Wicked Player

by Lynn, Stacey

  Inhaling a deep breath, I forced myself to focus. Despite his off the charts good looks, this was a job, not an afternoon hook-up meet and greet. And yet, that awareness. The way my body was responding, a warmth between my thighs, my pulse quickening. Good grief. The man from last night had ignited my libido and now I apparently wanted to jump everyone. I was being ridiculous and unprofessional.

  “I will stop my excited rambling now,” Miles said, earning himself a round of polite laughter. “And let the man of the hour finish explaining, most importantly, the true reason why this wing is so important. If you’ll join me, please welcome the best wide receiver in the league, Raleigh’s very own, Gage Bryant.”

  I sat motionless, hands frozen to my tablet screen while Gage stepped forward. As he moved, clasping hands with McGregor, his body moved in fluid motion, calm and smooth. Impressive for a man his size.

  He reached the podium and scanned the crowd, slid to Connor next to me, and then narrowed on me. “Thank you.”

  He yanked his gaze away from me as if it hurt him to look at me and as he started speaking, my hands curled into fists. What was this? I’d never experienced such a strong reaction to any man and worse, I couldn’t remember a man who had ever looked at me with such contempt.

  I didn’t have time to think about it. He was speaking and my job was to report.

  “Many of you know I come from a small family in Southern Ohio. My dad is a pastor and my mom helped out at their church until she quit to volunteer at a local hospital.”

  My eyes were fixated on his hands. They were large, strong and tan, veined and so damn sexy. They were also curled around the edge of the podium and a man his size risked snapping the cheap wood in two if he wasn’t careful. The tenseness in his body drew my focus in.

  “What you don’t know, is that I lived most of my young childhood in a hospital similar to the one here today in Raleigh.”

  What? None of this was in the research I’d done. I scribbled down a note to double-check, but I was listening too intently to complete my thought as he continued, without preamble, bearing his soul to reporters of all people.

  “My brother was eight when he died of leukemia. He’d beat it once when he was younger. Lost a year of school to the disease that ravaged his blood before we celebrated that we believed he’d been healed. When he was seven, it returned. And I know what it’s like to fight the fight of childhood cancer. I know what’s it like to live inside these halls, the forgotten child, the healthy kid who gets pushed to the back burner because there is a sibling who demands so much more.”

  Around the room, there were a few quiet gasps, a few more sniffles. My own eyes stung. Oh my God. This was horrific. My chest tightened and burned down to my stomach.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Gage continued. He flashed the crowd a smile, one that could incinerate a woman’s panties. My very own were melting despite the professionalism I was trying to maintain. “My parents are incredible people. They didn’t try to make me feel that way, it’s just the nature of the beast when you’re dealing with something so difficult.”

  His voice trailed off, and once again, his gaze slid across the room, bouncing from person to person. He landed on me again and when he did, that heat in my thighs began pulsing. Oh my God. I was turned on listening to him talk about his deceased brother. What was wrong with me?

  “Over the next couple of weeks, I ask you to keep that in mind. I haven’t dedicated the last several years of my life wanting and fighting and raising money and planning and sleepless nights for this new children’s wing out of a sense of duty. It’s out of a sense of realism. I wanted to give the kids in this hospital something I never had…time to play, to be a kid, time to throw a ball around with my brother when he was too ill to leave. This addition at the hospital isn’t a duty to volunteer hours or because I have too much money I don’t know what to do with.” A small round of laughter burst and silenced quickly. “It’s because I’ve lived this. Harrison would have loved this. I’ve donated my time and money not to a cause to have my name look good in the press.” He flashed a smirk. “Not that you guys would do that of course.” Another round of laughter. This time a little bit louder. “I do this because this was my life and the kids that are fighting all manner of diseases and cancers and viruses that fill the halls in the building…well, they deserve something. They’re not weak even when ravaged. They’re not sad, even when they know the end is coming before the rest of us. These kids, the sick ones, they’re the strongest humans on the planet and they deserve to have a little bit of joy and peace and fun to continue to give them strength.”

  He pulled to an abrupt stop and stepped back. His speech wasn’t over. His jaw was open like he had more to say but his gaze went to something and I caught movement. A young woman dressed in teal scrubs hurried down the aisle.

  Murmurs erupted as she grabbed all of our attention. She hurried to Gage and before she reached him, he was back, leaning into the microphone. “Excuse me. I need to go.”

  The woman’s face look panicked.

  Gage’s looked destroyed. Cameras flashed as he hopped off the stage, practically hurdling the podium, and hurried back down the aisle.

  He ran out the door at the back, not even saying a single word to the nurse, but whatever it happened was bad and he knew it.

  I had no idea what possessed me to do it, what drove me, but I was on my feet, following as quickly as possible before I could stop myself.

  * * *

  I followed him to the fifth floor, the benefit of lighted floors above elevators telling me where he’d disappeared to.

  I stepped off the elevator, assaulted immediately with a painted mural showing underwater sea creatures. It was beautiful with its bright vivid colors. Humpback whale and bright coral at the bottom, bubbles coming up from sea anemone plants, the bright orange tail of a fish peeking out behind. It was incredibly well done, with dozens of fish and whale and a few sharks and stretched at least thirty-five feet. It went from floor to ceiling, the perfect bright art a kid could stare at for hours and always find something new to admire.

  I shook my head and turned toward the hallway. The nurse’s station was empty and thank goodness.

  What story did I have to give them to get past other than, “Um, hi, I’m stalking Gage Bryant and I’m not supposed to be here, but let me through anyway?”

  Right. That’d go over as well as my mom trying to get me to believe asparagus tasted just like green beans. Please.

  I slowed my steps in the hallway even though my heart raced at terrifying speeds. I forced myself to look like I belonged. Rearranged the features of my face, I tried for stoic, even though my gaze bounced back and forth, into the windows at the sides of the doors to rooms. I didn’t gawk. I didn’t stare. Yet with each room I passed, an unknown emotion rippled through me.

  These were kids. Of course they were. I was in a children’s hospital for crying out loud. But the reality of what Gage had actually done, who he was doing it for, hadn’t hit me until I passed almost a dozen rooms, filled with children too young to have to face such opposition in their little lives. And babies. Hooked to tubes and monitors, and one with so many you could barely see the tiny infant beneath the tape.

  God. Help them.

  I chanted the prayer in my head, my jaw aching from clenching my teeth. Gage Bryant had lived this. It was all so unbelievably horrible that I almost didn’t notice when I found him.

  His back was to me, but I’d just spent a good twenty minutes staring at his hair, his clothes, his enormous size, that my feet pulled short when I caught a glimpse of him through a narrow window.

  He was seated in a chair so small it looked like it could buckle under the weight of him. His head was bowed, turned slightly to the left, his jaw moving, speaking. And on the bed, a little boy. Bald. Bright blue eyes. Sickly in color and in his bony frame.

  And yet he glowed. His smile was so big, his age young enough to show he was still too small for all of hi
s teeth to fit properly into his mouth. Cracked, dry lips stretched into the largest grin I’d ever seen in my life.

  Why had Gage left for this? I felt like I was intruding. I shouldn’t have followed him in the first place and whatever brought me there wasn’t for a story. Not this kind anyway. My phone was in my pocket, but it’d stay there. No way was I taking a picture of Gage Bryant in such a private moment even if it would help the story.

  “Can I help you?”

  I jerked back, stunned I hadn’t been paying attention and when I turned, I saw the prettiest woman, sad, such sad eyes, head tilted to the left, dried tears had ruined what little makeup she’d had on.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, I shook my head, feeling ten thousands kinds of crappy for whatever I was doing. “I just…Gage had been at the press conference and took off—”

  I sounded like an asshole. A gossip columnist. An ambulance chaser of a lawyer doing anything for a story. And worse, it wasn’t me. Shame chilled my brain. I had nothing good to say.

  “You’re a reporter,” the woman said. She glanced in the window and back to me.

  “I am. And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here.”

  One shoulder of her rose and dropped slowly. “I don’t know. Seems to me y’all should be meeting some of the families Gage wants to help, right?”

  She spoke of Gage so personally. Then again, he was bent over the bed of who I assumed now was her son. But how long had she known him? And why did the thought it could have been for awhile hurt? How long had her son been sick?

  “It’s okay,” I mumbled. “I should really go.”

  “I think that you, as pretty as you are, would probably make Brandon smile. Would you like to meet him?”

  No way. Not with Gage there. Not with the way he’d glared at me so viciously earlier. He would not want me there. “He’s not a story,” I said. There was no way I was going to have her son glorified in his illness.

  “Trust me,” she said. “If it helps other families, other kids like him, Brandon would want to be.” With that stunning response, she tossed out her hand. “I’m Penny. Brandon’s mom.”

  “Elizabeth,” I said.

  “I know.” She winked and her hand went to the door. “We watch a lot of news around here. Not much else is on and Brandon really loved your last story of the pregnant elephant at the zoo. He said he wouldn’t have learned that much in school if he was able to be there. Trust me, he’ll be thrilled to meet you.”

  My cheeks flamed bright hot at the compliment, and I could no longer hurry away like I should have before I even stepped off the floor. Instead, Penny had opened the door and stepped back, waving me in.

  Why did it feel like I was walking a plank on a pirate ship as my feet trudged forward?

  Seven

  Gage

  “You’re pulling my leg,” Brandon said. His frail body shook with laughter but to egg him on further, I did what he just accused me of doing except this time literally.

  I reached out and yanked his ankle. “Now I am. But it’s the truth. Ferrets are evil, evil little creatures.”

  Every time I visited Brandon I always made sure to tell him a story about an animal. Most of them were from my childhood when we lived in the house the church provided my dad and backed up to a creek. There was always some sort of animal wandering through our land. Foxes. Deer. Raccoons. Snakes and rodents.

  Mom used to get so pissed off I kept coming home with toads shoved into my shirt pockets. And the day it was a baby snake in my jeans pocket I thought I’d end up sleeping on a street corner bench.

  This particular story I’d told him was about my college roommate’s ferrets. Hennessy loved those things like they were family. Always carrying Tater and Tot around on his shoulders. Gross as hell.

  Those things freaked me out and Hennessy had been even scarier.

  “The pet store he bought them from assured him they were both girl ferrets. Turns out they were wrong.”

  “Ten of them, though?” His pale face scrunched up.

  “Yup. Ten little babies. And they were all on my bed when I got home from practice. Covered in goo and everything.”

  I had to throw away all my bedding. No way was I going to just wash the sheets and comforter and sleep under sheets where a ferret had given birth. I might have been a guy and a jock, but I had some standards for cleanliness. A ferret’s afterbirth crossed the line.

  “That’s gross.” He laughed this hoarse, painful sound and we both heard the door open and turned our heads.

  And what the hell?

  I pushed off the chair immediately standing in front of Brandon.

  She’d followed me? “What are you doing here?”

  It was hard enough watching the other reporter look like he was flirting with her only a few feet away and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. It was even worse when I had to fight my dick going hard having Beth…Elizabeth thanks to the nametag she was wearing…so damn close to me. So far away.

  And shit. She was a damn reporter. The kind who sniffed out stories and spilled secrets. And the woman I’d had bound last night, screaming out in ecstasy was now following me for the next two weeks.

  It was a disaster and maybe I was staring at her, being a dick I wasn’t normally, but this was bad.

  Did she know who I was? Could she tell?

  Her cheeks blushed and she whipped her head to Penny. “Um. Well…”

  “I ran into Miss Hayes.” She leaned to the side, catching Brandon’s attention. “You remember her, right? From the news?”

  A smack hit my back. “Move Gage. Miss Hayes? From the zoo?”

  He knew her? My fucking luck. I stepped to the side and dipped my head to Brandon. “You know her?”

  “Yeah…she taught me a lot about the elephants!” His dry lips cracked as he smiled and proceeded to ignore me.

  “Hi Brandon,” the sexy little minx said. Her cheeks were hot pink. Hands trembled at her sides. She gave me a wide berth as she stepped closer to the bed.

  The mere nearness of her sent my blood boiling and not solely from anger.

  This woman did it for me in a thousand different ways. My hands curled into fists. Somehow I had to resist the urge currently pummeling me to wrap my hand around her arm and yank her out to the hallway, demanding answers.

  Avoiding my furious glare, one I saved for my most hated opponents on the field, she stepped lightly to the side and held out her shaking hand to Brandon. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

  He didn’t shake her hand. Brandon adjusted his pillows, sat up straighter and without warning, he flung his arms around Beth’s neck, pulling her close and almost off her feet. “Hi! I think you’re the greatest. We watch you all the time on the TV because mom always says there’s nothing on but trash and news in the afternoon. And I loved when you went to the zoo.”

  He relaxed his hold on her and patted the bed. “Sit with me. Tell me everything about the giraffes and the elephants and the penguins, too!”

  It was a miracle. He might have laughed at the ferret story, but it’d been weeks, if not months since I’d seen Brandon light up with so much enthusiasm.

  Beth…Elizabeth…Miss Hayes…what in the hell should I call her? I hadn’t given her enough space to sit on the bed without bumping into me and as she shifted to do as Brandon commanded with fervent glee, her eyes slid anxiously to me, nibbling her lip. “Um. Excuse me,” she said, so quiet like a mouse.

  Funny.

  Twenty-four hours ago, I’d walked into a room with her only wearing white lace panties and a blindfold and she hadn’t shown an ounce of hesitancy. Yet there she was, barely able to meet my gaze.

  She had no idea I was the man who’d fucked her into oblivion last night.

  Which worked for me.

  “I’ll give you two a moment,” I said, my voice was gruff. Angry and relieved.

  Damn it. I didn’t want her to know who I was. That was the whole fucking point of the blindfold and the private membership at Ve
lvet. So why was I relieved and pissed the hell off she was acting like she didn’t actually remember me?

  Talk about a blow to the ego.

  I spun around and nodded to Penny. “Can I get you a coffee? Lunch?”

  “I’m good, but a little walk might be nice.” She grinned at Brandon. “You two going to be okay here?”

  “Yeah, Mom. Miss Hayes will hang out with me, won’t you?” His head whipped to hers so fast it was amazing it didn’t cause vertigo. If it did, he hid it well.

  She was dressed in a tight black skirt that was currently riding high on her thighs from her perch on the hospital bed. It took serious effort to pull my eyes off her legs to her face. I could have looked my fill though since she didn’t notice. Her gaze was fixed on Penny, studiously avoiding me.

  Huh. Did she or did she not remember? I had to find out.

  “Sure, Penny. I can stay for a few minutes.” Slowly, Miss Hayes’s gaze moved and rose, met mine. “I’m assuming I have some time? Or will you finish the conference?”

  I’d completely forgotten. As soon as the nurse hurried into the room where I was speaking, all I could think of was getting to Brandon.

  Thankfully, he was still awake when I got here and now he was looking more energetic than I’d seen him in a long time. “I’ll reschedule that time. Penny?”

  She pressed her hand to Brandon’s leg. “Have a good time. We’ll be close okay though, honey?”

  “I’m good, Mom,” Brandon said it through a yawn and that lump in my throat grew.

  Incredible how his energy levels could drop so suddenly.

  “Come on,” Penny said. Her hand pressed to my arm and grabbed my attention. “Let’s give them a few minutes.”

  “We’ll be back, bud, okay?”

  “Sure Gage.” He was already ignoring me. His eyes and attention on the pretty little blonde sitting on his bed, smiling down at him like he was the best thing since dark chocolate.

  Couldn’t blame her.

  The kid was cool as hell.