says. “I applaud your loyalty. I don’t understand it, because I know Coach put you on notice, and the last thing you need to be doing right now is fighting someone else’s battles, but I respect a guy who’s a team player, and you obviously are. But I’m here—we’re all here—to win. The defense has been sleeping on its feet all season. You can’t stop the run. Your pass rush looks like elementary school field day. And your chances of beating Carolina on Sunday with Ohalu at middle linebacker are about as good as your chances of keeping your job if I tell Coach you’re getting in my face again. So back off, get the hell out of here, and I’ll forget to tell Coach we ever had this conversation.”
She’s right about the way we’ve been playing. But she’s wrong about the thing that matters.
“We’ll beat Carolina on Sunday,” I say. “With O at middle linebacker.”
Something gathers behind her eyes, and for a second, just the half beat of my heart, I’m absolutely fucking terrified. She’s right: Coach would be pissed as hell about this. And he’d be well within his rights to send me packing.
But she doesn’t yell or threaten. Instead, she gives me a long, even look, and I get caught in the marvel of her eyelashes.
Then she nods. “I want Wayne on his back. All day long.”
For a second, I’m disoriented, and I actually think she might be talking about sex. But no, she’s talking about the Carolina Rush quarterback.
“I want to stop the run. I want a pass rush I can be proud of. I want to stop their streak, and I want to start ours.”
“We can do it.”
Her gaze doesn’t flicker. “You have this week to prove it.”
Chapter 5
Iona
“I know how to get you a pass rush,” I tell Coach Thrayne.
The coaches are eating pizza in the D pit. It will take all of my willpower and discipline to keep from gaining a hundred pounds at this job.
“Yeah?”
Coach Thrayne’s a good-looking guy. Mid-thirties, only just starting to show the wear and tear of the coaching life. Not my type—I’ve never gone after the blond Nordic ones—but I imagine he does okay for himself.
He’s also a good man. He was the defensive coordinator for San Fran when I was there, which is how I got on his radar screen for this job. He always had my back there. His sister, Ember, and I got to be friends a little, so I even got the behind-the-scenes on him. She said he was an overprotective jackass, but she said it like she loved him like crazy.
When I flew in to talk to him about the job, after he told me that if I could get him a pass rush, it would be mine, I asked him a lot of questions. One was, “What’s wrong with Ty Williams?”
“Wrong?” he asked.
So I queued up two clips on my iPad. I’d come prepared. One was a clip of Ty last season; the other was from the first game of this season. Sure, you could tell it was the same man wearing number 54. Same eerie eyes, same huge shoulders, same ready stance. You couldn’t see the difference till the snap got off, and then you could see it instantly. In the hesitation. In the way he moved, as if underwater. Not the same man at all.
“Not sure how much backstory you know, but you’re our third linebacker coach in a year. The first, James MacKenzie, died of a heart attack three days before training camp was supposed to start. He and Ty were real close.”
Coach and I looked across his desk at each other. I looked down at the tablet in my hand, at the man frozen just short of the gap in the opposing line. He was already a fraction of a second too late; the gap was visibly closing.
“We don’t just need a linebacker coach,” Coach told me. “We need a coach who can take a good hard look at Ty Williams, figure out what’s going on with him, and get through to him. I’m thinking you might be our ma— woman.”
Now Thrayne sets down his pizza slice and says, “Does getting me a pass rush have to do with dropping O?”
The coaches are onboard with not starting Ohalu at middle linebacker, but they’re not sure about it, not by a long shot.
“Indirectly,” I say. And then I tell him about my conversation with Williams.
Not everything, of course. I don’t tell him about that split second when I looked up from unpacking my stuff and could have sworn Ty Williams was staring at me with raw, unfiltered lust. Because it probably didn’t actually happen.
It rattled me. That look. It went into my eyes and straight through my brain like an arrow, to the deep, dark snake brain parts of me that are connected directly to the crucial bits. And the crucial bits lit up like Christmas. He wants you. Red alert!
In that instant, I got such a fast, hot rush off what I thought I saw, I got lightheaded. For a second, all that mattered was my body. And his.
Two seconds later, his expression went blank, which was when I knew I’d imagined it. The only raw, unfiltered emotion I could see in his pretty eyes was anger.
And I felt bereft. Like he’d taken away something that was supposed to be mine.
Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. Men like Ty Williams can have their pick of any woman in the universe of women. Rich models with expensively styled hair and legs up to their necks and enough sexual experience to write a competing volume to the Kama Sutra.
Anyway, I don’t tell Coach Thrayne any of that, for obvious reasons. But I tell him the rest. That Ty had come to talk to me and to make a case for Ohalu again. That I started out arguing for my own point and ended up willing to give Ty’s position a chance, for just one more week.
And I conclude like this:
“He’s so mad at me at this point that he’ll knock Wayne as flat as my aunt June.”
“That’s what it takes, huh? Get him that mad?”
I nod. But the truth is, I don’t think that’s what it takes. I think Ty Williams needs someone to play for. To win for. That person used to be Mack. And then it was no one.
I didn’t do it on purpose, but in threatening Ohalu’s job, I gave Ty a n
ew person to play for. To win for.
I don’t tell Coach Thrayne that, though. Not because I don’t think he’d understand. I think he would. He seems like that kind of guy.
No. I don’t tell Coach Thrayne because it gives me a sweet, all-wrong thrill that I know something about Ty Williams that no one else knows.
Not even Ty.
Chapter 6
Ty
Wednesday morning I’m sitting in my seat next to Brandon Haight in the big team meeting room when O comes in.
He looks like we’re behind 28–0 and he’s just taken a bad on-field beat-down.
He drops into the chair next to mine with an oof sound.
“One week to turn it around, huh?” he says.
I’m not any happier about it than he is, but it’s not going to help to have both of us cringing like beaten dogs. “It’s not on you,” I say. “It’s on all of us.” I include Haight in this observation, although we all know he’s not awake yet, slumped down beside me after another night of imitating a horny zoo animal. He parties way too much. “And the line. And on Dave fucking Brogan. And we’re fucking turning it around, so don’t think about it anymore.”
“How do you know?”
Because there’s no way I am going to let her be right. No way I’m going to let the Grizzlies release O.
When Thrayne and Cross came onboard and made the switch from 3–4 defense to 4–3, my first thought was that we’d lose one of the guys for sure. Average career in the PFL is three years, and change is the only constant. It’s only a matter of time until the guys you eat every meal with (and piss blood next to) disappear, and once someone leaves the team, it’s rare you ever see them again. It’s just the way it is.
But we didn’t lose anyone. They moved Dante Douglas from the linebacker corps to the line, but it wasn’t like we’d never see him again. He just had a new set of much bigger friends, and more pressure to eat fat and protein. O and I breathed a huge sigh of relief and settled back into work.
