Wrapped Up: A Triple Threat Sports Romance (7 page)

Brooke

I was engrossed in the world of Jane Austen in the wealthy English countryside when I noticed Jake standing in front of me. I had no idea how late it was, but he looked like he’d been out drinking all night. He stared at me like a lost puppy. A sad, lost, green-eyed puppy.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t home,” he said.

“You shouldn’t be,” I assured him. “Did you find your dinner?”

“I did, and I’m sorry you had to cook and eat alone. That’s not right. I owe you more respect than that, even just as an old friend,” he continued.

I closed the book and gave him a kind smile. “You don’t owe me anything, Jake. Did you enjoy what I cooked for you?”

“It was some of the best steak I’ve ever eaten,” he told me. I detected a slight slur in his speech, and I knew I had been right at first. He’d been out drinking, probably with a couple of guys from the team.

“Well, I’m glad you liked it. You should probably get to bed. You’ve got an early day ahead of you tomorrow with practice, I’m sure.” It was all I could do to keep my tone even and professional. This was business. My visit with Jane Austen had been personal. My conversations with Jake were not. It needed to stay that way.

“I do have an early start, but I’m also going to start letting you know where I am and what I’m up to, so you’re not sitting at home waiting for me to return from practice, or a game, or whatever,” he said.

“That’s fine.”

“I’d like for you to do the same. I think it’s only fair if we keep up with each other, you know, just in case anyone asks.”

“I think that’s fair,” I said slowly. I figured it was okay to agree with him since he probably wouldn’t remember in the morning, but I didn’t know how I felt about letting him keep up with me like that. My father didn’t even know where I was if I wasn’t at his house or at the office. Even then, he didn’t always know when I was at the office. I sort of came and went as I pleased. It was what I’d done for most of my adult life.

I had been responsible for myself since I was in school. While my father had been building his empire, I had been forced to fend for myself. He had his work, and school had been my work, making it my sole responsibility.

I wasn’t fond of the idea of having an authority figure of any kind over me, and that was exactly what it felt like was happening again. I knew he didn’t mean it that way, but it felt like I was granting him authority over my movements. I wasn’t really okay with that, but he didn’t seem to be in a good state to really discuss it at that moment. Any discussion would have to wait until he was sober.

“Okay, it’s settled, then. Good night, Brooke.”

“Good night, Jake.”

He looked so pitiful as he turned and walked back out of the room. It was odd to watch someone so big and strong stand with slumped shoulders and a lost look in his sparkling green eyes. I chalked it up to the alcohol in his system. It was amusing to see him put himself in such a vulnerable position.

I left Jane Austen in the armchair and cut off the lamp on the table before leaving the room. I was going to turn in as well. I figured once he was through with practice and I came back from work the next day, we would be able to talk about monitoring each other a little more.

Work ended up taking me out of town to meet with one of my father’s business partners the next day after lunch, so I decided to text Jake to let him know when I would be home for dinner. I wanted to give his plan a shot to see how it felt to let him keep up with me.

Going to a meeting out of town after lunch. Will be home around seven tonight.

The world didn’t explode after I texted him. Nothing happened. It did feel a little strange, a little foreign to be so connected with someone for the first time ever, but other than that, everything was fine. Part of me felt like I would eventually get used to it. Another part of me wanted to scream and run away.

I was torn between the comfortable feeling of being kept and the anxiety of being controlled. I wasn’t sure how long our
relationship
was going to work out if I had to do that every day, or every time I left the house, or at all. It was one thing to let him know if I was going to be late, it was another thing entirely to let him know what I was doing at all times.

I tried not to let it bother me as I drove out to meet with one of my father’s oldest partners. We were trying to work out a new investment deal in the company. Mr. Edwards wanted to change the amount of money he was putting into our operations, and I was heading out with some documents prepared by the company’s finance department. I offered to have our financial directors meet with him, but Mr. Edwards had insisted on meeting just with me or with my father.

The drive out to his old ranch-style home wasn’t that bad. The meeting even went well. I’d met with Mr. Edwards before with my father, but it was the first time in the five years since my father retired that he wanted to make any changes to his investment. He wanted to put more money in so he could get more money out, but he wanted to look over the portfolio from the last few years. He wanted to see how we had been doing and what we were doing to ensure continued growth given the stagnant state of the current market.

He had pledged to invest more money before I left, which I knew would please my father as much as it pleased me. Mr. Edwards had been one of our top investors for as long as I could remember.

On the way back, however, things didn’t go so well. A few miles out of town, I heard a loud pop underneath the car. Then, I heard the blown tire flapping on the road as I drove. I slowed down and pulled off to the side of the road.

I had no bars, no service on my phone.

There was no chance I could get ahold of Jake, or anyone else, to come out and help me, and all I could think about was how I hadn’t told Jake exactly where I was going to be. He knew I was going to be a little late getting home, but he had no idea where I was.

I had a spare, but I had never changed a tire before in my life. I had no idea how to even start to do it. I was also dressed for work, so getting someone else to do it for me was definitely preferable to doing it myself.

I sat in the car and stared at my phone, waiting for a signal to just magically appear, but I was in a dead zone. The signal didn’t even fluctuate.

I had told him I was going to be home by a certain time, dammit, and I was determined to do everything I could to get home by that time. I popped the trunk and got out of the car, leaving my suit jacket in the passenger seat.

In heels and a skirt, I drug the spare tire out of the trunk and rolled it over to the passenger side rear tire. I grabbed the jack and the tire iron. I placed the jack under the back of the car and inserted the tool to turn it and lift the car.

I was just guessing at that point. I didn’t know if I was doing anything correctly, but when the car started to lift off the ground, I figured I was doing something right. Once the wheel was off the ground, I took the tool and put it on the lug nuts. I tried to loosen them, but not a single one would come loose.

It was embarrassing to find myself stuck on the side of the road with no way to call for help and unable to do something that seemed as simple as changing my own damn tire. I checked my phone to see if I had enough signal to text Jake and let him know where I was.

It was after seven already. I was late getting home. I knew he would probably wonder where I was or what I was doing. He knew me well enough to assume I was just testing him, too, and that was probably the worst part of it.

I went back to the wheel but still couldn’t loosen anything.

I heard a car pull up behind me after trying for a few more minutes. The engine kept running as I heard the door close. I stood up with the tire iron in my hand, in case it was someone who planned on taking advantage of me.

It was Jake.

“How the hell did you find me?” I asked as I threw my arms around his neck.

“I called your father and asked who you would be going to see out of town for work. He told me where to find you,” he said. “Looks like you have a flat tire.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Can you help?”

He looked at me as if to say
you gotta be kidding me
. “Hand me the tire iron. I’ll get you fixed up in a jiffy.”

A few moments later, he was swapping out the tires and tightening the lug nuts on my spare. He tossed the tools and the blown tire into my trunk.

“We need to get you a new tire as soon as we can, like tomorrow. You don’t need to drive around on that doughnut too long,” he told me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you at home?”

“On my way.”

“Okay, I’ll see you there,” he said with a smile. He hopped in his Mercedes and waited for me to pull away first in my Kia. Even our choices in cars showed how differently we treated our money.

On the way back to his place, I saw the reasoning behind letting him know where I was. If I hadn’t told him as much as I had, he wouldn’t have been able to find me. In the future, I decided, I needed to tell him my schedule in more detail. It just seemed safer to let him know where I was and what I was doing.

I hated it, but it was a necessary evil.

Still, Jake had proven himself to be my hero, and it felt good to be going home with him. Those same big, strong arms that had worked on my car to replace my tire would have been perfect to wrap around me and hold me safely against his muscular body overnight.

He’d tried to hold me a few times already, but I had fought off the physical attachment. I didn’t know how much longer I could continue doing that. Eventually, it seemed like our appearance as a happy, loving couple would depend on our actually being a happy, loving couple. Things certainly seemed to be heading that way already.

Jake

As much as we tried to keep things professional and on a strictly business level, it felt like our lives were moving us closer and closer together. Maybe it was the fact that we already had a history that made us more open to it, but there was no denying that we kept moving in that direction.

Real relationships were so flawed, and they never seemed to work. One person always seemed to be more invested in it, or they wanted to move faster than the other person, and it just fell apart. Communication was harder with emotions involved. Brooke certainly would have agreed with me on that one. It was harder to voice concerns or desires with someone once love was involved.

As a real relationship, our looming marriage was doomed already. As a business transaction, we stood a chance at having a rather successful marriage. We were both very successful people already, and putting that together seemed like the perfect recipe for a successful life together.

But there was so much more to us than just our success. And it was all determined to come out in the open.

The first game of the season was a home game. Brooke had asked to come watch, so of course, I got her in. She sat with the owners in the suite they had at the stadium. They had the best seats in the house, and could watch through the windows or on the TV screens in the walls.

She got a close-up of my injury in the fourth quarter. Harley sent the ball soaring beautifully to me. I jumped up to grab it and before I landed, I had a defensive lineman’s shoulders in my ribs. It wasn’t the first time I’d ever been tackled, but I couldn’t remember ever being hit that hard in an actual game before.

I hit the ground and a sharp pain shot up my leg. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth against the bright white bolt that shot through my body. I was afraid to move. I let go of the ball and grabbed my leg to make sure it was at least bent in the right direction. I had seen some pretty nasty leg injuries over the years, and I didn’t want to be one of those guys getting carried off with a leg bent completely backwards.

Under my hands, my legs felt fine, but my right leg was
killing
me. I opened my eyes when Coach and a couple of other guys came out to grab me.

“Coach, I’m sorry,” was all I could say.

“Don’t worry about it, kid. You’ll be fine,” he assured me as they checked my leg and lifted me onto a board to carry me out.

The crowd was silent as they watched one of the team’s star players get carted off the field.

“Coach, tell my fiancée to go on home after the game. Tell her I’m going to get the team physician to look at me and I’ll meet her there,” I told him at the sideline before the guys carried me inside.

“Got it. I didn’t know you were engaged,” he said.

“Yeah, it just happened. I’ll tell you about it another time.” I winced. Even talking was painful. Every movement just made my leg hurt much more.

It was starting to feel cold, it hurt so much.

“What’s the word, doc?” I asked the physician after he looked at me.

“It’s not broken, but it’s not good either,” he said.

“Are you sure it’s not broken?” I asked.

“Yeah, the bone seems to be fine, but I think you tore the shit out of your muscles. It could heal on its own, but then again, it could be bad enough to need surgery.”

“Surgery?” That sounded like a career-ending injury, and it made me wonder. Had I been targeted for stepping away from the network? There was no way. I was one of the heads of the network.

The team physician hooked me up with some pain killers and a pair of crutches. He then told me to sit out at least the next three games to see how I was healing. He said I definitely needed to seek further medical attention if I wasn’t ready to get back on the field in three or four weeks.

Being off the field for that long was a terrifying thought. Realizing that my injury could easily have been threatening to my career was even worse.

On the ride home, in the back of the car, I had some time to think about what it would have meant to be out of the game for good. I had a marketing degree, but I didn’t have any real marketing experience. I had to start thinking of a backup plan, because being out of the game would have meant being out of the network, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow the network and the injury were related.

As coincidental as it seemed, it also didn’t seem right, not even for us.

The pain meds kicked in, and by the time I hobbled in the door, I wasn’t feeling anything.

“Oh my god, Jake, are you okay?” Brooke was up and running to the door as soon as my driver opened it for me to enter the house.

“Right now, I’m fine. When these meds wear off, I’m going to be hurting.” I laughed.

She took my face in her hands. “I saw what happened. I was so worried,” she said, and then it happened.

Our lips finally met, for the first time in over ten years. My hands on the crutches at my sides, unable to grab her, I was completely at her mercy while she kissed me. She held my face to hers in her thin hands and worked my lips over with her own. Our tongues met and reacquainted themselves with one another, and I could feel myself drifting towards her.

She pulled back and I could feel her lips curl into a smile against mine.

“It’s been too long,” she said.

“It has,” I agreed. “You taste like wine.”

“What else was I supposed to do while I waited?” she asked.

I smiled. “You taste even better than I remember,” I told her.

She kissed me again and wrapped her arms around my neck. I dropped my crutches and put my weight on my left foot as I wrapped my arms around her waist. Despite the pain I had been in, I felt my body responding appropriately to her advances. I pressed my hardening desire against her, and she rocked her hips against mine.

She turned and pulled my right arm over her shoulders to walk upstairs with me, leading me up to my room. She pushed the door open and let me fall back onto the bed.

“Jake Hall,” she said, standing before me, “I know this is just business, but it’s been coming since the night I saw you in the grocery store.” She pulled her silk pajama top off, revealing her perky breasts and hardening pink nipples.

She climbed onto the bed and began working the buttons on my shirt with her thin fingers. She spread my shirt open, exposing my chest to her hungry hands and lips. She rubbed my chest with those strong fingers and kissed my skin with her lips.

She worked my belt and pants open, sliding them down with my boxers to my feet and dropping them to the floor, exposing my hardened desire. She gripped me with her little hands and stroked me, bringing me up even harder.

Then, she kissed the tip of my head with her closed lips.

“Oh, Brooke,” I groaned, putting one of my hands in her long blonde hair and pushing her down gently on my shaft.

Her lips parted, and her mouth slid slowly down, taking all of me into her mouth, all the way to her throat. She pulled back, sucking on me the whole way, and then she came back down, taking me back into her mouth.

I felt her arms moving while she was dragging her lips along my shaft, and when she let me fall out of her mouth, she took me back in her hand and climbed up my body again with her lips, finding her way up to my mouth again.

I held the back of her head with both of my hands, and she held my shaft with one of hers, guiding me in between her wet lips. She slid her hips down onto me, and I could feel her muscles tightening to grip me just as her fingers had done a moment before.

I was inside her. I grabbed her hips and pulled her down onto me, pushing myself up into her at the same time. Her body shook above me, and she pulled her breath in sharply between her teeth as she sat up.

“Damn, baby,” I said, “you’re still tight as hell.”

She bit her lower lip and moaned as she rocked herself against me. She ran her hands up her sides and grabbed her perky tits while she rode me.

“Fuck me, Jake,” she said. “Fuck me like you used to.”

I pushed my hips up against hers and started rocking her back and forth along my shaft with my hands against her hips. I controlled her movements, and she gasped with each thrust.

I felt her body jerk as I rocked her harder and faster against me.

“I’m going to come, Jake.” She lunged forward, putting both hands on my shoulders to hold herself up as she gasped and panted.

I felt her body clench against mine, and she whined as she slowly rocked her trembling hips against me.

I rolled her over so that I was on top of her, and I lifted her legs to expose her delicate sex to me better. I rammed into her and listened to her moan as she gripped the sheets.

I gripped her breasts and squeezed them under my thick fingers as I pressed myself deep inside of her.

“It’s my turn,” I told her in a heavy voice. I pushed harder and harder as I got closer and closer to letting myself go.

I pulled out and spread her legs so I could spill myself on her stomach. I looked down at her fair skin as I came onto the soft flesh just below her belly button. She arched her back and moaned as she squeezed her breasts and rolled her nipples between her fingers.

“Yes, Jake. Yes!” she called out as I worked myself out onto her stomach with my hand.

As I finished, I lay down next to her on my bed, my body spent, my head spinning from the exertion and the pain killers.

I felt her weight shift on the bed, assuming she was getting up to grab a towel. I felt it shift again, figuring she was getting back on the bed with me. I vaguely noticed her body pressing against mine as I drifted off to sleep, thinking I should have told her how much I enjoyed getting to have her again after all those years.

I never would have admitted it if it hadn’t been for the pain meds, but I had thought about her often over the years. The one who got away was back in my arms, and we were planning on getting married.