Scoring Her Heart

by Marquita Valentine

  “Then tell me if you’ve used those same lines on a woman before.”

  My ears grow hot. “Some of them.”

  Her delicately arched brows rise.

  “Most of them,” I concede. “But I really do want to get to know you. And hell yes, I want to take you bed. I’m attracted to you.”

  When she doesn’t respond, I try again.

  “How about we start this date over?” I ask, then stick out my hand. “Hi, I’m Dallas.”

  She laughs, disbelief written all over her face, but a beat later, she’s shaking my hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Paige.”

  “Are you from around here?”

  “I’m from North Carolina, but not Raleigh.”

  “Wow. A unicorn. I didn’t think you guys existed.”

  She smiles. “We’re slightly outnumbered by transplants in this area.”

  “Like me.”

  “Exactly.” She picks up her fork and begins to eat. “Where did you grow up?”

  “Michigan. In a town called Wyandotte. My dad worked for the steel mill and my mom was the secretary at the local elementary school. They’re both retired now.” I don’t tell her I made their retirement possible. My parents fully expected to work until they couldn’t, even with pensions. Now, they travel a little, visit my brother as often as they want, and enjoy their time together.

  “Do you miss them?”

  “Yeah. It’s nice to visit during bye week.”

  Her nose scrunches. “What’s bye week?”

  “One mandated week off, courtesy of the NFL.”

  “Every team takes off at the same time, like football’s version of spring break?”

  “Not exactly,” I reply with a chuckle. “They rotate who has off so the American public can still get their football fix on Sundays.”

  “Who knew?”

  “Finley Owen’s sister should, but she doesn’t enjoy watching football and barely knows anything about it.” I’m half teasing and half serious. How can she not like football?

  She rolls her eyes. “You know I didn’t mean it like that! I was only being honest.”

  “So was I.” I give her a look.

  “Fiiiine.” Her cheeks turn pink. “I’m a hypocrite. Happy?”

  “I forgive you.”

  “How magnanimous of you,” she says, but her lips are curving into one of her pretty smiles. “I forgive you, too.”

  “Knew you couldn’t resist me.” Even as she makes a face, I wink at her and earn another smile. It feels almost as good as scoring on the field. “All right, this is the question-and-answer portion of our date. Ask me anything.”

  “Anything at all?” she asks.

  “Yup, and you have to let me do the same.”

  With a mischievous glint in her eyes, she taps her cheek with one finger and pretends to think it over. “What’s your favorite memory as kid?”

  That’s what she wants to know about me? Not about my football career. Or what it’s like to be famous... none of that. I’m so surprised I have to stall for time. “There’s so many... give me a second.”

  Paige starts to hum the theme song to Jeopardy.

  “All right. All right. I got one.” I hold up a hand for her to stop, and she does. “My parents took us up North to a cottage on Lake Michigan. We swam until we were waterlogged, ate hot dogs slathered in coney sauce, and built a campfire. Roasted marshmallows. My mom hates S’mores, but she made them for us anyway. Then we played cards until bedtime.”

  “You have siblings?” She smiles, her eyes smiling right along with her.

  I swallow. “Older brother.” An image of Mikey appears in my brain, not exactly unwelcome. He’s healthy. Showing me the right way to throw the ball. Dad’s cooking on the grill. Mom is doing her thing inside...

  “Only one?”

  “Only one.” I take a drink, then push away the memories before they turn dark. “Your turn.”

  “There are three of us. I’m the middle child, but there’s seven years difference between my oldest sister and me, and my little brother and me. Mom calls us her lucky sevens. Coincidentally, she’s been married seven times as well.” She crosses her fingers on both hands and holds them up. “This last one seems to be sticking.”

  “Good for her?”

  Paige shrugs. “Either I judge her or love her. I chose love.”

  “That’s pretty fucking deep.”

  “It can be hard at times, but loving her is easier than staying bitter... like my... Bitterness breeds more bitterness,” she says.

  I get the feeling we’re not talking about her bitterness. Hell, I doubt Paige could stay bitter or even mad at someone. She just seems like one of those perpetually happy people. “You close to your sister and brother?”

  “Mostly. Finley basically raised us.” Her eyes round a little. “I mean, our mom was there, but she worked a lot and...” Shaking her head a little, she reaches for her drink and takes a sip. “No matter what I say, it won’t come out how I mean it. I love my family. We could be closer, but what we have, it works for us. What about you and your brother?”

  “He’s my idol,” I say truthfully. “I hope to be the man he always thought I could be.”

  “That’s a really nice compliment and a huge burden, too, I bet. Finley has these firm expectations of me and Bond—that’s my brother.”

  “Like what?”

  “For me—not to date bonehead athletes or any athletes at all. Ever.” She bites the side of her lip. “No offense.”

  That sounds like something her sister would say. “None taken.”

  “We also had to get good grades, get a job, go to college or trade school, and not get pregnant or get someone pregnant until we were married.”

  “Damn. That’s one strict sister.”

  “It’s how she rebelled against our mother.” Paige gets this faraway look in her eyes. “Our mom is this free spirit who loves love, baseball, and marriage, but has no clue how to be financially independent or stable. We never had bedtimes, never had to do homework... or had any rules really.”

  “My parents were so strict that I had a curfew in college, and I was expected to go to Mass each week.”

  “Did you live at home?”

  “Nope.” I grin. “They had plenty of spies to make sure I really was a good boy. For the most part, I was. I waited until after I graduated to become a really bad boy.”

  “Buck wild, huh?”

  I hold my pointer finger and thumb slightly apart. “Just a little.”

  She snorts. “I read about your just a little bad-boy ways.”

  “Swear that it’s all behind me now.” I draw an X over my heart. “It’s why I want a good girl like you to help me stay on the straight and narrow.”

  “I thought it was to help your friend?”

  “Oh yeah... that too.”

  She tilts her head to one side. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Your lines. Almost everything you say is contrived. Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re a nice guy, Dallas, but lines don’t work on me.”

  “Unless they’re poetry.” Or some dude in a pond.

  She gazes at me, all serious. “Only if they’re sincere. I don’t think you want to be sincere yet, and that’s okay. But that’s not for me. So... thanks for the great dinner and conversation, but I’m not the one who can help you and your friend.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Paige

  “How did it go?” Layton asks as I shuffle into the kitchen, yawning and stretching. Although I hadn’t gotten home late, Layton was already passed out for the night.

  “I told him I wasn’t the girl for him.” I rummage through the cabinet and pull out my guilty-pleasure box of Apple Jacks.

  “Yes, you are,” she insists as I sit down at the table. Pushing over an empty bowl and the milk, she shakes her spoon at me. “You are so his type that it’s not even funny.”

  “I might be his type, but
he’s not my type. All he did was give me a bunch of lines.”

  He also told me about his family.

  Made me laugh.

  Made me feel desired.

  At the end of the evening, which I cut short by not ordering dessert, he walked me out to my car to make sure I was safe. I still can’t get rid of the image of him in my rearview mirror, standing in the parking lot, bathed in the glow of the lights as he watched me drive away. He looked... disappointed.

  “So what?” Layton chomps down on her cereal and gives me the stink eye. “How many excuses are you going to come up with to avoid finding the right one?”

  “It’s not an excuse!”

  “When’s the last time you had a date?”

  “Last month.”

  Her eyes narrow. “Try six months ago.”

  “If you know, then why are you asking?”

  “What happened with him?”

  “He told me I owed him a blow job since he paid for dinner,” I remind her.

  She makes a face. “Okay, bad example. What about Davis—nice looking, full-time job, and wanted a serious girlfriend. Y’all dated for eight months and then poof, he was gone.”

  “I discovered he had a serious foot fetish.”

  Her nose scrunches. “We’re all... weird, Paige.”

  “His foot was not going up my vagina or ass. Or any other orifice he could think of.”

  “Ewww, my brain.” She closes her eyes and then opens them. “You never told me that. You just said things didn’t work out.”

  “I didn’t want that image in your head. Bad enough it was in mine.”

  She grabs my hand. “You’re so sweet.”

  “He did cheat on me, though, with a foot model he’d met online.” I shiver and pretend to gag. “That’s how I found out about his foot fetish. He left his browser open and his web cam on.” My only consolation was that he not only was a virgin who had only been intimate with me, in all things... but he also hadn’t met the foot model in real life yet, so I didn’t have to worry about what I could have caught from him, or them.

  Or his feet.

  Or her feet for that matter.

  “Oh, dear Lord. I don’t envy you at all.” She digs into the bowl of her guilty-pleasure box of Chocolate Puffs.

  Unlike Layton, who has been with her fiancé since they were practically kids, I was unapologetically late to the dating scene. I didn’t want to be like my mom, in love with love so much that men took advantage of her. I didn’t want to be like my sister either, jaded and unwilling to let any man get close to her. So I waited until after college to start dating and didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty-four.

  No, it wasn’t with Davis, the foot-fetish guy. My first time was with my very first boyfriend. A sweet guy from Alabama, who, as it turned out, had an even sweeter fiancée waiting on him back home.

  Let me just say that it did not feel good to find out I was the other woman—right after meeting his family at his grandmother’s eightieth birthday party. Apparently, only whores wearing slutty dresses tempted men into sinning.

  Okay, so maybe his fiancée wasn’t that sweet and maybe he wasn’t either, considering he was not only a cheater, but he was also a coward who didn’t know how to defend me.

  “Are you thinking about the birthday party again?”

  I flush. “Am I that easy to read?”

  Layton eyes me. “Well, you are wearing your slutty pajamas to breakfast.”

  Grabbing my box of cereal, I dig in it and toss some her way. She only ducks and laughs in response.

  “Why are we friends again?”

  “Because whores need saving?”

  This time, I threaten to throw the entire box at her. “Excuse me?”

  She waves her napkin like it is a flag of surrender. “Because we always stick up for each other, no matter what, and you’re the best friend a girl like me could ever have?”

  Mollified, I set the box down. “Don’t you forget it.”

  “I think you should give Dallas another chance.”

  “Can we stop talking about him? I’d like to eat in peace.”

  “You’re the one who’s going to have to be around him, not me,” Layton points out. “Nolan can’t help him with the charity event.”

  She has a point. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do my job.”

  “You know I love you,” Layton begins.

  Here we go...

  “But you have really unrealistic expectations of men. You want them to be like the guys you read about in romance novels, but honey, they’re mere mortals.”

  “I’m not looking for someone who doesn’t exist,” I point out as I finish my breakfast. “Here’s the thing—for a guy like Dallas, I’m new and shiny. I’m a nice girl. The kind you take home to meet your parents and help you win a bet. That’s not the start of a relationship.”

  Layton eyes me. “Have you actually read all those romance novels on your shelf?”

  “Yes, but they’re not realistic.” Okay, so I might be pushing things since a lot of authors do have realistic meet cutes in their novels. Also, I can’t believe I just used the very thing said to disparage them. Pretty sure this requires paying homage to the great Judith McNaught by creating a display dedicated to her books at the library in order to attain forgiveness.

  “You can have realistic any day of the week, Paige.” She pushes her bowl away and picks up her phone, eyes roaming over the screen. I focus on pushing around the crumb floating in my pinkish-orange milk. “Try a guy who offers excitement and fun, and...” Her nose wrinkles. “What in the world?” she mutters, then raises her voice. “A guy who wants to get to know the real you and will only go as far as you want, as long as you admit you want to be with him.”

  “That sounds like something Dallas would say,” I mumble, then jerk up my head to find Layton looking at everything but me.

  I gasp.

  “Are you reading texts from Dallas?” I accuse.

  Her cheeks turn bright red. “No.”

  “Liar McLiarface!” I all but crawl on top of the table, trying to snatch away her phone. “Let me see.”

  Shoving her chair back, she holds the phone high in the air and out of my reach. “He texted me this morning, and it was so sweet and apologetic that I couldn’t say no.”

  “No woman can.” I plop down in my seat. “My mother would say yes to him. Which is why I’m saying no.”

  “Is that it?” she asks, slowly lowering her phone to her side. “Are you afraid you might really fall for him?”

  “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.” I get up, grabbing my dirty dishes and taking them to the sink. “Besides, I’ve only been on one date.”

  “He wants another.”

  “Then he can ask me.” I glance over my shoulder at her. “Are you texting him right now?”

  She nods. “I told him to call you.”

  “He should have called me in the first place.”

  Layton moves to stand beside me, placing her bowl and spoon with mine. “I think it’s kind of sweet that he knew to ask your best friend for help.”

  “If you think he’s so sweet, then you should go out with him,” I snap, but Layton doesn’t rise to my bait.

  “Listen, a guy like Dallas could get any woman he wanted. Also, a guy with an ego like Dallas wouldn’t be interested in a woman who told him she doesn’t enjoy football and he wasn’t her type, and then come back for more, unless he wanted more from you than just to score. Or win a bet.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but—”

  “No buts.” I can hear my phone ring from my bedroom. “Looks like he’s calling to ask for another date.”

  I stand there, unsure of what I should do. “I don’t know.”

  “One more date won’t hurt you. Have it here on your turf instead of his,” she suggests.

  Why does she have to make the temptation of Dallas seem so good for me? “Okay.” I sprint for my bedroom and scoop up my phone from my ni
ghtstand, answering it. “Hello?”

  “Morning. This is Dallas.”

  “I know.” I hit myself in the forehead with the heel of my hand. Manners, Paige. He’s done nothing to you. “I mean... Good morning.”

  He laughs, the sound making my stomach flutter. “I was hoping after you talked with Layton that you might consider giving me another chance to take you out. Make things up to you.”

  I lean against the wall, staring out the window at the trees. Leaves fall every so often as the wind blows. That’s what I’m afraid of—falling wherever love leads me like my mother, only to end up dried up on the ground.

  “We can go wherever you want. We can do whatever you want, or not do anything at all. Your rules, baby.”

  He had to call me baby. The one word that I loathe admitting I loved to be called by a man—well, a man who means it in a good way. “How about I make you dinner?” I ask.

  “Really? You want to cook for me? Damn.” He clears his throat. “I’d like that. What time, and can I bring anything?”

  “How about five and your favorite dessert?”

  “You’re killing me, Paige. I’m trying so hard to be good during the season,” he says on a groan.

  How could have I forgotten about his seven-percent body fat goals? “Then just bring yourself and I’ll cook something without carbs, or bad carbs... I’ll figure it out.”

  “Can’t wait to see you again.” The low timbre of his voice washes over me, and I shiver a little.

  In an enjoyable way.

  “Me, too,” I say honestly, because I do want to see him again.

  After we end our call, I sit on the edge of the bed and fight the urge to call Finley to confess everything. Except she would not only talk me out of it, but she would also find a way to punish Dallas for asking me out in the first place.

  Her worry comes from a mostly good place, but I don’t want to deal with our past... or our mother’s penchant for falling in love with men like Dallas Drake.

  Only, the past never stays where it should.

  CHAPTER 10

  Dallas

  The way to a woman’s heart is through her best friend. And thanks to Layton, I have dinner plans with Paige.

  A second chance to make another play.