Wrapped Up: A Triple Threat Sports Romance

by Lexi Cross

  I tried to follow, leaning into his kiss as he pulled away from me, not ready for it to end. I wanted more, more than just a kiss good night, but that was all I was getting.

  “Good night, Brooke,” he said with a warm look in his eyes.

  “Good night.” I reluctantly let go of my fiancé and watched as he walked away, leaving me at my door, fully clothed and physically unsatisfied.

  I asked myself what I really expected from him after everything I had said earlier in the evening. After our conversation about taking things too quickly with sex, I really shouldn’t have expected him to give in to our desires.

  I couldn’t deny how much I wanted him, though, which meant that his new approach, his emotional appeal to me, was working. I couldn’t tell if it was as genuine as it seemed or if he was just trying to take another route to get into my pants again.

  I couldn’t let myself fall for him all over again. We had already decided to essentially stamp our arrangement with an expiration date right from the start. It was wrong to play with each other the way we were.

  I went into my room and locked the door. I didn’t need him creeping into the room in the middle of the night to check on me or try to climb into my bed and allow us to indulge in our desires.

  As I undressed for bed, I watched the door. Part of me hoped to see him try the knob to enter. I slept in just my panties. If he did decide to come in to see me in the middle of the night, I wanted him to have fairly easy access to me. I doubted he would try, since he seemed to be pursuing me a different way, but I wanted to be prepared just in case.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jake

  “I will be more than happy to make an appearance,” I told the event coordinator at the local children’s hospital. She was scheduling a fundraising event for childhood cancer and asked if I would make an appearance to help draw attention to the charity. I figured at the very least it would give me the opportunity to visit with some of the sick children at the hospital and possibly brighten a few kids’ days.

  I had taken Brooke’s advice, and for about a week, I had been working in what we called our front office. My celebrity status as a star player was keeping me busy with community appearances and charity events, which was great because it drew attention to the organizations we were partnering up with, but it was also drawing attention to the team.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the kind of career behind me to support a lifetime of celebrity. I only had a few years behind me, which meant my celebrity status was eventually going to fade away. A few years down the road, I saw myself becoming that guy, the used-up former pro athlete still trying to live off his glory days and remain relevant.

  I had to find something else to do for when the day came when my celebrity status wouldn’t continue paying the bills. I had never thought about it before, but there was a future beyond football. And it was starting to look like Brooke was going to be part of that future, regardless of what our little arrangement was supposed to be.

  I needed to make sure I had a way to support her and take care of her once I was no longer playing on the field. She was right. I needed to find other ways to play for the team. I also needed to heal so I could get back on the field as soon as possible. I needed to play as long as I could to maximize the pull my name would have after I retired, whether I was forced to due to an injury or I chose to because it was just time.

  I called another local charity organization to offer my services. It was a community group that worked with a local homeless shelter. They were raising money to prepare for winter. They provided services to keep people off the streets during the coldest months of the year, but those services weren’t free. Cots, blankets, food, clothes, and the power to run the place all came at a price. The shelter had some public funds at their disposal, but they relied on private donations every year to make sure they were able to help as many people as possible. It wasn’t always just the homeless who needed their services.

  “Hey, you play on the team with Harley Marks, right? He’s your quarterback, isn’t he?” the program coordinator asked after I introduced myself.

  “That’s right,” I told her.

  “Would Harley be available for this event?” she asked me.

  At first it shocked me that she made the request. She was the first one to have asked for another one of my teammates. That was when it occurred to me that even once my own star power had run out, I would be able to continue doing what I was currently doing for the team permanently. If every player who was available for charity appearances had to make the phone calls, make the contacts, and arrange everything themselves, it would be incredibly difficult to schedule any appearances, like I was doing for myself.

  “I’m not sure, but I will gladly check,” I told her.

  I knew we had to have someone who currently did the job of scheduling public appearances for the team, but I had no idea who it was or how they operated. I did know that after making a handful of phone calls, I had scheduled more community appearances for myself than I remembered us organizing for anyone on the team in the few years I’d been playing for them.

  I had to come up with my own system for reaching out to my teammates to help set them up with these opportunities. I knew I would figure something out, but the realization that I could be doing it for other people associated with the team was pretty exciting.

  I took my ideas to Coach Hawkins.

  “Hey, Coach, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Yeah, sure, step into my office.” I caught him on a rare break, when he wasn’t pushing someone on the field or in the gym.

  We stepped into his small office. It wasn’t much more than a closet with a desk and a computer. He didn’t need more than the space he had because he almost never used it. To the rest of us, it seemed like a cramped space, but Coach seemed perfectly comfortable in there.

  “We’ve got an events coordinator already, right?” I asked him, just making sure.

  “Not really. We do have someone handling PR, but scheduling events like you’re doing right now is only part of what she does,” he explained.

  “Depending on the outcome of my injury, I’d like to possibly take over that position,” I told him.

  “Depending on your injury?” He raised an eyebrow. “Let’s get you checked out by the doctors first, Jake. If they say you can get back in the game, you’re going back in the game and forgetting about all of what you’re doing right now. If they tell you to stick to the bench, we’ll talk about your future with the team.”

  My blood turned to ice. I hated phrases like your future with the team. It always sounded like a decision had already been made when someone resorted to such a dismissive phrase. I decided to make my case right then and there. I knew there was a possibility I would be going back onto the field in a couple of weeks, and at that point nothing I said to Coach in our little meeting would matter, but if I didn’t make it back onto the field, I needed him to keep what I was saying to him in mind.

  “With my marketing degree and my record on the field, I think I’d make an excellent spokesperson for the team as either the head of PR or an events coordinator. After only a week of scheduling appearances and working with local community and charity organizations, I’ve got more appearances lined up for myself than I’ve seen the team schedule as a whole for the entire season. I’ve also got a request to get Harley out to one of the events coming up, but I’ll need to work that out with him,” I explained.

  “Well, there’s a reason why you don’t see active team members doing a whole lot of these events during football season, genius. I need you guys on the field, not running around and smiling for the cameras,” argued Coach.

  “Remember that whole positive image thing we talked about the other day?” I asked him.

  “Of course.” He sighed. He could already tell where I was going with this.

  “The way I see it, these appearances would help a lot with that positive public image issue we’re having. Of cour
se, I could work around the game and training schedules, and since we’re technically still part of the team even on the off-season, I could schedule more appearances then just to help keep us relevant. Who knows? It might even be a great marketing strategy to help us win over fans who aren’t typically football fans.”

  While I spoke, it occurred to me that all of what I was saying was essentially common sense from marketing and PR standpoints. And I was sure other teams had to be using the strategy I was explaining to Coach Hawkins already. It just made sense once I took the time to think about it, and it amazed me that I never thought about it before.

  I had always been so concerned with what was going on out there on the field every day at practice or every Sunday at the game. My time off the field had been preoccupied with girls and the network we had set up. Sure, I had a multi-million-dollar deal with the team, but the network was like a separate multi-million-dollar deal every season.

  Between my injury and having Brooke in my life again, my mind was open to the possibility of not having those things anymore. There weren’t lines of women trying to get in bed with me. I wasn’t killing it on the field, and I knew I couldn’t count on that forever. I wasn’t involved with the guys as much this season because I was working on the whole positive image issue. Normally, we met once a week, but I had the sneaking suspicion that the guys were meeting without me. The direction of my career was changing, and so was my lifestyle. I didn’t know how to explain to my coach that I felt the need to start seriously considering the future.

  “You’re completely right, and I’ll pass any ideas you have off to the right people, but I need you on the field, Jake. I need you to focus on healing so when the doctors check you out, they give you a clean bill of health and let you get back to doing what you’re good at, which is kicking ass and taking names for us out there.” He pointed out towards the practice field.

  “I understand,” I said, nodding. He wasn’t ready to face my career’s mortality like I was doing.

  “Now, you’re not out yet. Let’s not start talking like you are. I think you’ve done enough for today. Why don’t you go on home and get some rest? I’d really like to say I don’t expect you back here until you come in to see the doctor again, but I know that’s not going to happen. Just be careful,” he said. He patted me on the shoulder as he walked by, leaving me alone in his cramped office.

  The idea, I supposed, was that I would leave after he made it clear the conversation was over. I was tempted, instead, to go back to work in the front office. I had to have something to do to keep myself occupied. Otherwise, I was just going to obsess over the fact that I wasn’t playing and wasn't over Brooke.

  I had been devoting a little more attention to her over the last several days, trying to win her over and keep her from freaking out over the things that had been written about us in the tabloids. They weren’t saying anything bad. In fact, most of what was being said about us was pretty good. They just didn’t use the most flattering language when they talked about how she was taming the NFL’s most eligible and desirable bachelor.

  Well, it wasn’t flattering for her. I really enjoyed the way they talked about me, even if it was a reminder of the way I had lived my life before. It was a step forward, though, and I knew some of it was going to make it to our team’s new owner so that he would see that I was making an effort to create a more positive image.

  I had a driver pick me up at the training facility and take me back to my mansion, which had been paid for through the money I had raked in as one of the heads of the network.

  I wondered how many of the guys had already seen the articles about my mysterious date the other night. I wondered what they thought about it, and how it would affect my continued contributions.

  Everything was up in the air, and I needed to find a way to ground myself again if I wanted to ensure that my plans didn’t blow up in my face.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Brooke

  As the acting head of my father’s company, I was used to being on the cover of business magazines. I was used to giving interviews where I had to talk about my performance or about the company’s performance. In those magazines, my looks didn’t really matter, as long as I looked like I was there to talk about business and not just walking in off the street for the first time.

  As the apparent love interest of a pro football player, my look took on a different meaning. Every day there were more tabloids trying to figure out if I was his lover, something more, or just an agent helping him renegotiate his contract. Suddenly, I had gone from trying to look as business-like as possible to possibly looking too business-like for the kind of press I was receiving.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult for us to meet in public without being hounded by the press. Speculation over our relationship drove more and more photographers and reporters to follow us on the streets.

  I wasn’t used to all of the attention, and I wondered if it would eventually threaten my job performance to constantly have to dodge paparazzi every time I left the office or the house. I wondered if having to worry about different aspects of my appearance would eventually have a negative impact on my work and detract from my level of professionalism.

  Part of me wanted to go back to my normal, quiet life, when my sole focus was running the company. I knew if I went back to my old life, I wouldn’t have Jake anymore, and I would have missed him. All of these contradicting feelings were swarming around inside me, and I wasn’t sure which way I wanted to go.

  Jake wasn’t making things any easier on me either. He sent me texts regularly to let me know he was thinking about me throughout the day. It was usually something sweet and simple, just a hello here or a hope you’re having a good day there. It wasn’t anything to try to disrupt my day by starting a conversation, just a note to let me know I was on his mind.

  He left me notes everywhere, too, like the note right about eye-level on my bathroom mirror reminding me of how beautiful he thought I was. It was strange to have someone actually acting like they appreciated me. As a successful woman, so many men I met wanted either to prove to me that they were more successful or to let me support them while they did whatever they wanted. It was strange to find someone who looked at me like we were on the same level in that regard.

  It was working. Everything he was doing was working. He was starting to sweep me off my feet, and as good as it felt, it was also scary as hell. It was one thing to see all the signs of how he felt about me, it was another thing entirely to see those same feelings awakening in me.

  It definitely provided balance against the barrage of tabloid journalism, but it was going beyond that. And it was too late to do anything about it. I couldn’t have called off the wedding at that point. It would have ruined my chances with the company, not to mention the trouble it could have caused him while he was on the bench due to his injury. He was supposed to be healing and taking it easy, not running around town courting successful women.

  In speaking of women, it also seemed to me that he hadn’t seen any other women since we started talking about our arrangement. He was devoting himself solely to me, at least until we tied the knot. And if the notes and texts were any indication, it was more than a devotion to our arrangement that was keeping him faithful and loyal to me.

  It really was a scary thought, but until I had complete control over the company, I couldn’t back out of our arrangement.

  “I’m really impressed that you are finally getting married,” my father said to me one day, calling me in the middle of the day out of the blue to talk to me about the marriage and the changing of the guard, so to speak.

  “It’s an easy decision to make with the right person,” I told him.

  “With the right person or for the right reason?” he challenged me.

  “Funny,” I said in an effort to dismiss his accusation.

  “Don’t think I didn’t notice the odd coincidence of you finding someone to marry pretty much immediately after I told
you that you needed to in order to take over the company,” he continued.

  “I thought about that when I decided to tell you. I ran into Jake at the grocery store the same day you and I had that big talk about marriage and the company. It was a strange coincidence, but I hadn’t seen him in years before that day. And he was the one who got away, so I didn’t feel like I could just ignore him,” I explained, reiterating a bit of my original story, except it didn’t feel like a lie or a cover story anymore.

  “Well, as long as you’re happy and you think you’re doing the right thing,” he said in an assuring tone.

  “I really think I am,” I said, and then, I decided to say something else that probably put too many of my cards on the table. “Honestly, my first thought was to go out and find someone to marry just to get the company from you. And I really thought about turning Jake down for the fake alternative. When he first started talking about us getting back together, I didn’t think I would be able to make things move quickly enough, so I hesitated, and once I agreed to see him, he came right out and asked me to marry him.”