Harlequin Superromance May 2016 Box Set

by Janice Kay Johnson

  She also wasn’t ready to shout about it from the rooftops. The cab met her at the corner and she gave him directions to the farm, still thinking about Jonas. Torn between feeling badly about walking away without a word and worry that someone would figure out she’d slept with her story. She had a feeling sleeping with Jonas wasn’t what the network had in mind with this second chance they’d granted her.

  Finally, the taxi turned into the drive leading to the farm, and Brooks told the man to stop. She could walk from here and not wake her parents, because getting home at—she glanced at her phone—six-thirty, eesh—was not the kind of good time they’d encouraged her to have last night. The taxi backed out of the lane and Brooks walked quickly under the leafy branches of the tall honey locust trees lining the drive.

  She made it to her room quietly, shut the door and then flopped backward onto her bed and stared at the ceiling. The faces of impeccably coifed pop stars seemed to mock her. Happy, unencumbered. No cares at all other than entertaining a few thousand screaming teenage girls.

  Brooks blew out a breath. She needed to get out of this room. Out of her head. She threw on a sports bra, shorts and laced up her favorite Nikes and slipped back out of the house. The gnawing worry about who might’ve found out what she’d done wouldn’t leave her. Sleeping with Jonas could cost her the job, and maybe it should.

  She’d gone on the offensive with Jonas and then promptly backed off. She had film of him throwing that duck on the first day of the camp, the one that barely made it ten yards. That could have been turned into a story. But she didn’t do it. Because of the bargain, yes.

  That wasn’t all of it, though.

  She liked him. Not the impeccably dressed, charming star he’d been that first night. It was the slightly nervous, blustering man she’d seen that first day in the locker room that kept her from calling Jonas out on a nightly broadcast. The quiet man who listened to a young boy who’d survived a trauma. Every morning this week she’d driven to the station just after six to get ready for the day, and his truck had been parked outside the training center. That kind of training and focus was impossible to ignore, and so different from what she thought she knew about the Kentuckians’ quarterback before she came back to Louisville.

  Brooks ran past a mile marker on the highway and then turned to go back to the farm. From a professional standpoint, she should not have slept with Jonas. She probably should have turned down his dinner invitation, too. She turned back into the drive. Professionally, she knew she had to set new boundaries with Jonas.

  On a personal level she couldn’t regret last night. Not walking with him in the park or flirting with him over dinner. Not even sleeping with a man she barely knew. Brooks jogged up the porch steps and sat on the swing, catching her breath.

  The worry was there, but the regret she knew she should feel was gone.

  After a while her breathing returned to normal and she sat up. Pushed the toe of her shoe against the porch floor to rock the swing. Took a deep breath and watched the rolling Kentucky hills at the horizon for a long moment.

  “You look like you could use this more than me,” Jimmy said, pushing through the screen door to hand her a cup of coffee.

  “Hey. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  He shook his head and then sat beside her on the swing. “Didn’t hear you come in last night.”

  “It was late. I was quiet.” Funny how easy it was to lie about that. She sipped the strong, black coffee, wincing at the bitter taste, so she wouldn’t have to look at her father. He’d always been able to see right through her.

  “Do you think I should have run a story about Jonas’s shoulder already?” she asked, and immediately wanted the words back. They were too transparent.

  “Having second thoughts about having dinner with the man?”

  “No, I—” she paused. “I was just thinking. I have that tape of him making a bad throw. There are the reports from the actual injury itself. Some reporters would have gone on the air with that kind of information.”

  Jimmy rocked the swing a few times as he considered her words. “Did you not run the story because you wanted to go out with him?”

  “No.” She blinked. “I didn’t run the story because I don’t have confirmation of the actual extent of the injury and because I made a deal with Jonas and Coach Highland.”

  Jimmy slid his gaze to hers. “What kind of deal?”

  “I cover the camp, I get exclusive access and a no-questions-off-limits interview.” Brooks finished the coffee and set the mug on a tiny table beside the swing. “But I could have run the story, made him give me the interview.”

  “Seems to me like no matter which direction you go, you have a reason you should have gone the other. You need to trust yourself.”

  “Says my dad.”

  He elbowed her. “Say your bosses at the network who offered you this promotion. All access to a professional football team? Man or woman, no reporter is going to turn that kind of job down, and no network is going to offer the job to a reporter they don’t trust.”

  “It’s been a week. I haven’t reported on anything substantial.”

  “Of course you haven’t. The draft is old news, and training camp doesn’t start for another few weeks. When you have the confirmation and the interview, run with the story. Until then, you’re just fanning tabloid flames.” Jimmy picked up the mug. “You’re a better reporter than that. You want more coffee?”

  She shook her head, and he went back inside.

  Brooks blew out a breath. She stood, leaned her hands against the porch rail and ordered herself to focus.

  She’d made a deal and she would stick to it. Cover the camp, do the interview. Break the story if it needed to be broken.

  No more dinners with Jonas.

  No hanging around hoping to talk to him.

  Definitely no more sleeping with him.

  This was about business. He needed to focus on his shoulder rehab. She had to remember she was a reporter first, and a starstruck woman second.

  She wasn’t in love with the man, for crying out loud. It was one date. A single night of mind-blowing sex.

  She’d get over it.

  * * *

  “I SLEPT WITH HIM.” Two days after her date with Jonas, Brooks met Trisha for breakfast at a posh restaurant downtown. Because she’d been so busy hanging around late after the days at camp, she’d canceled their planned celebration dinner earlier in the week. “Tell me I’m an idiot.” Trisha only blinked for several long seconds. “On the first date, and it wasn’t even really a date, it was just dinner.” Brooks slouched against the seat of her chair. “I mean, it was kind of a date, but not really and—”

  “How was it?” Trust Trisha to cut straight to the sex of the matter. She sipped her orange juice and waggled her perfectly shaped brows at Brooks. “As good as that one girl told the tabloids?”

  “I didn’t read that particular slice of Jonas Nash gossip, but I’m going to say it was better. Simply because the written word can’t really capture what happened in his bed.” Brooks leaned forward tapping her forehead against the fine, cherry tabletop. “I should turn in my resignation. I should be publicly shamed—”

  “You should get a grip. It was just sex with a hot guy. Consensual sex between two willing partners is a beautiful thing—”

  “He’s an athlete. I’m the reporter assigned to his team.”

  “Please, like there haven’t been mattress meetings between reporters and coaches or reporters and players in the past twenty years since women joined the sports reporting ranks.” Trisha shrugged. The waiter arrived with their omelets and she waited for him to leave before saying, “It isn’t like you’re the warden of a men’s prison and you’re using your power to coerce the man.”

  She should have known better than to tell Trisha.
Free-spirited Trisha had never met a man she didn’t want to sleep with, and she never had regrets. How many times had she encouraged Brooks to stop thinking about the implications and just jump right in? The other night she’d sworn to herself she would put up walls between herself and Jonas. During the two days of camp since, she’d completely lost focus on her job too many times to count.

  Once simply because Jonas took off his shirt.

  She’d needed to be rebuked. Maybe she should have considered going to confession. A few Hail Marys or Our Fathers, and she might never look at Jonas Nash as if he was the last spoonful of salted caramel ice cream in the tub.

  “That isn’t the point. Ethics are involved.”

  “Has he asked you not to report on anything?”

  “No.” Although he’d offered a bargain for an exclusive interview.

  “Have you offered not to report on something because you slept with him?”

  “No.” But she did take the deal he and Earl had offered that first day.

  “Then I see no ethical dilemma here.” Trisha ate a few bites of her omelet. “If senators from different parties can date, if spies can date, I say football players and reporters can date.”

  Brooks thought about that as she finished her own breakfast. People made relationships like this work all the time, and it wasn’t as if he’d asked her on another date. Or said anything about it being a relationship. He’d asked her to dinner.

  She’d asked him to bed.

  They’d barely spoken in the days since. It probably didn’t mean anything to him, no matter what he said in the heat of the moment.

  “I’m being an idiot, aren’t I?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. But, Brooks, you’re allowed to have a life outside of work. You just have to figure out how to make that life coexist with the work. Ever since college you’ve been ultrafocused. You barely dated because of softball, and when that ended you didn’t date because you wanted to graduate early. It’s about time something came up that you can’t ignore in favor of your job.”

  “But I like my job. I have plans.”

  “We all have plans.” The waiter removed their empty plates and offered coffee. Brooks poured sugar into hers.

  “My plan was to live in Chicago. Here I am back in Louisville, and loving every minute of it.” Trisha shrugged. “Do you like him?”

  The man from dinner she liked. A lot. “I’m not sure I really know him.”

  “But do you like him?”

  The man who talked to Mark was solid. The man who made love to her blew her mind. The man who flirted with her over dinner was sweet and funny and made her toes curl. “Yeah. I like him.” And she refused to feel badly about that. Brooks swallowed. “That doesn’t mean I should have slept with him, though.”

  “It doesn’t mean you should die a virgin, either, longing for the touch of a man.”

  Brooks laughed. “I haven’t been a virgin in a lot of years.”

  “Then stop acting like one. You like him. He likes you. So what if your jobs aren’t perfectly in sync? You’ll figure it out.”

  They paid the bill and walked out of the restaurant together. Brooks knocked her shoulder against Trisha’s. “I’m sorry I bailed on our celebration dinner the other night.”

  “No worries. If I had a man like Jonas Nash burning up my thoughts, I might have canceled, too.”

  “Make it up to you this weekend? A girl’s night with dinner and dancing?”

  “It’s a date.”

  * * *

  “WHY DON’T WE call it for the morning? It’s the last day of camp this week. Go spend it with the kids.” Tom lifted the bar with two fifty-pound weights on either end as if it weighed less than a feather.

  “The shoulder won’t rehab itself,” Jonas said, a little annoyed that the trainer wanted to stop so soon.

  “You’ve been here an hour already.”

  Jonas glanced at the clock. How had it been an hour? He was still in the free weight area. Usually by now, he was on the second round of cardio.

  “I didn’t reset the clocks. You’ve been in la-la land for the past hour. Shoulder bugging you?”

  “No, the shoulder’s fine.” Jonas absently rubbed his shoulder, feeling the thin scar that marked where the surgeon had done his work. His shoulder didn’t hurt at all this morning. He’d just been...

  Distracted.

  As he’d been since he woke up alone in the condominium two days before. He hadn’t expected a long, drawn-out conversation about what happened between him and Brooks. He’d expected an awkward few minutes while he drove her home, and after that a few more awkward days when they inevitably bumped into one another at the camp or in the hallways of the Kentuckians’ complex.

  “I have that talk about building endurance and strength with the guys in twenty minutes, so let’s pick up again tomorrow.”

  Instead of having the uncomfortable conversation he’d expected the day after their date, he’d run into a chipper Brooks who acted as if it was an ordinary day. She didn’t bring up dinner or the walk or the condo. He hadn’t caught her watching him at odd moments. She left immediately following the last drills to return to the station; at least that was where he assumed she was going after the camp each day.

  “Jonas?”

  It was as if nothing had changed between them as far as she was concerned.

  A hand waved in front of his face. “Dude, where are you?”

  “What?” What had Tom said?

  “I said I’ve got that conditioning talk with the guys in twenty minutes. Let’s just pick up tomorrow.”

  Jonas shook himself. He had to get Brooks Smith out of his head because he was obviously out of hers. Rehab had to come first, and he’d just screwed himself out of a solid hour of training because his mind wouldn’t focus.

  “Yeah, sorry, man. I’m just going to run a circuit on the treadmill. Tell the kids I’ll be there a little later this morning.”

  “No lifting, not without a spotter.”

  Jonas held up his hand in a Scout salute. “Treadmill only, got it.”

  Tom put a faded ball cap over his longish, blond hair and left the training room.

  Jonas called up his favorite running circuit on the treadmill and started to run.

  Maybe nothing had changed. Sure, he’d seen that cute little dimple above her rear when she pushed the skirt over her hips and now he knew her sassy mouth was as sweet as Kentucky iced tea. He knew her name was thanks to her father’s devotion to a football team, and not a nod to an older relative. He knew that although the hot brown sandwich looked kind of gross it tasted like heaven and that in that moment before orgasm overtook her, Brooks forgot to breathe.

  None of that meant things had to change between them professionally. He was still the quarterback. She was still the reporter who could take his career from him.

  She could also give it back to him.

  Either way, what did he have to offer her? At best he had five more years as a top QB. At worst he’d be traded or simply let go.

  The treadmill inclined, and he pushed his legs harder.

  Team management liked the puff pieces she’d run on the camp. When he ran a search of his name, those stories came up ahead of the old gossip pieces about whom he was dating or what he’d done when he should have been practicing or preparing for a game.

  Ramos and a few of the other defensive players were already in town, using the facilities, getting ready for the season. His center and a few linemen were practicing together in Florida. It was as if because he was staying in Kentucky to rehab, they were more motivated for the season to begin, too. As if by focusing on his game, he’d renewed their focus on their own.

  That had to mean something for the new season, didn’t it?

  The treadmill
slowed and the incline lowered for the cooldown period of his workout.

  He still couldn’t throw a tight spiral for any distance, but he also didn’t feel pain from morning until night. Next week he’d go for another checkup at the clinic.

  Things were looking up, getting back to a normal that might help him right his career reputation. Brooks disappearing from his bed and acting as if nothing happened between them didn’t have to change that. He hadn’t asked her to dinner thinking it would turn into a one-night stand, but he also didn’t have to feel guilty about it. She was an adult. A willing participant in what had happened that night.

  He hit the button to end the program and stepped off the treadmill. Wiped his face on a clean hand towel and then tossed the towel into a laundry bag. Glancing at the clock, he saw he still had time before going to camp. Time enough to bring up the possibility of throwing left with Earl if he was in the building.

  Jonas left the training room, took the elevator up a couple of floors and then turned left down the hall. Earl’s door was open and the coach sat behind his paper-strewn desk with a pencil clenched between his teeth as he pounded his beefy fingers against the keyboard.

  Maybe this wasn’t the time to bring up throwing left, especially since he had yet to get his signature up to right-handed levels. He knocked on the doorjamb.

  Earl motioned him inside, pounded a few more keys and then clicked the mouse. Swooshing sounded in the room as the email was sent and then he took the pencil from his mouth.

  “How’d it go this morning?”

  “Five miles an hour and pushing one-fifty on the bench.” Of course, he’d only lifted the weight a couple of times before Tom called a halt to the session.

  “What did I tell you, son? Just give it time. A partial labral tear doesn’t have to mean your career is over.”

  Jonas didn’t have anything to say to that. “Camp is going well. We’ll close it up next week, but the boys are already making progress.”

  “You ready for the sit-down with Brooks once the buses have left?”