by Payne, Lyla
“You know, I can’t help my reputation. Or that people like me, girls included.” He lapsed into silence for the briefest of seconds. “In fact, I think we should get to know each other better so you can realize you like me, too. I mean, we’re trapped in a car, then a train, then a bus. What else will kill the time?”
“Sleeping?” I suggested. “Eating? Reading? Anything?”
“The fact that you’re trying so hard not to get closer to me during this whole trip only proves that you have feelings you’re trying to avoid, you know. If you really didn’t feel that … thing between us, you wouldn’t be such a bitch.”
“Oh, so I’m a bitch now?”
“You know you are. It’s your thing. It might work for you as far as putting the people off that you want to avoid, but I find it charming. For the record.”
“Fantastic.” More like he enjoyed a challenge. After watching him play tennis for the past five years, I should have guessed that none of this would go down as I’d hoped.
Sam Bradford the tennis player loved being the challenger. His level of play had dipped since becoming number two in the world, and he’d been knocked out of more than one tournament early by nothing other than his own lazy game.
But put him up against the number one in the world, and he sparkled. Kicked ass, ran down every ball, aced every other serve. He was bored playing those first weeks of a tournament—which wasn’t good for his career, or his winnings—because it was too easy. The conclusion foregone.
It was clear to me now that I had gone about this the wrong way. The more obstacles I put in his way on this road to getting his money back, the more determined he would become to get there, with or without me, but it was too late to change my story about us needing to stay inconspicuous now.
Dammit.
It was the same with me. Thwarting his advances only made Sam more intent on wooing me. Maybe if I made myself look like an easier conquest he would lose interest. It was worth a try. Or it would be, if I could trust myself not to believe my own gig.
The problems that could arise from my pretending to like him would begin and end with the reality that I did like him, and with the way my blood heated every time we accidentally brushed against each other, it would be stupid to assume we wouldn’t end up in bed.
“I don’t want to play a game.”
“Fine. But you’re still going to like me.”
Sam hadn’t drawn his line in the sand. I had, but the more time we spent together, the harder it was to see, or to remember why I’d etched it there in the first place.
Chapter 8
Sam
The Croatian, then Bosnian landscape held my attention for quite a while. Fields of wheat and maybe barley stretched across the foreground, dotted with bales of hay and the occasional grouping of livestock. I glimpsed grapevines and wineries, and we crossed bridges over more than one sparkling, impossibly clear lake complete with crashing waterfalls. The Dinaric Alps reached toward the sky, silent sentinels in the distance. I’d seen those up close, since they sat nearer the coast, but I’d never spent time in the interior of the country.
It all made what would be a six-plus hour ride a little more bearable.
The inside of the bus left more to be desired. Aside from the smell, which I’d identified as a potpourri of impressive body odor, stale breath, and unwashed hair, the bench seats were an army green plastic that reminded me of the behemoth that had dropped me off at elementary school. Pieces of stained yellow foam and the occasional spring poked through faded cracks. Trash—cigarette butts, balled-up scraps of paper, discarded straws and toothpicks—and droppings of what I hoped wasn’t feces smudged the rubber aisle runner, and the few characters who joined us on this journey were suspect at best.
No families, just a gaunt, pale couple with sunken eyes and a twitchiness that infected my nerves, a bunch of men traveling alone, and one fat woman, all of whom, in my rampant imagination, might already be infected with the zombie virus. At best, they were connected to some sort of European ring of organ thieves determined to sell at least one of my kidneys on the black market.
I was quite keen on keeping them both.
Once I put a stop to a pointless internal monologue about all of the potential ways riding on this bus was probably going to kill me, it dawned on me that something had changed between the train from Jesenice and boarding this bus in Croatia—Blair had stopped fighting me at every turn. She’d stopped avoiding my gaze, quit making a face every time I opened my mouth, and had even let her hand brush against my leg the couple of times she’d leaned down to get something out of her bag.
“You two nice couple,” the fat woman said as she tottered past, apparently intent on finding a seat closer to the back. Probably in case the meth heads went into withdrawal. Or maybe there had been a falling out among the organ thieves.
“Oh, no, we’re just—” I stuttered, my voice dusty from the last twenty minutes of silence.
“Yes!” Blair interrupted, turning a hundred-watt smile on the woman and leaning in to my side in the process. “We’re on holiday and wanted to do something different, so we’re touring the countryside. It’s so lovely.”
“Yes, yes. Lovely couple. Thank you.”
Obviously the woman’s English left a little something to be desired, but given that I didn’t understand diddly-squat of any local dialect except the tiny percentage of German that was spoken here, pointing that out seemed more than a little insensitive.
She moved on, her giant muumuu and dirt-streaked coat slapping the bench seats on her way past. It seemed Blair had more ideas on this whole cover thing than she had shared with me. We were a couple on an adventurous holiday, now. I turned to her and raised my eyebrow in a silent question we both knew wouldn’t get answered. Instead of asking it, I choose something more innocuous in an attempt to get her talking again. “I was thinking maybe I should dye my hair, what do you think? Since we’re all keen on the backstories and undercover now.”
“I was thinking you should shave it.”
“You must be kidding.”
“Are you attached to those sunny brown locks, Bradford? How manly of you.”
“Thank you for noticing the magnificence of the exact color. The highlights are all natural, too.”
She snorted, but her voice wasn’t quite right. It kept fading when it should have punched me, too soft for the banter that had so far defined our time together. Blair had been quiet for the last half hour or so. I thought she’d fallen asleep before she answered that lady.
I breathed deep as she leaned across me to peer outside, her breasts, barely contained by a tank top and hoodie, brushing my arm. She rested her head against the window, which was propped open at the top, eyes closed. I shut my own, breathing her in and trying not to pop a boner against her belly while trying to remember how long it had been since I’d gotten laid.
Longer than usual, for sure, and my intense reaction to the smell and heat of her was about ten seconds from embarrassing me. I shifted in an attempt to put space between her torso and my crotch. It earned me a curious look, but it didn’t last long. She looked a little sick. “Are you okay?”
“Do I look okay to you?”
“I mean, you still look good. Green’s a nice color on you.” As hard as I tried, I could not keep the smirk off my face or out of my voice. Blair had been none-too-subtle about the assumption that I would be the one most uncomfortable on the bus.
“I get motion sick, sometimes, especially on the hillier parts. The smell isn’t helping.”
One of our fellow passengers had some kind of mutant BO that had been making my eyes water since boarding this bucket of bolts two hundred miles ago in Ljubljana—which, for all my world travels, I still couldn’t pronounce.
“You were fine in the car. And on the train.” I wanted to reach up and rub her back to offer comfort, but I had promised not to touch her until she asked. Stupid.
“I know. I guess the terrain wasn’t so bad? It�
��s better when I’m driving, too.” She pushed off the window, brushing harder against me as she settled back in her seat. “Distract me.”
A million filthy thoughts sputtered through my mind, urging my hard-on toward painful, but if she was softening toward me now wasn’t the time to be dirty. “What are you majoring in?”
“Boring.” She sighed. “Marketing.”
“Okay, fine. What do you want to do with your marketing degree, Blair Paddington?”
“I think I’d like to work in higher education. Recruitment, maybe.”
“You could talk me into about anything.”
“Is every conversation just an excuse to make a suggestive comment?”
I shrugged, then gave her a smile. “I can’t help it. My mind is one-track with you this close.”
“Try harder.” She crossed her arms, features twisting into a grumpy expression that was starting to turn me on. I heard a hitch in her breath, and her tongue snaked out to lick her cherry red lips.
It took every ounce of focus to bite back a groan. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep my promise not to touch her. The heat vibrating in the space between us suggested that’s about all it would take to set off a chain reaction.
“What was it like growing up with your dad?” I tried, suspecting Blair wouldn’t come within ten yards of giving me an honest answer to that one.
“What was it like growing up with your dad?” she fired back, splotches of red appearing on her cheeks.
“Not too memorable, but not horrible,” I replied, trying to model a normal response for her. Nothing about my parents was a secret. My financial divorce from them at age sixteen had been the talk of the tennis world, as had my subsequent decision to still let them join me on tour when they asked. “They got me into tennis, so I’m thankful for that. I spent the majority of my childhood traveling, and they spent the majority of my teenage years spending the money I made.”
“They sound sweet.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
“They’re not evil or anything, they just never had money. I could have been worse off.”
“You could have been better off, too.” Blair’s hand, resting on her thigh, twitched and then inched its way toward mine.
I held my breath waiting for the contact. My body went perfectly still, like a thirteen-year-old boy on his first date in a movie theater, anticipating that very first moment when his hand touched the girl he’d been fantasizing about for months.
When her skin hit mine—just the outside of her pinky finger against the outside of mine—the little spark that shot up my arm shocked me, but still, instinct urged me to stay still. She reminded me of an animal in the woods, one trying to decide whether or not to take the carrot out of my hand. Scaring her away was the last thing I wanted.
That realization surprised me, too. Why, with my ability to go through life happy and satisfied and unfettered, alongside girls who wanted to be in my company, had this one sparked such an interest for me?
It could be as simple as the fact that she didn’t seem like other girls, but I thought it was more than that. I’d thought that we could go through this trip together, and if we didn’t end up acting on the feelings between us, it would be easy to shake it off. Somewhere in the past three days, that had changed. Not ever knowing what it was like to be with her—really be with her—would take some time to get over. Maybe a long time.
Nothing sounded worse than finding out.
“I’m guessing neither of us hit the lottery in the parent department.” I nudged her finger with mine. “Tell me more about your dad.”
She hesitated. Her finger rested against mine now, relaxed. “It was … fun. His life. At least for a while. He wasn’t like other dads. Especially after my mom died, it was like he and I against the world. And it took me a while to realize that the little games we played were cons.”
“You helped him steal from people?” My stomach clenched. Poor kid. Who got their ten-year-old mixed up in international crime?
She tensed, drawing her hand back into her lap. I missed it as though she’d taken mine with her, as though her hand was a ghost appendage that I felt even though a surgeon had removed it.
“I’m not judging,” I rushed to explain. “You were just a kid. I’m … I don’t know. Sad.”
“You don’t need to be sad for me, Sam. I had a more privileged youth than about ninety-five percent of the population, and no matter what he made me do, my dad never mistreated me. He loves me, in his way.”
“But you’re tired of it. The stigma.”
“I didn’t know I was helping him. I refused to keep doing it as soon as I realized what was going on.” She flicked a glance at me for the briefest of moments, then looked away.
Without another thought to my previous promise, I reached up and slid my hand along her jaw, turning her head toward me. The expression in her deep brown eyes eluded me. The truth of her thoughts, of her feelings, hid behind things such as resentment and pride, and her daring me to say that she should regret her unorthodox childhood.
“I don’t blame you for what happened to me, Blair, and no one else your dad conned can blame you, either. He’s the criminal. He’s the one who should have known better.” I smiled, my heart doing a stutter-step when she lifted the corner of her lips in response.
I couldn’t decide if her pissy face or her smile made me want her more.
“You’re a good guy, Sam. I know because otherwise he wouldn’t have seen you as an easy mark. You’re too nice. You trust people too easily.” The smile fell away. “I’m jealous of that, a little. The way I grew up, especially after my dad’s lifestyle came out … I’m not sure I’m capable of trust.”
I felt like a dumbass. After all she had seen and done, she must think I was a real idiot for falling for her dad’s bogus scheme. It didn’t stop my hand from tracing a line down her neck, over her shoulder, and down her arm until it settled on top of hers. Her skin was so silky, so smooth, and contradicted her prickly personality. “Maybe your way is better. At least people can’t take advantage of you.”
“Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot, Sam. You can’t trust everyone. People are assholes, on the large.” She bit her lip and stared out the window. “But not trusting anyone isn’t the greatest life plan, either.”
The speaker on the bus crackled to life, screeching loud enough to set my teeth on edge before the driver’s voice burst through the static. Most of it was unintelligible—all of it was in Croatian. “Did you catch any of that? I’m pretty sure I caught nothing.”
“Not really, but we should be about ten minutes or so from the last stop in Bosnia. Next up, Belgrade!”
“I never thought I’d be so happy to hear someone say that.”
Belgrade was not my favorite place in the world even though plenty of people thrived in its cosmopolitan atmosphere. It didn’t even rank in my top fifty, but the people I knew from Serbia were some of my favorites. Aside from Marija, who was hot as fuck and sweet besides, the Serbians on the tour—and there were plenty of them—had a great sense of humor. Jokesters, the lot.
“I’m going to get out at the station and stretch my legs. Try to settle my stomach. It should help me get through the last couple of hours.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Maybe the stinky guy will get off here, too.”
The smell of her body wasn’t quite as nice as it had been when we both had access to showers every day, and I could only imagine that my own wasn’t too pleasant. Still, Blair smelled nothing like the reek of the man stinking up the bus. Blair’s scent of salt and sweat and skin mingled into something earthy and somehow sexy.
Then again, maybe as a professional athlete, I was prone to find things like sweat and dirt a little sexier than most guys.
“Why are you whispering? Even if he could hear us over the rattle and cough of this junker bus, what are the chances he understands English?”
“Here’s a pro tip for you, world traveler. Always assume everyone k
nows how to speak English.”
“Fair point.”
More people spoke English than anything else, especially in the Western world. I knew that, but we seemed so far away from everything out here. Like maybe we were two college lovers backpacking their way through Thanksgiving break, intent on seeing new things and experiencing them together.
I wouldn’t mind being that guy. Especially if Blair would consent to being the girl.
Whether or not she would under normal circumstances, she kind of had agreed to it for now. The cover had been her idea, so she couldn’t get mad at me for playing it up. Especially now that she’d been the one to touch me first—and she hadn’t complained when I’d done the same. We were making progress. My initial reaction was pleasure, because nothing would improve this little vacation more than getting to know Blair well enough to have a little fun, but then our conversation a few minutes ago replayed in the back of my mind.
You can’t trust everyone, Sam. People are assholes.
Her included? It was hard to admit, but that she had spent time working cons with her dad bothered me. The way she’d tensed up when she’d admitted it triggered a negative response, too—almost like she hadn’t meant to tell me the truth. If it was the truth.
No. I was being stupid, overly paranoid because of the situation. She had found me, not the other way around. She wanted to help. And Quinn knew her. He would warn me if he thought she was dirty—not in a fun way.
The bus shuddered to a stop a few minutes later, every bolt and joint creaking and groaning in protest. It bellowed a huge cloud of exhaust, the odor overtaking anything else that might have found its way onto the curb as I followed Blair into the Bosnian evening.
“Are we close to the border? Like, will they check our passports here?”
“I don’t know. Don’t think so.” She wandered down the platform, away from the thin crowd of our fellow passengers.
Some seemed to be getting air and stretching their legs, grabbing snacks from the smattering of vending machines or braving the toilets, but others hurried away, intent on getting home, maybe, or catching another bus to somewhere else.