Wrapped Up: A Triple Threat Sports Romance (8 page)

Brooke

It happened. The sexual tension between us had grown to the point that we couldn’t fight it any longer. There was no denying it anymore. There was no denying my attraction to him, or that I had thought about him so often over the years since we broke up. He’d had me in his bed, and he’d given himself to me as well.

I had wanted it. I had wanted it since the first time I saw him in that damn grocery store. But that didn’t mean we should have done it. I couldn’t have guaranteed that my decision was completely my own. I had been drinking wine all night and worrying about the injury I had watched him sustain on the field during their first game. I knew that he was going to be worried about that injury once he woke up and got his head cleared from the pain meds the doctors gave him before sending him home. I had been under a lot of stress from fighting with my dad to having a real fight with Jake, from trying to figure out how to make our fake relationship work to the incident with my tire.

We shouldn’t have slept together. Our relationship was supposed to be a purely business transaction. It wasn’t supposed to be personal in any way, and yet, there we were, fucking on the bed the night after his first game.

I couldn’t deny how much it had turned me on to see him vulnerable before me, though. The night he’d gone out drinking, I’d caught a glimpse of how he really felt about me. I had suspected it the whole time. I knew he valued my company beyond our little arrangement, and when he came home apologizing for leaving me there alone, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cared.

Then, to see him come home hurt and in need of more than just medical attention, I had been unable to help myself. I had thrown myself at him. No matter what, Jake was always going to be mine. And I had to get that thought out of my head, right away, if we were going to make our arrangement work.

Real relationships were so flawed, and we were also so flawed, that there was no way we would be able to make a real relationship between the two of us work long enough to get what we needed out of our marriage. Physical attachment was a mistake. It would lead to an emotional attachment, and that would undo us.

I woke up next to him, and he hadn’t moved all night. He still lay next to me snoring. Apparently, he needed the sleep so much that even the pain in his leg wasn’t enough to wake him up. I slid out of the bed and hurried to my room.

I hadn’t been able to sleep all night. I lay in bed next to him, feeling him and listening to him beside me. I dozed off a few times, but when morning finally came with sunlight through the window, I knew it was time to go before he had a chance to wake up and realize what we had done.

I grabbed some clothes and threw them into a bag. I threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. I figured I could shower at the gym at the office before going in. I didn’t want to shower at the house. I didn’t want him to find me still there.

I needed time to think about what we had done. I wanted him to have to take some time to think about it, too, before he came to talk to me, but I knew he would end up coming to the office once he realized I wasn’t there.

I dreaded the coming conversations.

What we had done was wrong, and when Hollie prepared the prenuptial agreement for me, I was going to make sure she included a couple of clauses about our sexual behavior. We were to have no more sexual relations. If he needed to get laid, he’d have to go out and find some skank at a bar or something, or pick up some tramp off the street. I didn’t care. I just knew we couldn’t sleep together again.

Sex threatened to undermine the whole thing. Part of what had kept me up overnight was having to sort through my emotions. By sleeping with him, I had forced myself to remember how I had felt when we broke it off the first time.

For years, it had felt like we had unfinished business between us. I had buried that feeling in my work, and I had given myself over to my career completely. I had assumed he had done the same. The last thing either one of us needed at the moment was to let our old emotions cloud our judgement moving forward.

I hurried into the building at work, realizing I was there before anyone else. I ran downstairs to the gym and hit the shower. The hot water washed over my tired, sleepless body.

I could still feel him inside me.

“It’s all in your head, Brooke,” I said with a groan, trying to convince myself that I was just imagining it.

But no, I could still feel him. My body ached to have him in me again. My tits ached for his hands to touch them again. I leaned my head against the tile wall. There were so many things I wanted to do with him in bed, but I knew that we couldn’t do any of those things if we were to continue pursuing our business arrangement.

“Fuck the arrangement,” I yelled in the shower with my eyes closed.

I wanted Jake, but I didn’t know what to do about it anymore. I didn’t know if I should have just given in or if I should have just walked away at that point. The only thing that made sense was washing the sex away and going to work. Work was great for burying my emotions and ignoring my feelings.

I turned off the water and put on my work clothes. As I buttoned my blouse and pulled up my skirt, the world outside the walls of my father’s office building disappeared. Well, it didn’t disappear; it changed. It was no longer full of people like Jake Hall. It was full of customers, investors, and consumers. It was full of business opportunities.

I took a deep breath and looked at myself in the mirror over the sink as I did my hair and makeup for the day. I was no longer the vulnerable little girl trying to figure out where she stood in a relationship that had ended ten years ago.

I was the powerful boss of a multi-million-dollar nationwide operation. I was the founder’s daughter and future owner of Scott Enterprises. I could remember when the company was founded, and I had watched my father build it from the ground up. I had then proceeded to climb the tower from the ground up myself.

I was ready to take on the world and leave my thoughts of Jake Hall behind.

Jake

I woke up alone. It was to be expected. It would have been nice to wake up with Brooke next to me in my bed, but I wasn’t surprised to find that she had left me there either at some point overnight or in the morning. I wasn’t even surprised when I went to her room, knocked on the door, and didn’t get a response. I crept in and found an empty bed.

I still wasn’t surprised. I knew where she was. She had run off to her safety net. She was a bit of a workaholic, a little too devoted to her job at times, but as a professional athlete, I couldn’t really fault her for it. It was pretty hard to climb up to the top without that kind of devotion.

I decided to go to her office to talk to her about what happened between us the night before. I was torn between keeping things purely professional and exploring what could have been if we hadn’t given up on each other so easily after high school. Our arrangement would have given us the perfect opportunity if we would just not run from it.

I took an elevator up to her floor and walked passed the receptionist, who was trying to say something to me about how I couldn’t enter. She must not have received the memo that I was her boss’s fiancé. I wasn’t sure which office was hers, but I was going to make my presence known. Someone would eventually tell me where she was.

As I passed men and women in suits, I did receive a few confused looks as people recognized me but couldn’t figure out why I was in their office building. It was amusing that no one had the gall to speak to me. My presence was so out of the ordinary, no one knew how to deal with it.

I found Brooke in a large office overlooking the neighboring buildings. She stood at the windows behind her desk when I entered. Even in her business skirt and suit jacket, I remembered all too well what the body underneath had looked like the night before. I felt my desire starting to grow again.

The clean top of her desk would have been the perfect surface for round two. There was just a small lamp to push aside, and we would have had enough room. The walls on either side of her office were lined with shelves, mostly full of books and plaques that Brooke or the company had earned over the years.

I understood bookshelves in someone’s home providing a place for their private collections, but I never understood why so many executives had books lining their office walls. It was obvious for teachers, doctors, lawyers, and the like, whose professions relied heavily on having printed resources available. I wondered what Brooke had on her shelves other than the section of company records collected in binders.

I was able to approach her desk before she said anything or even seemed to notice I was there. Whatever it was she was focusing on at the window had her full attention.

“Brooke,” I said in a calm, gentle tone as I reached her desk.

She jumped, startled, and turned around. Her beautiful blue eyes still had a distracted look in them. They barely focused on me.

“What are you doing here?” she asked in a distant tone.

“We need to talk,” I said, trying to infuse a sense of urgency into my voice to hopefully wake her out of her little mini-trance.

“What about?” Her voice started to sound more grounded. Her eyes focused on me clearly.

“About last night, what else?” I asked.

“No, not here.” She started to step around her desk. She reached a hand out to take my arm and led me back to the door of her office.

“What do you mean, not here? You’re the one who fled to work,” I said in a low tone, trying not to let everyone on the floor hear our conversation. I didn’t want to embarrass her.

“I mean
not here
. Yes, I’m at work, and if you want to talk business, that’s fine. But our personal issues can be handled after work. Now, I will talk to you tonight,” she insisted.

“Fine. I’ll be home. It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” I told her, turning to leave. I felt her eyes on me as I walked away from her office and left her standing in front of the office door.

While I stormed off, I couldn’t help but feel impressed by how stony and professional she could be when she needed to be. I also couldn’t believe she’d turned me away the way she had. It was as if I wasn’t her fiancé, as if we didn’t have to keep up appearances for everyone, even at her office. Especially at work! Any of the company’s employees could have gone to Mr. Scott to tell him what was going on between us.

I was used to women falling all over me. I was a pro athlete. I was one of the team’s star players. I was Jake Hall, dammit. Women didn’t turn me down or make me feel like I had to wait in line, not for any reason at all. Seeing how her priorities were stacked up made me want her even more.

I found myself thinking about her all day, from the time I left the office until I realized I had spent most of the day on the couch in front of the TV, wondering if our sex was on her mind all day. When I checked my watch for the millionth time, I realized I’d been checking it pretty regularly all day.

I couldn’t get her off my mind, and I wasn’t sure why. Normally, sex signaled the end of the road for me. It was usually the only reason I kept someone around, and once it happened, it was time to move on. With Brooke, it had felt right, like it was supposed to happen. It didn’t feel new. It felt like we were just sliding back into old habits, back into a comfortable routine we had abandoned too early.

I supposed one of the reasons I was making so much out of our arrangement was because she was the one who got away. Brooke Scott was the one I had always wondered about. I had wondered what would have happened if we had stuck together, or if one of us had chosen a different school to stay closer so we could continue to grow.

I laughed at myself. I was being melodramatic and overly analytical about the whole thing. It was just a business arrangement. I needed a steady girl on my arm for a positive image, and she needed a husband so she could inherit her father’s company. The fact that we had a history should have been making this easier, but it only seemed to be complicating things.

I decided to take a different approach, though. I wasn’t going to continue trying to woo her into bed. We might have moved too quickly with sex, for her taste anyway. I needed to be subtler with her if I wanted to make our arrangement and budding relationship actually work. I figured instead of forcing her into an awkward confrontation when she got home from work, I would whisk her away to a nice dinner.

I called ahead and made reservations at a nice, cozy restaurant in the heart of the city. I got up from the couch and started getting ready. The doctors had recommended staying off my feet unless absolutely necessary for the next few weeks, and standing to get myself ready for the evening was definitely painful, but I figured Brooke counted as a necessity.

I heard the door around the time I expected her to come home.

“I’m home. What do you want to talk about?” she snapped.

“Nothing. We’re going to dinner,” I said, greeting her dressed for our surprise date.

“What?” Anger and confusion ran across her face.

“Dinner first. Let me do this,” I urged her as a way of countering any protests. I gently guided her back to the door with a hand on her arm.

“Wait a minute, what’s going on?” she asked, and pulled her arm away from my grip.

I took a deep breath. “Look, I feel bad for last night. The way you left this morning told me you weren’t ready for things to move forward so fast. I want to make it up to you with dinner. I want to show you I’m not just trying to take advantage of our arrangement to get you into bed. So, let me treat you to dinner.”

“That’s better,” she said in a gentler tone, but she still kept her distance from me.

We definitely had some work to do to repair the damage that had been done by our actions the night before. I felt like we needed to go ahead and fully define the nature of our relationship before everything blew up in our faces. If we kept going the way we were right then, that was the fate we were looking at.

My driver waited for us in front of the house with the back door open. Brooke slid into the car and across the backseat first. I slid in beside her. She sat across from me, an arm on the other door, her face turned towards the window. She rode like that into town and all the way to the restaurant. She only backed off the door as the driver pulled up to the curb and opened her door to let us out.

“I look like I’m going to a business dinner,” she remarked as I got out of the car behind her.

“No, you look fine,” I assured her.

“You’re just saying that so I’ll go along with your date,” she said. I wasn’t sure where the confrontational attitude was coming from, but it presented a welcome challenge.

“No, I’m saying it because you’re beautiful, and no matter what you wear, you are a model of feminine perfection,” I told her.

She squeezed my arm. “Not quite as poetic as I remember you being in high school, but that was still pretty good,” she whispered.

As we approached the door, I caught the flash of a camera. Then, suddenly, a couple of other cameras flashed around us. We weren’t exactly surrounded, but several photographers came out of nowhere. I heard one of them trying to ask questions about what we were doing out together.

“What is this?” Brooke asked me, repulsed by the scene.

“News of my injury must have gotten out. Add that to the fact that I called and made reservations, and you’ve got paparazzi waiting to ambush us. I’m sorry. Just stick with me and don’t say anything.” I wrapped an arm around her, pulling her away from the cameras and protectively taking her under my wing.

I wanted them to get
some
pictures of her. I wanted there to be
some
speculation in the papers and tabloids. That was the whole point of having an arrangement to put a steady chick on my arm. But at the same time, I wanted to keep her hidden away from the vultures as much as possible. She was more than just a pretty face, hot legs, and a nice ass.

If she had been just another woman, I would have thrown my arm around her waist to pose for a few shots. Then again, that was the kind of stunt that had our team in the predicament we were in with the new owner. The images of this new interest, however, would show that I was more serious about her by showing how protective I was being over her. Unfortunately, the paparazzi were a fact of my life that she had to look forward to nearly every time we went out. At least during football season. Or whenever there was additional news surrounding me, like a possibly career-threatening injury.

Luckily, Brooke seemed like the kind of woman who would rise to the occasion and use the attention for her own benefit as well, showing her father and other important business partners how serious we were and how photogenic she could be.

We pushed through the crowd gathering around the photographers. I opened the door to the restaurant and held it to let her in before letting it close behind me.

“Mr. Hall,” a young man said, greeting us as we entered the restaurant.

“Yeah, whoever told them we were going to be here…” I started, shaking my head. I was going to suggest that they needed to be fired for tipping off the self-proclaimed reporters outside, but I knew that was a bit much.

“I understand, and I do apologize.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s just one of those annoyances that come with the job, you know? I just hope they got something for their efforts,” I said, putting on a friendly smile as we were shown to our table.