“All right. Deal.”
He reached a hand out and I took it, swallowing hard when I felt a shiver go up my spine that was becoming entirely too familiar for my liking. I pulled my hand away and gave him a tight smile, one that fell off when he mimicked it.
I didn’t need him to outright say that he wasn’t happy with the idea of a truce— that much was written all over his face, much like it was probably written on mine. But I was determined to keep my word to Lauren and not screw up again.
Which meant that I needed to stomp my little crush right into the ground.
All I needed to do was keep reminding myself of why we were in this position in the first place. Jared was waiting for the DNA test to prove whether or not he was the father of a newborn infant. He’d apparently had unprotected sex with one of the cheerleaders of the Wolfpack and multiple others had come forward to support her.
Needless to say— it made Jared look exactly like the womanizer he was.
Disgusted by the entire situation, reality once again put a stop to my libido as efficiently as a cold shower.
12
Jared
April had to be the most exasperating woman I’d ever met.
She had been the one who so formally requested that we agree to a truce, but for the next two days, she was colder than she had been when we first met. She hadn’t outright picked any fights since we made peace, but the passive-aggressive comments about Brittany and my ‘playboy antics’ were beginning to wear on my already thin patience.
It was hard enough for me to try to put a lid on the flirting and her rattling my cage was only making me want to bend her over my knee and turn her ass red.
I tipped my head to the side and eyed her carefully, noting her rigid posture and the way she purposely stayed as far to the other end of the couch as humanly possible. Fuck, I was kind of surprised she was even sitting with me at all. The day before, she had practically ordered me to watch television alone so she could sit at her desk and get some work done.
Which turned out to be code for sitting by herself and reading while avoiding me, as I found out when I snuck in and surprised her shortly after.
The girl certainly was in touch with her inner rage.
But now as my mind drifted back to the perverted places it typically stayed, all I could think about was what I’d do if given the chance. April was tense as hell and I would bet a year’s salary that one good fuck would loosen her up exponentially.
If only she would agree to it.
With a low grunt, I turned my head back to whatever movie she had picked and tried to re-immerse myself in the plot. I’d missed too much of the beginning to know the full details, but it irritated me to no end that she had chosen a chick-flick— a genre she hated as much as I did.
Why’d she choose it? Well, the fact that the story seemed to be about accidental pregnancy seemed to be a major tip-off. I clenched my jaw and turned my entire head toward her, smirking when I saw her cheeks turn red almost immediately.
“This movie sucks,” I said dryly, waiting for her to finally woman-up and meet my eyes. When she did, I continued. “Why don’t you pick something you actually want to watch.”
“Who says I don’t want to watch this?”
“You aren’t fooling anyone, April. We both know why you picked it. And for the last fucking time—I am not the father.”
April shrugged, returning her eyes to the screen even though I knew I had her full attention. “So you say. The cheerleaders seem to disagree.”
I scoffed. “The girls who jumped into this are just pissy that I never called them back.”
Her eyes turned to me and the fire behind them burned bright.
“If there wasn’t any truth to their claims, no one would have believed them. But you’re infamous for being a player, Jared.”
I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call myself infamous—at least not for my relationships (or lack thereof) with women. My frown deepened as I considered her words.
When all was said and done, I wanted to go down in the books as one of the best damn quarterbacks my generation had ever produced. Sure, I took advantage of my fame and got with women because of it, but the way April made it sound...
Would that be all anyone remembered? The number of tally marks I had carved into my bedpost? Was there really a chance that the gossip and rumors would outshine the fact that I was an extraordinary athlete?
I couldn’t answer any of those questions and it was leaving me with a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. I stood up from the couch and muttered, “I’m going to lie down,” before I stalked away, not bothering to glance back and see whatever look might have been on her face.
I didn’t bother to shut the door after I entered April’s bedroom—just plopped right down on the bed face-first and groaned into the pillow. After I got out the noise of frustration, I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling for a little while. Eventually, I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the sound of the movie still playing in the living room and focus only on the faint noise of the traffic outside the apartment.
I didn’t know how long I was lying there when the floorboard outside the bedroom creaked, but I could still hear the movie playing. I didn’t even open my eyes to look at her, I simply pulled an arm from underneath my head and patted the spot next to me on the bed. After a brief moment of hesitation, her footsteps began to approach.
“I’m sorry for being such a bitch,” she said with a sigh. “I offered you a truce, but I really haven’t been honoring it.”
The bed dipped beside me and I cracked an eye open, surprised that she took my invitation. But she was perched right on the edge—ready to flee at any moment.
“I’m not lying, you know,” I told her, shocking myself a little as the words just slipped out. “I’m really not the father.”
She shifted around uncomfortably and judging by the way her jaw flexed, I imagined she was biting down whatever scathing remark came naturally to her. When she turned to meet my eyes, it was clear that she didn’t believe me.
“How can you be so sure?”
I could count on one hand the amount of people who knew the truth about what happened with Brittany. The whole affair was a complicated mess and I had only confided in people I knew I could trust— people whose opinions mattered to me.
For a reason I couldn’t even begin to comprehend, I felt compelled to add April to that list.
“Because I never slept with Brittany.”
13
April
My jaw dropped and my eyes went comically wide at his admission.
“If you didn’t sleep with her, then why the hell haven’t you said that? Does Lauren know?”
Jared propped himself to lean against my headboard and shrugged, his eyes uncomfortably shifting around the room. “She does not. And I have my reasons for keeping it to myself.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because I feel like it,” he said sharply before shaking his head. “I really don’t know. It just... feels like the right thing to do, I guess.”
A thought occurred to me and I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you’re just saying this because you think it’ll make it easier to get into my pants, I—”
“That’s not why I’m telling you,” he interrupted with a wry smile. “I won’t deny that I still want to get between those gorgeous legs of yours, but it has nothing to do with this.”
I studied him for a long moment and when I saw no recognizable signs of dishonestly on his face, I let out a long sigh and asked, “Are you going to give me the full story?”
He considered it for a moment before sliding a hand through his hair and shrugging. “There really isn’t much to tell, but I will if you agree to drop the whole ice-queen persona.” There was a short pause before he added, “And I’d appreciate it if you dropped the whole ‘professional’ bullshit as well. Just act fucking normal.”
I was hesitant to agree to drop the professional
ism between us, but I admittedly was way too curious to pass up the chance to hear the full story. I nodded my agreement to his terms and he let out a long sigh.
“I did go to Brittany’s hotel room with the intention of fucking her on the night she claims I knocked her up. We started to fool around—clothes came off and certain parts might have been groped a little— but she was totally fucking hammered and ‘sloppy drunk’ is kind of a boner killer for me. So I put her on the bed and just kept shrugging her off until she finally fell asleep. Then I went back to my own room.”
“And when she woke up naked—”
“I guess she remembers me taking her back to her room, but nothing beyond that. So she’s under the impression that we fucked.”
I slowly shook my head, trying to put together the missing pieces myself and failing miserably. His voice and expression both looked sincere, but it made no sense to me why he wouldn’t have just come out and admitted it when the scandal first arose.
“What reason do you have to keep this a secret? You’re only hurting yourself. If you would have just told Lauren, we could’ve avoided all this drama.”
Jared shook his head and gave me a sad smile. “It might have avoided the DNA tests, but it still would’ve been rough. I knew she was drunk when I took her up there—I just didn’t know how drunk until we started messing around. Do you really think that would have gone over well? And how do you think it would have affected Britt? Her reputation would’ve been ruined.”
“Why do you even care? After everything she’s said about you, why in the hell are you worried about her reputation?”
“Because I’m pretty sure I know who the real father is and the truth would not only ruin her— it’d destroy him. I’m not going to do that to my brother.”
I knew Jared was an only child, which meant the real father of Brittany’s baby must have been a teammate. But there was still something missing here—a vital piece of information he had left out.
“Does he know it’s his?”
“He slept with her a few times before and after the shit in the hotel room went down with me. He damn well knows it’s his and that’s why he was the first person I talked to when she started slinging accusations. I agreed to take the heat for now, but he knows that once it comes out that I’m not the father—his head’s going to be next on the chopping block. We’re hoping that either something bigger will come up or the press will just lose interest so he can handle it quietly.”
“So in the meantime, he thought it’d be okay to let your reputation suffer,” I said dryly, shaking my head slowly in denial. “Sounds like a real good friend.”
“He just needs time to figure out how he’s going to handle what’ll happen when it comes out. He’s panicking.”
I scoffed and let out a humorless chuckle. “Who wouldn’t be? He’s a father now.”
“He’s also married.” My mouth snapped shut as I stared at him incredulously. “He doesn’t know how to tell her.”
When he paused to give me a chance to respond to that, I tried and failed to keep the malice out of my tone as I said, “There’s not a good way to tell your wife that you cheated on her and fathered a child.”
Jared shook his head. “I agree, but it’s not what I meant. He doesn’t know how to tell his wife that he wants a divorce. For some fucking reason, the moron fell for Brittany. The whole thing is just ridiculous, if you ask me.”
“And yet you let yourself be involved.”
“I owed him a favor,” he said grimly, his tone implying that he wasn’t willing to elaborate. Then he sighed and scrubbed a hand over his jaw as he admitted, “But I didn’t know it would be this bad. I wouldn’t have agreed to take the heat if I had.”
Regardless of my personal opinions about the situation as a whole, I had to admit that learning the truth gave me a whole new respect for Jared. I now knew that he wasn’t the type of guy to take advantage of a severely drunk woman, but he was the kind of man who would take the fall for a friend. Two pieces of information that seemed small, but felt rather large.
It just proved to me how little I knew the real Jared. Maybe I had been right all along—there was a normal guy under all that persona. Okay, maybe not normal, but decent. A good man.
It was just a matter of digging through all the bullshit to find him.
The realization was like a kick to the stomach. Now it would be twelve times harder to get rid of my crush on him and it was made worse by my agreement to just be myself and drop the professionalism between us. I was desperately hoping he was going to continue behaving like he had the past two days because I was terrified of the possibility that I may give in to him if he started up the flirting again.
“Thank you for telling me all that,” I finally said when I realized he was staring at me expectantly. “I appreciate that you trusted me enough to tell me the truth.”
Jared shrugged, trying to coolly play it off. “No big. Least I can do for you agreeing to house me for two weeks.”
“Only ten more days to go,” I swiftly pointed out.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding absentmindedly as his brows knit together in a frown. “You’ll be rid of me before you know it.”
There was an awkward tension lingering in the air, so I stood up and started easing my way toward the open door.
“Well with our new-and-improved truce, the next ten days should be a lot better than the first few. Right?” I asked, laughing nervously as he watched me with narrowed eyes.
“That depends. You going to keep up your end of the deal and drop the professional shit?”
“I said I would.”
Jared swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up, shooting a charming smile at me as he walked over to stand beside me.
“Then the rest of our time together should be wonderful.”
Having a wonderful time with him was exactly what I was afraid of.
14
Jared
“April.”
“It’s fine. I’m just going to—”
“April,” I drawled, dragging out her name while I suppressed an eye roll.
“Jared—”
“Let me do it.”
“I don’t need—”
I growled in irritation and gripped her hips firmly, lifting her into the air and smirking at her squeal of surprise. I twisted around and placed her on her feet behind me, then reached out to take the wrench from her hands while she just started up at me with wide eyes.
I crouched down and crawled under the sink to undo the pipe she was struggling to get loose. I lined up the wrench and used my all my strength to turn it, grunting from the strain. The damn thing was pretty well stuck—if it wouldn’t have pissed her off, I might have pointed out that there was no way she could’ve gotten it off by herself.
Instead, I stuck my hand out and said, “Give me the new one.”
A moment later, the replacement was placed in my hand. I made quick work of putting the new piece on and making sure it was tight enough to not leak, but hopefully loose enough for her to get off next time. When I was done, I eased myself out of the small space and looked up to find her glaring at me.
“I could’ve done it myself,” she said stubbornly, crossing her arms over her chest.
With an exaggerated eye roll, I lifted the old pipe into the air so she could see it. “No fucking way. It was practically welded on there.”
She took the pipe and eyed it warily, but she wouldn’t drop the stubborn act. “I didn’t need your help.”
“Okay, okay. I get it. You didn’t need any help. You’re a strong, independent woman,” I said sarcastically as I sat up on my knees and twisted the faucet on, checking to make sure it didn’t leak before cutting the water off and turning back to look at her. “But since I’m here, you might as well put me to use.”
Please, dear god, please put me to use.
It’d been two days since I told her the truth about Brittany and we renewed our truce. She’d dropped all the p
assive-aggressive comments and the rigid behavior to act more like herself like I wanted, but if anything, getting to know the real her was just making my time stranded here so much worse.
The horrifying truth of the matter was that I was beginning to like her. We still hadn’t talked much at length, but I could feel something familiar rising in my stomach—something I hadn’t felt since I had a crush on Sandy Feldman in tenth grade. I wasn’t fond of how it felt back then and I sure as hell didn’t like it now.
I justified the feelings by telling myself that since my dick still wanted her, I was bound to be frazzled until I satisfied the need. I wasn’t used to this lengthy foreplay—or to being repeatedly turned down. That’s all it was.
But since this was uncharted territory for me, I didn’t know how long I had until I began to confuse the crush-like pangs for something else. Something deeper.
Something to be avoided at all fucking costs.
April tossed the old pipe into the trash can and let out a mumbled thanks before she stalked out of the kitchen. I heard her go into the bedroom and open the closet door, then her muffled voice as she called out, “I’m taking a bath!”
I silently wished that had been an invitation while I cleaned up the mess from changing the pipes. Once I was done, I stood up and washed my hands, then leaned against the counter and glanced around the kitchen.
What could I do to earn some points with her? Helping her take the pipe off had been a bust—not that I did it for her favor anyway. I had only insisted on helping because I knew she was struggling and I figured I might as well.
But how did one seduce a woman like April? She wasn’t responsive to my usual methods, which must have meant she was looking for something else entirely. Maybe romance?
Infamous: A Bad Boy Sports Romance Novel Page 6