Me? I smiled. I thought about dragging this out just a bit longer when he was so clearly miserable. But it wouldn’t help our current predicament to leave the rest of the room in the dark.
I cleared my throat in as ladylike a way as I could.
“Luke is my neighbor,” I said. “In case you’re wondering why he’s acting like an insane person right now.”
Cameron’s mouth dropped open. William’s smile fell, and Coach buried his head in his hands.
For the first time since we sat, Luke’s eyes were directly on me, and I could clearly see the warm flecks of gold in the brown. He was just as confused as the rest of them, but still, he said nothing.
“As much as it pains me to say this—because my first impression of him was hardly a good one—don’t be too hard on him right now. He had no clue who I was and vice versa.” Casually, I rested my folded hands on my lap and held his stare.
He let out a slow breath and glanced over at Coach Klein. That told me everything I needed to know about Luke Pierson at that moment. He was a player, and the person he would defer to would be the man leading the team on the field, not from a luxury box or a corner office overlooking the Seattle skyline.
Finally, he spoke. “If you guys wouldn’t mind, I’d like a few minutes alone with Miss Sutton.” His eyes found me again. “To apologize for my previous ... behavior.”
What I hated most was that I hadn’t asked for privacy first. But second, I hated that his voice was low and commanding, without being overbearing. He carried his leadership as effortlessly as he wore that blue shirt. Like, I almost found myself getting up out of my seat and leaving the room, simply because he’d asked it.
Cameron gave me a look to question whether it was fine, and I nodded. After they’d filed out, William shut the door behind him with a quiet click.
And then we were alone. Faced off across a sterile conference table with the logo of a howling black and red wolf staring down at us from behind Luke’s big, dumb, judgmental head.
He watched me. I watched him. And neither one of us spoke.
Finally, I gave a pointed look at the clock on the wall. “You’re wasting prime apology time.”
Oh look, the humorless man was not amused. He folded his hands on the table in front of him, taking up far more space in the chair than I did, his biceps looking very much like boulders straining under the fabric of the shirt. “Why not sell? You can’t possibly want this team.”
Oh, that observation rankled, but I refused to let him see it.
I tapped my chin. “Strange version of ‘I’m sorry,’ but I can work with it.” One of my eyebrows lifted slowly. “If I thought for a second you were actually sorry for being a complete prick to me.”
Luke slicked his tongue over his teeth and regarded me steadily. Other than those first few minutes when I’d taken him by surprise, I could now see the unflappable side of him emerging. The side of him that would manage a game with a steady, calm hand.
“I’m sorry that it was impossible for me to have any clue who you were when you showed up at my front door.” He lifted a hand and gestured in my direction. “Similar to how you could have had no idea who I was when you shoved a plate of cupcakes at me.”
My cheeks burned hot, and his lips finally bent in a satisfied smile.
“Still,” I said with a sniff, “you weren’t exactly giving me the benefit of the doubt, were you?”
“No,” he conceded. “I’ve had years of experience behind me to back up the fact that when a woman who looks like you shows up at my house in a bathing suit, flaunting her … baked goods, it usually only means one thing.”
A woman who looks like you.
I nodded slowly, letting the slow burn of anger sweep through me.
He kept going, oblivious to what he’d just stoked inside my body and how high those flames could shoot. “So I apologize for being rude that day. And I apologize for turning off your terrible music in a way that might have been a bit heavy-handed.”
“Your sincerity is blowing me away,” I said dryly.
“You may not believe this, but this is incredibly sincere for me,” he answered between gritted teeth. “I am sincere when I say that if I’d known who you were, I would have been polite. I would have taken the damn cupcakes from you and gone about my day. I would have ignored you last night. I would have shaken your hand without wanting to drop multiple curse words about twenty minutes ago.” He leaned forward, and I found it hard to breathe evenly at the full force of his eyes, his personality, his everything at that moment. “And I am sincere when I say I hope that Robert knew what the hell he was doing because we don’t need anything getting in the way of us winning another Super Bowl, which is the only thing I care about right now besides my daughter.”
I knew his words weren’t meant to make me feel small or cause me to fight the urge to curve my shoulders in protectively, but it’s what I felt all the same. It took every ounce of moxie, every ounce of Sutton audacity to face him without flinching. When he finished his speech, I stood from my chair and looked down my nose at him. He leaned back, clearly surprised.
“I won’t mess this up for you, Pierson. You don’t need to worry your big, meaty head over that.”
His eyes darkened ominously, but I held up my hand.
“You know nothing about me. You know nothing about the type of person I am. I’ll treat you with the respect you deserve as the team quarterback, but you sure as hell better do me the same courtesy as the team owner. I may still be getting my footing, but I bet I could make all sorts of trouble for you if you ever felt the need to remind me what women who look like me usually do or say in your obnoxious, golden boy presence.”
Luke’s jaw was granite, his shoulders rippling with tension, but his mouth was shut, and that was all I cared about. More than likely, I’d want to pass out from sheer adrenaline once I wasn’t in the same room as him, but I’d be damned if he saw that.
“After we leave this room,” I warned him, “we start over. I won’t hold what you said to me against you, the way you treated a perfect stranger who was trying to be kind, and you won’t hold against me that I called you an arrogant, pretentious, narcissistic prick.” I pulled in a deep breath and folded my arms around my waist. “Deal?”
From the chair, he unfolded his body to his full height, and the way he towered over me made me lift my chin stubbornly. I couldn’t read a single thing in his eyes or in the set of his muscular body.
“Pretty sure you didn’t call me all those things earlier,” he said casually.
“No?” I shrugged. “Must have just been in my head. I think all sorts of interesting things when I’m not worried about when I’ll get my next manicure.”
Luke’s nostrils flared, but he was smart enough to know he had zero grounds to keep pushing me.
My entire life, I’d used charm and a sweet smile to smooth over situations like the one I currently found myself in. This was the first time I tried on my badass bitch suit, and even if it didn’t fit perfectly yet, at least I knew it was passable.
“Do we have a deal, Mr. Pierson?” I held out my hand again.
For one eternal second, he stared at it like it was made from poison, but then he took it. My arm zapped with energy, something quick and hot and annoying. The moment our hands separated, it stopped, and I felt the aftereffects strongly enough that I wanted to rub the skin of my palm.
“We have a deal, Miss Sutton,” he said quietly and walked out of the room.
As soon as the door shut behind him, my knees gave out, and I sank into the chair.
“Awesome,” I said into an empty room. “An excellent first day at work, I think.”
7
Luke
From the moment I woke up, I knew it would be a shit day. I’d forgotten to close my bedroom curtains, and as my room faced east, I opened my eyes to a painfully bright sun shining directly into my eyes. Like the day dawned with the intent to make my journey into wakefulness as harsh and jar
ring as possible.
I made my smoothie without a single glance toward her house. While I was actively not looking that direction, my blender broke. Four dollars made their way into Faith’s swear jar. Faith’s eggs ended up on the kitchen floor when she knocked her plate over on accident, and then she put her own dollar into the jar.
My mood was already so foul by that point, in anticipation of the team meeting, I couldn’t even bring myself to punish her for her creative use of curse words.
I almost ran out of gas driving Faith to Monique and Dayvon’s house.
During my workout, my elbow was sore and tight.
In the shower afterward, my shampoo bottle was empty.
Each successive thing reduced any remaining good humor I had into a snarling, snapping tangle of energy.
The team meeting was only about ten minutes from starting, and by the time I found a padded seat in the main room, I felt very much like a leashed lion. If anyone dared get too close, I’d swipe with a heavy paw and pray to inflict damage.
What had Coach Klein said the day before? I didn’t always react well when genuinely surprised.
While that was true, this was something different. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t the guy who remained steadily, purposely mute around my laughing, chatting teammates. Whatever they saw in the set of my mouth, my eyes, and my body language was enough for them to give me a wide berth. In front of me on the table was my binder for team meetings.
Scribbled notes in the margins, readable only to me. Diagrams with Xs and Os and lines and arrows, plays that unfolded in my head when I would sit and listen to Coach talk or our offensive coordinator discuss the defense we would be facing next. All the small things that I did on a daily basis that added up to wins during the regular season.
It was discipline—in every meeting, every workout, and every morning that I made my smoothie and chugged it down.
Sitting in that chair with my eyes shuttered and my jaw locked tight, I didn’t feel very disciplined. I felt like screaming. The jumble in my head was messy, a tangle of past and present. My conversation with Robert about her business failures, her absence in his life, and how she was posting pictures as she worked her way through Europe while her father sat home by himself for every holiday. Her face at my door, cupcakes in hand. Her smile at the meeting yesterday.
It was a cacophonous, discordant mess in my brain; nothing I could make sense of even if I wanted to.
Of course, I wanted to. It was what I did every day on the field. To anyone else, a line of players shifting in motion looked like chaos. But I knew what it meant when someone went left, and another went right. When their eyes darted back to the edge of the field.
My fingers tingled with the need to scoop into my thoughts and find the one thread that I could pull to make all this make sense. Any kind of sense. But I had the feeling that if I pulled the wrong thread, it would only tangle the knots further.
So I’d sit. And wait. And keep my mouth shut. Say a prayer to the football gods above that she didn’t come in and fire everyone in the front office and replace them with Victoria’s Secret models even if that would make Jack sublimely happy.
I let out a slow breath as the volume in the room increased with each new teammate appearing through the door. No Alexandra yet.
Just the thought of how they would react, how they’d see her, had me leaning forward and pinching the bridge of my nose. This was a disaster. It was everything I didn’t want for us. Someone sat heavily in the empty seat to my right and nudged at my elbow.
Gomez, my center, laughed at the dark expression on my face.
“Who pissed in your Wheaties, Piers?”
All I did was sigh and lean back in my chair. “I just want this over with.”
We’d played together for six years since New England traded him for two of our draft picks. He balanced me well, all smiles and jokes, amping up the O-line with his positive energy. His forehead wrinkled at my tone, but he knew me well enough not to push.
Then he leaned in. “I heard about her.”
Of course, he did. I pinched my eyes shut and tilted my chin up.
“Heard she’s hot. Like really hot.”
Someone sat down to my left. “Dude, you’ve never seen her before?” It was Jack. Like I wasn’t sitting between them, he leaned closer so that Gomez could hear him above the steadily rising noise in the room.
“No. I mean, I know she must have been at the funeral, but I wasn’t exactly lookin’, you know what I mean?”
Jack nodded. “Same. I looked at her Instagram last night.”
“No shit?” Gomez asked.
I pushed my tongue against the inside of my cheek and glared at Jack, who was completely oblivious.
“She’s got this one shot on a beach or some shit. Let me pull it up.” He whistled under his breath. “No top. I’m tellin’ you, dude.”
Under my breath, I made a strange noise that almost sounded like a growl.
He ignored me as Gomez laughed. His thumbs flew across his phone screen, and I fisted my hands under the table to keep myself from choking him. Just as he whistled softly and turned to hand his phone to Gomez, someone stood in front of us and blocked the light.
Logan snatched Jack’s phone out of his hand and tossed it back at his chest. Not gently either. “Knock it off, Coleman.”
My eyebrows lifted slightly as Gomez sat back in his seat. Jack mumbled something that didn’t sound very kind and shoved his phone back into his pocket.
“What’s your problem?” Jack muttered.
“You have a sister?” Logan asked.
Jack looked away. That was a no.
“I have four. All younger.”
My eyebrows went even higher.
Logan gave me a long look.
“Were you in that meeting yesterday or not?” he asked.
The undercurrent of his quiet voice was pure steel, and the implications, the fact another captain was chastising me, flanked by two members of my offense, made my face hot. “You know I was,” I replied evenly.
Logan leaned in close enough so that no one outside the two of us would be able to hear him. “Then act like it,” he bit out.
He sat in the row in front of us, oblivious to the fact that I was glaring daggers and knives and swords and all manner of weaponry at the back of his head. Later, when I didn’t feel like I was one fraying thread away from punching someone, I’d have a talk with him about verbally reprimanding me.
Of course, when you’re wading through the thick mud of a bad mood, you can’t possibly entertain the notion that they’re right in what they did. I shoved that train of thought down when Coach Klein and William entered the room. The volume around me flared quickly, briefly, until she walked in.
Then there was a hush, a vacuum of sound so intense, it was as if they all pulled in a breath at the same time. Inexplicably, it made me want to break something apart with my hands.
Her hair was pulled back this time, no waves or curls in that sunny, bright hair. No red lips. Skinny black pants, a loose white top, and a red tailored jacket covered her body. She looked sleek and bright and polished.
Rich. Powerful. Confident.
And I hated her at that moment because she was so beautiful that it hurt to look at her. Like waking up in the morning to find the sun aimed straight at me when I wasn’t prepared for it.
The guys all shifted in their seats while William introduced her and gave them a similar brief overview of where we currently found ourselves as an organization. Tension rippled through the room in the sets of shoulders faced in her direction and in the eyes glued on her, unable to believe what they were seeing.
William gestured toward Alexandra, and she smiled at him gratefully. Jack actually had his hand covering his mouth, and I elbowed him until he dropped it. His eyes were wide and disbelieving, but he was smiling as if he’d just won the lottery.
She cleared her throat and folded her hands tightly in front of her, a tiny display of n
erves that made me look away from her briefly. I didn’t want to see her nerves. I didn’t want to see her at all.
My eyes pinched shut tightly, and I saw Robert’s small embarrassed smile as he told me he was eating Thanksgiving at Joy’s house. Again.
Her voice knifed through my thoughts, and I pried my eyes open.
“Thank you all for being here. As William said, I’m Alexandra Sutton. Over the next few days, it’s my goal to meet every one of you, and when I get that chance, I’d love for you to call me Allie. I know preseason starts in a couple of weeks, so while I can’t promise you that I’ll have the entire play card memorized, I do know what first and ten means, so I’d like to think I’m not completely hopeless.” There was a small ripple of laughter through the room, and I vaguely heard one of my molars crack down the middle underneath the pressure of my jaw. Her body relaxed slightly, and I found myself winding even tighter.
Her smile straightened as the room quieted again. “I’ve spent the past few days immersed in facts and figures and charts and budgets. But those papers don’t adequately convey the amount of love and respect my father had for the Wolves organization. It’s humbling to know that he trusted me to try to fill his shoes.” She glanced down at her spiked black heels and exhaled a laugh. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
This was my nightmare. Staring at her, all I could see in my head was her on my front porch with that plate of pink cupcakes. Her sitting at her patio table and holding her speaker up in my direction. Her holding my gaze fearlessly the day before in our meeting while she laid out her terms of how this would go. And now we were joking about her shoes in the team meeting.
I’d keep my end of the bargain. When I shook her hand, slim and cool in my own, I meant it. I wouldn’t do or say anything to disrespect her in front of anyone. But I also couldn’t force myself to sit here and laugh and joke and think it was funny that the person who owned our team promised us that she knew what first and ten meant.
The Bombshell Effect Page 6