Royal Baby (A British Bad Boy Romance) (42 page)

Chapter 21

Liam

Even for someone who wasn’t a big drinker, it would’ve been tough to stay sober at the party which my team threw that night. For me, who was an epic drinker, it was a task of Herculean proportions.

The first problem was that everyone knew I was a man who liked his drink and, since I was ‘man of the match’, they all wanted to buy me a drink or two…or several. The second problem was that I
really
wanted to drink. It wasn’t that I needed alcohol to enjoy myself or any such cliché, it was just that since I’d reached the legal age—and in fact for many years before that—I’d commemorated happy events with alcohol. It was a big part of my life to have a nice toast with mates, and much as I wanted to be a different man—and specifically be one without a slamming hangover tomorrow morning—it was a hard thing to quit drinking on the greatest night of my life.

I’d had an ecstatic phone call from my brother and Lauren, who were currently in Thailand, congratulating me. I also had the Premiership trophy on the table before me, and I was planning to propose to the woman I loved tomorrow. If tonight wasn’t the night to have a few cheeky drinks, then when the hell was? Nevertheless, I was dedicated to remaining merely nicely drunk, as opposed to ‘falling down and doing something stupid’ drunk as I used to get when I was a teenager.

It was actually quite a pleasant level of tipsy to be, and I wished I’d known about it years ago. I was drunk enough to enjoy the buzz of alcohol and chuckle at things that normally wouldn’t even raise a smile, but not so drunk as to lose track of reality or where my feet were. I also got to watch everyone else drunker than me with an indulgent smile and a little smugness. Plus I got the satisfaction of knowing that none of this was going to hurt in the morning.

All in all, and although I was sorry that Allison and I had had so little time together today, I was having a really good time.

“Liam!” Brian flopped down beside me, another man who had chosen not to get too drunk. “Enjoying yourself?”

I nodded.

“Well, you earned it. What are you drinking?”

I looked at my empty glass and then at my watch. Yeah, one more wouldn’t hurt; I was pacing myself well.

“Guinness,” I replied.

Brian smiled, nodded and got up to head for the bar, returning a few minutes later with the pint.

“To Liam Croft,” said Brian, raising his own glass in salute. “Whoever the hell he is.”

“The King is dead, long live the King,” I replied jokingly. It was somewhat true, because tonight the old Liam Croft would be buried, and tomorrow a new man would rise…one who was more respectful than arrogant, one who focused on his training, funded local charities, and of course, one with a girlfriend.

In fact, one with a fiancée.

The most beautiful fiancée in the world, I might add.

I drank deeply.

The evening spun on. And, suddenly, ‘spun’ really did seem to be a fitting word. I knew that I could hold my liquor—I had years of evidence to back that up—and yet now I was struggling. I knew I hadn’t had that much, and yet the room refused to stay still and the people before me began to blur as they walked. They looked strangely funny, and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

Somewhere beneath the giggling imbecile I seemed to have suddenly become, there remained a thin layer of lucidity, now shot through with concern. It wasn’t concern that I was drunk—I would rather not have been, but it was no big deal if I was. The concern was that I didn’t
feel
drunk. The room spun, the world blurred, my thoughts fuzzed…and yet it didn’t feel like drunkenness as I’d experienced it in the past.

I felt…weird. And I didn’t like it. Not one fucking bit.

The room began to dim and I looked around to see if the lights were actually being turned down. I wasn’t sure. Honestly, I wasn’t sure of much at this point.

I looked to my left, and for a second, I thought I saw the overly-Botoxed blonde model from the car show the other week approaching me. Who the hell invited her?

I blinked, and the last thing I remembered before I sank into disjointed unconsciousness was the face of my manager, staring at me from across the table with an expression of undiluted hatred.

Then it all went black.

Chapter 22

Allison

When I got back to my hotel room, there’d been no good reason for me to put on the very special lingerie that I’d bought the other day, yet I’d gone ahead and done it anyway. I wasn’t seeing Liam until tomorrow morning, but I wanted to get the most out of the pretty underwear set, and once Liam arrived, it wasn’t going to last long. I might keep them anyway; they could look even sexier when ripped, but it was still nice to see them on me in pristine condition. 

I didn’t think that I was a particularly narcissistic person; I knew I wasn’t bad looking, but still felt that I paled next to someone like Lauren, who inhabited her stunning body with such confidence. Nevertheless, in this lingerie, teamed with a pair of high heeled shoes, I thought I looked pretty damn sexy!

I paraded up and down in front of the mirror, then tried striking a variety of poses on the bed. Whether or not I would have time to try these poses in front of Liam tomorrow, I didn’t know, but it made me feel good. Looking in the mirror and seeing that sexy woman looking back filled me with a confidence I was quite unaccustomed to.

Of course it wasn’t just the lingerie that was doing that, it was Liam himself. To be loved by a man like Liam, to know that he found me attractive and irresistible—that was worth a whole shop full of lingerie and stilettos. With Liam beside me, I would never be insecure again. It was a wonderful sensation, and I took a moment to examine my real depth of feeling for him. It had all been so damn unexpected. I hadn’t even thought that I’d like the man when we first met, and yet I felt a great deal more than that now.

It wasn’t so much that I could imagine spending the rest of my life with him, it was that I couldn’t imagine
not
spending the rest of my life with him.

After the excitement of the day, sleep was simply not an option, or at least not yet, so I got out my laptop again. I’d already written up my report of the game and, while it might have lacked some of the salient details, it contained an extraordinary description of Liam’s goal. I still felt as if I could see that ball curving through the air in slow motion and could describe every millisecond of its nerve-wracking and yet inevitable journey. Now I decided to log on to Twitter and catch up on the facile world of social media. I grinned as I glanced at the trending topics—there was Liam’s name; that goal still the talk of the Twitter-sphere. I clicked on his name, feeling a strange rush of pleasure as I did so, keen to read other people’s reactions to his astonishing performance.

At first, I thought that what I was seeing was indeed about that incredible goal: ‘LIAM CROFT DOES IT AGAIN!!!’ the top tweet declared.

Then I saw the pictures.

My heart turned cold, my stomach contracting and a clamminess stealing across and throughout my body. They couldn’t be recent pictures…they just couldn’t. He had a bad boy past—I knew this—and surely these pictures were from months ago, taken during his drinking and womanizing heyday. He’d changed since then; he’d changed since meeting me. He
had
.

These pictures
couldn’t
have been taken tonight.

But there, in the background, just behind the blonde head that nestled so cozily into Liam’s neck, I saw the Premiership trophy. These pictures could
only
have been taken tonight.

What they showed was Liam, clearly drunk, his eyes vacant, his mouth a clownish gape of a smile, sprawled across a leather sofa in the private room of an underground club. He was accompanied by the aforementioned blonde girl, wearing a skirt so short that it was barely worth wearing it at all.

Another wave of shock swept across me as I realized I recognized the woman—it was the blonde model from the car show…the one who’d claimed to be involved with Liam.

And right now she was
definitely
involved with him.

She had her hands on his belt, industriously undoing it, while Liam threw his head back and relaxed on the sofa. That was the first picture. As they went on, taken one after another at five to ten second intervals, I could see a second and then a third girl join the little party. I watched as Liam’s belt was removed, swiftly followed by his pants. I watched as one girl unbuttoned his shirt, another kissing his chest as it was steadily revealed, leaving him only in his boxer briefs. I watched as the girls themselves undressed, helping each other, while Liam stared with wide eyes, and I watched as one girl sat astride him, pouring champagne down his throat.

No…please. No, no, no.

The last picture was the hand of a bouncer closing across the camera lens, signaling the point at which the photographer had been ejected from the private room, but it wasn’t hard to guess at what had happened next.

With a shriek that even I hadn’t known was coming, I hurled the laptop across the room and heard it break against the far wall before burying my face in my hands and trying as hard as I could not to cry. But the tears came anyway—hot, angry tears that scalded my cheeks.

How could I have been so pathetically stupid? A bad boy like that didn’t change. Men like that obviously
couldn’t
change…especially in just a couple of weeks, which was how long I’d known Liam for. And if anyone was foolish enough to love a man like that, then they’d always be left alone and crying in the stupidly expensive lingerie that they’d wasted their money on because they’d thought he might actually care.

Suddenly the lingerie itself became a mockery to me—a symbol of Liam’s betrayal and my own idiocy. With unrestrained violence, I tore it from my body, lace ripping, until I stood naked in my hotel room, choking back gut-wrenching sobs. Then I crawled beneath the covers of the bed and cried like a baby. I wished that I wouldn’t; I wished that I didn’t care. But I couldn’t help it.

My heart was broken.

I couldn’t have said how long I stayed there, curled up in self-loathing, but I was forced out of it by the buzzing sound of my cell phone. My first thought was that it must be Liam, calling to tell me the perfectly reasonable explanation for all this—I hated myself for that thought. Although I didn’t want to speak to anyone right now, I also desperately wanted a distraction, so I checked the phone to see who was calling. It was Alan Granger.

Right now, work seemed like the most important thing in my life, so I answered, trying to keep the tears out of my voice.

“Hi, Alan. The match was fantastic. I’ve emailed you my report.”

He ignored that. “Are you sleeping with Liam Croft?” he asked.

I almost dropped the phone. How the hell could he know? It couldn’t be the photos making the rounds on the gossip sites right now; if anything, they suggested the opposite.

“What? Um...”

In my fragile state, lying did not come naturally to me.

“Is it true?” Alan pressed. “Is that why you’ve been staying out there all this time?”

My heart sank.

“Yes.” The word was out of my mouth before I could even think about it. I didn’t want to lie anymore, and I wasn’t even sure that I had the capacity. “Yes,” I repeated, and then burst into tears again. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I finally managed to get control of myself again and waited for Granger’s response.

“I think you’d better get yourself back here,” he said.

I couldn’t quite gauge how angry he was from his tone, but I knew he was. He had to be. The minute I returned home, I was no doubt going to be fired.

Crap, crap, crap.

The worst part was that I had no one to blame but myself for my predicament. I’d deceived my boss in order to stay here and be with Liam, and now it was all blowing up in my face.

“Okay,” I said in a timid voice. “I’ll arrange the flight.”

“All right. We’ll talk once you’re back in the office. I got your email, and it was a good write-up of the match, by the way. You sure can write. But you really do need to come home, Allison.”

He was right. It was definitely time for me to leave England.

There was nothing left for me here.

Chapter 23

Allison

“You been crying, love?”

In a strange way, I was glad to be back in Mikey’s cab again as I headed towards the airport. It was a curiously comforting place, and there was always a friendly and understanding ear for me to confide in. In a strange way, he was the best and most trusted friend I’d made during my stay in London.

“I’m okay, Mikey. By the way, how long did you say you’d been with your wife?” I asked.

Mikey grinned. “Fifteen years. Doesn’t seem it some days. Others it really does. Circle of life.”

“She’s done things to upset you, right?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know about upset. She’s got on my wick from time to time, I know that.”

“Have you done things to upset her?”

Mikey considered the question. “I broke our wedding photo. That was a bad day. Threw something at the TV during the football. She said I obviously didn’t care. I said it was just a photo and it didn’t mean anything. Turns out that was the wrong thing to say.”

“But she forgave you?”

“She’s a wonderful woman,” he replied. “She realized I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Do you think she could ever do anything you wouldn’t forgive?”

Again, Mikey considered this—he obviously liked to give people a full answer to their enquiries. “I don’t know, love,” he finally said. “These things…you can only really know when they happen. Do you want to talk about it?”

“Um….”

As I hesitated, he spoke again. “You can tell me anything, love. I won’t judge.”

“You really can’t tell anyone.”

Mikey tapped his nose. “Driver-passenger confidentiality. I tell you, I’ll keep your secret better than any lawyer or doctor.”

I took a deep breath. Then I poured out the whole story and when I was done, Mikey responded in typical fashion. “Want me and my brother to settle his hash?”

I couldn’t help grinning at that. “No thanks. I…I don’t want him to think that he matters. Because he doesn’t.”

***

By the time I arrived back in the States, I had such a backlog of texts and voicemails from Liam that I almost considered changing my phone number. I decided not to read or listen to them, and then promptly reversed myself and listened to every single one. They were all on a theme—it wasn’t his fault, Brian had drugged him to get the pictures he wanted in the papers, he never actually did anything…he had in fact been far too out of it to do anything. If I didn’t believe him, then he was starting legal proceedings against Brian and that would surely provide proof.

I deleted the messages. There were some men you simply couldn’t trust. He was probably making up the whole story, and as for the court case, he’d already been considering getting rid of Brian, and this sort of attention-grabbing story was a good way of doing it. With that much money you could make any story appear true, bribe doctors and lawyers and so on. It was all too easy.

Bottom line: I just didn’t believe him anymore, and I’d made a huge mistake when I’d decided to trust him after the model incident at the car show. It was like that old saying—fool me once, shame on you…but fool me twice, shame on me.

Right now I was more than ashamed at how dumb I’d been. I was devastated.

I tried to put Liam behind me by concentrating on other issues in my life—like the fact that I was probably going to be fired the minute I set foot in the office. If I hadn’t spent the whole trip back thinking about Liam, as much I wanted to think of anything else, then I would’ve spent it worrying about what I was going to say to my boss. Unfortunately, I still had no idea what to say.

When the moment finally arrived, I stepped into his office, legs trembling and heart racing. I decided to take a page from Lauren’s book and simply tell him the truth, including the fact that I’d deliberately lied to extend my stay in Britain.

Granger listened to every word with a curious expression on his face. When I finished, he simply said, “Do you want to keep your job here?”

“More than anything.”

“And yet you’ve come in here to tell me that you lied to me and slept with an interview subject.”

I could only nod. “I thought I owed you the truth, and I understand if you want me gone.”

Granger nodded back. “Keep that attitude, and we’re golden. All I ever want from you as a journalist and an employee is the truth.”

I started to realize that I wasn’t actually being fired.

“Generally speaking,” Granger went on, “I’d prefer you not to sleep with the men you’re supposed to be interviewing. Or women, I don’t judge. On the other hand,” he said, holding up my article. “Keep producing fantastic copy like this and you can screw your way through the NBA for all I care. Just be honest about it.” He passed some pages across the table to me. “Here’s your new contract.”

“New contract?” I said, bewildered.

“Like I said, the work you’ve been doing is fantastic. I’m promoting you.”

“Promoting me?”

“Stop acting like a parrot and sign the damn thing,” he said with an eye-roll.

“But I…I…”

“You see, that’s why I’m promoting you,” said Granger, arching an eyebrow. “It’s your way with words.”

***

With a new job, which was essentially the same as my old job but at a higher salary, I was keen to throw myself back into sport, and most particularly into
American
sport. Most of all, I was keen to put Liam Croft behind me, but at the present, it was hard to be a sports journalist and avoid him. In fact, it was damn hard to live in the world and avoid him—his smug face stared from the front of every newspaper and magazine, and it grinned from billboards and flashed across TV screens and computer monitors. It wasn’t just that he and his team had won the Premiership; Liam had also been awarded a coveted place in the England squad, and with the World Cup looming on the horizon, he was hotly tipped to be Captain.

But there was more than that. Away from sport, Liam was still making headlines. Initially there had been the party photographs which had gone around the world in seconds on the internet, quickly followed by other news media. The validity of these pictures had been instantly denied by the Croft camp, and Brian Thomas—who, it was claimed, had engineered the pictures—had been fired and taken to court. With the affair in court, the details suddenly became much more public; the three girls involved sold salacious stories to newspapers and appeared on chat shows, each apparently trying to out-do each other in how graphic and shocking a story they told about ‘their night with Liam’. By the time Liam’s lawyer found a money trail from the girls that led back to Brian Thomas, it was too late, the damage was done.

The image of Liam Croft, the playboy player, was indelibly imprinted on the world’s collective consciousness.

There was no way I could avoid all of this, not least because it was my job, but I didn’t go into the details. When I finally weakened and read some of Liam’s current press, I felt a pang of pity for him. He’d ended up where he least wanted to be, and was setting an absolutely terrible example to the kids who idolized him so much. I instantly crushed the germ of sympathy—all that might be true, but he’d brought it all on himself by once again acting like a dick. How many times could you forgive a person if they kept on making the same mistake? Brian Thomas might be an unscrupulous man, but Liam’s claims that he’d drugged him…that just seemed too far, even for Brian. The only thing Brian was seemingly guilty of was paying the three girls to have a good time at the party with Liam, and it wasn’t exactly uncommon for managers to hire models and actresses to populate parties and have fun with players.

There was also no doubt in my mind that it’d been Brian who’d told Granger about me and Liam, because that was something he’d threatened to do in the past; a vindictive act which had thankfully backfired. But drugging his own client and paying three women to pose for staged photographs as a publicity stunt—that was entering the realms of fantasy.

I pushed the matter from my mind—Liam would be fine, he could take care of himself, and he would live a long, happy and shallow life. I needed to focus on myself.

It was about two weeks after my return to America now, and I was chatting to my father on the phone.

“You still seem a bit down,” Dad said.

I hadn’t told him about Liam and the events in the UK. He’d read my articles with pride and insisted on a full report on my return, but I knew that telling him the full story would only upset him. Worse still, there was a good chance that if I did tell him, he would be heading over to England on the next plane to find Liam and ‘settle his hash’, as Mikey would have put it.

“Dad, I’m fine.”

“You know what would cheer you up?”

“I don’t need cheering up. I’m fine!”

“How about we hit the game this Saturday?”

I was about to reaffirm my fineness but stopped. Going to see a game with Dad sounded good. When I’d been a kid it was a weekly ritual, and we still tried to meet up to watch some live sport or other as often as we could, but I’d been so busy lately that it had been months. And, of course, however much I might say otherwise to my father, I wasn’t fine, and I could use cheering up. This sounded ideal.

“Sure. Let’s do it,” I said.

“Good. I’ve already got the tickets.”

“Dad!”

“I know my little girl.”

I smiled. “Usual seats?”

We’d been occupying the same seats in the baseball stadium since I was old enough to yell out and call the umpire names.

“What do you think?”

I grinned widely. That was what sport was about—families going out and enjoying themselves, making memories. It was sports people and their managers who were dragging the industry down with product placement, commercialism and sponsorship deals. It would do me good to simply sit in a crowd and watch a ball game.

“I’ll be there.”