“I wasn’t in the mood for loud and clubby or jazz quartets and tuxedoed waiters.”
“This is fine, really. I hadn’t made it back here yet.”
They were quiet for a few minutes. The man at the back of the restaurant folded his newspaper, dropped a few bills on the table and left. A biker came in and sat on a stool at the counter. The waitress flirted with him a little and then yelled another order to Lionel in the kitchen. Lionel put a couple of plates on the ledge between the kitchen and dining area, telling the waitress to stop bugging the customers and do her job. But then when she wasn’t looking at him, he watched her as if he couldn’t see anyone else in the room. Brooks smiled.
“They’re kind of sweet.”
“You mean the dysfunctional way she flirts with the customers so he’ll notice her, and the way he looks at her like a cartoon puppy with hearts for eyes when she’s not paying attention?”
“Exactly.” The waitress dropped off their plates and then returned with a pitcher of sweet tea to refill their glasses. Jonas’s foot brushed against hers and her toes curled against the leather sole of her sandal.
When the waitress left Brooks said, “They’ve been doing this for at least ten years. You think they’ll ever actually make the move?”
Jonas shrugged, but he seemed intrigued by the idea. “What is that?” he asked, pointing to her sandwich and wrinkling his nose.
“Hot brown, best sandwich. Ever.” She cut into it with her fork and let the flavors of turkey and cheese, bread and butter sink into her taste buds. She closed her eyes as she chewed.
“Sandwiches are held in your hands, not eaten with a knife and fork.”
“The best ones are.” She circled her fork with a bit of sandwich on it. “You’ve never had one?”
“No. I’ve seen them on the menu, but could never get past the picture. It’s like someone blended all the food groups together.” His pupils seemed to dilate when she circled the fork closer to him.
“Says the man eating smoked pork ends covered in a blended tomato sauce.”
Jonas ate some of his barbecue. “At least mine isn’t a heart attack on a plate.”
“It’s turkey. Turkey is good for you.”
“Turkey marinated in about three pounds of cheese and butter.”
“And white bread, don’t forget the white bread,” she said around another bite of the sandwich. Another flavor hit her palate and Brooks closed her eyes. “And the bacon. God, the bacon.”
“It has bacon?” he put down his own sandwich.
Brooks nodded and took another bite. Jonas picked up his fork. “What are you doing?”
“Trying your sandwich?”
She shook her head. “Get your own.”
“Just a little bite?”
“I don’t share food. It’s unsanitary.” Not to mention something people who were dating would do. This was not a date, she reminded herself, no matter how many shocks of electricity hit her when his foot inadvertently knocked against hers under the table. He was a tall guy in a small booth. There was nothing relationshippy going on here. Not at all.
He watched her for a long moment. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” Brooks put down her fork and held her hands over her plate, moving them in circles. “My plate. My food. If you want a hot brown you should get your own.”
“But I might not like it.”
“I’m sure you can afford it, Muscles.” She picked up the plate and inhaled. “Bacon and cheese, toasted bread. Turkey, some seasonings. And you chose regular, everyday barbecue.”
“You are an evil woman.”
Jonas signaled the waitress, and put in an order for the sandwich. Brooks couldn’t resist the scent of his barbecue any longer and nipped a shred off his plate to pop in her mouth. Still not relationshippy. Relationshippy meant you fed the person you were eating with. This was straight up food kleptomania.
“Nice, spicy. You’ve learned your way around barbecue, I see.”
“Texas, remember? I was bred on barbecue.” She speared another bit of barbecue from his plate and Jonas playfully slapped it out of her hand. “You don’t share food, I don’t share food.”
“Meanie.”
He positioned his fork near her plate. “A nibble for a nibble?”
Brooks eyed his plate and then her own. Maybe there was no harm in a little sharing. “Just one.”
Jonas forked up a bit of her sandwich and she did the same with his. His brown gaze met hers and she felt herself melting, just a little. Not that she’d been all that solid from the second she heard his truck in the drive, and that was a problem, because he’d asked her to dinner, but that didn’t mean this was a date.
If it was a date there was a whole other problem because she was a reporter and he might be her next big story. His pupils dilated as he savored the food and Brooks forgot to breathe for a long moment.
She should not want this to be a date.
“Aren’t you going to finish?” he asked, and she realized she was sitting at the table with her forkful of barbecue still in her hand, hanging somewhere between the plate and her mouth. She’d forgotten to eat. Brooks shoved the meat into her mouth as the waitress delivered Jonas’s second plate.
“Just in time, and thanks for sharing,” he said.
“Don’t get used to it.”
“Protective of your food, are you, Princess?”
“Only child. I never got used to sharing.”
“Me, too.” He frowned, as if he might say something more. “This is really good.”
“Nothing else like it in the world,” she agreed. “So, did you always live in Texas?”
“All the way through college.”
“Must’ve been a little culture shock to come up here after the draft. Do you get back often?”
“Until this off-season I technically still lived there, although I spent more time away than I did there.”
“Your parents don’t bug you to come back?”
“Parent, and no, my mother doesn’t live in the States.” His expressive brown eyes went flat.
“Oh.” So he was alone. Brooks filed that bit of information away. “I moved to Miami after college, took a job at a local affiliate and started making my way up the reporter ranks. I didn’t get home much, either. This is actually the first time I’ve been in Kentucky for more than a weekend since graduation.” She wasn’t sure why she told him that, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from talking.
The waitress made a big deal of cleaning the emptied tables around them, looking toward the door a few times more than was necessary.
“Lucky you for this is the assignment that brought you back, then.”
“I didn’t realize how much I missed it. The smell of dewy grass in the morning, the sound of cicadas in the yard at night. At my apartment in Miami all I heard was traffic.”
The waitress picked up their empty plates and glasses, not offering refills, and slapped a paper ticket on the table.
“It’s nice here, you know, when the waitresses aren’t ready to go home for the night.” He pulled his wallet from his back pocket, put a few bills on the table and stood. Brooks wiped her hands on her napkin and followed him to the door. “You want to walk for a while?”
Walking with a guy on a summer evening. How long had it been since she’d done that? This was maybe getting a little too familiar and unbusinesslike.
“Sure,” she said.
They started down the cracked sidewalk, talking about nothing in particular. When they turned into a neighborhood park with a rose-filled arbor marking the entrance it seemed natural for him to take her hand as they started off down a mulched path between the oak trees.
“Why Brooks?” he asked, emphasizing the s in her name. “And in case
I didn’t already, I apologize for butchering your name for the past few weeks. I didn’t get the memo about that extra letter.”
“It’s been butchered worse. I kind of thought it was on purpose.”
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. I’ve, um, mostly been on autopilot the last couple of years, and I don’t watch the sports shows.”
“That’s a first.”
“After the first season full of ball-hog and perennial loser comments, I decided watching actual game film was a better use of my time.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond. Until this job, her focus was college football, but she knew how ruthless some reporters were. And she wasn’t sure how differently she would have reported on Jonas’s professional career had she been given the opportunity before this summer. She decided to steer the conversation to more comfortable ground.
“Usually it doesn’t bother me. The name thing.” She shot him a glance, but he didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about her comment.
“Family name?”
She shook her head. “My dad is a huge Cincinnati fan, always has been. When the NAFF placed the Kentuckians franchise, everyone swore he’d switch league loyalties, but he never has. He likes to tell people he bleeds orange. Anyway, back in the 1980s they had a couple of good running backs. One of them, James Brooks, ran for fifty-six yards, and the last five yards he dragged a defender with him into the end zone.”
“Brooks is a little more feminine than James, I suppose,” he said in the dark. “I remember seeing some highlights of that game.”
“It’s made a lot of reels. Anyway, I was born a couple of years after that, but on the same day and within a couple of minutes of the score. My mom was high on the epidural, the nurses didn’t object and I count my blessings every day for that timing because the chances are good that I’d’ve been named Ickey or Boomer if I’d been born any other time.” She looked up at him in the twilight as their shoulders brushed together. The familiar sizzle made its way along her nerve endings. “What about you? Any goofy family stories you’d care to share?”
Something crossed his face, but she couldn’t tell what it was. Embarrassment, maybe. But then it was gone, and she found herself falling deeper into those chocolate-brown eyes. Maybe not knowing the definition of what, exactly, this was, was okay. It could be a date. She could date a man and still remain impartial to his professional life.
People dated and married from different religions and political parties. She and Jonas had a single dinner, maybe it didn’t matter that she was the sports reporter to his injured player. Other people did it all the time. So could she.
CHAPTER SIX
JONAS ORDERED HIMSELF to look away, but those brilliantly green eyes wouldn’t let go. He felt himself moving closer to her, and closer was the last place he needed to be. This was just a dinner. It didn’t mean anything. Men and women had dinners all the time and nothing ever happened.
He wove his fingers around hers and started walking again.
“I don’t think football even registered on my mother’s radar when I was born,” he said finally and wanted to kick himself. Because she would ask a follow-up to that. They might not be on camera, but he didn’t want to share that part of his life with anyone, reporter or not.
“I was named for her favorite scientist. Jonas Salk,” he said and mentally cursed the words.
“You’re kidding.”
He shook his head, glad to be on the subject of his mother and not himself. He didn’t have to tell her all of it. How he’d learned just how much he didn’t measure up to the man he’d been named for. “My mother is a brilliant scientist. She had a plan for her career and a plan for her personal life. She chose the paper-perfect sperm donor, followed every single pregnancy tip and old wives’ tale you can imagine, because she wanted her son to do great things. Like Salk.”
“I’d say you’ve lived up to that, maybe in a different way. National Championship in college, first round draft pick. Those are pretty big accomplishments.”
“Athletic accomplishments aren’t the same as academic.” Not to Beverly Nash, renowned particle physicist, anyway. Her voice echoed in his mind.
Named for a brilliant scientist and you can’t even dissect a frog correctly.
He’d been eleven when she took a fellowship in California, leaving him with a live-in housekeeper. By the time he was a teen she was living and working in Switzerland. He’d get a card for his birthday, a box filled with textbooks for Christmas, when she remembered the holiday. Otherwise, it was him, a housekeeper and a few visits from distant relatives.
“Accomplishments are accomplishments,” Brooks said, squeezing his hand. “Is that why it’s so important to you to make a comeback? You don’t have anything to prove, you know.”
Yeah, he did. He was a collegiate national champion who had been in a single professional play-off game that his team lost in glorious fashion. Being photographed with models, having a mansion in Dallas, resting on his college accomplishments wouldn’t get him into the Hall of Fame. Wouldn’t take him from player to whatever came next.
“I didn’t ask you to dinner to talk about my football abilities.”
They had circled the park, and Jonas turned back onto the sidewalk that would lead to the parking lot where they’d left his truck.
“Why did you ask me?”
Damned if he knew. If that moment he’d had a brief thought about using the dinner to somehow charm Brooks into dropping her story about him, she’d already dropped it. At least for now. So asking her out was a moot point. But he’d still asked. “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said, trying for carefree in his voice, but fearing he failed miserably. “People have to eat.”
They walked for a little while in silence. “So what happens with you after this season?”
“I play another one. You?”
She shrugged in the darkness. “Hopefully I report on another season, and another after that. And maybe one day I’ll be an analyst in the booth.”
“You see yourself in the booth?” He was surprised. He might not watch the shows, but he heard about them, still. Women reported on football all the time. They anchored at local stations and a few led the talk shows on Sunday mornings. None of them were in the booth, though. That was still a man’s territory.
“Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The booth isn’t for me.” There was something about talking about the game but not playing it that made Jonas particularly uncomfortable.
“A lot of guys make the transition.”
“I’m not one of those guys. I like playing the game, I don’t like analyzing it.”
“The two things aren’t so far apart, you know.”
He knew that. On the field, he analyzed the defense, he analyzed his O-line and he analyzed his receivers. But he didn’t want to analyze what someone else might or might not see. “They aren’t so close together, either.”
“Touché.” They started around the park again. “For what it’s worth, I can see you in the booth, or maybe coaching.”
“Don’t—”
“You were good with Mark. Coaching isn’t just about x’s and o’s you know.”
“Coaches inspire their teams.”
“And you don’t? I’ve seen you turn a potential five yard loss into a twenty-five yard gain.”
“You saw me throw the other day.” Even if that pass had been perfect, though, it didn’t mean he was meant for coaching.
“Could you throw even that far right after the surgery?”
Jonas didn’t answer that. For the first few weeks after the surgery he could barely lift his arm over his head to put on a shirt. Before the injury, though, that pass would have flown straight and true.
They arrived back at the truck and Jonas helped Brooks inside. She turned to look at him.
“You can still be great, you know.”
Her eyes captured him again, and he couldn’t look away. There was something there, something deep and comforting and maybe just a little bit reckless. For a little while he wanted the reckless. To not think about the past or the future or the what ifs.
“I didn’t ask you to dinner tonight to talk about football,” he said, his voice rough. The reckless, though, required an explanation and he didn’t want the explanation to be a lie. Jonas swallowed.
“Oh.” She nodded.
“I wanted to spend time with you. Away from the cameras and microphones.” He didn’t know why he was telling her this. No, that was another lie, and he was done with lying, especially to himself. From that moment on the awards show stage to the silly arguing and that moment in the locker room, he’d wanted to know what Brooks Smith was like. Not as a reporter, but as a woman.
She was bright. Funny. A little stingy with her food, but everyone needed a fault or two.
“Jonas.” Her quiet voice snapped him back to the parking lot. “Why don’t you not take me home?”
His stomach muscles tightened as the words slipped from her lips in that slow drawl.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded, and he knew he wouldn’t take her home, not just yet.
When he was behind the wheel, Brooks took his hand in hers and turned her face to watch the buildings passing by. The sun was beginning to set when he pulled into the parking lot of the condo where he’d spent the first few years of his contract with the team. Several other players lived there during the season, but the place was mostly a ghost town now. He parked in his designated spot and then somehow they were inside the glass-and-chrome decorated living room.
Memorabilia lined the walls and a low, white couch sat behind a glass-topped coffee table. He cringed. It was too perfect. Too planned out.
Too much like the other times he’d brought a woman here. Maybe he should have taken her to a hotel. There was still time, he could—
Harlequin Superromance May 2016 Box Set Page 86