“Yeah, after all the shit that went down last week, you could use a fun night out,” Shane added.
Being photographed in a club a week after being arrested was the last thing I needed. “What I could use is a time machine.”
Aiden and Griff exchanged glances. “One drink. We’ll go and have one drink, and if you aren’t feeling it, we can leave those two assholes there and head back to the hotel.” Aiden tipped his head to where the brothers sat cramming food into their grinning mouths.
I sighed. Trav had a point. Training camps were about to get underway, and it would be a while before any of us had more than a day or two off. With Aiden and Griff both having families, it made it even harder for us to all get away together.
“I’m going on record to say this is probably going to end up being a mistake,” I said lamely. “But, I’m in.”
Trav jumped to his feet, surprisingly quick for a guy who was almost three hundred pounds of pure muscle, and crossed to where I sat in three quick strides. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Maybe we’ll even get you laid.”
Georgia’s face flashed in my mind, the way her lips had parted when she’d come apart on her couch for me.
I shook my head. “No thanks.”
Shane smirked. “You still wrapped up in Coach’s daughter?”
Wrapped up in her? Absolutely.
Ever going to see her again? Probably not.
I let my head fall back against the chair and pushed a hand through my hair. “Pretty sure that’s over.”
“Even better,” Shane said. “We’ll definitely hook you up tonight.” He looked at his brother and then stood. “C’mon, man. Let’s go back to the hotel and change.”
The two of them promised to meet up with us in an hour and took off, leaving me alone with Griff and Aiden.
Aiden poured a tumbler of whiskey and brought me a beer, sitting on the couch that Shane had just been on. “What happened with her?”
I twisted the top off the beer and took a long pull. I wasn’t interested in rehashing our conversation, but I knew my boys well enough to know they weren’t going to let up until I told them what they wanted to know.
“It’s over,” I said, still not meeting either of their eyes.
“’Cause of her dad or the arrest?” Griff asked.
“Both,” I sighed. “After we talked, I decided that I couldn’t keep seeing her. Then I get arrested and she’s at my door, demanding that I tell her what’s going on.”
I hadn’t been able to get the entire conversation out of my head. From the fury that was blazing in her eyes when I’d gotten home to the way her shoulders had sagged as she’d walked away from me.
For days, the guilt of the pain I’d put her through threatened to suffocate me. But no matter what happened with my future, it was better this way. It didn’t matter that I was miserable and just wanted to hear her voice.
“What happened?” Aiden asked.
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Oh, you know, nothing much. She just dropped a bomb about her past, and once it went off, I was left standing there alone with no idea how the hell I was going put everything back together.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I sat up and rested my forearms on my knees. “She grew up with a nanny who had two kids. Piper and Jack. They may as well have been her sister and brother too. When she was in college, they were all in a car accident. Jack fucking died.”
Griff grimaced. “Aw, man, that’s fucking rough.”
“Yeah. Gets rougher. Apparently, Georgia was the only one who knew about Jack’s drug problem at the time. She spent years beating herself up about it.”
My stomach knotted as her voice floated through my head, the way it had cracked when she’d broken down telling me about Jack and her guilt.
“Fuck,” Griff breathed.
I nodded slowly. “So, you can imagine that seeing my fucking name in the news for being arrested for drugs was a shock. Especially considering I’d pretty much avoided her since that fucking dinner with her family.”
“So, what the hell did you tell her?” Aiden asked.
I shrugged. “I told her what she needed to hear.”
“What she needed to hear? What exactly was that?”
“That I had a problem.”
“Why the fuck would you tell her that?” Aiden growled, jumping to his feet. He squeezed the back of his neck. “I don’t understand why the hell you keep doing this shit.”
I pushed out of the chair I was sitting in. “Georgia is amazing. She’s ambitious, smart, funny, and so damn gorgeous. She deserves to have the fucking fairy tale that every girl dreams of. And I am no Prince Charming.”
“No, you’re more like the court jester. A fuckin’ dumbass who doesn’t realize how stupid he is,” Griff said from his corner of the room. “You guys remember how long it took me to see what I had with Brooke? Years you two spent giving me shit about it, and I just ignored you both until I almost lost the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s my fucking turn to give you shit.” He smiled, looking like the Grinch when he came up with a plan. “Tell Georgia the truth. If she’s as into you as you make it out to be, maybe she’ll overlook the fact that you’re an idiot and give you another shot.”
Aiden chuckled. “She’s gonna have to overlook a lot of shit when it comes to Quinn.”
“Fuck off, man,” I growled. “I can’t. Even if I could, laying it all out there isn’t going to change the fact that her dad is my coach now. I can’t date the coach’s daughter. I’ve already got a bullseye on my back for being the black sheep of the team. How the hell am I ever going to get on the field if I’ve got a criminal record and Coach hates me?”
Aiden was usually the life of the party, the one who lightened up any uncomfortable situation, but what he said may have been the sagest advice I’d ever gotten. “You only get one life. When that life is over, you really think you’re gonna look back and wish you’d gotten more playing time on the field?”
I sank back onto the chair I was standing in front of.
“Aiden Shaw, future Hall of Fame quarterback giving me life advice.” I looked up and gave him a halfhearted smirk. “You missed your calling. Should have been a motivational speaker.”
He shook his head. “Laugh all you want, but you know I’m right.”
He stepped around me and headed for the door. “I’m going to the bathroom before we head out.”
When the door closed behind him, it left Griff and me alone in the oversized suite. “The other night, you were convinced that I needed to stop seeing Georgia. Now, you’re siding with Aiden and trying to convince me I made a mistake.”
Griff grabbed the chair that was next to mine and pulled it close. “A week ago, I thought dating her was a mistake. Then I spent the last few days with you and realized that the only mistake would be if you let her go. You’re fucking miserable.”
“I’ve got a lot of shit going on. Anyone in my shoes would be miserable.”
Griff nodded in agreement. “Yeah, they would. But you forget that I know you. I’ve seen you going through worse shit than this, and never once have I seen you this low before. If you didn’t have the weight of missing Georgia hanging over you, you’d be stressed and overwhelmed, but you wouldn’t be downright depressed. So, fuck what I said last week. If you’re feeling this chick, to hell with who her dad is. Get your girl.”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand. Even if getting my girl was an option, she wouldn’t have me. She was pretty fucking serious when she walked out my door.”
Griff scratched his chin like he was trying to channel his inner Buddha. “You’ve gotten a lot of texts the last few days. They all from Jamie?”
The majority of the texts had been from my sister, but there had been a couple from Georgia. “Couple have been from her. She’s been asking to talk.”
Griff leveled me with a stare. “Sounds to me like maybe Georgia would have you. If you’d ju
st get your head out of your ass.”
That was so much easier said than done.
17
Georgia
The doorbell alert chimed on my phone, and I opened the app to see Piper’s face staring back at me. “Go away.”
“No. Unlock the door.” Even through the warped screen of the camera I could see the glare she was giving me.
“Fine.” I pushed the button to let her in and then sat up on the couch.
Piper hurried inside, her arms full of bags, and dumped them in the kitchen before practically stomping to where I was nestled into the couch and coming to a stop in front of me.
She crossed her arms over her chest and stared down at me. “You are gross.”
Not that I’d looked at myself in the mirror today, but I had no doubts that she was correct. I’d thrown myself into work for the better part of the last week, not bothering to stop long enough for things like showering. “Aren’t you sweet?”
She uncrossed her arms and then huffed before flopping on the couch beside me. “You need to get up.”
“I’ve been up. I was in bed earlier and moved to the couch. That counts as being up.” I pulled the blanket that was on my lap up and caught a whiff of myself. Piper was right; I was gross.
“Okay, fine. I’ll bite.” She propped an elbow on the back of the couch and rested her head on her hand. “Have you heard from him since you went over there?”
It had been two weeks since Quinn had told me he had a problem, and I hadn’t heard a single word from him. At first, I’d avoided the TV and social media, my heart too bruised to even want to hear his name. But after a day of moping around, I’d finally caved and had spent the better part of an afternoon reading everything I could on his career and arrest. After I binged as much information about him as I could, I’d sent him a text, asking if we could talk. It wasn’t too surprising when I didn’t get any response.
“Nope. Nothing.”
She frowned. “He hasn’t tried to text you at all?”
“Or responded to my texts. Not that I expected much. He wasn’t very happy to see me sitting on his doorstep. Our conversation was not pleasant.”
The look on his face when I’d told him about Jack, his jaw clenching as the words tumbled out of my mouth, flashed through my mind. It had hurt him to hear it almost as much as it killed me to say the words. He’d reached for me, no doubt to offer comfort as the tears had flowed from somewhere deep inside me, but I’d pushed him away. It had been a long time since the true loss of Jack had hit me, but standing in front of a man who I was falling for and being denied the truth, it had gutted me.
“Maybe he’s getting the help he needs,” Piper said, her voice full of false optimism.
“I’m missing something. It just doesn’t sound like him.”
Piper’s wide eyes collided with mine. “How well could you really know him after a few weeks?”
“Well enough to know something isn’t right,” I muttered, my belly twisting in knots.
“You were charmed by him. He’s handsome, seems like a nice guy, did all the right things. But that doesn’t mean that you know what kind of guy he is.” Her frown deepened. “Maybe—” She paused and softened her voice. “Maybe getting the brush-off is for the best. You don’t want to be mixed up with a guy like that.”
I pushed to my feet, the blanket pooling on the floor. “I do know him. His favorite color is green,”—I pointed at my face—“just like my eyes. He likes his eggs scrambled with cheese, doesn’t drink liquor, watches chick flicks with his sister, who, by the way, is practically his only family because his mom died when he was a child, and his dad was abusive.” I was pacing, trying to work out the things that I knew about Quinn in my head.
“All of those things are great to know about a person, but just because he told you some things from his past doesn’t mean that he was honest with you about everything.” She reached for my hand and pulled me back to the couch. “Do you hear yourself? You’re trying to make excuses for a man’s drug arrest. Trust me when I tell you that you need to just cut your losses and move on.”
“I can’t,” I told her honestly. “I can’t just walk away from him.”
Piper’s hands landed on my knees. “Oh, god, please don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“You can’t go down this road again. It took you so long to get over it when it happened to Jack. I can’t watch you fall apart like that again.”
Listening to my best friend would have been the smart thing to do. After all, she’d been Jack’s sister; she’d lost even more than I had when her brother had died in that car accident.
But even though I’d only known Quinn for a whopping two weeks, I knew him.
Heroin?
The Quinn I knew would never. “Piper, he drank water and ate salad and fish at lunch. He works out twice a day. Does that sound like someone who does drugs to you?”
“There is no type that does drugs.” Her serious eyes pleaded with me to listen to what she was saying. “Anyone, from any social status, can get hooked. Just because he doesn’t seem like the type doesn’t mean he isn’t.” Her voice cracked. “Look at my brother.”
My heart broke all over again, the memories of the boy I’d grown up with washing through me, the staggering anguish when we’d lost him and the immense guilt that had wracked my body at the thought that I could have done something different and maybe he would still be with us today. But I couldn’t shake the niggling in the back of my mind that there was more to this than he was telling me.
“I’ve been over it in my head for the last few days. When I asked him about it, he never said that the drugs were his. He avoided it, actually, telling me over and over that they were in his truck. Never actually saying ‘yes, it was my heroin’.”
“But when you asked him point blank if he had a drug problem, he admitted it, right?” she pressed, her eyebrows bunching.
Is that what he’d done? Admitted to a drug problem? I’d rehashed our entire conversation over and over again, trying to figure out why the hell it felt like he’d been hiding something, and it finally dawned on me that he never said he had a drug problem.
“He said that he had a problem. But he didn’t say he used drugs. When I asked how long, all he said was years. But I swear to God, the way he looked away from me when he told me that, it feels like he was hiding something.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Yes! His addiction. He was hiding his addiction.”
“But why? I already knew. I was standing there waiting for him when he got out of jail. I knew where he’d been and why. What was the point in hiding it from me any longer?”
I knew that I was grasping at straws at this point, and maybe Piper was right. Maybe I was charmed by Quinn. It was entirely possible that I was infatuated with him, or the idea of him, blinded by the warm fuzzy feelings he gave me anytime he was around, and wasn’t thinking clearly. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling in the pit of my stomach that I wasn’t wrong.
I hadn’t been wrong all those years ago about Jack, but I’d let him convince me that he was just having a good time, that the drugs that he was trying out were just for fun.
I couldn’t stomach the thought of being right again, with Quinn this time, and just walking away from him when he probably needed me the most.
“Could it be because your dad is his coach? He can’t admit it to you if he’s going to try to convince your dad that it wasn’t his.” Her voice rose, the frustration of not getting through to me spilling out. “I don’t know what his reasoning is. But the bottom line is this: he was busted for possession of illegal drugs. Really bad illegal drugs. He isn’t being truthful with you or answering your texts. If he has a problem, it’s obvious that he doesn’t want help.”
“Wait.” I lunged for my phone and quickly pulled up the text thread with Quinn. I scrolled quickly back to the day before he’d been arrested.
When I found what I was looking for, I turned the
phone toward Piper. “I think I figured it out.”
18
Quinn
I pushed the barbell away from my chest and let out a ragged breath. Sweat rolled down my temple as I lowered the weights back down and then repeated the move again, this time a groan accompanying the breath.
I’d been in the team’s weight room for the last three hours, pushing myself to the edge of my limits and punishing my muscles with a brutal workout.
With one final press of the bar, I let it rest on the bench and grabbed for a towel, mopping the moisture from my face as I sat up.
“Miller!” a deep voice boomed. “My office.”
I pulled the towel away from my face to see Walter Reed standing across the space, his arms folded across his wide chest. I’d purposely arrived before it was even light outside to avoid as many of my teammates as possible but knew that not seeing anyone would be a long shot. However, I hadn’t been expecting the coach to show up at eight a.m. on a Sunday morning.
“Can I shower first?” I’d known this was coming, Coach wanting to have a sit-down to discuss my arrest, but I was hoping I had at least a few more days before it happened.
“No.” He turned abruptly, not offering me any chance to respond, so I slowly pushed to my feet, every muscle in my legs protesting. It had been a long time since I’d worked this hard in one session, and I knew I’d regret it tomorrow.
But today, it was what I’d needed to keep my mind off everything.
It had been three days since I’d returned from the last-minute hockey trip, and try as I might, Georgia had never been far from my mind. Griff and Aiden had thankfully dropped the subject of my love life for the rest of the night, and as much as I hated to admit that they were right about something, I’d enjoyed letting go and forgetting about the shit I was in.
But walking into my apartment after getting home, I’d lost any hope that I’d had of forgetting about the stunning woman that had barged into my life. The space was quiet like a tomb, and the silence was just as suffocating as it had been since Georgia had run away in tears.
The Hardest Play Page 12