That smile of his had been the first thing to grab my attention.
“You…” I pointed at him and narrowed my gaze. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. Playing with me and messing with my head. Again,” I snapped.
He actually looked like he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“Mia, I can assure you I am not playing with you.”
“You’ve been stalker boy all week.”
“Nope, I just happened to be in the same place you were. That’s all.”
“And tonight? You just happened to be here at the same time as me?” I gave him an incredulous glare.
He raised his massive shoulders. “Okay, busted. Tonight wasn’t a coincidence. I knew you’d be here. Just didn’t know you wouldn’t be alone. Thought I’d try my luck anyway and get reacquainted. You know, since we’re going to be seeing more of each other.” He nodded, and my heart squeezed at the thought of seeing more of him than I wanted to.
“No… no to everything. And leave me alone.”
He stepped closer, and the fresh woodland scent of his aftershave tickled my nose, weakening my defenses. He turned his smile up a notch and inclined his head to the side.
“Leave you alone? Is that what you really want?” His gaze clung to mine.
“Yes,” I answered, and I really wished my stupid voice didn’t waver with that quiver of uncertainty.
He noticed. Of course, he would. “Liar,” he breathed, leaning in closer.
I stepped back. “One whole year. You left me alone and stopped the stupid chasing. Now you decided to revive it. What the hell for?”
The man had mystified me in so many ways. He was the love ‘em and leave ‘em type, clearly, because that’s what he did to me. I just didn’t peg him to be the type to follow you around after, trying to get with you again. Then stopping for a year and starting up the whole process all over again. Like it was some kind of game.
“Things change, but one thing stayed the same.” He gave me a sexy grin, and his blue gaze brightened under the moonlight.
“What? You’re still a dog?” I frowned.
He chuckled again. “Still want you, Mia. Still want you, and I know you aren’t into that guy you think is your date. He’s just like the others. Interesting, but he won’t tick every box. He’s not me.”
Cocky, arrogant, and a complete asshole. A complete asshole who knew he was right.
He also knew I knew because he wasn’t the kind of man to chase a woman who didn’t want him.
I took another step backwards, and he stepped forwards.
“Can’t say no to me forever, Mia Cartwright. Can’t resist forever either. I know I don’t want to. The memory of that night’s still in my mind. It’s in yours too… I can tell.” He smirked, looked me over, and walked away.
Damn him…
I didn’t want this. I wanted to forget. Now, it would be even harder. I would be working with him. Couldn’t run away from him at work.
I’d try, though, because no way was I falling into the same trap I got caught in before.
No matter how gorgeous he was, or how I felt.
Eric Declan had another thing coming if he thought he could have me again.
Chapter 2
Eric
* * *
Maybe I was crazy and should give up.
Once you damaged some things, they couldn’t be fixed, no matter how hard you tried. Or in my case, no matter how stalkerish you became.
What the hell was I doing chasing a woman who didn’t want me?
Well… maybe that part was highly debatable, and it was because I knew that was why I continued my pursuit.
There was something about Mia I’d never been able to forget.
And, it wasn’t her beauty. Granted every time I’d seen her with her long brown hair, those seductive green eyes, and that body of hers that was made for sin with curves in all the right places, I was a goner. A complete goner who’d crept back into the teenaged boy I used to be and couldn’t resist staring at her.
I’d been a complete dog to her, but I’d had my reasons. Reasons that would never be good excuses to treat a woman like her the way I had.
Never mind that I was pretty certain she could have had my ass shipped off the team and probably ruined me so I never played pro ball again.
I’d seen it happen amongst people with power. My own father was exactly like that.
He hated competition, and instead of riding it out and trying to improve himself, he eradicated it. Literally, as in got rid of it. That was my old man. CEO of Declan Property Developers.
Defy him or cross him the wrong way, and that would be it.
I should probably thank my lucky stars he hadn’t done something to ruin my career. Although the fact that I played ball like Uncle Rory and had no interest in pushing pencils behind a desk in an office should have been some clue that something was off genetically.
“Hey, man, you can stop now.” Gilly beamed, throwing a towel at me. We were in the park doing sit-ups. The same park I’d just happened to run into Mia in last week. That actually hadn’t been planned, but it did kickstart my mission to try. Try again.
I stopped my exercises and sat up fully looking at him.
He started to laugh at me. “Thought you were going to take off like a rocket. Remember, this is just extra general training.”
I returned a smile and sighed, pulling in a deep breath. He was right to call it that. We trained so much and so hard we had to categorize what we were doing. Today was general, meaning hanging out.
“Got carried away,” I explained.
“Oh yeah, like you got carried away the other day with that idea of yours.” He quirked a brow and looked me over.
I might not be his best friend on account that his best friend was now his wife, but he’d always been that for me. In the six years he’d known me, he seemed to now be able to figure out my crazy plans quicker than I could think them.
Like when Coach Simpson started talking about the hurricane and the devastation it left in Newport Beach, and I gave him the brilliant idea to do a fundraiser. I did that because all the fundraisers we had went through the marketing consultancy. As in where Mia worked.
Gilly was no fool. He saw straight through my bullshit.
“I think a fundraiser is a brilliant idea.”
“Sure, it is, but you came up with that out of the pure goodness of your heart?”
I opened my mouth to answer but stopped myself. Gilly wasn’t an ass, and neither was I. Well, not these days. I’d changed… a lot.
I liked to think of myself as wiser now. It was the whole Mia incident. I’d fucked up big time and in a way that probably couldn’t be fixed. It just happened at a time when I was really unstable. That was the best thing I could say to explain it.
“Okay… I admit I have ulterior motives. But it’s still a good idea.”
Gilly shook his head at me and bit the inside of his lip. “Fuck, man… it’s happening again, isn’t it. Your Mia chase?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I was thirty-one years old, and last night saw me acting like a teenager. Me going to the club because I knew she’d be there; me watching her like some creeper. Her with her date. She looked happy. I had to admit it, but she’d looked happy with me too.
Before I screwed up. The thing was, I’d never really had her. Not long enough to explain my obsession, but long enough to not be an idiot and deny what I felt when I was with her.
So, was it happening again? My chase?
Yes.
“I can’t get her out of my head.” I only spoke like this with him. Everyone rightly thought I was one of the biggest playboys on the team. I was. I absolutely fucking was… Then she happened.
“It’s been well over a year since you two hooked up. At least to my knowledge. And the last time we spoke about her in any depth, you said you were going to leave her alone. What made you suddenly decide you wanted to jump on that train again?”<
br />
That part was a very long story. One I definitely should have shared with a guy I classed as my best friend.
“Some stuff’s changed.”
“Like what?” He smirked.
“Stuff in my life, man.”
A serious expression washed over his face. We did speak at length about Mia over a year ago, and at the time, I’d told him there was some stuff going on in my life then too. I knew he’d wanted to ask me about it, and he still did.
We had a code between us, as friends and players on the team. It wasn’t just us. It was the other guys too. It was this: there were some things we just didn’t talk about.
Plain and simple.
It had to be that way to preserve the proverbial hive mind we had as a unit. When you brought shit in from outside the field, it messed with the way we played. Some things couldn’t be helped, and my situation was like that, but that was the general of it.
As friends… I would admit that I just didn’t want to talk about the disaster of shit that had hit me eighteen months ago.
“What is it, Eric? You know, I may have held off on asking this whole time, but I know you have shit that you need to get off your chest.” He nodded and gave me a crude smile.
“I do, bro.”
“Gonna tell me while we can still class ourselves as young?” He tapped his lip ring as if that signaled some element of youth.
“Yes. And come on, bro. You make us sound like we’re ready to pick out the latest walking stick or joint cream.”
He laughed. “Well, at the rate you’re going, man, we will be. You’re like a closed book. Can’t read you, can’t figure out what’s going on with your ass. But… sometimes, there a spark of something, and I know you have shit on your mind.”
“I hear you. I have a thing I have to do later. Maybe I’ll be able to talk more about what’s been going on after.”
“A thing?”
I nodded my confirmation. “A thing.”
A thing… I made that sound like I actually had something to do. I didn’t have anything per say, unless you called picking up your uncle from prison a thing.
Uncle Rory was being released today. Early parole.
It was the news of that, that shifted things around for me.
I didn’t realize how deep his imprisonment got to me. A month ago, when he called me and told me his application for early parole was being considered, hope awakened in me. Then, when he called me and told me it was actually happening, it was like I found myself, and I wanted all the stuff I’d put on hold in the time he was away.
When I saw Mia in the park, it was like a lightbulb went on over my head, and I wanted her all over again.
“Okay, man. You do your thing and talk to me. You do know this all sounds very secretive, right?”
“I know.”
“And this whole thing has what to do with Mia?” He looked at me with anticipation.
“How about I say that I acted the way I did with her because I wasn’t thinking straight.”
He just looked at me. “Dude, that sounds like bullshit.”
“I know, and it is bullshit.”
“So, you had sex with her and left her straight after because you weren’t thinking straight?”
I’d never actually told it to him like that, but when I did tell him, it wasn’t that hard to figure out. I also never really showed any remorse when I said it. I’d talked like an ass. Hearing him say it out loud like that in plain truth made me feel like a bigger asshole than I was.
“Yeah.” I bit the inside of my lip and held back a frown.
Any more explanation would take me back to how I’d felt that day. The day I’d been with Mia was the same day Uncle Rory was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. I’d also found out then that Uncle Rory was a lot like me for a reason. In the sense that he was my real father.
So, yeah, I wasn’t thinking straight.
Or possibly, not at all.
* * *
“How’ve you been, kid?” Rory asked.
There was a sparkle in his eyes that reached out to me.
We’d just sat down to eat at Carla’s, the diner we’d always gone to when I was a kid.
I had to admit I for damn certain felt as excited to hang with him as I had been at eight years old. That was when we really started hanging out and he trained me, teaching me everything I knew about football.
“I’m good.” I nodded.
“Super Bowl star again?” He beamed now, looking proud. Prouder than the man I called my father had looked when he heard my news.
“Super Bowl star again.” I smiled back at him. The Centaurs had won the Super Bowl for the second year in a row. It was a massive lifetime achievement.
From the minute we’d walked into the diner, people looked our way. Women who were always checking me out, and football fans. Before we were even seated, I’d signed ten autographs.
I didn’t want to seem like a pompous ass, but I was kind of used to the fame now. The Centaurs had always been good. Winning the Super Bowl for the second year in a row was a bonus.
“Kid, I’m real proud of you. Really proud.” Rory nodded.
“Thank you, uncle.” It sounded weird to call him that now that I knew the truth.
It came in the form of an email I shouldn’t have seen. An email from my mother to my grandmother begging her not to say anything to my father about Rory.
What I remembered most were these words:
Jack isn’t Eric’s father
Rory is, and now that he knows I live in fear of what he might do.
Jack would disown me if he ever found out the truth.
I would never forget the words. It was like they were photographed to my mind, embedded to stay forever.
Prior to seeing the email, I’d overheard Rory arguing with Mom. Twice.
The first argument had been bad, but I didn’t actually know what they were arguing about. Then the second one happened months later. The arrest followed, then email with the truth, then me messing up what I might have had with Mia.
“Well, our days of throwing ball in the park paid off huh?” He grinned. His eyes crinkled.
“They sure did. You know I got this whole football obsession from you, right?”
He laughed, but there was an element of sadness in his eyes. “You did get that from me.”
He pulled in a deep breath.
He was what had changed me too. What had happened to him was a massive eye opener.
The thing was, he didn’t know that I knew the truth. He didn’t know that I figured out the truth was what sent him on that downward spiral where he’d turned to drink, drugs, and messed everything up with his work.
He’d always been so different from Dad. Then he just turned into something else. He was an accountant, and what sent him to prison was securities fraud. Fraud he got mixed up in to fund his drink and drug habits I never knew about until it was too late.
“How are you?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Glad to be free. Never going back. Look, son, I …” His voice trailed off, and he seemed to hang on to those last words. “You shouldn’t have had to pick me up from prison. I could have gotten a taxi.”
“You knew I’d be there. Dad wouldn’t have come.” And neither would Mom. They were just as bad as each other.
They loved money and the image that came with it. I knew I got the worst parts of me from them. It was just how I’d learned to be.
“Your father and I come from two different worlds. It’s worse now because I embarrassed our family.”
“Don’t worry about him.” I straightened. “Fresh start… this is a fresh start, and you can rebuild. Don’t worry about the past.”
I was hoping to have more of an effect by saying so, but it didn’t seem to work.
“The past is a real bitch, son. A real bitch.”
Now, why did I think he was talking about Mom when he said that?
Could be because Mom really was a controlling bi
tch. The type I couldn’t imagine him getting with. Mom was the kind of woman who knew her husband cheated on her every second he got and stayed for the money. I figured she must cheat too, but it was all too much wealth to sacrifice. In Orange County, image was everything. Didn’t matter who was screwing whom, if you had prestige of any kind, you held on to it because it would define you.
“How about we focus on the future?” I suggested. “We have a lot to catch up on.”
I knew what got to him was the fact that he’d missed out on being a father to me. We saw each other all the time, but it was different. He was almost like an older brother.
“We do. You have your life though. I can just imagine how crazy it all must be.”
“It’s crazy enough. I want to see you though. There’s loads to tell you.”
“Yeah?” A flicker of interest lit up his eyes.
“Yeah. Lots.”
“Kid, I’m not sure what more you could tell me other than your team won the Super Bowl. Again. That’s a massive achievement. What more can we talk about?” He smirked.
There was a lot.
A lot, like maybe I should tell him what I knew of him being my real father. It could set in motion something, whatever that was.
I hated secrets, and it was worse when I had to tread carefully in regard to what I said and who I said it to.
I thought though, no matter what, and no matter who was involved, this was about the two of us. Him and me. No one else.
“I could tell you about my new car I ordered in from Japan.” I decided to cast the heavy stuff aside and verge on to the light-hearted.
He smiled at that. “New car, Eric? How many cars does a guy need?”
“Enough. Also, when last I checked, your car looked like it was pulled from the Dark Ages.”
Everything he owned had been locked away. When he left, I sorted everything out and made sure his house and car were both taken care of.
“Do I still have a car?”
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