Play for Keeps

by Maggie Wells

  He always ended the call with a smile on his face, even if Millie had been prickly with him. Glutton that he was, he discovered he liked her salty side almost as much as the sweet she tried so hard to hide. Every night, he ticked off another day on his mental calendar. With every conversation, Ty realized he’d thought about hanging around Millie more than any married man should over the years. Still, when he searched his conscience for a hint of guilt, he came up clean. He never acted on the impulse, and if his marriage hadn’t gone south in such a spectacular way, that kiss might never have happened.

  All jokes about players being players aside, he simply wasn’t built to be a dog with women. Sure, he’d dated a lot in his younger days, but he’d never been one to juggle relationships. He claimed he didn’t have the skills for keeping multiple women happy, but in reality, he didn’t have the interest. Even in his globe-trotting days playing EuroLeague ball, he’d known he wanted to come home to the States, meet a nice woman, and try to build a family complete with both a dad and a mom.

  Lust. He’d been blinded by lust when he met Mari. And she’d been the starry-eyed girl who hung on his stories from his playing days. He never really gave her curiosity much thought. People liked knowing pro athletes whether they were retired or not. Hell, his own father still took great pleasure in holding court with his golf cronies, bragging as if Ty’d dunked a game-winning shot the night before.

  By the time his third week in Reno rolled around, he and Millie were on a semiregular schedule. Ty found himself looking forward to their nightly calls more than anything. They hardly consisted of anything earth-shattering. Mostly day-to-day stuff. Millie dished what little gossip she could scrape up on a college campus in the summer session. He told funny stories about his dad and the guys they golfed with each day.

  They laughed and teased, keeping the conversation light, but all the while, he was mining for information. Small pieces of Millie he could pretend he alone knew. Like her inexplicable aversion to seeded hamburger buns or the fact that she enjoyed knitting. One night, she’d talked about how devastated she’d been when she lost her grandmother. He told her about the magical inlet in the Greek islands where he’d found peace with the end of his career as a ballplayer.

  When things got too deep or too heavy, Millie got them back on track with a quick quip or Sahara-dry observation, but he didn’t let her deflections bother him. Stories were exchanged. The connection was deepening.

  At least on his end.

  Ty had a hard time figuring out exactly what Millie was thinking or feeling. She was a woman trained to hold her cards close to her vest. Not one to air her every grievance or frustration aloud. If Millie didn’t like something, she found a way to shape what troubled her into something more palatable. Her restraint and determination were qualities Ty found both admirable and frustrating as all hell.

  Of course, the juxtaposition between Millie and Mari cut both ways. If Mari had chosen to end their marriage in a more circumspect way, he wouldn’t have gone through all the upheaval that gave him opportunity to spend more time with Millie. Maybe they would have found their way to each other eventually, but if his wife hadn’t publicly humiliated him, he’d have moved slower. He would have gone through the formalities and let a decent interval go by before he even thought about dating.

  But his relationship with Mari hadn’t ended with grace and decorum. He’d ignored the snarky tweets she posted with a hashtag #TydDown whenever he dragged her away from her online life to attend one of the many university and booster functions a coach’s wife was expected to attend. He’d also tried to ignore the PicturSpam images of his wife and other men. They’d been popping up here and there for months, but he chose to turn a blind eye. To pretend he didn’t know she was making a chump out of him. But they both knew the jig was up long before Mari packed her bags and loaded them into her car the night before the NBA draft.

  She claimed to be in love with Dante Harris. Since Ty couldn’t, in all honesty, make the same declaration concerning his feelings for her, he didn’t try to stop her. When Dante’s name was called in the draft, the first person Dante kissed was his mama—and the second was Ty Ransom’s wife. If ever there was a film clip guaranteed to make the sports world hum with speculation, it was a star player planting one square on his coach’s spouse.

  Ty’s quiet life became a circus, and Mari was its scantily clad social media ringmaster. That night, she changed her favorite hashtag to #NotTydDown and proceeded to post photos and video of all the ways she and Dante celebrated, some of them featuring bits and pieces the sports media was required to blur when they aired them.

  Part of the agreement their lawyers had made included a cease and desist on all public commentary about their split following the NSN interview with Greg Chambers. As far as Ty knew, Mari had stuck to the bargain, and he certainly wasn’t interested in stirring things up, so all was quiet on the Ransom front. Just the way he liked it.

  He could go on with his life. Choose his own furniture. Eat Chinese food straight out of the container while standing there with the refrigerator door wide open. Drink milk from the carton. Leave the toilet seat up. His life was his own again, and he liked having control. Ty considered himself an essentially private man. On leaving the league, he learned to appreciate the simplicity of life outside the limelight. This past month had reminded him how much happier he was when people minded their own business. Therefore, he saw no reason to announce his desire to have private relations with the university’s public relations guru to the world. He was content with the way things were.

  Mostly.

  Wrapping one of the thin, rough towels that came with the short-term rental around his hips, he stepped from the shower. Water beaded on his shoulders and rolled in tickly rivulets down his back, but he paid the tickling streams no mind. Goose bumps pebbled his skin. He tried to blame his shiver and the subsequent goose bumps on the air-conditioning, but he knew all too well it was more likely caused by the message alert on his phone.

  Millie had called.

  In all the weeks since he’d dropped her off in front of the Merryton Hotel, he’d been the one to do the dialing. A hot rush of pleasure heated his skin. He could almost hear the droplets of water sizzling as he reached for the phone and scanned the missed call notification. A part of him wanted to curse the old man for strong-arming him into going to one of the casinos for dinner. The other part was glad he’d been the one to be unavailable for once. He liked calling her later in the evening. Bedtime.

  At least, bedtime for her.

  For him, they were prime time. Which meant he usually showered later. Better to wash all evidence of his pent-up frustration away before hitting the hay. But tonight, after a couple of hours in the trenches, he needed to wash the stench of slots, smoke, and the all-you-can-eat snow crab off before he could settle in. Peering into the mirror, he ruffled the water from his close-cropped hair. He saw more gray hairs creeping in on the sides, and the other day, the old man had teased him about the silver stubble in his beard. He rubbed his hand over his cheek, trying to decide if he wanted to shave before calling her back or wait for morning.

  He opted to play it smooth and hard to get. Pulling his razor and a can of cream from the cabinet above the sink, he smirked at his reflection, feeling smug. She could wait. At least a few more minutes. Millie certainly had no compunction about postponing their chats to a time more convenient for her.

  Clean-shaven, minty fresh, and unable to stand waiting a second longer, he snatched up the phone and padded into the condo’s master bedroom. The furnishings were comfortable if not a bit generic. The bed was a standard king, which meant he slept diagonally most nights, but the pillows were firm and plentiful. Hitting the recall button with his thumb, he propped a couple against the headboard, then dropped onto the bed. The knot at his waist loosened a bit but held the ends of the towel together enough to keep him decent.

  “
Hi, Ty.”

  The throaty rasp of her greeting did things to him. Stirred thoughts and urges he’d bank for later. For now, he had to set the jumble aside and form coherent sentences. “Hey, sorry I missed your call.”

  His lack of explanation might have been a bit of payback. Millie never gave excuses for why she would need to call him back or accounted for her time in any way, so he followed her lead. He didn’t want her thinking he counted down the hours until he could talk to her again. Even if he did.

  Playing by the unwritten conversational rules, he opened with an inane yet remarkably telling question. “How was your day?”

  She sighed. “Boring. I hate summer session. Campus is like a ghost town in the afternoons. Kate has banned me from her office because I told her I was tempted to release the bikini picture from her honeymoon. I have no idea why she’s being such a pill. If I were built like her, I’d dance a bikini-clad flamenco on top of every swimsuit edition in the athletic department’s secret archive.”

  Ty wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond, so he stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed one ankle over the other, and started in what seemed like the safest place. “Secret archive?”

  She guffawed. “Don’t play innocent. I know what’s in the file cabinet at the back of the bull pen.”

  He smiled, the image of Millie rifling through the battered metal drawers in search of contraband forming in his mind’s eye. She wasn’t wrong. When the university’s human resources director cracked down on “potentially offensive” materials displayed in the workplace, the warren of cubicles housing the coaching assistants was hardest hit. All calendars, posters, and, yes, a nearly exhaustive collection of Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions were deemed too dangerous for public display. But instead of taking the stuff home, some smarty-pants locked all the loot in a filing cabinet no one bothered to use once departmental records became computerized. A limited number of duplicate keys were made, and being awarded one had become a departmental rite of passage.

  At least now Ty had a pretty good idea who’d planted a copy of Burt Reynolds’s Cosmopolitan centerfold in the mix.

  “Are you the one who keeps slipping issues of GQ and Esquire in?”

  “Not me,” she said in a singsong voice. “But I can tell you people really are crazy about a sharp-dressed fella.”

  “Sadly, I don’t think they’re having any impact on Mack’s or Beau’s wardrobe choices,” he said gravely.

  Mack and Beau were the elder statesmen of the Warrior coaching staff. They were known for their love of polyester shorts, snow-white athletic shoes, and, in Beau’s case, striped tube socks color coordinated with whichever polo-collared shirt his wife of over forty years had pressed for him. They were also two of the handful of coaches who’d willingly relinquished their keys to the cabinet. As far as Ty knew, the head coaches declined their copies. He knew far better ways to get shit-canned in professional coaching than ogling two-dimensional versions of scantily clad women. The three-dimensional ones caused enough trouble.

  “I’d run away with Mr. Beau if he’d ditch that hussy.”

  “Watch yourself. She may look all sweet and charming, but I’m pretty sure Mrs. Beau would claw your eyes out if you put the moves on her man.”

  Millie heaved a heavy sigh. “No use. I can’t get the guy to look twice at me anyhow.”

  “I have fifty that says he’s looked more than twice.”

  Her delighted laugh made the prospect of coughing up fifty bucks on a bet he couldn’t prove one way or another totally worthwhile. “You’re so good for my ego.”

  “Is that why you keep talking to me?” he asked, knowing the question was shameless enough to border on pathetic but beyond caring.

  “No, I keep talking to you because your voice gets me hot.”

  Stupefied by her bluntness, he stared at the ceiling for about ten beats too long to be cool, then pulled the phone away from his ear, not certain he’d heard her correctly. “I, uh… Did you just say—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “So Danny told Kate I was ogling him when I went to the fitness center.”

  Reeling and desperate to catch up, he blurted. “Were you?”

  “Have you ever seen me step foot in the fitness center?”

  Ty blinked, his whirling thoughts stopped cold. “No.”

  “If the little shit thinks he can bully me by fueling Katie’s fire, he’s going to be in for a rude awakening.”

  Several parts of her statement leaped out at him. First, Danny McMillan was about as far from a “little shit” as a man could be. Sure, the guy had toned and trimmed his physique from the height of his NFL playing days, but he was still built like a bull. Second, she wasn’t wrong about her “Katie” calling her new husband on his bullshit if she saw fit to. If any person was qualified to deliver a master class on gamesmanship, it was Coach Kate Snyder. And last…he had no fucking idea. He’d lost the handle on the entire conversation when she’d said his voice made her hot.

  “My voice makes you hot?”

  “Yeah. Sure it does.”

  Her confession was glib. Completely offhand. As if he’d asked what color the sky was, and she’d reminded him it was dark outside. A bark of a laugh escaped him. “You’re a piece of work, Millie.”

  “About time you noticed,” she answered without missing a beat.

  Catching on to the tempo, he grinned as he adjusted his grip on the phone. “You want me to list all the things I’ve noticed about you?”

  “Would you?”

  This time, he was better prepared for her no-nonsense volley. “Do you play tennis?”

  “God, no. What’s the point of doing all that running and never getting anywhere?”

  “But you ran track in school?”

  “Cross-country,” she corrected. “I’ve never been good at staying inside the lines.”

  “I can believe that,” he said. She laughed, and his dick perked up and took notice. “You’re awfully good at this.”

  “At what?” she asked, all innocence.

  “Keeping the conversation moving, never lighting for very long on one subject. Particularly not when the subject is you.”

  He’d swear it wasn’t possible, but her voice dropped even deeper. “Oh, you’re wrong. I’m my favorite subject. Ask me anything.”

  Emboldened by her straightforward play, he drove straight to the goal. “What do you do about it?”

  “About what?” Her voice rose on a coy note, letting him know she wasn’t the least bit confused by his line of questioning.

  “You said my voice makes you hot. When we hang up, do you…handle things?”

  “Sometimes I don’t wait until we hang up.”

  Zero to one hundred in a split second, he was feeling turbo-charged. “Christ almighty, woman.”

  “You asked.”

  She lobbed those two little words back at him. A chance and a dare. Now, after weeks of keeping things friendly, comfortable, and strictly aboveboard, she was changing the game and challenging him to play along. Without allowing himself a chance to think better of his actions, he opened the knot on his towel and tossed the now-stifling terry cloth open wide. Blessed cool gusted from the vent above the bed, but the conditioned air offered little relief. Every ounce of restraint he’d cultivated dried up. His body pulsed as if he hadn’t jerked himself raw nearly every night since he’d left her. He was melting down at the core, and he was helpless to resist.

  “Millie.”

  Her soft sigh wafted through the phone. “You know, I’ve always hated my name.”

  He swallowed hard, trying to come up with enough spit to form at least one more syllable. “Why?” he managed to croak.

  “Well, it’s not exactly sexy,” she said with a husky laugh. “I’m named after my grandmother. Not much of a surprise. Aren’t too many women my age c
alled Millicent.”

  “I like your name. It suits you.”

  This time, her laughter carried a sharp edge. “Wow. I know I’m a little older than you, but I’m not that old.”

  “You aren’t old at all.” Whoa. The comment didn’t come out sounding like the compliment he intended. He took a breath and tried again. “I mean it suits your personality—a sharpshooter who’s not afraid to be flirty.”

  “Like Annie Oakley.”

  “Like you,” he retorted. “All woman. And a little all-knowing.”

  He could almost hear the smile in her voice. “You mean Cassandra?”

  “Stop trying to distract me.”

  “As I said, you can ask me anything you want.” The unmistakable sound of bedsheets rustling sent his heart rate soaring, but her breathy chuckle kicked down the last of his defenses. “Make sure you ask me in your superhot voice though. Oh, and say my name. A lot,” she added as if he’d need the extra coaching. “I like the way you say it.”

  “Do you want me, Millie?”

  “I think we both already know the answer.”

  “No deflecting,” he admonished. “I want to hear you say you do.”

  “You’ve heard me say so before. I like you. I want you. When you come back with those precious divorce papers in hand, I’m going to do things to you. I’m gonna make you cross-eyed.”

  “You’re a big talker.”

  “The biggest,” she boasted. “Now, ask what you really want to ask.”

  “Are you touching yourself?”

  “Of course.” She panted softly. “Are you?”

  Her unabashed answer coupled with the hitch in her voice turned his dick hard as titanium. He wrapped his hand around the stiff length and groaned out loud. “God, I haven’t let myself. Not while we were talking.” He ran his palm lightly over the head of his cock, then gave himself a hard stroke. “I wanted to, but I didn’t want to make things…weird.”