Playing To Win: The Complete King Brothers Collection (A Contemporary Romance Box Set)

by Teagan Kade

  I nod and we go back to eating, but I can’t seem to shut off my brain. I should heed Gordy’s advice. It has never once put me wrong. I should cancel my forthcoming date with Phoenix, but the more I try to will myself to do it, the harder it seems to become.

  *

  I’m still thinking on Gordy’s words when I arrive for my shift. He’s the best reader of people I know. I can only imagine what Stone King got up to back in the day. I don’t imagine he spent his free time hanging around the library with his face buried in a book.

  Maybe buried in something else, my head offers, but I tamp it down. The last thing I need right now is that kind of gutter thinking.

  It is surprising then I spend most of the morning constantly checking the doors, waiting for Phoenix to arrive.

  You’re obsessed, I tell myself. He’s only going to use you.

  But the Phoenix I met wasn’t the overt player I expected. Sure, there were glimpses of it, but I saw something deeper there too, something I’d like to explore other than that delicious body of his.

  By lunch I’m checking the clock so much I miss a poor girl’s plate entirely, feeding the floor with pepperoni pizza instead.

  By 1 PM I’m a bundle of nerves, unable to stand still and wondering what kind of weird time machine has suddenly made me fifteen and hormonally unstable again.

  I actually breathe a sigh of relief when I see him walking in, smiling away like he owns the world, stopping to talk to everyone, it seems. He’s popular. There’s no doubting that.

  Calm your farm, Heather, I remind myself as he joins the line, replacing my look of expectancy with one of apathetic cool.

  He sees right past that, of course, standing in front of me smirking. “You’re pleased to see me, admit it.”

  I try to suppress the smile. “I will admit to nothing.”

  “And yet your body’s giving everything away.”

  “You want the pepperoni or the Hawaiian?”

  He licks his lips, watching me. “I want it all.”

  Oh, God. I’m losing it. I slide him a slice of both, adding another for good measure. “Since you’re a growing boy and all.”

  “I thought extra servings were against policy.”

  “Do I look like I follow the rules?”

  “Hmm,” he moans, looking almost amused before moving along down the line.

  I take a breath when he’s gone, my entire body suddenly a maelstrom of excitement and nerves and just downright horny as hell. He barely said a word to me and already I’m dreaming up the many ways he could please me.

  I watch as he takes a seat at a table close to the serving line, eating but eyeballing me the whole time. I’ve never seen anyone eat pepperoni pizza and make it look so damn sexual. I try to ignore him, I really do, but my eyes keep ping-ponging between him and the next student in line.

  He takes forever to finish, finally going to stand… only to reach into his bag and pull out his laptop and a textbook, studying right there, watching me over the top of it. He’s waiting on me, I realize.

  When the lunch rush is finished, I take the opportunity to stroll over and seat myself before him. “So, what are you doing? There are about ten thousand far more quieter places to study around campus, you know.”

  He closes his laptop, leaning back with his hands behind his head. “And yet I can only seem to find you here.”

  “I’ve got to work.”

  “And I will be here when you finish, make sure you’re safe when you leave.”

  “You’re being serious?”

  “Deadly,” he replies, rocking forward, “plus I want to make sure you’re not going to cancel our date. Don’t know about you, but I’ve been looking forward to it all day. I don’t do well with disappointment.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere. I take the cue to lean back myself, assuming the role of the inquisitor. “We should talk about that. It might explain a few things.”

  “On our date, we can talk about whatever you want, but it is happening.”

  “So you’re just going to sit there?” I check the clock on the far wall. “You do realize I’ve got to clean up, probably be here for another three hours at least. That’s a long time to wait.”

  “Ah, but the best things in life are worth waiting for.”

  “Fighting for,” I add.

  “Believing in,” he continues.

  “And just damn well never letting go of,” I finish, surprised he knows the quote, another one of Gordy’s many go-tos.

  I have to press my tongue into the side of my cheek to stop myself smiling, standing and unsure what to do with my hands. I kind of place them together in front of me. “Better get comfortable then.”

  Phoenix lifts his laptop lid back open and places his fingers on the keyboard, pretending to check something in the textbook to his right. “Oh, I am comfortable—perfectly comfortable.”

  I don’t know what else to say, so I leave him to it while I busy myself cleaning up with the others, but the whole time all I’m thinking about is him—painful, persistent, glorious Phoenix King.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PHOENIX

  I may have my laptop and textbooks out, but I’ve barely paid them attention, splitting it instead between Heather and the clock on the wall.

  The sun’s setting outside, the dining hall empty, and the last of the staff passing me by with a quizzical expression on their faces. If my calculations are correct, and they often are, Heather’s the only staff member left.

  Get back to work, I tell myself. Time will go faster.

  But five minutes later I’m back to clock-checking my ass off. I close my laptop and pack everything away, leaving my bag under the table while I stand and make my way to the kitchen area.

  It’s strange being on the other side of the counter, probably raises a bunch of health and safety issues, but I have to see Heather. I’m too restless to sit over there on my hands playing the waiting game. I’ve got to move, be proactive. It’s always been that way, part of what makes me such a great baller.

  There’s a certain sterile charm to the commercial kitchen beyond, faint smell of ammonia and cleaning chemicals. I navigate my way past the equipment, past a pot that looks like it could hold a human being.

  “I might just have to put you in it.”

  Heather’s standing in front of me with a dishtowel over her shoulder, an apron on that’s far too tight—not that I’m complaining.

  I approach her slowly, running a finger along the counter and holding it in front of my face. “Spotless.”

  “The cleaners clean the kitchen, dumbass.”

  I shift my eyes to the dishtowel. “And I suppose that’s just for looks?”

  She pulls it off her shoulder, twists it up, and flicks it at me. The tail of it cracks an inch away from my groin.

  I jump back. “Whoa, watch the boys.”

  “What?” she laughs, whipping at me again but catching the side of a counter, the metallic ring signaling she could more than hold her own in locker room combat.

  She pulls up, tossing the dishtowel back over her shoulder and leaning her hip against a counter. “Students are not allowed to be back here, you know.”

  I look around. “And yet here I am.”

  “Wow, you guys really do think you own the place.”

  I shrug. “What can I say? Being a King has its perks.”

  She thumbs behind herself to the wet area. “You know how to wash dishes, big boy?”

  I stand up a little straighter at that. “Mmm, pet names already, and what am I to call you?”

  She smiles. “How about boss lady?”

  I’ve never been the submissive before, but I suppose it could prove interesting… as long as she doesn’t take that dishtowel to my ass. I have a mental flash of it connecting with the back of my ball-sack and I damn well want to scream the pain’s so vivid.

  I look past her to a pile of plates, pots, and pans, none of them clean. “You’ve got to get through all that, yo
urself?”

  She turns and slow walks in the direction of the wet area. “The sooner I finish, the sooner you get me all to yourself.”

  “Well then.”

  I follow behind, standing next to her at a sink so big it could double as a jacuzzi.

  “You do know how to wash a dish, don’t you?”

  I laugh it off. “Please.” But truthfully, the last and only time I had to wash a dish was camping, and all that meant was dipping it into a river.

  She senses my hesitation, always keenly aware of what I’m thinking. I have to watch that.

  She reaches over me and takes hold of what looks like one of those handheld shower nozzles. As she stretches her shirt pulls tight against the underside of her breasts, the shallow curve of shadow there enough to get my dick jumping in my pants.

  “Here.”

  I take the nozzle and test the trigger, watching water shooting out hard, and hot. “Magic,” I tell her.

  She gives a stunted laugh. “You take a dish, spray it down here, in the sink, and then put it here, into the rack,” placing her hand on each station. “It’s really quite simple.”

  I look to the pile. “Animals, all of them.”

  She ignores that, moving further away from me to where a box kind of contraption with a large handle is—kind of a giant sandwich press. “Once you’ve rinsed and racked everything up, I’ll load the dishwasher.”

  I select the least disgusting plate, firing away at it with the nozzle and watching, with some pleasure, as the grime is stripped away.

  I fumble a bit at first getting used to the process. After all, this is my first time in a commercial kitchen. It’s not long, however, before I’ve picked it up, smashing through the pile and racking the dishes faster than Heather can load them. That’s another King trait: we learn hella fast. You take a process and you break it down looking for areas to improve and optimize. I use it in basketball all the time—good old economy of motion. It’s no different here. Dare I say Heather is even impressed as I move onto the larger containers and pans.

  I rack the last of them and clean off my hands, standing back and clapping them together. “And that’s the buzzer, ladies and gentlemen.”

  With a huff Heather pulls the dishwasher door down, setting it to run, steam billowing from the sides. “Not so fast, mister.” I look around but can’t see any more dishes. “That’s it, right, boss lady?”

  She jerks her head towards a station in the corner. “I’ve still got to chop and prep for tomorrow. You ready to bail yet?”

  I don’t give up. I’m going to prove that to her. She can have me making Baked Alaska next. I do not care. I’ll do whatever it takes to get to this date and win her over.

  I cross the kitchen with her to the prep station. She reaches under the counter and hands me a pair of silicone gloves.

  “Bit early in this relationship for that, isn’t it?”

  “Your ass is already mine. I don’t need to inspect it to know that.”

  She has me there.

  I slip the gloves on and stand there feeling like an idiot. I’m so out my depth here it’s not funny. I’d be the laughingstock of Crestfall if anyone found out.

  Heather slides a chopping board across to me, takes a knife from the magnetic strip running across the wall, hands me one in turn. There’s a series of containers at the far end I missed before, full of whole vegetables—carrots, potatoes, mushrooms. She selects one and passes it over to me, providing another, empty, container to my left.

  I look down. “Carrots, huh? I guess a Bugs Bunny joke is out of the question?”

  She reaches into her container, selecting a potato and placing it down on her chopping board, knife moving to cube and carve it with such speed I’m questioning whether she’s a line cook or superwoman.

  She looks to my chopping board. “Those carrots aren’t going to chop themselves.”

  I take in the knife I’m holding, select a carrot, already peeled, placing it on the chopping board with no idea what to do next. I’ve never chopped anything in my life—not a vegetable, not a loaf of bread. We’ve always had people for that. Our meals just appeared every night. Even now, living with my brothers, a chef comes in every Sunday to meal prep for us, make sure everything’s nutritionally A-Okay so we can perform at our best.

  Heather notices me looking lost. “You don’t know how to chop a carrot, do you?”

  I shake my head slowly knowing honesty is probably the best course of action here.

  She dumps the potato she was chopping into an empty container and slides up next to me, taking a carrot to demonstrate. Her body brushes up against me in the process. I get a hint of her scent as she moves past me, somehow earthy and yet feminine, floral and woody and certainly no commercial fragrance I know of. My cock tightens in my jeans, my burgeoning erection thankfully hidden below the line of the counter.

  “It’s easy,” she says. “Just do as I do. Hold the carrot here, with this kind of grip.”

  I take note, copying what she’s doing.

  “You need to hold the knife like this, almost as if you’re pinching the blade, got it?”

  I adjust my fingers. “Think so.”

  “Now curl your fingers in a little, like so. You want the side of the blade to rest against the middle knuckles of your non-knife hand. It’s safer that way.”

  “Easy enough.”

  “Now chop down, but you want to make it with a rocking motion, shifting from the tip to the end of the blade. It’s not a literal ‘chop’, more of a caress, a smooth and seamless action.”

  “How can describing how to cut a carrot sound so damn sexy?”

  She ignores that and cuts. I copy.

  “Good,” she says, but more to exaggerate the motion. “Let the blade do the work. You shouldn’t have to tense up at all. Keep the cuts even, moving the carrot down incrementally.”

  I do as she says, concentrating on my technique and suddenly Crestfall may as well be a million miles away. “Where the hell did you learn all this stuff?”

  I notice she’s already done with the carrot, onto her second potato. She keeps her eyes down, hair tied up in a tight bun, copper threads in it I hadn’t noticed before straying from the area above her ear. “I went to culinary school, cut plenty of vegetables there, let me tell you.”

  “I thought you said you were homeless?”

  “I was,” she says, “but like I said, the owner of that soup kitchen I used to go to kind of took pity on me, gave me a place to stay, helped me get my GED, get into that cooking school. The rest is history, I suppose.”

  “So that’s why you’re here?”

  “I’m here because I need the money.”

  “For?”

  “A food truck is the current idea.”

  She doesn’t elaborate and I don’t think I should press. “I like it. You thinking waffles, pizza, Mexican? There’s this taco truck in New Jersey I went to once, this killer barbacoa burrito they do.”

  “We’ll see, but it won’t be for profit. It’s to give back.”

  “I admire the hustle, but you led me to believe you didn’t have a heart.”

  She taps her chest with the end of the knife handle. “It’s there. It just needs a kickstart from time to time.”

  Something I can definitely help with.

  We talk a bit more, but before long I’m lost in the task, all my concentration on the rocking motion she showed me, making sure every cut is even and true. It’s weird. It’s a humble task—simple, some might say—but it feels amazing to master it. Before long I’m chopping away feeling like a younger Gordon Ramsey.

  “That’s the way, big boy. We’ll make a line cook out of you yet.”

  I smile and it’s partly because I’m pleasing her and wanting to please her, but I also realize it’s the act itself. Every time the blade hits the board it’s so fucking satisfying, so simple and yet so perfect. Hell, I might even pick up a cookbook after this.

  “Feels kind of good when
you get it,” I tell her, reaching for another carrot and noting it’s the last.

  “Better than basketball?” she asks.

  “Hell yeah,” I reply. “Better than landing a three when the clock’s down and you’re all out of hope.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “It means I never thought I’d get so much pleasure out of chopping vegetables.”

  “You seem like an easy man to please.”

  I smirk at that thinking of all the ways I could please her, happy to provide a lesson of my own in a different kind of culinary fashion, taste-test my way into her heart—or other, more intimate places.

  I look to her, smile when she looks back. “Easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  HEATHER

  I’m tense walking with Phoenix to my car. We pass the spot where the mugging took place, nothing of note to mark it out.

  “Have they caught the guy?” Phoenix asks. He has his bag over his shoulder, stands a good foot taller than me, but it’s reassuring having him here, a human seawall ready to weather out any danger coming my way.

  “I haven’t heard anything from campus security. They don’t have any cameras down here.”

  “I’ll see to it that changes.”

  I look up to him, fishing in my new-ish bag for my keys. “You guys really do own this place, don’t you?”

  He glances over his shoulder to the campus looming on the hill. It looks like Hogwarts from here with its turrets and towers. “When you’ve invested as much as we have in this place, you kind of expect the keys to the kingdom.”

  I squint into my bag. “I’d settle for the keys to my car right about now.”

  Phoenix looks into my bag and I’m really hoping his eyes settle on something other than a tampon or the lipstick vibe one of the soup kitchen girls slipped in for a gag. “My god,” he says, placing his hands on his hips. “It’s bottomless in there.”

  He’s looking harder just as my fingers find the keys. I pull them out, shaking them in front of his face. “Voila.”

  He gives a small clap, following me to my car and watching as I attempt to the open the door with some modicum of grace—somewhat difficult given half of the hinge has rusted away. I finally wrench it free, almost tugging it back right into his balls.