by Kennedy Ryan
When I reach the landing for the next floor, a man, probably a baller based on his height, drunkenly yells at a woman I can’t see because his large frame blocks her, has her trapped against the wall.
“Clothes,” he slurs. “What’s a stripper doing with clothes on? I wanna see them tits. And that fat ass. Take ’em off.”
“I told you I’m not a damn stripper,” a strident female voice fires back. “Now get your hands off me or I’ll kick and sue your drunk ass.”
That voice . . . it couldn’t be. It better not be. Not here in this den of iniquity.
The woman steps away from the wall, buttoning her blouse and muttering under her breath in something other than English.
The hell.
“Banner?”
18
Banner
“Jared?”
I utter his name, shocked to come face to face with the handsome devil I’ve been avoiding all week.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, stalling and hoping to distract him from the fact that I’m here.
Needless to say, it doesn’t work.
“You’re asking why I’m here?” he demands, confusion and disapproval settling onto his face. “I belong here. I’m in places like this, parties like this all the time doing business.”
“Well so am I,” I say, willing my hands to stop shaking after the confrontation with the drunken giant. “I have business here, too.”
I step around him, hoping to get away, but no such luck. He grabs my arm and drags me into the nearest bedroom, slamming the door behind us. I can’t believe it’s empty. Seems like every corner of this house is occupied by rutting athletes and willing strippers, but he finds the first available in seconds.
“Who’s here with you?” he asks.
“No one. Why would someone be with me?”
“Why are you here, Banner?” He looks back at the door and then back to me, storm clouds darkening the vibrant blue of his eyes. “Was he bothering you? Did that guy touch you?”
Groped is more like it, but I’m not telling Jared with his face looking like that. I wouldn’t put it past him to go after him, and I know Jared used to ball and can handle himself, but let’s not risk it with a guy nearly seven feet tall.
“I’m fine.” I push past him. “I need to go.”
“Yeah, home.” He catches my elbow again.
I glance down to his hand on my arm.
“You really have to stop doing that.”
“What?” he asks, the clouds in his eyes shifting from stormy to cumulus. “Touching you?”
His grip gentles, and he cups both my elbows, drawing me into the hard heat emanating through his well-tailored suit.
“You liked it when I touched you at the movie, right?” His low-voiced words steam the small space around us.
How many times have I re-lived those scorching moments with Jared over the last week? Asleep, awake, working out, while reviewing a contract. The memory of those electric, erotic moments assails me without warning and have given me no rest. I woke up wet again this morning. I’d come in my sleep. Thank God Zo is traveling. I may have been making noises while I slept or said Jared’s name. I have no idea, but it would have been awkward and hurtful, and I refuse to hurt Zo any more than I have to.
What I’ve already done is more than enough. My heart aches every time I think about the conversation we need to have. I’ll have to tell him what happened with Jared, but I can’t even imagine how that would feel telling him another man touched me that way when I was supposed to be faithful to him. Telling him another man has overtaken my thoughts, my dreams. I’m not a cheat. I keep reassuring myself it was an indiscretion, but nothing we couldn’t get past.
But do I want to get past it? Get past Jared? Stay with Zo? I know I have to deal with it, but I can’t right now. It’s free agency season. Several of my clients, including Zo, are in the thick of it. That means constant contact with teams, meetings with GMs, negotiations with lawyers, phone calls with clients vacationing in time zones all over the world. I don’t have time to be preoccupied with a personal life, much less one as complicated as Jared Foster is making mine.
“Banner, you did like it, right?” Jared’s still touching me, his hands sure, his words confident, but uncertainty lies just behind his eyes. “Why have you been ignoring me?”
“Jared, you know why. It’s complicated.” I sigh heavily and pull away, walking over to open the door. “I’m working and I can’t do this with you right now.”
“Working how?” His question comes from behind me, and his hand slams the door closed again. He’s at my back. I’ve been outmaneuvered. I wanted to keep my distance, but there’s no distance between my back and his front. Between my body and the long hard length of him.
“Was he bothering you?” Jared asks, his lips at my ear, his breath in my hair. There’s genuine concern in his voice, and I hate that this man everyone assumes would sell his grandmother to make the right deal cares about me. Always has. It complicates things even more.
“I’m fine, Jared.” I rest my forehead against the door, refusing to relax against him, though every cell in my body urges me to do just that.
“You were buttoning your blouse,” he says, voice tight. “If he bothered you, then—”
“Then what?” I turn around to face him and lean against the door.
Big mistake. I’m confronted with eyes the dark blue of a midnight sky and the face carved from my fantasies with a lust-tipped chisel. He’s wearing a three-piece suit. The powerful width of his chest stretches beneath a navy blue jacket, vest, and a shirt the color of pink champagne, no tie. His hand still rests against the closed door, and his arm crowds me in.
“I hate it when you ignore me,” he says unexpectedly.
My eyes snap to his, and that was a mistake, too. Looking into his eyes. The intensity there is mesmerizing.
“Not just this week,” he says. “But when we first graduated, right after all that shit went down with The Pride. We were at a few of the same conferences. Every time I tried to talk to you, you froze me out. Once you even threatened to blow your—”
“Rape whistle,” I finish for him, chuckling. I was so desperate to keep him out of my life. I understood the danger then of giving myself to him, and even when I wasn’t sure what his role had been in what happened, when I didn’t believe I could trust him, I knew I couldn’t trust myself. I knew it then and I know it now.
“I need to go,” I say abruptly, turning back around and pulling on the handle. Under the weight of his hand, the door remains closed. “Jared, my client needs me.”
It’s true. It’s why I came here when Tanya texted me that one of my rookies might be in trouble, but it’s also my get-out-of this-room card. I’m relieved when his hand falls from the door, but that’s short-lived because his hands grip my hips from behind, and he presses himself into me.
“Banner, I know you have things you’re working through.” A short laugh rustles the hair at my neck. “Hell, if your free agency season is anything like mine, you’re busy every second of the day.”
I nod, holding my body tense to create even an inch between our bodies.
“But I can’t stop thinking about Saturday,” he whispers across my neck, his words followed closely behind by his lips feathering light kisses across my skin. I shiver and he pushes into me, his thick length wedged into the cheeks of my ass. “About your pussy clenching around my fingers.”
“Oh, God.” I drop my forehead to the door again, my breath coming heavier. “Stop.
“Your nipples,” he continues, his breath thinning out, his palms spreading at my waist until he can brush the underside of my breasts. “I want them in my mouth again. Ban, please.”
“Don’t ask me to . . .” I swallow my words, but my fear won’t go down. “I cannot hurt him like this, Jared.”
“I don’t want you to hurt him. I want you to choose me.” He squeezes my waist, a warning. “But if you don’t choose me, you will
hurt him because this . . . We are going to happen.”
“I have to go.” I step back into him only long enough to wrench the door open. “I need to find my guy before he destroys his career.”
I’ve been distracted by Jared long enough. I need to handle what I came here to do and get out before I allow Jared to wreak any more havoc on my life.
“Which guy?” he asks from right behind me. “You can’t wander around this house looking for your client, Banner.”
He takes my arm . . . again . . . and stops me in the hall.
“Do you know what kind of party this is?” His face hardens above me. “Anything goes, and half these guys are so high out of their minds, they wouldn’t even notice if you said no. So the hell I’m letting you run all over this house looking for your client.”
“Letting me?” Feminist indignation raises both brows. “Since when do you think you let me do anything? You’re not my father or my boyfriend, and even they don’t let me do things. I just do them. I’m a grown ass woman, not some little girl who requires an escort at a fucking party.”
“Oh, the grown ass woman who was being accosted when I found her?” he demands, anger sparking in his eyes. “That was going well.”
“I have a job to do.”
“Well you’re not doing it without me in this house at this party, and I don’t care if you like it or not. Try to shake me.”
Our wills war as we exchange glares, neither backing down.
“Tell me who you’re trying to find,” he says, softening his hands on me, his eyes on me. “And I’ll help you, but I’m not letting you out of my sight in this house.”
A weary sigh forces its way past my lips. I’ve been here an hour already and haven’t found my baller yet. There’s no telling how much trouble he’s gotten into since Tanya texted me.
“Hakeem Okafor.” I look up and see recognition and realization on his face. “Yeah, the one who was suspended for weed twice this season. He’s here and it’s a lot worse than weed. Tanya saw him over a line of coke. He hadn’t done anything then, but I need to intervene before it gets out. One post to Instagram, one tweet, one peep about this, and he could be out of the league for good.”
“A line of coke.” A muscle knots under the sculpted line of Jared’s jaw. “Let me get this straight. You’re at what is essentially an orgy to ‘rescue’ a seven-foot man who’s probably high on cocaine, from himself? Have I missed anything? Some detail that would make this a good idea?”
My concern gives way to anger.
“I told you why I’m here.”
“And I’m telling you it’s not wise.” He places his hand at the small of my back and urges me toward the stairs. “Where are you parked?”
I dig in the heels of my Stuart Weitzmans and whip around, shoving him back.
“I need to find Hakeem first, Jared.”
“You’re his agent, not his mother, Banner,” he returns with heat.
“Right. I’m not his mother,” I snap, slicing one hand through the air for emphasis. “His mother fled a war-torn country with four children and nothing but the clothes on her back. His mother worked three jobs to support them by herself in a new place where she knew no one and had to restart their life from scratch.”
“Ban—”
“His mother is the one I looked dead in the face and promised if she sent her son to the NBA, I would do everything in my power to help him. To protect him.” I swallow an anxious lump, recalling that conversation at her tiny kitchen table on the south side of Chicago. “She’s the one who, for the first time in her life, isn’t worried about how her kids will eat or how they’ll go to college. How her family will make it, and that’s because her son is making eight figures playing basketball.”
I push past him and start toward the set of stairs that takes me to the next floor.
“I need to find him so he can keep playing basketball and I can keep my promise to her.”
“Killer with a heart,” he says softly behind me.
I freeze, one foot on the next stair, and look at him over my shoulder. The years fall away, and I’m not the high-powered agent wearing six-hundred-dollar shoes, and he’s not the ruthless man with a fleet of well-tailored suits and the fastest growing agency around. We’re just two barely-adults dreaming about our futures and wondering who we will ultimately become. I’m happy with the path I chose, and I know he’s happy with the road he’s taken. Our paths diverged, but for whatever reason, lately we keep coming back to this.
“Are you gonna help me or what?” I ask, offering a wry grudging smile.
He rolls his eyes and steps around me to lead the way up the next flight of stairs.
“Ten minutes,” he says sternly. “We look for ten minutes and then you’re leaving with or without him.”
So he thinks. If I haven’t found Hakeem in ten minutes, we’ll renegotiate.
But we do. On the next floor in a room with a few guys, and thankfully, no phones out taking pictures or recording it. And yes, with cocaine everywhere.
“Please let me handle this,” I ask Jared in the hall outside the room. “You helped me, and I appreciate it, but this is my guy. You’ll be right here if I need you.”
For a second he looks like he’ll protest, but he finally nods and leans against the wall.
“If you’re not out in five minutes . . .”
He leaves a trail of unspoken consequences in the wake of that sentence. I nod my agreement and head in, closing the door behind me.
“What the hell are you doing, Hakeem?” I ask with no preamble.
He glances up, his eyes droopy and dazed from the drugs.
“Huh?” He blinks a few times like I’m a hallucination. “Banner?”
“Yes, Banner.” I stand over him, pointing to the drugs and bottles of liquor on the table. “You already had two suspensions for weed. What do you think they’ll do to you for this shit?”
“Nobody would tell—”
“Somebody did,” I cut in, slit-eyed and furious. “And they called me.”
“It’s a private party.” Dismay and panic clear some of his haze.
“Nothing is private. I told you that day one. Maybe once your little coke party pops up on Instagram you’ll believe me.”
He glances around the room, probably seeing the faces around him with new eyes. Some he knows and some he doesn’t. I pray he’s realizing how foolhardy it is to do drugs at all, much less with guys he doesn’t know and can’t be sure he can trust.
I step closer and bend to speak so low only he will hear me.
“Think of Adeago,” I whisper his sister’s name to him. “She wants to go to Northwestern, right? She doesn’t have a scholarship. She’s depending on you, Hakeem. So are Kambili and Ekeema.”
I pull back and touch his shoulder. “So is your mother. You know this.”
He glances from the table littered with coke and weed and destruction then back to me and nods solemnly. He’s a good kid, barely a man, who went from having nothing one day to having riches and resources beyond his wildest imagination the next. It’s a lot. It’s a trap if you don’t have the right people surrounding you. I don’t recognize half the men here. They’re not the right people. Not ballers, but hangers on. Opportunists. Some of them predators. By now, I’ve had enough predators assume I was prey that I know how to spot them.
“Let’s get out of here.” I reach for his arm, but someone reaches for mine.
“You do lap dances?” The huge man attached to the arm asks me, staring at my ass.
I was out, for once, having dinner with Quinn when Tanya texted me, so I’m dressed well. Black harem pants that snap tight at the ankles and a silk blouse longer in the front and cut higher in the back, exposing my lower back and butt.
“Hands off. I’m not a stripper,” I say for the third time tonight.
I mean, really? Do strippers dress this well?
“I like this fat ass,” he says, smacking the derriere in question.
Oh, hell no.
“I said hands off, hijo de puta,” I snap, slipping into the language that always seems to best convey my strongest emotions.
“Uh, I don’t know what you called me,” he says, amusement lighting his drug-hazed eyes. “But my dick got hard.”
“You want that dick shoved down your throat,” Jared says from the open door with a calm I recognize as false. “Touch her ass again.”
His eyes are burning the spot where the man holds my arm. I jerk free and touch Hakeem’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”
Hakeem stands and stumbles. I catch his arm, but his weight buckles my knees and we both almost fall. Jared rushes over and slips under Hakeem’s arm, supporting him.
“Sorry,” Hakeem slurs. “That Grey Goose got me like . . .”
“And that Molly got you, too,” the ass slapper says. “You gon’ feel that, bruh.”
“You took Molly, too, Hakeem?” I ask.
“I guess.” Hakeem slumps into me, all seven feet of him, and I grunt under his weight.
“I got him,” Jared says, irritation barbing his voice. “Man, try to walk.”
Hakeem is practically dead weight, but we get him to the hall. I start dragging him toward the stairs we came up, but Jared stops short.
“There’s a back staircase,” he says. “Let’s take him that way.”
“Good idea.” I shift Hakeem on my shoulder and follow Jared’s lead.