Untouchable: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Kathryn Thomas

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Untouchable copyright @ 2017 by Kathryn Thomas and E-Book Publishing World Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  UNTOUCHABLE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  RIPPED

  STOLEN

  OTHER BOOKS BY KATHRYN THOMAS

  UNTOUCHABLE

  Chapter One

  Quinn

  “That’s your cue, Quinn,” the cameraman said to me.

  I caught his warning at the same moment that somebody decided to bump into me, knocking me off balance and clean out of the frame. I had been straightening up, taking a deep breath and trying to poise myself to start talking. I stumbled to the side, catching myself before I fell to the ground. Wearing heels today, apparently, had been a mistake. I liked to wear them when I knew I was going to be talking to basketball players. They served the vain purpose of making me feel taller; I was already tall, but every inch counted and solved the practical problem of putting the giant, overgrown men and me on something of a more balanced height difference for the sake of filming. It generally helped in interview journalism when both parties, the interviewee and interviewer, were visible.

  I straightened up and saw a young woman in a cheerleader uniform shooting me the same dirty look I was shooting her.

  “Excuse me, we’re trying to film here,” I said to her.

  “This is a court; athletes have first priority,” she said haughtily, before slinking off to join the rest of the gaggle of women who looked just like her. Athletes. She wasn’t an athlete. Maybe she was if you considered cheerleading a sport. I didn’t, but there was a part of me that knew it was partly because I had never made it onto any of the cheer teams when I was at school. There was some athleticism involved, and it was pretty dangerous sometimes, but still, an athlete? So there was no reason why all the cheerleaders were beautiful women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven? There was no reason why the majority of them did modelling and pageants on the side? Even if she was an athlete, she was not one of the ones I was there to see. I shook my head and straightened my clothes, moving back into the frame.

  I had been at the arena for hours now, and the game was finally on. The players usually had a long time to themselves in the afternoons, so I wasn't able to talk to any of them then. I had had to wait until now to really get anything I could use. The beginning of the game was no good because the guys were getting ready for the tip-off and mentally preparing to dominate the other team. Their coach likely had words to say to them at that time, too. Halftime, now, was my first in. I wouldn't be able to talk to the players, that would be too much of a distraction, but I would be able to get a word in with the coach. At least a little something.

  My network had been talking with him and other management heads of the team, and there weren't that many reporters there today competing for his attention.

  “Did you see that, Tony?” I asked my camera guy.

  "Huh?"

  "That girl, she practically ran me down," I complained.

  “What? Oh, yeah,” he said, distracted. He had been watching the girl who had just piledrove herself into me. The girls were getting ready to take to the court during halftime.

  “Can we go again?” I asked. “I need to start with an introduction before we can talk to the coach. We’ll get that once the whistle blows for halftime.”

  Tony nodded, getting back behind the camera, making sure the shot was okay. About a minute later, the whistle sounded for halftime. He gave me a couple seconds and counted me down. Trying to watch the game and be a part of the action was difficult when all I was working. I loved basketball, but the live-viewing thing didn’t really work for me. My dad had taken me a few times when I was a kid—and that was really when my interest in sports was born, but when you watched at home, you could rewind and be comfortable, it was cheaper and it was my true relaxation time.

  Being on the court, the times that I was, it tended to be for work. Sometimes I would catch highlight reels or interviews and see myself in the frame. It was both amazing and embarrassing. Maybe it was stupid, but I thought of video footage as direct slices of the past that were saved into permanence, and it always felt strange to me to see a literal past-version of myself. It was like another level of this intense self-awareness. I began my speech while the players trooped off the court behind me and the crowd erupted into cheers seeing the cheerleaders take their place.

  I had ended up a journalist because I was a nerd and loved to read. I had ended up a sports journalist because what I lacked in actual athletic skill, I made up for in theoretical and sports knowledge. Behind every sport that was played on the face of the earth was a history and theory. There were records of games and players. There were times, dates, and figures that were significant. There were names that were relevant and events that were legendary. My dad had planted the seed by taking me to games and having me watch with him. Of course, he had friends who he could have done these things with, but I think it was the only thing he could think of at the time to do with me that constituted some sort of bonding. I was his only child, and I had done him the disservice of being a girl. He never tried to play the games with me because I never wanted to, but he did let me sit with him and watch.

  He had also been patient, answering all my questions—which I would ask during the games—interrupting it and making him pay attention to me when he would rather have been focusing on the players on the television. That was when he would tell me who was who and why this guy was considered better than this other one and for what reasons. He told me why the game had to stop whenever a player hit another guy and why the crowds seemed to have chants and all the intricate rules that came together to make organized sports work.

  The first time I had watched a basketball game in an arena, I had been like six or so. I remembered feeling that it was very loud. The only thing I heard over the din of the crowd was the squeaking of the players’ shoes on the shiny court floor and the whistles sounding every so often. I remember the crowd being rowdy and the team that my dad had come to see ultimately losing, but I knew that I had had a good time and it was something that my dad liked and interested me, as well.

  The atmosphere at games, when you were really there, just feet away from t
he players and watching the action unfold—next to people who were just as excited and tense and anxious as you were—was something everyone has to experience at least once in their life. It was like there was a charge running through you and it was running through all the rest of the people there who also wanted to see their team win, whether they supported the opposing team or not. You didn’t get the feeling of electric community when you were down courtside for work. You couldn’t get caught up in the action of your team performing because some of the time…a lot of the time…more often than not…frankly…your team wasn’t playing. You reported on whatever game was being played, and it was your job to stay on top of the action, to pursue the players and coaches, and to not miss anything.

  The Charlotte Yellow Jackets were playing the Dockside Gulls. At the halftime whistle, the Yellow Jackets were down forty-three to fifty-one. The Yellow Jackets were my team, had been since I was younger, having been born and raised right here in Los Angeles. They played a mean game and usually led their matches right from the beginning, but today they were straggling. Not by much, but I wondered what the coach would have to say about that.

  Being an athlete myself had never been in the cards for me. I didn’t have that sort of drive and the stomach for constant failure and pain. I was a nerd; I couldn’t play sports and that was why I had read so many books when I was a kid. I did like sports, however, the theoretical side of them. I liked the analysis of game plays and the development of the sports into what we now know of them from their inception years ago.

  I playfully called myself a sports historian, but my job was reporting. I reported the sports news as it happened. I did sideline reporting, but the thing I preferred was interviewing and writing pieces based on the interviews. I liked to put together journalistic pieces because there was so much to say about a game or about a player than just the final team scores or a certain guy’s career stats.

  I liked to think that the league had an asset when it came to me, and it was true. The people my age and younger working for my outlet were interns and personal assistants. My parents had suggested getting in early with a news network as an intern or a personal assistant when I was still in college, so that I could show my chops, learn a lot, and hopefully start in a writing position earlier than the people who didn’t. I had started from the bottom, and now I was a reporter and correspondent. Yes, the gig was my dream job, and yes, a lot of the players were surprised by the questions I asked them and the sports knowledge I had.

  I had been on the sidelines for other sporting events, but I liked basketball the best. For one thing, the courts were covered, which meant we weren’t affected by incumbent weather. For another, we were indoors, which meant I didn’t have to worry about my heels digging up someone’s AstroTurf or special grass. I felt that the game, from the size of the court to the fact that it was played inside, was just tighter and more controlled than other games.

  I smiled and shook hands with Garrett Trudeau, the coach of the Charlotte Yellow Jackets. He had finally gotten away from the team long enough to give me a few words. He was an older guy; they all were. He had coached basketball at every level, from high school to professional in the National Basketball Association. He was a legend in his own right, and I knew as much about the man as I did about the players. That was another thing. It was a little surreal, meeting all the players and sports figures that I had studied and heard so much about in person. It was a little intimidating when it was a person whom I respected—like Garrett. We were going to be on camera; I had to keep my cool and try not to make a fool out of myself in front of a legend.

  “The Yellow Jackets are down at the end of the second quarter, how do you think they can rally and rebound from a possible loss?” I asked. Garrett looked a little surprised at the fact that I had suggested his team might lose. I wasn’t wrong. The game wasn’t over yet. Anything could happen between now and the next couple quarters. There could be an injury, there could be a foul. Anything. Of course, I didn’t want the Yellow Jackets to lose, but it was a possibility in every game, especially when they were against a team that was evenly matched with them.

  “They don’t have many points on us. Their lead isn’t substantial enough to make us worry,” he said cockily.

  “With a view of the season, the way it has been so far, what do you think you guys need to do to stay in the game?”

  “We're on the right track, all we really need is for Dante to be Dante.”

  He wanted Dante to be Dante.

  The Dante to which he referred was the Charlotte Yellow Jackets’ point guard. He was—as far as anyone in the league was concerned—a machine. He had been playing since his early twenties after he had gone to college the same place I went: UCLA. He had gotten in on his basketball playing, of course, and had had a full-ride scholarship. Wasn’t it cruel the way people like me, whose skills did not typically earn then full-ride scholarships, had mountains of student debt to pay back, and people like him, whose skills did earn them full-ride scholarships, made the entire sum of money that I owed in one or two months?

  Dante Rock had the career stats of someone who had been playing for ten years, while he had only been at it for six. His backstory was one that people loved to repeat because fans ate it up. He had come from a single-parent home in a small Ohio town after his father had left his mother. He had picked up a basketball—and the rest was history. That was the come up that so many young men wanted but so few would actually get because of the sheer level of skill that was required to be an elite athlete in this sport, or any sport for that matter.

  He had gone from living in a town that wasn’t even indicated on major maps, where the entire population could fit several times over in the arena we were in at that very moment, to living next door to directors and movie stars in Hollywood and having enough money to literally purchase the entire square foot area of land on which his home town sat if that was something that he felt he wanted to do.

  To say that Dante carried the Yelowjackets was unfair to the rest of the players. He was, however, a real asset. He had been Rookie of the Year and the Yellow Jackets’ MVP not once but two times. Garret saying he wanted Dante to be Dante was implying a lot more things than just fantastic basketball playing.

  There were a number of things wrong with that statement. I knew what he meant, but he had to be able to tell that the statement itself really could have gone either way. Dante being Dante could refer to the fact that the man was well on his way to achieving legendary status in the league and he wasn’t even thirty yet. He had talent out of his ass, and his worst games were comparable to some people's best games. Basketball is a team sport, but the guy shone. It was just a fact. Trudeau was probably counting on the guy to get them in the door and win the championship. If anyone could take them all the way, it was Dante Rock.

  That, of course, relied on a number of factors. There was Dante Rock the star athlete, who everyone expected to succeed, and who did succeed. Then there was the other Dante Rock, the one you read about on trashy gossip blogs because he was photographed partying on a yacht or he was banging this girl or the next. He was still sort of a young guy, and he was earning millions of dollars a year. The fact that he had no family, wife, and kids, at least no kids that he knew about to support, meant nearly every dollar of that salary was disposable income.

  He disposed of it extremely well, with no help. It wasn’t a secret that the guy lived in the Hollywood hills in a mansion the size of some small towns on his own. It was not a secret that he collected luxury sports cars the way some people collected stamps. The guy was single and rich; he was living it up. I couldn’t even be mad because somehow, living like a total degenerate, he was still able to perform on the court. He was affectionately referred to as a bad boy, which was annoying to me, because all he needed to be in the news for was his job…and that was playing basketball.

  Dante was so good at his job, he was such an exceptional player, that that meant his other indiscretions were
mostly just overlooked. Oh, did he have racy pictures of him and a number of unidentified women leaked onto the internet? Was there photo and video evidence that he had had a weekend-long bender in Vegas and had maybe managed to burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars in a casino? Was the man with a different model or actress or socialite every other weekend? It didn’t matter because he would show up to the court the next day and dunk on you, me, your mother, and everyone else.

  He had somehow managed to balance the two sides of himself. His partying and his job really depended on each other if you thought about it. He partied as hard as he did because he had the money, station, and resources to do so. He played so well because he needed to get that money in order to keep acting like a hoodlum in his off time. He had a good stasis going and hadn’t gotten into too much trouble… lately.

  There were times he would slip and get suspended, but still, overall, he seemed like too much of an asset to his team for them to let him go.

  “Dante’s a big player for you guys. Do you think this could be his first championship?” I asked.

  “It would be a first championship for a lot of the guys on the team. I think the lineup could get us that win. I’m confident in our players.” I smiled at him. So diplomatic. We could just cross our fingers and hope that on game day Dante wasn’t passed out in a villa somewhere in the Caribbean with half their cheer squad.