Sacked (The Alpha Ballers#2) (8 page)

I didn’t know anything about the Patriots roster, who was on the team, or who I was going to be working with. All I knew is that teams usually didn’t have more than 2 or 3 QBs on the roster, so at most I’d be working with 2 or 3 men in tight pants.

I had enough trouble keeping track of one man out of tight pants, so more than 2 or 3 might have been a little much to ask, especially when the tight pants became part of the equation.

Yeah, I might have tight pants on the brain right now. Couldn’t be sure.

Finally, we arrived at the room labeled “QB Training/Recovery,” and went inside. There were all the familiar tools - ice baths, training table, massage table, all the gear I’d need to make sure the quarterbacks could play effectively. The rest was up to them.

“Why don’t you stay here and get acquainted with your equipment while I go find the guy you’ll be working with.”

“Sure, thanks, Mr. Morris, for the opportunity and the pep talk.”

“It was my pleasure, Miss Calloway, just make sure we did the right thing in hiring you.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Great. I’ll be back soon.” Morris left the room and I busied myself with looking around and checking things over, making sure everything was clean and well stocked.

I didn’t need to check, because the Patriots were very obviously a team that made fastidiousness into an art form, but I liked to know the details of the stuff I’d be working with.

A couple minutes later Morris came back in the room with someone.

What? WHAT?

It was him. The man from last night. Mr. Right Then, the guy I had spent the night with.

“Lance Parker, meet your new athletic trainer and physical therapist.”

Lance..Parker? Parker from last night was really Lance Parker? What the hell?
 

I tried to keep the astonishment from off my face but I knew right that second that I was doing a really terrible job doing so. Parker, well, Lance, had a shocked look on his face too.

Morris didn’t seem to notice. He turned to me and continued as if nothing was wrong.

As if I wasn’t about to start working with the man who I’d just had my first one night stand ever with.

“Charlotte Calloway, meet Lance Parker, starting quarterback for the New England Patriots. He’s your most important customer.”

Ugh. This was gonna be bad, I just knew it. On the one hand, my body immediately began aching for him all over again, seeing him there all dressed up like he just came from something almost formal.

On the other hand, though, I was gonna have to touch this man…for a living. Wait, there was a downside to this?

Oh yeah, he was a glamorous star athlete who probably had girls all over him all the time, and who probably brought home another girl every single night.

“Nice to meet you, Lance,” I said, reaching out my hand and emphasizing his real first name as heavily as I could without making it seem awkward. “I’m Charlotte, looks like we’ll be working together this season.”

Lance took my hand in his, and flashes of him pressing me against the wall as we kissed just hours earlier flitted through my head - I tried to wave them off but they kept coming. “Thanks for coming on board, uh, Charlotte, it’ll be good to work together.”

“I’m sure of it.” We were still holding hands.

Great, just great, Charlotte. Way to fall in lust with literally the worst guy in New England to fall for. Brilliant move. And just before your first day of…working with him! Or, more specifically, working ON him.

Because, you know, that’s what you do now! You work on Lance Parker’s body. For a living. Just great.

Lance and I must have both realized we were still shaking hands at the same time, because we both pulled our hands back at the same moment, both of us wearing sheepish looks.

Morris kept on like there was zero tension in the room, and zero knives with which to cut it. “I’ll let you two get acquainted. Glad to have you aboard, Miss Calloway.”

“Thanks again, Mr. Morris. I won’t let you down.”

“You wouldn’t have time to even if you wanted to.”

He smiled at us both and left the room. We were alone. As soon as the door closed I had my hands on my hips, getting up in Parker’s face.

“What’s the big idea, anyway?”

Lance just stood there like a statue, his mouth opening and closing but no words coming out. “Huh?”

“Last night, dummy. Giving me a fake name like that. Do that to every girl, eh?”

“To be clear, Miss Calloway, it was my last name I gave you.”

“Factually correct, ‘Mr. Parker,’” I countered with.

“And we both know, Charlotte,” he said, emphasizing my name in a way that would have made me swoon if I wasn’t so mad at him already, “that factually correct is the best kind of correct.”

“Be that as it may, Lance, that whole nonsense about having two last names was just a game to you?”

“Uh, yeah, wasn’t it to you too? We were flirting at a club, I didn’t think it really mattered what we said.”

I looked down, reaching up to pull an errant lock of hair back behind my ear. “OK, you have a good point there, fine. But still, you should have told me your real name.”

“I just didn’t want you to know who I was.”

“You didn’t want me to know who you were? The starting quarterback of the New England Patriots?” Now I pointed at him, hard, poking him in that perfectly chiseled chest of his, the chest I’d pressed myself against over and over while riding his cock a few hours ago. “Don’t you think I should have known that from the start?”

Lance stayed standing there, letting me poke him. “I just didn’t want you taking me home for the wrong reasons.”

“The wrong reasons?!”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to sleep with you just because you wanted to get with a pro athlete.”

“You think that’s what I wanted? To have a one night stand with a professional football player? Do you even know me?”

Lance laughed, his laugh warm and rich and sexy and gorgeous and I could not believe how much I both hated Lance Parker and wanted to jump into his arms right at that moment. “No, Charlotte, I don’t know you at all. But I had to plan for the possibility that you recognized me and that all you wanted was a night with a starting quarterback.”

“Well, that’s not what I was looking for.”

“Well, you got it, even so.” He thought about it a second. “Would that have changed anything if you had known?”

“Maybe. Yes, it would.”

“Really?”

“Of course it would, I’m not some athlete-chaser! I’m not interested in being ‘the girl from last night,’ indistinguishable from ‘the girl for tonight.’” I even made the air quotes at the right time, which I was momentarily proud of. It’s the little things that matter.

Lance laughed again. “Now who’s pretending they know all about whom?”

I bit my lip and kept silent for a second. “You’re right, that was a little unfair of me, I apologize.”

“Thank you.” Lance looked around like he was surveying the place. “Everything here to your liking?”

“What? Oh, yeah,” I looked around too. “Everything seems in order, I’ll know if I need anything when we get started working together.”

“Seems like we already started working together last night, didn’t we?”

I knew my face must have exploded in crimson at Lance’s words. He stood back and laughed again. “Let me be very clear, Lance Parker,” I said, sticking my finger in his face and waving it back and forth, like I meant business, because, you know, I actually did mean business. “If I had known that we would be working together, regardless of your chosen occupation, last night would have gone very differently. Are we clear?”

He leaned in, and I could feel his warmth on me, his smell taking me over. I wanted to collapse in his arms right then and there; the room was filled with good places for us to fuck. Sigh. “I am well aware of that, Miss Calloway. And let’s be clearer - I can keep things professional if you can, understood?”

“Loud and clear, Lance Parker. Professional it is.”

“Great.” Lance moved back and lifted up his wrist, looking at his watch. So few people wore watches these days, I kinda liked that Lance still did. “I gotta go, I have a QB meeting in a few minutes.”

“Sure. I’ll be here setting up.”

“Great. Schedules are all on the wall so you’ll know when we’ll be coming in, barring anything unforeseen.”

“We?”

“Primarily me, yeah, but we have another QB on the roster, as a backup. Oliver Lee. They took him in the third round this year. I haven’t really talked to him much.”

I figured that. Football teams, and sports teams in general, were a little weird - you had to have at least two of every position on your roster to account for the possibility of injury, but it wasn’t like the two quarterbacks would ever be friends. One was trying to keep his job, the other was secretly hoping the other would fail so he could come in and save things. It was more than a little odd.

“Got it. Just the two quarterbacks this year, then.” At least there would be fewer men in tight pants on my watch. I guessed that was a good thing.

“Yeah, though one of us is all you’ll need.” He cocked his eye at me when he said it, and I felt new waves of lust pulse through me.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Lance’s eyes widened in surprise. He definitely wasn’t used to dealing with a woman with spine.

“Don’t do that thing.”

“What thing?”

“You know what I mean, Lance, don’t do that thing where you turn me on.”

He laughed again. “I’m turning you on right now?”

“You know you are, you know how much I want you, don’t give me that. This job is really important to me, and I need to make the best of it. Please don’t give me a hard time about what happened last night.”

“Interesting choice of words, there, Calloway. ‘Hard time.’ Very interesting, indeed.”

“Shut up!” I knew I was blood red all over again. This was going to be impossible.

“I couldn’t help it, you just made it too easy.”

“I’ll be on the lookout in the future against that.”

“Don’t, it’s more fun this way.”

“Not for me, Lance!” I almost-yelled, needing him to understand this. “Look, you’re a made man around here, you can come and go as you please. I’m just the training staff, I can be replaced and no one will remember I was even here in a couple days. I need this job. I moved here from far away just to do this, not to end up in bed with an athlete.”

Lance got quiet. “I’m not here to jam you up, Charlotte, we both have the same goal. We both want New England to win a championship this year, right?”

I nodded.

“And though I’m out on the field and under the bright lights during the games, you’re nearly as important to that effort. If I can’t play, or can’t play effectively, then we don’t win. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“So I’m not here to make your job tougher. We’re on the same side on this one.” He stopped, then smiled. “But you gotta admit, this is fucking hilarious, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not! It’s terrible!”

“It’s a little funny. Come on, give me that.”

“OK, fine.” I really had a tough time disagreeing with such an earnest and gorgeous face. The name thing aside, it really didn’t seem like Lance had a disingenuous bone in his body. Of course, I didn’t really know him at all yet. “It’s a little funny,” I agreed, finally nodding.

“Thank you.”

Lance turned to go. “I have a meeting to get to.”

“Yeah.” He turned and was about to open the door. “Lance?”

He stopped and turned back around. “Yeah, Charlotte?”

“It was just a one time thing, right? Last night?” I tried to make it sound like I wasn’t hoping he’d rush over and kiss me, press me up against the wall and do naughty things to me instead of going to his meeting, but I wasn’t sure how successful I was.

Lance looked like that was the last question he wanted to answer. Why, I didn’t know. “Charlotte, I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“I have a very strict rule that I live by during the season.”

“Go on.” I didn’t know where he was going with this, but I had nowhere else to be right now.

“During the season I don’t date, I don’t go out. I even live here at the facility. I try and do as little as possible that isn’t football.”

“So, you’re like a football monk?” The words just came out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about them.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I’m a football monk for 5 months of the year, and the rest of the time I can have a life.”

“How come? That’s a lot of time closed off from the rest of the world.”

Lance shrugged. “It’s all I know how to do. I’ve never been good at dealing with stress, it really works me over. So a few years back, in college, I figured it out - minimize the stress, maximize the performance. It worked and I stuck with it.”

“And you’ve never thought to change that rule?”

“No, it got me where I am today. I wouldn’t be standing here, one of the 32 starting quarterbacks in pro football, if I hadn’t started sticking to that rule.”

“It just seems kinda…robotic, and that’s not just coming from someone interested, interested…” I trailed off, not knowing how to continue.

“Interested in…?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. I’m a dumb football player, Charlotte, spell it out for me.”

“In seeing if last night was a one time thing or not.”

“Charlotte, we can re-enact last night on any number of these training tables right fucking now, if you want. I’m down.”

“No, no, no, that’s not what I meant,” I said, inwardly thrilled that he had said that. I really needed to get ahold of myself. “I meant getting to know each other. For real.”

“We’re bound to get some of that as the year goes on. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other.” He smiled. “In particular, you’re going to be seeing a lot of me, and more importantly, touching a lot of me.”

“You know, there are any number of things in this room I can use to stab you with. You know that, right?”

“Peace, Calloway, peace. I know, and like I said, I’m not here to jam you up. I know this is an important job and I’ll try to be on my best behavior.” He narrowed those gorgeous dark eyes of his. “But, just to let you know, you don’t make that easy.”