Offensive Behavior (Sidelined #1)

by Ainslie Paton

  “I love you and I need you.”

  His ambition and hers. Two spotlights one stage.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck. “We’re never doing breakup sex again. Make up sex all the way.”

  The only living creature with a heart bigger than a giraffe was a blue whale. “Need to get you home.”

  “I can’t ride in this skirt. Can’t wait to get home.” She undid the top button on her shirt.

  The blue whale’s heart was as big as a car. “Here?”

  Her shirt floated to the floor, her bra, followed. “Oh God, yes. I suddenly have this fantasy, and it’s you and me, a pole, an empty stage and seriously filthy sex.” Her skirt came off, her panties.

  So many things a man in love could do with a willing naked woman and a pole, especially a man who’d had excellent training and whose heart was the size of a car.

  Zarley stood on her toes, stretched her arms above her head, hands gripping the pole, back arched. She would flip and curl and open herself fearlessly to him. She was extraordinary and she was his. He pulled his shirt off. It was a lifetime away from brooding in the back booth to the love of this girl who could fly, and the brightest happiness he’d known.

  “Get over here and begin us, Reid.”

  He put his mouth on hers in a hot rush, a kiss to reset time, to promise here and now and always. He felt her tremble and knew it wasn’t from the pose she held or the scene or the promise of explosively good kinky make up sex, but all the ways they could spin and climb and unfold the future.

  And make it theirs, better together, to keep.

  If you enjoyed Sidelined 1—Offensive Behavior, read on for:

  information on Plus, including bios for Reid, Owen, Dev and Sarina,

  and for the first chapter of

  Sidelined 2

  Damaged Goods

  Cara and Owen’s story

  If you really liked Offensive Behavior, you can find out more about the series at:

  www.ainsliepaton.com.au

  The final book in the series, Sold Short

  is Dev and Sarina’s story

  And if you really, really enjoyed Offensive Behavior, or you have a comment that might help another reader, leave a review at your favorite ebook retailer or Goodreads.

  From the company website

  About Plus

  Our software helps teams crush it

  We build software and make apps to help people do critical and cool stuff together.

  We’re for dreamers and doers.

  We’re for teams big and small, virtual and formal, creative, collaborative and kickass.

  We’re for start-ups and full scale enterprises, for co-ops, institutions and non-profits.

  If you do things in teams, then we’re for you.

  Better Together

  How we came to crush it

  Plus happened because Reid McGrath is a dreamer and doer, Owen Lange is a finance whiz, Dev Patel is an ace bug catcher and Sarina Gallo is a turbo talent wrangler.

  Plus happened because the four of them met at Stanford and decided to do or die, together.

  Now we’re 1500 people focused on making stuff to help other people get things done.

  Here’s what else we are:

  - One hundred thousand customers. Plus new ones every day

  - Two hundred and fifty user groups

  - Fifty-two BBQs a year and twenty-four pizza days

  - Fifteen coffee machines

  - Twelve products. So far

  - Ten candles in the birthday cake

  - Five offices in three countries

  - One classic American muscle car. It’s Dev’s, don’t touch it

  - One percent of our profit to our favorite charities

  - Extra vacation time for volunteering

  - One remaining original founder’s Better Together t-shirt. It’s Owen’s and he’s keeping it safe

  How we crush it everyday

  We’re awesome and we want to stay that way so we have some rules to guide us. Here they are:

  1. No assholes

  2. No bullshit

  3. Play as a team

  4. Don’t screw up with customers

  5. Add value

  Occasionally we mess up. You might’ve read about it. We’re only human and if we’ve screwed up with your team, we’ll do everything we can to fix whatever’s wrong as soon as possible. You can count on that.

  About our Founders

  Reid McGrath

  Occasional CEO, and Chief Innovator

  Tall, dark, broody and bossy. Also a genius, which can be painful. Reid is a small-town boy who had big dreams and he’s busy making them come true. He started Plus in his dorm room at Stanford, yes, we know it’s a cliché, and recruited Owen, Dev and Sarina to play on his team and the rest is history.

  Reid was our CEO for nine years and then he wasn’t and then he was for a short time again. You might’ve read about that too. Now he serves as Plus’ chief innovator and he’s just as bossy as ever, but slightly short on the broody. It’s because of Reid most of us play on dream teams during the day and dream about teams at night.

  Owen Lange

  CEO and Chief of Money

  In another life, Owen Lange might’ve been a Vegas card shark. Instead he chose to sharpen his reflexes on the kinds of zeroes and ones that belong in a balance sheet. The lights stay on and we all get paid every week on time because Owen is our chief of money. He’s also the guy who pays for pizza and keeps stockholders happy, which of course includes every Plus employee. He’s kind of like a dad. He’d let you borrow his car but he’ll send you to your room without supper if you miss curfew. He’s the responsible, nice guy, but don’t let that fool you, he’s also our resident daredevil. He’s jumped out of more planes and scaled more rock faces than Plus has industry awards.

  Dev Patel

  Never wants to be CEO, Chief Engineer

  Code cracker, hacker, UX visionary and muscle car junkie. Dev fixes what Reid breaks and breaks what Reid fixes. It’s worked out well for us so far. If you want to make an unfailingly polite, mild mannered, generous and rational man smack his forehead repeatedly on a hard surface, be a Plus customer with a problem that takes longer than two hours to fix. Dev doesn’t have a superhero suit but as our chief engineer, he sure has a supernatural sense for shipping unbeatably good product and a nose for sniffing out better ways of doing things.

  Sarina Gallo

  One-time stand-in CEO, please don’t make me do it again, Chief of People

  Sarina went to Stanford to learn how to be a game developer and discovered the best game of all was finding and motivating talent. She’s one of the Valley’s best people people—and that’s not a typo. If you want a career in the IT industry, you can’t do better than having Sarina help you plan your start at Plus and your future world domination at whatever you want to do. Also that would make her happy, because she lives for making stars. Sarina is our chief of people and she fixes everything that Reid and Dev and Owen mess up, and you’d never know it.

  Read on for a sample of Sidelined 2:

  Damaged Goods

  Owen rolled to his back as fingers of awareness prickled his brain. Seconds later, with the involuntary tightening of the muscles of his torso, he was fully awake. He groaned, stomach hollowing out as a spasm squeezed across his chest.

  He brought his knees up, heels pressing into the mattress, and when that didn’t relieve the aching pressure, he grunted and straightened his legs out again. There was no comfort. No avoiding this. And it was too soon. But there was nothing he could do to stop the throbbing wave of feeling coming.

  His fists were balled at his sides, curled in the sheet. He needed to calm down. If he could calm down, it wouldn’t be this way. He tipped his head back into the pillow, chin up, mouth open, his breath coming in snatches. God, it was too soon. He had to hold out. But the swoop of nausea arrived along with the sharp hug of sensation wrapping around his ass, hip to hip, making h
im want to buck against it. A hiss of heat ignited along his spine, tendrils of fire licking deep and hateful, and a stream of profanity smoked from his lips.

  This was going to eat him from the inside out.

  He rolled, bringing his knees up and over so he was on his side, trying to make himself smaller, to get away, to find comfort, but the fire was out of control now, electric in its intensity, unrelenting in its intention to break him.

  Hands to his face he stifled a sob.

  He used to be a man who ruled his body with his brain, who made sense from chaos, thrived on ambiguity and loved taking risk by the scruff of its neck and shaking it until it was shouting Uncle. Now his body set the agenda and he cowered at the uncertainty he couldn’t master. Not without help.

  This was his life now.

  After the accident.

  This merciless invasion of pain turning his waking moments into a dance of caution and his sleeping ones into anticipation of another hijack.

  Like precision clockwork, every four hours the pain was back, drying out his mouth, making his hands shake. Each assault hitting him harder than the last, weakening his resolve.

  He wouldn’t sleep again, unless he took a pill. If he didn’t sleep, he’d be a zombie during the day. And it was a day where he needed to prove he was ready.

  Could he breathe through this pain, find the slices of ease in the knife slides of agony until it was time to get up? He was better off wishing it was worse. If it was worse, he’d pass out and never need to know the struggle.

  How did his life become a place where worse was better?

  But it wasn’t worse, it wasn’t better, this invasion of pain in his body wasn’t a foe he could get familiar with. He squinted at the clock, three minutes since he’s last looked. If this was before, he’d be awake in fifty-five minutes. At five-fifteen, he’d be dressed and leading his Cannondale bicycle out from under the garage door. He’d have an hour to ride in Golden Gate Park and still make the office in Palo Alto before eight.

  He’d thought about giving the bike to someone who could use it. Just the idea of sitting astride it, leaning forward to take the handlebars made him tense. Before the accident he’d been able to put his body in that arched forward position made to chase speed, and lose it there while his head did other things: solved problems, planned, dreamed. That hour was the prayer portion of his day before the business of living started. Now the business of living was as much a strain on his body as it was on his mental strength.

  He’d thought he knew how to handle pain. Having his heart ripped out should’ve taught him everything he needed to know to master this.

  And it wasn’t supposed to be this way. He was supposed to be healed. Recovered. Good as new. Taking it easy still and to expect fatigue, but mended, ready to pick up where he’d left off when the truck crashed into Kuch’s Tesla and put them both on the critical list.

  That was four months ago. A whole season had passed. A summer he’d filled with surgery and therapy, resting and impatience. And a lifetime of arguments with his family. He was not going back to Chicago, and no way was he going to Vegas. He wasn’t joining the family business now or ever. He’d crossed the country to put distance between himself, the easy money and the hard addictions of being a Lange. And it was going to stay that way. He might have broken his back but he wasn’t breaking that rule. He’d make his own way or not at all, and that hadn’t changed since Stanford, meeting Reid and starting Plus.

  And nothing Brooke said or did, while she kicked around to care for him would change that. She’d smoothed his way and given him a dozen distractions as only a wayward baby sister who had no reason to earn her own living and no ambition to change that could.

  Without Brooke sleeping down the hall, there was no reason to stifle his moans. No one in the house to wake if he stumbled around in the kitchen or ran scalding shower water long enough to create a citywide shortage. No one to take that information and make it another reason for his family to pressure him to come home.

  Knowing he was alone made this more freeing and more desperate. But he’d wanted this, to be back to normal, even as he knew his body wasn’t ready for it. For fuck’s sake, parts of him still weren’t functioning and maybe never would again.

  As if living through that first fatal crash in his life wasn’t enough to make him wonder if he’d always be alone.

  The pill bottle on the bedside table was empty. It’d had a merry rattle to it this time last week. The pain doc said he shouldn’t need them anymore. But one more wouldn’t matter because if he had the shakes when he fronted the office he wouldn’t get past Sarina’s eagle eyes or Dev’s probing. Reid, he could bluff, unless Zarley had continued to work her voodoo on him, taking his wooden Pinocchio and making him into a real boy.

  The sane part of him hoped she had.

  There wasn’t much left of the sane part of him. Another axe swipe of evil rippled around his hip and under his thigh. He used it to push his legs over the edge of the bed and reef himself upright. He was sweating, his hands shaking. Standing made his head spin. He shuffled to the bathroom holding on to walls and doorways and the edge of the sink. He made the shower water almost too hot to stand, trying to sear the pain out. But five minutes under the spray and his legs were trembling and the decision made.

  He got out, toweled his face off, avoided the mirror, he wouldn’t like what he saw. He took a fresh prescription of relief from the bathroom cabinet and popped a pill from the blister pack. These things were highly addictive, he’d been warned. A gateway drug to other opiates. But he wasn’t addicted. He was the only one of the Lange’s who hadn’t made booze, drugs or dice his religion.

  He just needed a little help on this last stage of his recovery. He took the pill, guzzling water with it. He’d sleep now, a few more hours and be refreshed and ready when he woke. When he was ready, he’d find another way to deal with the pain. Move to the slow release drug and learn to pace himself, waiting the hours required till it was safe to take another dose. He could do it. He wasn’t an addict.

  He drank a second glass of water and caught sight of his eyes in the mirror, red-veined, sunken and heavy lidded. Barely recognizable. Damaged goods.

  He wasn’t addicted, but he was destroyed all the same.

  About Ainslie Paton

  By day Ainslie Paton is a mild mannered corporate storyteller working in marketing, public relations and advertising.

  She’s written about everything from the African refugee crisis and Toxic Shock Syndrome, to high-speed data networks and hamburgers.

  Nights and weekends she writes cracking, hyper-real romances. Her heroes are often tongue-tied and brooding, or heartbreakingly beta. Her heroines are the challenge they didn’t know they deserved.

  You can find out more about her books and newsletter at: www.ainsliepaton.com.au

  You can chat to her when she’s avoiding work on Facebook or on Twitter