Skin in the Game

by Jackie Barbosa

  But that was then. This was now, and she was going to enjoy the heck out of the fact that the tables had turned—or at least equalized.

  “I guess I won’t change it to Agatha, then,” she said lightly.

  He coughed to avoid choking on his coffee. “God, no. Why, were you thinking of doing that?”

  “Well, you have to admit, it would be a lot more memorable.”

  “Any man who could forget you needs his eyes examined.”

  She held back a gust of harsh laughter. He’d probably used that line—or variations of it—to great effect on any number of women in the past. It wasn’t his fault that it was the worst possible thing he could have said to her. And for that reason, she wasn’t going to hold it against him.

  “Now you’re just trying to flatter me so I’ll go out with you.” Or sleep with you.

  “You’re right. Is it working?” he asked, his eyes puppy-dog wide and hopeful. The effect was hilarious…and irresistible.

  “Maybe.”

  “Good. Pick you up at your place at, say, six o’clock?”

  Her place? Crap. That was an idea that had the words “epic” and “disaster” written all over it in capital letters.

  “No, I’d rather meet you,” she said hastily. “Where are you staying?”

  He named a luxury resort hotel five miles down the river on the Wisconsin side and gave a room number on the top floor. Probably an extravagant suite with a killer view of the falls. The kind of place she couldn’t afford to stay for even one night if she saved up for a year.

  “Six thirty, then?” His smoky-lashed eyes swept over her with possessive heat, lingering on her mouth, her throat, the swell of her breasts. She wondered again what he’d think if he realized who she was.

  God, he was so out of her league. In every possible way. They might have grown up in the same small town, but they had nothing in common anymore. Cade had become rich, famous, and worldly. In addition to his Texas ranch, which was probably twice the size of downtown Harper Falls, he owned a mansion in Houston as well as a chateau in the French Alps. Over the years since he’d hit the big time, he had dated supermodels, actresses, and heiresses. Angie, by contrast, taught math to wisecracking teenagers, still lived with her father in the modest three-bedroom house she’d grown up in, and counted herself lucky if she could get a date at all.

  She wouldn’t lie to herself. There was no future here. This could only turn out one way—badly.

  And she couldn’t bring herself to give a damn.

  Chapter Two

  Fourteen, fifteen, sixt…

  Cade’s arms trembled and strained. Gritting his teeth against the fiery pain in his shoulder, he lowered the barbell back into place and let loose a string of vivid curse words.

  Fortunately, he was alone in the gym at the Chateau Le Croix so there was no one to object to his vain taking of the Lord’s name and any other violations of their virgin ears.

  Disgusted, he sat up and wiped the towel around the back of his neck to soak up the sweat trickling from his hair. Damn it! Six months of rehab and training, and he still couldn’t do more than fifteen reps at two hundred pounds. He’d never get back into the NFL before the end of the season at this rate. He could throw as far and accurately as ever, but no one would believe he was durable enough to take a solid hit if he couldn’t bench at least his own body weight.

  He rolled his shoulder and winced. He could almost hear the clanging of metal against metal; with all the screws and plates holding his bones together in there, he had more hardware than a Home Depot. Despite the surgeon’s assurance that the pain would fade and his full strength would return with time and rigorous physical therapy, Cade was no longer certain he believed it. He was no longer certain anyone believed it.

  His cell phone jangled loudly from its position atop the rack of dumbbells on the other side of the room. He grimaced. The ring tone—Pink Floyd’s “Money”—told him it was his agent. Perfect timing.

  He rose from the bench and reached the phone before the third ring. “Hey, Stu. What’s up?”

  “Interest in you, that’s what.”

  Cade pulled the towel from around his neck and stared blankly in the mirror. When he’d left Houston yesterday, there hadn’t been a single team willing even to give him a look, much less talk dollars and cents. “What happened?”

  “Haven’t you seen any of the games today?”

  “No.” He’d deliberately avoided it, in fact. Watching football when he couldn’t play—or at least have a hand in the outcome—was a form of torture.

  “Got a TV handy?”

  Cade glanced up at the flat-screen mounted to the wall across from the treadmill and the stationary bike. “Yeah, hang on.” He crossed the floor and retrieved the remote from the tray mounted to the treadmill’s instrument panel. He hit the power button. “ESPN?” he guessed.

  “Nah, just turn on the NFC game. Where you are, you’ll get the right one.”

  The Vikings game, then. Cade flipped through the stations until he found it. The first thing he noticed was the score. The Vikings, who’d looked invincible during the preseason and were considered by the pundits to be a serious contender for the Super Bowl this year, were down by four touchdowns in the third quarter to a team they should have been trouncing by the same margin. Then, he noticed something even odder. Warren Harris, the Vikings’s star quarterback, his archrival, and—not entirely paradoxically—his best friend, wasn’t taking the snaps. Instead, the second-string quarterback, who didn’t even look old enough to drive, was running the offense. Badly.

  A sick feeling came over him. The kind of sick feeling that was accompanied by a tinge of hope. And he hated himself for it.

  “Where’s Warren?”

  “He was in a minor car accident on the way to the stadium this morning. Broken leg, apparently.” Stu’s tone was a little too gleeful for Cade’s liking.

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “What hasn’t it got to do with you? You know as well as I do Harris is going to be out weeks—if not for the rest of the season—and his backup is barely out of diapers. They need a solid, experienced replacement…pronto.”

  “And they want me?” Cade was dubious. There must be half a dozen quarterbacks warming the benches of other teams who looked better on paper than he did.

  “Well,” Stu hedged, “they want to take a look at you. And I told them they’re in luck…you’re just up the road. Said you’d drive over there tomorrow and—”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. It’s a fabulous stroke of luck that you’re in Minnesota already. You’re first in line for the job. Once they see you can still chuck a ball sixty yards and with accuracy, they won’t want anyone else. Just be there at ten a.m. sharp and—”

  “I can’t do it,” Cade said quietly.

  “What do you mean you can’t do it? Of course you can. You’re dying to get back in the game, and you’re more than ready. No more dilaudid, right?”

  Cade grimaced at the reminder. He’d holed up in his Texas ranch last month to kick the painkiller habit. There was no way he was going to check into one of those plush Betty Ford–style facilities. He knew there were rumors—there always were in these kinds of situations—but he refused to air his dirty laundry in public. It had been the most wretched week of his life, but despite the fact that he now felt every twinge of pain like a knife wound, he wasn’t about to backslide.

  “No more dilaudid, but that has nothing to do with it. I have plans.” Plans that he hoped would include eating breakfast in bed with a certain gorgeous blonde after keeping her awake most of the night. He shifted to find a more comfortable position as his cock gave a happy little jerk at the thought. Although the delectable Angela Peterson was far from the only conflict on his schedule.

  “Cancel them, postpone them, whatever. I told Grimshaw you’d be there, and you can’t make a liar out of me.” When Stu didn’t get his way, his voice had a tendency to veer into p
etulance.

  “Sorry, Stu, I really can’t do it. Not tomorrow. Not for at least the next three weeks.”

  Cade thought he actually heard Stu’s jaw drop open. “You’re not serious. I can’t believe you’re going to pass up a chance to get back in the league to coach your high school football team for three weeks. Getting a favorable trade and the starter’s job somewhere is all you’ve talked about since training camp opened. Now you’ve got the chance and you’re about to blow it to play with the pee-wees? You’re out of your mind.”

  And hurting your wallet.

  Cade sighed. Maybe he was out of his mind, but it didn’t feel like it. He’d promised Coach Lund that he’d see the team through the next few weeks, since the assistant coach quite literally didn’t have the balls for the job. Cade still couldn’t imagine a woman coaching football, even as an assistant. It had to be obvious to anyone that she’d never played the game, but Lund swore this woman was a flat-out genius when it came to strategy and play calling. Still, a genius at strategy and play calling wasn’t necessarily a genius at coaching, and Cade had to assume that this was what why Lund wanted his help.

  A vague memory tickled at the back of his brain of a girl he’d met in his senior year in high school. One with a remarkable grasp of football. She’d been the one to tell him, after they lost the first game of the season, that the team would never win a game so long as they only had twelve offensive plays. He remembered staring at her in awe, because that was exactly how many plays they had, but the only way she could have figured it out was to have counted them while they were playing. And not even the most fanatical football fans did that.

  He tried to conjure an image of her and got thick glasses, long hair of an uncertain shade, and little else. Certainly not her name. He was sure he’d known it back then—something with a “j” sound in it; Julie or Jenny, maybe? He’d never been good with names, though, and sixteen years was a long time. Still, he felt a twinge of guilt that he couldn’t recall more about her. In a lot of ways, she’d been as responsible for their winning the state championship that year as either he or Lund.

  All right, maybe a woman as a football coach wasn’t completely insane.

  “Well, what do you have to say?” Stu prodded.

  “Nothing,” Cade answered firmly, although he felt a twinge of regret as he said it. He wanted to play again. Badly. He just hadn’t expected an opportunity to come this soon…or in this way. “We’ll just have to pass on this opportunity, Stu. It’s not like there won’t be others.

  And besides, I don’t want to get a reputation as an itinerant ‘gun for hire’ who goes back to being a benchwarmer the minute the anointed starter recovers.” I am the anointed starter. And at this point in his life, he’d rather retire than settle for less. He didn’t need the money. Hell, Stu didn’t need it, either; Cade’s success, both on the football field and through endorsement contracts, had lined his agent’s pockets nearly as well as his own.

  If this turned out to be his one and only opportunity to get back on the field, he would miss the game like hell. But he couldn’t believe it would be his only chance, and he also wasn’t going to back out on his promise to the man who’d practically raised him. This was just the first crumb being thrown at his feet. The Vikings were a team on the rebound, and Cade wasn’t interested in being their first date.

  Stu sighed. “You couldn’t be there by noon?” His voice held a pleading note, and Cade knew this was more about salvaging his credibility after making a promise than any hope that Cade would actually take the job—if it were even offered.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Noon might actually be doable. Coach Lund had asked him to come by between nine and ten in the morning to fill out the necessary paperwork for the district’s mandatory background check and for a primer on the team’s roster, strengths, and weaknesses. That would take an hour at most, but Cade wouldn’t be able to take over coaching the team until the background checks were completed and the district signed off all the approvals—apparently, it was harder to get approval to volunteer at a school these days than to get a job at one—and that would take a day or two.

  So, what harm could it do? None, really. Going to the try-out wasn’t a commitment from him any more than asking him to come was a commitment of an offer from the team. Even if one was forthcoming, he could say no. And in the long run, he had a better chance of getting the kind of offer he was looking for if he could demonstrate other teams’ interest in him than if he had no nibbles at all.

  Those were all the rational reasons to agree, but the real reason he did was the hollow feeling in the center of his chest when he imagined a future without football.

  ***

  Angie came home to find her father sitting in his favorite armchair, its tattered upholstery protected by a quilt her mother had made years before, with the football game blaring from the TV. This came as no surprise, of course. He’d never done anything else on Sunday afternoons from August through February for as long as she could remember.

  Of course, she had all those afternoons to thank for her encyclopedic knowledge of the game, since she’d spent nearly every one of them either on her father’s lap or at his knee, listening in fascination as he explained every formation, every play call, every stratagem. What had begun purely as an attempt by the only girl in a houseful of boys to monopolize a small portion of her father’s attention had grown into both a passion and a calling. Thanks to her father’s tutelage and her uncanny ability to analyze spatial patterns and mathematical probabilities, she’d worked her way from the strange girl who liked football way too much into a position as assistant coach—and for the next few weeks, anyway, head coach.

  She walked into the living room and greeted her dad with a peck on his stubbled cheek.

  “Hey, chickadee,” he said. “How was Pirates today?”

  Angie grinned at the joke. He knew perfectly well it was called Pilates, but he couldn’t resist poking fun at the name. “Good. We said ‘Ar’ the whole time.”

  “Then we have something in common, because I’ve been saying ‘Ar’—and worse—at this all afternoon.” He nodded toward the TV.

  A quick glance at the screen told her why he was annoyed: the Vikings were down by four touchdowns in the fourth quarter. And their backup quarterback—who didn’t even look old enough to shave, let alone play in the NFL—was taking the snaps.

  Angie frowned. “Where’s Harris? Are they just protecting him since there was no chance of a comeback or was he injured earlier in the game?”

  Her father’s eyes flew wide open. “Neither. Didn’t you hear? He was in a car accident on the I-35E this morning. Ten car pile-up.”

  Angie’s stomach did a nosedive. “Oh God, he’s not—?”

  “No, no, nothing that serious. But the news reports say he has a broken leg—or maybe an ankle—although the team hasn’t confirmed anything yet. Anyway, he obviously couldn’t play today after being banged up like that.”

  Her insides relaxed a bit. “Well, that’s a relief. Still, they’ll have to get someone else to play quarterback.”

  Her dad snorted. “If they don’t, I’m going to become a Packers fan.”

  Angie pressed her hand to her heart and pretended she was about to swoon. “You wouldn’t.”

  “You’re right. I’ll become a Cowboys fan, instead.”

  “Oh, now you’re hitting below the belt.” If there was one team that every member of the Peterson family had agreed to hate, it was the Dallas Cowboys. With the Packers, it was rivalry, but the Cowboys they all despised on principle alone.

  Her dad chuckled. “So, what’s for dinner tonight?”

  A pang of guilt stabbed her in the stomach. She rarely missed a Sunday dinner with her father, and she never did so at the drop of a hat. Although her mother had died four years ago now, Angie hadn’t quite shaken her fear of losing her father, too. Making sure he remained healthy and didn’t sink into depression due
to loneliness was the reason she continued to live in the “apartment” over the garage instead of getting a place of her own.

  So why hadn’t she thought of that before she’d accepted Cade’s invitation tonight? The truth was, she hadn’t because the day of the week had completely slipped her mind. If she’d remembered it was Sunday, she would have said no.

  Maybe.

  She swallowed her remorse and said, a little too quickly, “I have a date tonight.”

  Her dad leaned forward, instantly intrigued. A little too intrigued. “A date? With whom?”

  She knew his interest was neither prying nor jealous. He’d made it clear for some time now that he thought she should date, that he wasn’t an invalid and could handle a few nights alone. Angie knew this was true, but what was the point of dating when she couldn’t do anything more than that? She sure as heck wasn’t going to move a boyfriend or husband into her father’s house, but she couldn’t move out and leave him all alone, either.

  The more immediate problem was that she couldn’t tell him who she was going out with tonight, because her father would be absolutely giddy with excitement if he discovered she had a date with Cade Reynolds. He’d be envisioning wedding bells and a passel of football-playing grandkids in two seconds flat.

  She swallowed her remorse and lied through her teeth. “It’s not a date date, just a get-together with some friends, Dad.”

  A flicker of disappointment crossed her father’s face, and for the life of her, she wasn’t sure if it was because he was sorry she wasn’t going on a real date or because he knew she was lying to him. He always could see right through her.

  Fearing he’d call her on it, she rushed ahead. “There’s plenty of the stroganoff we had last night still left in the fridge. I’ll be home late, so don’t wait up.”

  Already feeling as if she was doing the walk of shame, she turned and headed upstairs to her room to figure out what on earth to wear on her date with Cade Reynolds. She wasn’t sure she had a single thing in her closet that would be appropriate for the occasion.