Blindsided
Authors: Jami Davenport
Tags: #Sports Romance, Football Romance, Athelete, Marriage of Convenience
Chapter 2—Flushed out of the Pocket
Chapter 4—Scrambling out of the Pocket
Chapter 10—Running Down the Field
Chapter 15—Driving for the Score
Chapter 21—Working in the Trenches
BLINDSIDED (SEATTLE STEELHEADS FOOTBALL)
GAME ON IN SEATTLE SERIES #6
By Jami Davenport
Copyright © 2015 by Cedrona Enterprises
All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this book ONLY. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Jami Davenport. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
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This book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning
This book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. This book is for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.
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The daughter of one-time rock legends, Emma Maxwell is the good girl of the family, the dutiful sister, the doting aunt, and a dedicated employee in the family party-crashing business. Every Wednesday night at Karaoke, she indulges in her secret fantasy of being a singer. Yet the thrill of being on stage doesn't rival the thrill of a spontaneous liaison with the delectable, yet downtrodden, quarterback of the Seattle Steelheads, Tanner Wolfe, Emma’s long-time crush.
Tanner didn't see it coming--not any of it. He was blindsided--by his dysfunctional family, his plummeting career, and the one thing he least expected--by love. After photos with Emma go viral, Tanner is caught in a lie and tells a bigger one to get out of it. Now he’s shoulder-pads deep in a temporary marriage while struggling to resurrect his disastrous career and reunite his broken family. As time passes, Tanner begins to wonder if temporary is good enough, but he’s made a promise to Emma, one which has nothing to do with marriage vows and everything to do with her Nashville singing career and the end of their relationship.
Will Tanner and Emma take the ball and drive for the win, or will they be permanently relegated to the sidelines as the clock runs out on their temporary marriage?
DEDICATION
A huge thanks to Yvonne and RJ for dropping everything and being there when I needed you.
Emma Maxwell was the first to admit to being a hopeless romantic. She believed in love at first sight, and she believed when she saw “The One,” she’d know it. Birds would sing. Harps would play. Her heart would recognize its soul mate. And Emma suspected she’d found him.
For that very reason, she fought off several Greeks to get a front row seat in the student section right behind the players’ bench. Pleased at her rare display of aggressiveness, she settled into the plastic bleacher seats at Husky Stadium, ignoring the glares of the Sigma Pi whatevers. Next to Emma sat her twin sister, Avery, who’d been rendered speechless after witnessing Emma’s triumph over the frat boys. Even in their drunken state, they dared not mess with a woman on a mission.
The sun glinted off the boats bobbing in the small bay off Lake Washington. A slight breeze kept the late summer day from being too hot, but Emma wasn’t here for boats or a water view.
She was here for
him
.
She raised her binoculars as the team ran onto the football field for their home opener and spotted him immediately. Tanner Wolfe, quarterback, was last year’s freshman sensation. He’d led the University of Washington Huskies aka Dawgs to a Bowl game and third place in the conference. Everyone expected big things this year of the boy who was barely a man. He carried a lot of weight on those broad shoulders of his, and he did it with a confident smile and easygoing attitude.
Emma had always been intuitive. While she’d never claim to be psychic or clairvoyant, she
knew
things. After what she’d been through with her first love, she’d thought a harmless crush on a campus celebrity might be the best thing to happen to her. Yet when her infatuation on the quarterback continued through his freshman year—her senior year in high school—she began to wonder.
What she was feeling didn’t feel like a crush, if felt like—
Love
.
Emma followed Tanner’s every move through his warm-ups. When he came to the sidelines for the kickoff and removed his helmet, he turned to squint up into the crowd. Their eyes met briefly, and Emma
knew
.
Yes, she knew.
From that moment forward, Tanner Wolfe held her heart in his big hands.
Even if he didn’t know it and never would.
Five Years Later
Tanner Wolfe lived in fear every single day, a fear no one saw, a fear that haunted his dreams, and crushed the life out of his happiness.
Tanner was a fraud. A big, fat fucking fraud. Not that he was really fat. Instead he was six-foot-four of pure muscle and crazy-good athletic talent. And sometimes—most of the times—he hated himself for it.
People thought he was amusing and charming and completely unflappable. He wasn’t—not deep down where it actually counted. Instead he was the total opposite, hoping like hell the word never got out that his devil-may-care attitude was as fake as his come-on lines and broad smile. Women didn’t seem to mind the fake part, and most of the time Tanner told himself he didn’t give a shit either.
Most of the time
.
But what about the other times? What if he was exposed for the fake he was and his protective outer layer was skinned down to the raw, black ugliness that dwelled inside him?
His teammates and fans would hate him, and his on-going campaign to make everyone love him would crash and burn just like the rest of his life had lately. He’d survived a lot of stuff in his twenty-four years, but he didn’t think he could survive being exposed. His charm was all he had, that and an overabundance of fake arrogance and contrived confidence most people couldn’t see through. It’s no surprise in the age of texting and tweeting, that no one cared enough to look beyond the surface. Everyone was wrapped up in their separate lives—just like Tanner.
Or at least like he once was.
Then things changed. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t know exactly when, but if he had to pinpoint the why and the when, he suspected his world shifted the day he’d heard his hockey-playing brother had been traded to the Seattle Sockeyes, the same town where Tanner played professional football. Even worse, he’d found out about Isaac the same day he’d thrown an interception with ten seconds left on the clock to lose the last game of the Steelheads’ umpteenth losing season. Possibly Tanner’s last game as a starting quarterback. He’d had two years to prove himself, and he’d done a piss-poor job of it.
On that day, the scales fell off his eyes, and he saw the light. His carefully constructed life was all a façade. His goals, his dreams, his future, once taken for granted, were getting more and more out of reach, like one of those nightmares where the harder a guy runs to escape the monster, the deeper the quicksand gets, and the slower he goes. It didn’t help that team management drafted a hotshot rookie quarterback in the first round on the same day big brother signed a huge, long-term contract with the Seattle Sockeyes. Tanner had just been served notice by his team and by his life.
Thank you, throwing arm, and thank you, asshole big brother
. In their screwed up, uber-competitive sibling rivalry, Isaac had beaten him to the punch once again.
Tanner was an involuntary member of the Wolfe Pack—the nickname the press used when referring to the three brothers who played professional baseball, football, and hockey. Damaged souls every last one of them, rooted in their proverbial dysfunctional family in which what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. They were all strong on the surface, and weak as newborn babies underneath.
But Tanner never exposed his belly, not since his mom died, not since he’d learned that weakness angered his father and got him either the belt or running laps until he threw up and/or passed out from exhaustion.
Isaac’s move to Seattle had been months ago, and things hadn’t gotten better as winter gave way to spring. Early June in Seattle proved to be a warm, sunny one, but Tanner couldn’t shake the ominous feeling his life was about to change, and not necessarily in a good way. As his buddy Hunter liked to say, adversity and change force a guy to grow and become a better man.
Whatever.
When his agent Mark Beedle called to report the breaking news, Tanner put on his game face even as his insides churned, while those two bacon burgers he ate for dinner plotted their escape from his stomach.
“Are you sitting down?” the bastard said. His agent had a well-deserved rep as a ruthless jerk, though his wife and business partner was even scarier.
“I am now,” Tanner said as he sank his butt onto a plush couch in his Seattle high-rise. He stared out the wall of windows, but the beauty of an early Seattle summer escaped his notice. Not even the orange and purple sunset over the Olympic Mountains reflecting on Puget Sound caught his attention.
“The Steelheads have been sold.”
Tanner stopped breathing as he attempted to process what this meant for him and his team. Everyone knew the slimy owner and his fat-assed, lazy sons had bled the team dry then attempted to move them out of town. The league had been not-so-secretly trying to oust them from ownership for the past five years. When the Steelheads drafted Tanner in the first round two years ago, he’d cringed even though he put on a good public face. Playing football for the Steelheads was like being sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.