Discovering Us (True Love Trilogy)

by Harper Bentley

  “Jag,” I whispered, pulling away and looking around at the reporters watching us as they scribbled away on notepads.

  “Guess I’m famous now, El. Get used to it,” he said with an eyebrow waggle, chuckling as he continued holding my face, looking down at me like I was the best thing he’d ever seen.

  And I loved that.

  I tiptoed up and kissed him, not caring one bit that more flashes went off. “Hey, it’s kinda like Beauty and the Beast,” I said with a chuckle pulling back and looking around at all the flashes.

  He snorted. “I guess so. See? Fireworks. Stick with me, babe, and that’s what you’ll get.” He wrapped an arm around my shoulders, bent to pick up the sign I’d made for him, looked at it nodding in approval then said, “Let’s go get my luggage,” as he led me to the baggage claim area.

  On his knees behind me, I was on my hands and knees on the bed in front of him, Jag clutched the headboard with one hand, his other arm wrapped around me, holding me to him tightly, his chest against my back, as he showed me how much he’d missed me. And, oh my, had he missed me.

  When we’d gotten back from the airport, we’d barely made it inside the condo before practically tearing off each other’s clothes, our lips mashing together heatedly before he picked me up, making his way to the bedroom. Once there, his knee hit the bed and he came down on top of me, lifted my hips with his hands then slammed inside me so hard and so fast, my body tensed and I came immediately, my neck arching up as I cried out his name.

  “Fuck yeah,” he now growled as he pumped inside me roughly.

  This act wasn’t sweet, it wasn’t tender, but it was perfect.

  “Missed you, babe,” he breathed huskily in my ear .

  God, I loved when he got carried away, so turned on that he made me feel that I was all he needed.

  “Missed you too, Jag,” I panted. His chest, slick with sweat, slid against my back.

  He groaned and his hand that was on the headboard hit the bed as his thrusts sped up, becoming more powerful, his hips driving into mine hard several times before he buried himself to the hilt with a grunt. His forehead came down to rest on my shoulder and his arm around my chest pulled me even more tightly to him. We were both breathing heavily when he turned, pulling me with him, the back of my head landing on his outstretched arm.

  “Jesus,” he mumbled, his chest still rising and falling rapidly.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled right back, breathing just as hard as he was as we lay there staring at the ceiling.

  Jag was uber busy that season, playing almost two hundred games by the time October came around. Well, he didn’t pitch every game, but, of course, he had to be at them. I’d gone to almost every home game but didn’t travel with him. I did fly to Chicago at the end of April when they played the Cubs, getting there Friday afternoon and staying the weekend, splitting my time between Mom and Dad’s house and Rebecca’s apartment. Jag knew I missed everyone, so he gave me the plane ticket as an early birthday present, which thrilled me to death. He kind of figured that out when I jumped on him, knocking him to the living room floor and proceeded to kiss him fifty bazillion times. He’d also gotten tickets for everyone, his family, my family, my brothers included, and Rebecca and Ross to go to the game with me, and I don’t think he was too embarrassed when Rebecca and I made our entire crew do the wave when he took the mound.

  As the season went along, I’d gotten to know several of the wives and girlfriends of the players, and for the most part they were all pretty nice. One of the outfielder’s wives, Gwen, was a real sweetheart who clued me in on everything. She and I sat together every home game in the seats behind home plate that were reserved for wives and girlfriends. We’d exchanged numbers and had hung out together a couple times when our guys were on the road. She worked at a boutique in Beverly Hills and when I’d gone by to see her one day, she told me she could get me some really good deals by using her discount if I found anything I liked. I’d had to laugh when I picked up a Fendi handbag I liked and saw the price, which even if I were to use her discount, the thing would still have cost over a thousand bucks. Jeez. I told her I’d pass for now, which made her laugh too.

  The team ended up finishing third in their division, which meant their season was over, which was disappointing, but it also meant I’d get to see Jag more. That is until his agent, Dirk Dixon, started getting endorsement deals for him. Now, I was all for supporting Jag’s career. I loved that he was already semi-famous and well on his way to super stardom, but it seemed that ol’ Dirk was all for keeping us apart for some reason.

  I’d met Dirk at a party one of the players had thrown at the beginning of the season, and although he was a nice enough guy, I got a strange feeling about him. I guess that feeling could’ve come from the fact that every time I looked around, he seemed to be watching me. I didn’t know what that was all about, I’d even told Jag about it (he just laughed it off) but the guy still gave me the creeps. He reminded me of Jerry Maguire a lot—good looking, around six-feet tall, athletic build, in his early thirties and he was a true schmoozer. I decided to trust Jag’s judgment when it came to Dirk, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to keep an eye on him.

  As soon as the season was officially over, it seemed as if Dirk began booking all kinds of gigs for Jag, which was truly a good thing. The first commercial he contracted had Jag promoting pickup trucks at a local car dealership. A local insurance company hired him next. These were cool but pretty small jobs, but when Dirk secured a Nike endorsement for Jag, we were absolutely ecstatic. That was big. Huge. Afterward I thought maybe Dirk wasn’t so bad.

  Chapter 16

  I was twenty-two when things got a little shaky between Jag and me.

  We flew home to Chicago for Thanksgiving right after Jag had done some ads for Nike. My brothers, of course, had to rib him a little for looking like a pretty boy, which Jag took good-naturedly. We also went home for Christmas, and I was glad we got to see our families over the holidays.

  After New Year’s, things settled back down, with me attending school as usual and Jag dividing his time with going to his trainer, attending team meetings and learning to surf some more. He even got me out there a couple times, but I didn’t have the surfing bug, so I left it up to him. I just didn’t have great patience with falling time and time again. Into freezing cold water. That was salty. And possibly contained sharks.

  When spring training came around again, Jag took off for Glendale on a definite high since he’d just finished shooting another ad for Nike. I was so proud of him. We’d bought the current Sports Illustrated that featured the ad that had him sitting on a weight bench “sweating,” curling a dumbbell and all decked out in everything Nike. His arm muscles were bulging as he lifted the weight and he looked hot! While he was gone, I had the ad and the cover of the magazine framed for him in a big poster frame and hung it over the fireplace to surprise him when he got home.

  Things were pretty much the same as they’d been the year before when he was gone, with Mr. Ashton and me setting up weekly coffee dates—I had him over to our place this go ‘round since he’d added a couple more kitty allergy assassins to his mix and I didn’t want a repeat of last year’s oh-so-fun reaction to them. The Lenoxes still kept an eye on me too. Al fixed my garbage disposal once and we all had dinner together several times over the course of Jag’s absence. I hadn’t seen Alessandra since the previous spring. I guessed she’d probably been on location on some tropical island having pictures taken of her gorgeous body. That or she’d had a tragic thong accident which involved the words anal and surgery. Hey, one can dream.

  Right after Jag had left for spring training I’d gotten a job at one of the Starbucks in town, only working a couple days a week. Jag was paying all the bills and I felt like a freeloader, so I’d thought I’d contribute a little. I’d saved some from my previous job so I did have some cash available, but I also found that I got bored pretty easily when he was gone, being able to study only so much, so i
t kept me occupied and broke up the ennui some.

  When Jag finally got back, he was again busy as all get out, playing games and endorsing even more products that Dirk had booked for him to promote. I had to admit, a small perk of Jag’s being gone to spring training was that I didn’t have to deal with Dirk. Even though he’d moved up a notch or two on my “Meh” scale, I still had a strange feeling about the guy.

  I was busy with school, having practicals, exams and quizzes at least once a week it seemed. Talk about stressful. But I still made it to a lot of Jag’s home games, and I’d even gotten to go to one of his video shoots for a commercial he and another player were doing for a cell phone company, which was fascinating to watch. It was also a pretty cute ad that was about dropped calls of other companies, and they used a phone as the ball that Jag had to pitch then an outfielder dropped it. Corny, but cute.

  Gwen and I still sat together at the games, and we tried calling each other when the team was out of town to make plans to shop or get lunch, but I was getting really busy with school, that most of the time, I’d had to pass.

  Things kept getting more hectic, with me missing more and more games because I had to study so Jag and I rarely had time together, and it was even worse if he had back-to-back away games because we’d go weeks at a time not seeing each other. On top of all the games, in his spare time, he had tons of endorsement deals that Dirk made sure to book, so he was gone a great deal of time for those too.

  One evening when he came home from some endorsement gig he’d been working on for the entire week, he walked to the dining table where I was studying and said, “We need to talk.”

  I looked up at him with a smile, which fell quickly when I saw the look on his face. Crap! What was this about? “Okay…”

  He sat down in the chair next to mine, turning it to face me and ran his hands over his face then up through his hair, then laced his fingers together, resting his hands on top of his head. God, he was handsome. It always just struck me at some of the weirdest times how good looking he was. Like, I’d look at him after having been hanging out with him for an hour and it’d suddenly just hit me how sexy he was.

  He now made a habit of sporting scruff on his cheeks, which he knew I loved because I’d told him it gave him a really rugged look. His hair was a little longer than he’d ever worn it too, but it looked great on him. I sat watching him as he looked anywhere at me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, suddenly scared to even know.

  He glanced at me and took a deep breath, expelling it then brought his hands down, taking mine into them. “I had this gig today, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I thought it was for suntan lotion or something, at least that’s what Dirk told me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Okay…”

  He bit the inside of his lip and looked down at our hands. Good grief. Just what could be so bad about this?

  “It was for swimsuits from the lingerie company Alessandra models for.” He looked up at me, watching me closely.

  All I’d heard was swimsuits, lingerie and Alessandra and it was enough to make me suck in a deep breath. Then all I could do was just look at him, finally noticing that he was wearing a blue button down that was untucked and unbuttoned halfway down to expose a white wife beater underneath, his sleeves were rolled up to expose his forearms and he had on some pretty fancy faded jeans. He hardly ever wore button down shirts and never wife beaters, spending most of his time in t-shirts like I did.

  “Was Alessandra there?” I asked, remembering back to her little comment about her and Jag doing a commercial together and knowing that she’d probably made it happen by using her sexy, Brazilian voice, cooing in her agent’s ear and convincing him to hook them up.

  Jag held my hands tighter and I already knew the answer.

  “Yeah.”

  All right. Nothing to be upset about. It wasn’t like they’d gone on a date or anything. They’d made a commercial. And I’d attended the cell phone one and saw how technical it all was, so this couldn’t have been that big of a deal.

  I nodded then said, “Okay.”

  “Okay?” he asked, surprised that I wasn’t ripping him a new one.

  “Yeah, okay. I mean, it was a commercial, right? It couldn’t have been that bad, could it? I mean, you didn’t kiss her or anything, did you?” I cringed a little when I said those last two words, not wanting to hear that it was that bad.

  “No. Nothing like that. It wasn’t bad. We filmed on the beach. There were around ten other girls there, so it wasn’t like it was just us.”

  Oh, so now they were an “us.” Great. All I could do was sit there and nod stupidly.

  “So… you’re all right with it?”

  “Yeah! I’m fine!” Well, that came out two octaves too high, but it was all I had at the moment. And I wasn’t going to be that girl—the jealous, whining, bitchy girlfriend who was so insecure that she folded at the news of her hotter-than-hell boyfriend cozying up to the hotter-than-hell supermodel who lived down the hall.

  “Good. Thanks for understanding, babe.” He leaned in with a smile and kissed my nose then got up, heading toward the bedroom to change his clothes.

  I followed him asking where he’d gotten the clothes.

  “They provided them for me,” he explained with a shrug as he took off his boots and socks, unbuttoning the top button of his jeans.

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Um, so when does this commercial air?” I questioned.

  “They said in a couple weeks. I’ll probably be in Colorado when it does.”

  Hm. So he’d thought it through as if he didn’t want to be around me when it aired. Good to know. “Oh. Okay.”

  “Yeah.”

  Well, weren’t we the vocal ones?

  “Gotta finish studying for finals,” I said, watching as he took off his shirt leaving him in the wife beater. Wow. I’d never really liked wife beaters, but, damn, he looked good in it. It clung to his well-defined pecs and tight abs, and it made his shoulder and arm muscles look huge.

  “Gonna shower,” he said back, looking back at me, his eyes turning that damned navy which made my breathing speed up.

  “’Kay,” I mumbled, still not leaving the room.

  “’Kay,” he muttered, walking toward me in his unbuttoned jeans and wife beater. Gah! His hands went to the hem of my t-shirt and he pulled it over my head and off, his eyes glittering down at me when he saw that I didn’t wear a bra.

  Looking him over, I couldn’t keep my hands off, as I ran them up his abs then over his chest and up to his scruffy cheeks, cupping his face and pulling him down to kiss me. His hands went to my hips then slid up and under my breasts where his thumbs smoothed across my nipples. He stepped away from me and quickly pulled his wife beater off, turning it around in his hands and sliding it over my head and on me. I laughed in surprise, but when he growled deep in his throat and grabbed the back of the shirt, twisting it in his hand to make it tighter on me then yanked me closer to him, I gasped before his mouth came down hard on mine. After that, every bit of our clothing came off but the wife beater I wore.

  He led me to the bathroom where he pulled me into the shower, making me keep the shirt on as he sprayed water on it. “Goddamn,” he muttered, lust flickering in his eyes as he took in my White T-shirt Contest moment, my nipples hard and straining against the thin fabric. His mouth came down hard on mine and he then proceeded to erase any thoughts of his commercial with what’s-her-face from my mind.

  My cell phone rang one evening in the middle of June when Jag was in Colorado.

  “Oh. My. God.” Rebecca said indignantly.

  “Shit. You saw it.”

  I heard her take a breath. “El, are you sitting down? Sit down.”

  Shit! I’d told Rebecca about the commercial Jag was in and when it was supposed to air, and since she was two hours ahead of me, I guess it’d shown already. I
sat down in the big, cushy chair I’d bought from IKEA with my Starbucks money, throwing my legs over one arm while leaning back against the other and waited on the bad news.

  “You sitting?”

  “Yeah.”

  She took another breath before informing me, “El, you are not to watch that commercial.”

  Wait, what? “Um, what?”

  “El, I’m telling you, do not watch that fucking commercial.”

  Oh, God. This was bad. Rebecca only cursed when she was upset. Just great.

  “Why? What happens in it?”

  “Oh, El, it’s not good.”

  “Jesus,” I whispered. “What’d Jag do in it? Fuck Alessandra?”

  “All but,” Rebecca whispered back.

  Okay, now I was angry. The past weeks with Jag had been great. He hadn’t brought up the commercial again, so I assumed there wasn’t anything to it, so I let it be. “Are you fucking shitting me?” I hissed. “What happens in it?”

  “You’re just gonna have to watch for yourself,” she said with a sigh. She told me what channel it’d aired on and during what program, so I grabbed the remote and turned to the station immediately.

  “I will. I’ll call you after. Thanks, Bec.”

  “Wish I were there to make you a Long Island iced tea,” she said. “I think you’re gonna need one.”

  “I’ve got some wine. Think that’ll do the trick?”

  “Is it one of those jumbo bottles?”

  Oh, boy. This was just fabulous. “No, but I’ve got three bottles.”

  “That should do it.”

  We hung up, I got the wine, downed a glass quickly then poured another, downing it just as fast. Then I sat and waited.

  Ever had one of those moments where you knew you were alive and breathing but it felt like every bit of oxygen had left your body as if you’d been punched in the gut? Yep. My gut-punching moment had occurred at exactly nine-oh-eight in the evening when, get this, the Dodgers versus the Rockies game had gone to break.