Play for Keeps

by Maggie Wells

  When they reached the table, she gave him a gentle shove, and he dropped into the seat he’d abandoned to go after her. “First, it takes two,” she said firmly. “And I know you can do anything you choose to do.” Regaining her seat, she sighed. “Second, you can’t react emotionally now. You need to stop and think. Start with possible. Then we’ll deal with probable and go from there. You have choices too. Not the same kind Mari has, but you do have some.”

  He massaged the vertical lines between his knitted brows with the side of his index finger, and Millie found herself transfixed. “Three months,” he mumbled. “So, yeah, possible. I guess.”

  “You and Mari were still sleeping together when she was…seeing Dante.”

  He lifted his hand enough to shoot her a look. “You’re cute when you get all euphemistic. I seem to remember you being more blunt than this.”

  She reached across to pat his forearm. “Yes, well, I’m afraid you might cry.”

  He let his hand fall palm up on the table. Unable to resist the invitation, she slipped hers into his, sighing as those long fingers closed around hers. He squeezed once, then relaxed his grip. “I’m afraid I might too.”

  “We’ve got possible. Let’s talk about probable.” She took a bracing breath, then plunged in with the tough questions. “Were you guys still pretty…regular?”

  He pulled back as if he’d been scalded. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  Millie wanted to smile when she spotted the blush darkening his skin, but she settled for a simple lift of her eyebrows. This wasn’t the time for needling him about delicate sensibilities. Still, she liked that he had them. He had an honorable streak a mile wide. One strong enough to overcome the very natural and human impulse to seek revenge, validation, or solace in a woman’s arms when his marriage imploded. No matter how hard the woman in question tried to lure him into temptation. Of course he’d be reluctant to discuss his marital relations with the woman who was now his lover.

  “It’s okay, Ty.”

  “Not one fucking bit of this is okay,” he snapped, launching himself from the chair. “I don’t want to talk about this with you.”

  Millie nodded once, then pulled her phone from the bag she’d abandoned in an empty chair. “Would you like me to contact Danny? Or Mike Samlin?”

  Ty whirled on her. “What? Why?”

  She shrugged. “Because they’re men? Because you’re not sleeping with them?”

  “You think I can’t do the math on my own?”

  “I think you’re upset—which is totally reasonable,” she hastened to add when his lip curled into a sneer. “And maybe you’d have an easier time telling them things you might not want to tell me.”

  He tilted his head. “And why wouldn’t I want to tell you?”

  “Because we are sleeping together. Maybe you’re afraid you’ll hurt my feelings?”

  He pounced on the hint of vulnerability. “Are you telling me you have feelings?”

  “Good Lord, Ty,” she blurted, exasperation overcoming her. “Of course I have feelings. I’m not a robot.”

  “For me.”

  He skirted the end of the table and came to a stop beside her chair. He stood unmoving, waiting for her to expound, but she didn’t. He was a ballplayer, used to intimidating opponents with his superior height and strength, but he didn’t scare her. She found him…breathtaking.

  “Do you have feelings for me?” he asked, enunciating each word with precision. Before she could suck in a little oxygen, he leaned down, effectively caging her in with one hand planted on the table, the other gripping the back of her chair. “And if so, what are those feelings? Specifically?”

  The intensity of his stare held her in thrall. She didn’t try to bolt or slither from the seat. The truth was, she didn’t want to elude him or them or what they might be able to carve out together. The only part she wanted to avoid was the bit where her heart ended up broken into a million pieces. She’d spent years reinventing herself after her marriage fell apart. If she Humpty-Dumptied again, there might not be enough horses, men, or superglue to make her whole once more.

  She started to shake her head but stopped when he leaned in closer. “You know,” she whispered at last, taking the coward’s way out.

  “Tell me.”

  But she couldn’t. Verbalizing her feelings would make them actual information. Information was knowledge. Knowledge equaled power. This man had enough power over her already. She couldn’t give him carte blanche. So she’d start with a few basic truths. Maybe those would be enough to placate him.

  “I don’t want Mari to be pregnant with your baby.” He stiffened enough to tell her this was not the confession he wanted or expected. She needed to give him a little more. Enough to let him infer but not enough to confirm. “I wish you’d never slept with her, but given the circumstances, pretending would be fairly ridiculous.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Is this a feeling?”

  “Jealousy,” she replied with a jerky nod. “I’m jealous.” When his brows rose, Millie felt the need to spin the confession. “Not ‘I’m gonna put sugar in your gas tank’ jealous, but yes, jealous.”

  Ty nodded, compressing his mouth into a thin line as he digested. “Jealous is a good start. What else?”

  “Angry.”

  An emotion easy to own. She’d been pissed off since this whole mess started. Pissed at Ty for marrying the nitwit. At the nitwit for being too blind to know what she had. At Dante Harris’s ingratitude and the vicious glee the press exhibited in taking what should have been a private matter and whipping it into a story concocted for consumption. She couldn’t even think about the morons who sat like lumps in front of their computers and television screens gobbling personal pain like handfuls of mixed nuts.

  She was angry he kissed like he did. Sweet, sensual, drugging kisses that burned hotter than one of those fire-starter logs. The feel of his big, rough hands on her body stoked the flames higher and higher. She didn’t want to love him. Never asked him to love her. But now that she’d had him, she didn’t want to share one bit of him with anyone else. Not even a baby.

  “You’re angry?” he clarified.

  “Yes.” She bit the word off hard, incensed that he seemed to be questioning her right to feel this way. “Yes, I’m angry.” She tipped her chin up a notch. “What of it?”

  Ty smiled as he pushed away and rose to his full height. But not a happy smile. The gleam of it glinted with a steely, sharp edge. “Nothing. I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

  Once she had some breathing room, Millie sucked in a deep hit and went straight to the heart of the matter. “When was the last time you slept with Mari?” He blinked, then started to recover, but before he could say a word, she held up a hand to stop him. “Not slept, had sex. And not oral or anything else. Full intercourse, including ejaculation. The kind of sex that gets a woman knocked up.”

  “A perverse part of me loves it when you get explicit.”

  She acknowledged the comment but didn’t let the playful gambit deter her. “Great. We’ll get to perversions later, but right now, we’re talking about the probability of baby making.”

  “A week or so before she left.” He raised a hand in a gesture of futility, then let it fall away. “I don’t remember exactly. I thought about what went wrong a lot…after. I can’t pin it on any trouble in bed, but I let a lot of other things go. Things I didn’t want to admit to seeing.”

  Millie wet her lips, her mind clicking through various options as she tried to figure out how best to approach her next question. “And before you discovered the affair with Dante, did you suspect anything?”

  He shook his head a split second too early for his denial to be anything but a knee-jerk reaction.

  “Ty, anything?”

  Something must have pinged, because he stopped on a dime. “Why? What did you hear?”


  Despite years of speaking with caution and diplomacy, Millie couldn’t think of a single gentle way to break it to a man that his trophy wife had been making a chump out of him behind his back long before he’d copped a clue. “I’d seen some things posted on social media sites—”

  “You saw them?”

  Millie nodded, a guilty grimace twisting her lips. “A couple of pictures of Mari on PicturSpam with some of the football players.” Mari half-dressed and commanding the players’ full attention, she clarified for her own edification. “Maybe one or two with Dante.” Or ten, she amended in her head. She firmly believed that in cases such as these, it was better not to quantify matters any more than one absolutely had to. “I’d seen a few but didn’t want to make something out of nothing, so I didn’t think to say anything.”

  Okay, that was mostly a lie. She had wanted to tell Ty about the photos but decided not to after talking the conundrum over with Avery and Kate. When her friends advised against getting involved, she had been relieved. Millie had been far too interested in Ty to risk being the one he forever associated with discovering his wife’s infidelity.

  Fire flared in his eyes. His jaw tightened, but he relaxed it with obvious effort. Inclining his head in silent acknowledgment, he averted his face. She watched his chest rise and fall, wishing she could touch him, comfort him, remind him that he was a thousand times the man those boys would ever hope to be. But she couldn’t. Not now. Not if she wanted to hang on to any shred of her own sanity as well as preserve his.

  “It’s possible you are the father,” she said at last.

  “But I’m probably not,” he added hastily.

  The seconds ticked silently between them, but she couldn’t not ask the question. “Does that make you happy or sad?”

  “This whole mess makes me…mad.” But rather than ranting and raving, he threw himself back into his chair, propped his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head into his hands. “I don’t want any of this. I mean, I would have been happy to have a baby when I thought we were happy, but now?” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Why do I ever think I’m going to get to be happy?”

  The despair in his voice cut her to the quick. Needing to do something, Millie flipped the lid on the pizza box and closed it. “Whoa. Pretty nihilistic attitude you’ve got, fella.” She rose, taking the box with her. “Should I bust out the tiny violin?”

  “Christ, Millie, I get it. You’re tough as nails, but do you think you can stop busting my balls for five minutes?”

  She whirled back to face him, the box clutched in her hand. “No, because the second I do, you’ll drop that fine ass of yours into your sulking chair and try to drown your sorrows in a bottle.” Yanking open the refrigerator, she smirked at the nearly empty shelves, then shoved the box inside. “I can’t let you. People like you and me, we suck at sulking. Pouting leads to nasty hangovers, extra housework, and”—she let the door swing shut as she searched for one more consequence for rampant self-indulgence—“pimples.”

  Dark brows rose. “Pimples?”

  “Maybe only those of us who use chocolate as a crutch.”

  He rewarded her with a weak smile. “But we’re not the type to sulk, you and me.”

  Drawing a deep breath, she steeled her spine and crossed the room to stand right in front of him. “No. We’re the type to barrel right on through to the finish.”

  “I need to look into how paternity tests work.”

  She nodded and reached for one of his hands. He gave it to her willingly. “I think a test would be the first logical step.”

  Ty looked up at her, his eyes dark and searching. “And if the baby is mine?”

  “Then we figure out what to do next.”

  He blinked slowly, his jaw set. “Yeah. We figure it out.”

  “But first things first.” She gave his hand a hard squeeze to command his full attention. “Admit nothing. Agree to nothing. Don’t even talk to Mari.” She crouched down until they were eye to eye. “Block her calls if you have to.”

  He started to say something, but she cut him off with a sharp shake of her head. “No. Call your attorney, and request the paternity test. I didn’t say anything about this before because I wasn’t sure if it was true or relevant, but the rumor mill has been saying she and Dante have been on the outs. If so, pregnant or not, she may be looking for a soft place to fall.”

  “And I’m a big, old softy,” he said with more than a hint of bitterness.

  Laying her hand along his jaw, she stroked the sharp slope of his cheekbone. “No. You are a good and honorable man.” Giving him a wobbly smile, she leaned in and kissed him tenderly. “And if Jane Austen taught the world anything, it’s that good and honorable men get screwed around a lot before they get their happy ending.”

  “And you think I’ll get a happy ending?”

  She forced a smile, but she knew the result was weak. “I know you deserve one.”

  “People don’t always get what they deserve.”

  “Not if they leave everything up to destiny.” She kissed him again, this time with gusto, but pulled back before he could wrap her up and pull her against him. “People make their own luck.”

  Catching his forearms, she stepped out of the circle of his reach. A slick side step brought her back to the seat across from him. Plunging her hand into her bag, she groped until she got hold of her tablet, then yanked the pad free. “Call your lawyer,” she instructed. “I’m going to do a little research.”

  Ty shifted his weight to one hip and dug in his shorts pocket for his phone. “What are you doing?”

  Not looking up, Millie tapped an icon on the screen. “Doing what I do best—managing facts.”

  She smiled as she scanned her files, but it wasn’t a happy smile. She’d come here tonight hopped up on Dutch courage and expecting to be in his bed by now. Instead, they’d bickered, played true confessions, and continued the crazy tango she’d hoped to end by scattering all her cards out on the dance floor. Then she’d barfed, and his phone rang, and the world went wonky. But now she had a mission: Protect Ty. Get Ty everything he wanted.

  Replaying the events in her head, she tried not to react to the growing urgency in Ty’s deep voice as he dumped all the evening’s revelations into his attorney’s lap. She had her own mission. A swipe, two taps, and a little scrolling later, she had new ammunition. Thanks to Mari’s addiction to hashtagging every occasion in her life, Millie captured screenshots of a few less-than-flattering photos.

  Under #MerryMari, she found several pictures of Ty’s ex-wife partying with men who were not her husband, some dating back as far as a year prior. They proved nothing, but one didn’t need proof to convict someone in the court of public opinion. All she needed was enough leverage to hold Mari in check until this mess could be settled one way or another.

  She switched her search to the more incriminating #RecruitingTrip hashtag she’d stumbled across in the months before Ty’s marriage imploded. It didn’t take a genius to piece the string of events together. The Warriors’ season had ended before the tournament. Ty and his assistants had made a round of visits to shore up their relationships with players who’d already committed to Wolcott and possibly sway a few who may have been on the fence.

  Mari Ransom had used the same opportunity to get in good with Ty’s star player. The pictures of Mari and Dante left little room for hoping their relationship was strictly platonic. Some had been dug up when the news of the affair went public. Mari had then deleted most of them, but Millie had grabbed screenshots before the posts disappeared. She’d started a file of them long before the story broke, just in case things got ugly. Uglier.

  Tearing her gaze from the screen, she found Ty prowling the kitchen as he listened to his attorney. It boggled her mind to think any woman would choose an amped-up puppy like Dante Harris over Ty’s sleek, smooth grace. He moved like a
big cat. A leopard or panther. Each step deliberate. The play of muscle under satiny skin mesmerizing. His focus compelling and utterly unwavering. As if sensing her stare, he turned. Their gazes met and held. Her stomach twisted into a knot, but then he smiled. A rough, grim attempt. Wary and weary. A bit ragged around the edges. But a smile nonetheless, and meant only for her.

  Hell, maybe he’d already caught her and she didn’t realize. Or want to admit to being too far gone over him. Still murmuring yeses and nos into the phone, he closed the distance between them. His long toes bumped her shoes, then he covered her foot lightly with his, holding her in place as he bent to brush a bone-melting kiss to the top of her head. She put a hand on his chest, not quite sure if she meant to hold him or push him away. Either way, she had to touch him.

  Straightening, he mumbled, “Yeah, she says three months,” as her hand trailed oh-so-innocently over his abs. She curled her fingers into a small fist when she hit the waistband of his shorts but allowed her knuckles to graze his crotch when her hand fell away. Ty raised his eyebrows, his face a mask of mild shock. But the light in his eyes said her playful advances were always welcome.

  “Right, I know,” he said into the phone. He closed his eyes, snapping the connection between them like a thread. “I want to get started on whatever I need to do, so I can figure out where to go from here.”

  Millie stared at the rigid line of his back as he listened. He nodded twice, but the movements were jerky. He ended the call with a few brusque words of thanks, then lowered the phone to his side. He stood still—loose-limbed and unmoving—for a long beat. Then he went into a windup worthy of a major league pitcher and hurled the phone at the stainless-steel face of the refrigerator.