Play for Keeps

by Maggie Wells

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  Copyright © 2018 by Maggie Wells

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Eileen Carey/No Fuss Design

  Cover image © Dean Mitchell/Getty Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

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  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  An Excerpt of Love Game

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Life is undoubtedly a contact sport, but love is the only game worth playing. This book is dedicated to all those who refuse to be benched. Play hard, play fast, and play for keeps!

  Chapter 1

  Millie Jensen rapped on the tinted glass sliding door off Ty Ransom’s patio until her knuckles ached, refusing to let up. This time, she added a threat for good measure. “Ty, if you don’t open this door in the next ten seconds, I swear I’ll throw a chair through the glass.”

  He couldn’t hear her, of course. The glass was the super-duper insulated kind. The type to not only repel the elements, but also empty threats and spin doctors in the midst of mild coronary failure. She cupped her hands around her face, pressed her nose to the glass, and peered into the gloomy room. The dark, combined with a vaulted ceiling, gave the space a cavernous appearance. Caught in the flickering light of the television, oversized furniture cast hulking shadows on the walls. She peered at the screen. A pair of talking heads yammered at one another. The National Sports Network logo anchored the scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen, but the latest scores were taking a back seat to big-time gossip this night.

  She was about to call to him again when she saw the display on his phone light up with the incoming call. “Don’t you answer that!” she shouted through the glass.

  He didn’t even check to see who was calling, much less answer. Tyrell Ransom, head coach of Wolcott University’s men’s basketball team, sat sprawled in a massive armchair parked in front of the screen, his long legs akimbo. The hand that held the phone dangled over the arm of the chair. Millie squinted, wishing she’d chosen high-beam night vision as her superpower when she’d clicked through the latest “Choose Your Superpower” internet quiz. The second the call clicked over to voicemail, she turned the meaty side of her fist to the glass and began to pound with all her might.

  At last, the shadowy figure stirred.

  Millie pounded harder, urging him to hurry up and unfurl his long, lanky frame. He rose from the chair so slowly, she almost shouted again. Instead, she held her breath as he approached. Each step he took was deliberate. His gaze never left her. A part of her—the part she liked to keep tamped down tight, because her impulses tended to get her in trouble—admired the lithe grace of his movements. No doubt this man was an athlete. Once, an elite one. He was still a man in his prime, even though his days in the spotlight were long behind him.

  He narrowed those startling amber eyes and peered down at her through the glass door as if she were a specimen on display. Falling back on old habits, she snapped to full military attention before meeting his questioning gaze. Her father had been a master sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps. It took a helluva lot more than one sulky, washed-up basketball giant to intimidate her.

  “Open the damn door.” She enunciated each word carefully, making lipreading possible in case her intentions were somehow lost in the shuffle. She’d slipped out of the wedding party she’d helped put together to celebrate her best friend’s recent nuptials to come check on him. She wasn’t about to be turned away.

  “Now!” she bellowed when he didn’t move fast enough for her tastes, giving the glass another thump with the side of her fist. The lock snicked, and he lifted the security bar. Before he could do the honors, she grabbed the handle and yanked the door open.

  Shooting a disparaging glance at the glass in his hand, she brushed past him. “Yeah, because sitting in the dark getting drunk is always the best course of action.”

  “I hadn’t thought about getting drunk,” he mused, letting the door slide shut with a thunk. “Good idea.” With a grace that always surprised her, he turned and walked toward the fully stocked wet bar. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be at Kate and Danny’s party thing tonight?”

  “It’s still going on. Your absence was noted,” she added pointedly.

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t much up for socializing.” He tossed the clear liquid he’d been drinking down the drain, then nodded to the crystal tumblers lined on a shelf. “Can I buy you a drink, Mil?”

  She watched as he splashed less than a centimeter of liquid into the bottom of the highball glass he’d been carrying. This time it was amber, not clear. Crap. If he hadn’t been drinking before, he was now.

  Ignoring the offer, she opted to switch on a floor lamp. Warily, Millie peered down at her shoes. The nappy faux hide on her Jimmy Choo ballet flats was damp but otherwise appeared none the worse for wear in spite of her stealth approach. When Ty hadn’t answered the ring of the bell, she’d had to activate plan B. Since there was no way she’d chance rolling ass over teakettle down his steeply sloped yard to get to the back door, she’d cut across the neighbor’s yard to get to his split-level McMansion.

  Exhaling her frustration, she shifted straight into fixer mode. “Okay. Time to pull up your big-boy pants and make a plan.”

  Without taking his eyes off her, Ty tossed the drink back with a flick of his wrist. He fixed her with an oddly defiant glare as he let the tumbler slip from his fingers and drop to the floor.

  “My big-boy pants?”

  Millie goggled as the heavy crystal glass rolled across the wide-planked wood without shattering. She stared after it in wonder. Had it survived the fall because his arms were so long and it hadn’t had far to go? Shaking he
r head, she thanked God she wouldn’t have to add cleaning up shards of glass to her to-do list for the night.

  “Right.” She clapped her hands together. “Your woman has ditched you. No big deal. Happens all the time.”

  “Thank you for your condolences.”

  She let the sarcasm pass. He could expend his anger on her all he wanted. She was more worried about what he said to other people.

  Moving past him into the still-shadowy great room, she spotted the remote control perched on the arm of the overstuffed armchair and made a beeline for it. She pointed the zapper at the screen and switched the power off, plunging them into thick, buzzing silence.

  Feeling steadier, she faced Ty once more. “The real juicy part is she left you for one of your players.”

  Ty planted his big, ball-handler hands on his hips. “Thanks for clarifying,” he said gruffly. “I almost missed the juice.”

  Millie rolled her eyes. She didn’t care what her friend Kate said about an athlete’s innate mental toughness. There was nothing trickier than handling a bunch of superjocks and their touchy egos. “I am sorry, Ty, but you had to have seen something like this coming, right?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be making me feel better or something?”

  “I’m not your mommy. I’m not here to kiss the boo-boo and make everything better.” A shiver ran down her spine even as she spoke the words. Awareness. Hot. Tingling. Happened every time they shared space. Which meant she’d had more than two years to get a handle on her attraction to him. Too bad being near him made her grip feel shaky. “No, my job is to help you put the best possible face on a situation that may reflect badly on the university.”

  He inclined his head slightly but still managed to look straight down his nose at her. “You’re a real pal, Millie.”

  “I’m working,” she reminded him. “I’ll try to be a better pal when I’m off the clock.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Setting her jaw, she studied him, measuring his readiness to step up to the line on this one. “First of all, we have to keep you off the phone. Then, we need to spin your marital situation: amicable split, coming for a long time, you wish her well, blah, blah, blah. When they start lobbing questions about Dante, we keep the focus on your contributions to his NBA career.”

  “So you don’t think I should go on TV and tell the press I want to take a baseball bat to his shins?”

  She blinked, surprised by even the hint of violence coming from this quiet giant of a man. “Do you?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Kinda.”

  “Over her? Really?” The questions, three simple words tinged with seven shades of disbelief, popped out before she could stop them. “I thought you two were pretty much done before all this.”

  The air between them sizzled and cracked with tension. At last, he ran a hand over his close-cropped hair and down to knead the muscles in his neck. “No. Not over her.”

  “Then why?”

  The corners of his mouth curled up in a rueful smile, but she didn’t see even a glimmer of happiness in his eyes. When he spoke, he enunciated each word slowly, as if he were forced to explain his reasoning to a particularly slow toddler. “Because I envy his court time. His career. His future.” He flung one long arm out. “He’s just starting out. No injuries. Nothing holding him back. He’s going to have the career I never had.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Then this could be the strangest midlife crisis ever.”

  He held up both hands. “Hey, I’m not having a crisis, and this is not my fault.”

  His palms looked to be about the size of salad plates. A fact Millie had long found intriguing. But this wasn’t the time or place to speculate about how great it would feel to have those big mitts all over her. She could let her fantasies loose later. When she was alone.

  Besides, the defensive note in his denial told her he wasn’t quite as cool with his wife leaving him for one of his NBA-bound players as he wanted her to think. Feeling the need to do something, anything, to make him realize she was on his side, she reached out and gave his arm an awkward pat. “No. No, it’s not. And I am sorry.”

  He looked down at her hand, a smirk curving his lips as she yanked her fingers away a tad too quickly. “Wow. You really suck at the sympathy thing.”

  Millie had the good grace to grimace. “I’ve never been very touchy-feely.”

  Ty cocked his head. “I’m surprised.”

  “Are you?”

  He took a half step closer. “You don’t strike me as the kind of woman to shy away from anything.”

  Proved how much he knew about her. It was all she could do to hold her ground. Not because she was scared of him. More that she might not be able to keep her own impulses in check. Ty Ransom was not only tall, built, and too handsome for his own good, but he was also sweet and funny in a self-deprecating way that most successful jocks never quite mastered. A flutter of nerves tightened her belly.

  Flattening her hand on her midriff to quell the internal uprising, she plastered her public-relations smile on her face. “Well, I do like a good fight.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “That’s why I’m here. We don’t have to let the press run this thing. Take control of your message instead of spouting off. Make the story the one you want to tell.”

  “I don’t see what there is to control,” he said with feigned nonchalance. “My wife left me for a first-round draft pick. Can hardly blame the woman for upgrading, can you?”

  “Well, truthfully—”

  “He’s got two working knees, more vertical lift than I had on my best day, and according to our good friend Brittany at NSN”—he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper as he referred to the perky, blond reporter from the sports network—“charisma.” He nodded to the darkened screen, then shrugged. “God knows Brittany would know.”

  “Brittany doesn’t know squat.”

  He guffawed. “You do have a way with words.” He crossed to the wet bar and plucked another clean glass from the shelf. “You’re hired.”

  “Thanks, but I already have a job.”

  “See? You don’t even want me,” he muttered as he pulled the stopper off a decanter. “Charisma,” he growled. “Don’t think I ever had any, even when I had game.”

  She hated this. Hated seeing this proud, cocky man lose his swagger over a woman who was little more than a piece of dandelion fluff. Sucking in a deep breath, she approached with caution. “Ty—”

  “My game was okay one-on-one.” This time, he sloshed three fingers of whiskey into the glass and sucked a few droplets from the back of his hand before replacing the stopper. “Took a lot of English classes in school, so I could quote poetry and shit.” He picked up the glass and stared hard at its contents, then took a healthy slug. He didn’t even gasp as the liquor went down. “Girls always liked that.”

  She placed a gentle hand on the center of his back. “Don’t.”

  He stiffened, then slowly lowered the glass to the bar. “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t downplay who you are. Don’t brush off everything you’ve accomplished.”

  Ty didn’t acknowledge her encouragement, but he didn’t lift the glass again either. “What? What have I accomplished? An NCAA championship? Nope. Only made it to the finals. We lost. A spot in the NBA Hall of Fame?” He shook his head and gave a bitter laugh. “I didn’t even have a dozen starts in the league.” He picked his head up and glanced over his shoulder. “Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  Millie knew his NBA career was roundly considered a failure, but she wasn’t one to keep up with sports stats. He’d had medical issues; she knew about those. Something about fractures in his legs never healing completely. She let her hand fall to her side and curled her fingers into her palm. A part of her wanted to slug the people who called him
a disappointment square in the nose. Not that violence would do much good. She was better at using her words to fight the good fight. But still, the man wanted to play. The issues he faced weren’t of his making.

  “Eleven starts in five years,” he grumbled.

  Ever the one to put the best face on things, Millie responded reflexively. “You did well overseas.”

  He whirled to face her, but his balance was compromised by too much strain on his bad knee and not enough sleep. Maybe a little by the booze he’d just swallowed, but Millie doubted it could hit a guy his size that fast. He staggered to the side, and she lunged to catch him—as if she could even slow his progress if he decided to face-plant. At a fit six foot eight, he was over a foot taller than she was and outweighed her by at least eighty pounds.

  “Whoa, big fella,” she crooned, the soles of her shoes sliding a bit as they corrected course.

  He stared down at her, undeterred by their awkward little waltz. “I’m fine. My knee is messed up too.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t even get drunk,” he said derisively. “Did you know that? Never have been able to catch a buzz, and believe me, I’ve tried.”

  “I believe you. You’re a pretty big guy. Probably takes a couple of gallons,” she speculated, eyeing him from head to toe with a comical leer.

  “You know, I tried to jump-start my career when my legs strengthened, but too little, too late. No one here would touch me as a player.”

  Millie softened when she heard the wistfulness in his tone. “But you did good as a coach, right?”

  She gave his bare forearms a squeeze to drive home her point. And yes, there might have been a little joy in handling him in a non-PR sort of way. She was still breathing, after all. Lordy, the man was beautiful. That little ditz he’d married had to be out of her mind.

  “You are an awesome coach, Ty. Everyone knows you are. Even self-centered little shits like Dante Harris. Who got him where he is today? You did.”

  “I only want to do my job.” He gestured to the television screen. “I don’t want to deal with all this. I just want to do my job.”