But for how long? Charlotte didn’t know, and so she would be on guard, as Joey had cautioned. What she couldn’t tell anyone, even her closest friends, was that one secret exposed would lead to another, then another, until her worst mistake resurfaced. Every minute now was an unknown.
All she could do was focus on the game.
Charlotte strode outside to be immediately signaled over to the sidelines as the players, damp from rain and sweat, dove into the first scrimmage, with Kip transformed into a hard, cursing force no one wanted to cross. Several minutes into the mock game, two rookies collided with a reverberating crash of bone and muscle and metal and hit the ground hard.
One man dragged himself to his feet. The front of his shirt was stained red, and when Charlotte and another trainer lunged forward, he hollered with his hands out, “It’s his!”
Charlotte reached the injured man first, discovered blood blooming across his mouth and chin. As he reached back and yanked off his helmet, he growled a curse and she could see that he’d lost two teeth.
“Welcome to camp,” the other trainer said with a friendly wink as they collected the teeth from the turf, and helped the player to his feet and off the field.
After the completion of the first of that day’s two-a-day, Charlotte was refilling her water bottle at the Gatorade station when two offensive linemen trotted past in jersey shorts and cutoff tees, identical thick lines of sweat down their shirts.
“Rub on me anytime.”
She looked up from the drink dispenser and brushed back the errant spirals of hair that had frizzed from the earlier light rain. “Who said that?”
“Said what?” the taller of the two replied, while the other shrugged and crossed his arms over a wide chest, making the Japanese characters tattooed on his dark skin soar over his biceps.
She glanced across the way at where Nate was crouched, examining one of the new prospect’s quads. So far today, Nate hadn’t said a word to her, and when he saw her now, as if he’d felt her eyes on him, he only turned his back to her and continued with his task.
So that’s how it was.
Mind made up, she worked through the next few hours until the majority of the players had retreated inside to the locker room. Then, taking a deep breath, she barreled right in.
All of a sudden the same men who oozed confidence and felt free to say and do whatever they pleased on the field were modest and scandalized when she walked in on them without their pants.
It would’ve been laughable had Charlotte not been on a mission to defend herself and lay down some rules.
“Eh, somebody get her the hell out of here,” someone shouted, and several booming male voices rang out in agreement.
“Nope.” Charlotte planted her fists on her hips. “It’s time for an anatomy refresher, don’t y’all think? I am a female and you all are males. Our bodies aren’t exactly the same, but so what? I’m not a massage therapist, so please do not try to be funny and ask me to rub on you. I’m a trainer. Let me do my job.”
Several of the men had tuned her out and continued dressing—or undressing—in front of their cubbies or moving off to the showers, while some cursed and others pretended to be invisible so that she wouldn’t get the crazy idea to single them out.
“Nice speech. Now get out.”
This came from TreShawn Dibbs. His shadow seemed to fall over her as he stepped closer, his mouth flat, his eyes cold.
Charlotte had faced down many a disgruntled athlete and wasn’t going to back down from a man who’d been busted for steroids, found not guilty of cocaine possession and was rumored to have a history of domestic violence. In him her family saw championship potential. All they wanted were results.
Well, all Charlotte demanded was respect.
“Who said I was done?” she replied coolly, sliding her gaze about the room and seeing only bystanders who showed no interest in getting involved. Not even the men from the coaching staff, who for the most part wore poker faces. One—was he the wide-receivers coach?—was smirking.
“I did.” Another step, then TreShawn reached back—
Charlotte’s hand shot up, planted firmly on his chest with a solid thwump. Her heart surged against her ribs, but she didn’t shake. “Touch me and you won’t like what happens next.”
Long moments later, TreShawn backed away from her and had the nerve to howl with laughter. “Made you flinch,” he said, then tossed his towel at one of his teammates and left the locker room.
She waited, knowing he wouldn’t leave the premises until after a full weight-training session. Checking his individual training schedule for the day, she made a mental note of when to be in the weight room. Time evaporated as she updated injury reports, viewed last season’s films to compare the rehabilitated players’ performances to what she’d witnessed today and sat in on the coaches’ late-afternoon meeting in preparation for a full-squad training day tomorrow.
Charlotte had a few unscheduled minutes and took the opportunity to check her phone. A voice mail message from Tem marked Urgent.
“My sorority sister Rebecca’s son, Chaz Lakan, is in the city tonight. He’s a journalist in L.A. And he was an exhibitor at the Black Expo last year—remember? I told him you’d meet him for a late dinner….”
Her mother’s message continued with the location where Chaz Lakan—the name still didn’t sound familiar no matter how many times Tem had dropped it in her message—would be, and she was especially “helpful” in having taken the liberty of choosing the outfit Charlotte should wear.
Working the tension from her jaw, Charlotte put away her phone without returning Tem’s call. Urgent, right. Pairing up her unmarried thirty-two-year-old daughter with a man was a downright emergency to her mother.
“You look pissed. Is it because of Dibbs or your phone, which has a talent for getting in the way of things?” Nate had soundlessly entered the room and leaned against his locker, watching her.
“The best way to forget the Rio is to stop mentioning it,” Charlotte said. “Especially here. We can’t bring what happened in Vegas to Mount Charleston.”
“Right.” He turned, opened the locker and swept off his shirt, rewarding her with a full view of his muscled, sweat-dampened back.
She was entitled to look, she told herself, so long as she didn’t touch. And even that didn’t seem fair, though she’d take what she could get. It was risky, but how could she not want to know, scene by scene, what would’ve happened with Nate had her mother’s phone call not interrupted them in his suite?
Nate turned to face her, and suddenly she was unable to move. Holding her stare, he gripped a fresh T-shirt in front of him and took his sweet time putting it on, maximizing the effect that tickled and tortured her aching libido.
She’d never been more turned on to see a man change shirts.
“Charlotte,” he whispered, his lips curving into a slow smile.
She blinked. “Uh…what?”
“Next time we do this, I hope we can switch places.”
Any decent comeback failing her, she hurried straight to the weight room to see TreShawn exchanging bro hugs with the assistant coach who’d monitored his workout. When the coach left, Charlotte sidled up to the player. “So, TreShawn, how much better did you feel after intimidating me in the locker room?”
“Can’t take it, then leave.” Tough words, but there was no steam behind them as there had been earlier. First day at camp could wear down any man, and she thought it served athletes well to remember camp as a humbling experience.
He seemed especially drained, and she knew exactly why. There was a learning curve—physical, mental, emotional—when coming off steroids.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Damn, does it matter?”
“Yes.” If he was desperate enough, he’d find a fresh hit of steroids. Withdrawal was one thing, but returning to a sport with a body that felt deflated compared to the way it had been under the effects of unnatural enhancement
s was something else entirely.
What kind of trainer would let him destroy his career and health that way?
Ask questions, get answers, push, watch over him. She would do it all.
“Miss, I’m going to get my hair braided.” He reached up with flexing muscles and grabbed the big puff of tightly curled hair that was straining against a rubber band. He was known in the league for sporting long braids with a streak of color that was a shout-out to whatever team he was on. Now that he was the Slayers’ new kicker, she assumed he’d be getting some red or silver in his hair.
He didn’t call her Charlotte, as she’d asked everyone to do, but “miss” was a start and was actually…respectful.
TreShawn sighed. “Look, you don’t believe me? C’mon, then.”
Charlotte narrowed her eyes but followed him as he continued out of the weight room toward the lobby. “Come with you?”
At her hesitation he scowled. “Yeah. Thought you’d back off.”
A dare.
“Do not leave without me!” Charlotte called, already racing back toward the locker rooms. He’d challenged her and she was more than ready to show him she wasn’t to be trifled with. She grabbed her duffel and ran back half expecting to find the polished lobby empty, with only a vacant reception desk and the supersized photo collage of past Slayers in action.
But TreShawn remained where she’d left him, and with a conceding headshake said, “Let’s go. Don’t touch my radio.”
Chapter 7
Granite-black with a wide body and custom rims, TreShawn’s Chevy Suburban LTZ was designed for looks, strength and dominance. The vehicle was a complement to the image the man projected. So was the deep-bass, spirit-digging rap that vibrated throughout the SUV’s interior. Like his ride, the almost painfully loud music spoke for him—angry, distant, a ruthless warning to be careful not to get too close.
Charlotte recognized his tough-guy facade for what it was and let him sink into the shallow comfort of it as he leaned back in the leather driver’s seat, one platinum-ringed hand at the wheel. His posture relaxed, he seemed to have forgotten that she occupied the seat beside him, seemed to see only the stretch of highway before him, missing the series of pointed looks she shot his way as the speedometer’s needle swept past eighty. If the vehicle hit a pothole, it would probably go airborne and God only knew how it might land.
Junipers and ponderosa pines blurred to nothing but a tangle of color. Up ahead, clouds seemed to drape over the mountaintops and felt close enough to grab hold of. She twisted in her seat, resolving to stare at his profile until he acknowledged her. The defiant set of his jaw and the furrow of his brow made him appear older, but he was close in age to her sister Martha. He was still a child in many ways, yet in others he was an old soul, one who’d grown up much too soon as a teenage delinquent.
“Gonna tap out?” TreShawn silenced the blaring rap with a press of a button on the steering wheel and flicked her a glance.
The quiet was so sudden it felt like whiplash. “No. But here’s the way I see it. You’re driving like a maniac with the intention to either scare me, in which case you’ve failed pathetically, or to piss me off, in which case you’ve succeeded with flying colors.”
“You’re in my space.” At least his foot eased off the accelerator.
“Then next time be careful who you invite into your space. You keep thinking of things to throw my way, hoping I’ll back down or give up.” Charlotte shifted around to watch the Mount Charleston mountain landscape gradually transform into urban Las Vegas. “So. Are you always this combative to perfect strangers?”
“Why not? Eventually it’s every man for himself. Even when somebody says they got your back. They never do.”
The SUV, the rap, the aggression—it was all his armor. “You’re in the NFL, TreShawn. Along the way somebody had your back.”
“My uncle had a meal ticket. Cashed me in to Texas A&M.”
“So your childhood was what? All rainy days, no rainbows?” It was the same way she’d reason with Martha, who could be stubborn and one-sided and wore a mask to hide her vulnerabilities. “No good days?”
“Pizza days were all right,” he said thoughtfully. At her puzzled headshake he went on. “That Pizza Hut reading program. My school had the hookup—you know, read a quota of books, write reports and sooner or later you get a certificate for free pizza. My uncle made sure I kept at it, raised me to never turn down the chance of a free meal.”
Charlotte figured his uncle’s motivations had more to do with getting TreShawn educated. Clearly it had worked to some degree, because “pizza days” were the young man’s rainbows. “Texas A&M put you on track.”
“There’s stuff you learn on the streets that you can’t learn in the classroom, miss.”
“The cocaine?”
“Wasn’t my stash. Nor was the jacket the cops found it in.”
“The domestic violence?”
“Ex swings at me, I block her, she falls and it’s domestic violence.”
“The steroids?”
TreShawn was silent for several heartbeats. Then, “All part of staying in the game. Sometimes you gotta do wrong to make things right.”
“You won’t be happy that way.”
“Too grown and too real to chase happiness. You gonna tell me you made all the right choices?”
Charlotte snorted, her headshake solemn. “Hardly. But, TreShawn, please take it from me that the wrong things, they stick with you. You never forget them.”
The young man shrugged as if to be nonchalant, but Charlotte saw the way his fingers tightened over the wheel. “Miss, at the end of the day, football’s all that’s left. If I ain’t got football, I ain’t got nothin’.”
That resonated. For so many people professional football was just entertainment, just a game. For others—people like Charlotte and apparently TreShawn Dibbs—it was life. Was it life for Nate Franco and his family? Or merely a slice of the image they wanted to portray to the world?
With a press of a button, TreShawn resumed the chest-pounding rap and ended the conversation. Charlotte let him be, satisfied that he was obeying the posted speed limits. When they rolled into an industrial-looking cranny of Vegas, she paid attention to the beautifully raw graffiti on buildings, the chalk on the sidewalks, the various ethnicities of people crisscrossing in the streets.
He parallel-parked the Suburban in front of a squat brick-fronted building, and Charlotte gazed up at the sign. Heaven and Hair.
“Georgiana hooks it up for me.” TreShawn patted his big puff of hair again. “This will take a while.”
“I have time.” And unread work emails downloaded onto her iPad, for when the waiting made her crazy. And the “Fruit Ninja” app for when the emails made her crazy.
TreShawn set his vehicle alarm, then dap-greeted the vendor stationed in front of the salon frying something that smelled like Italian beef and fresh jalapeño peppers—something that promised to guilt her into an extra hour of early-morning running should she succumb to an everything-on-it sandwich. Charlotte let her willpower propel her into…
Whoa.
The sleek high-ceilinged lounge entertained the salon’s waiting customers with high-definition news coverage and piped-in R & B set at a low, almost soothing volume. Turning in a slow circle, Charlotte took in the ultramodern details, from the stainless-steel beverage counter to the silver-glazed floor.
Abruptly she stopped. Someone was watching her closely. A dark man with a ropy build and a Mohawk braided from front to back hitched his chin in a wordless hello, then moved past her to the beverage counter.
“Who’s that?” Charlotte asked TreShawn when he entered the place. “The man over there who looks like he’s auditioning for an A-Team reboot?”
“Q.”
“Just Q?”
“Yeah. He’s security. Come here often enough and you won’t even notice him. He’s kinda part of the decor,” he said, drawing out the last word, amusement evident in
his eyes. “C’mon. G’s waiting.”
Beyond a pair of massive glass display cases containing hair-care products and tools was the pulse of the place. The spacious room was a harmony of color, complementing and contrasting in both muted and bold shades of gold and black and silver. Two rows of stations with ergonomic styling chairs sat in front of well-lit floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A large decked-out nail spa held pride of place in the center of the room. Modest-sized stations with plushy chairs encircled the revolving tower of nail polish bottles.
Over the cacophony of voices and music, TreShawn scanned the clients and heavily made-up stylists, then went over to a woman dressed in black except for the slash of electric-purple lipstick.
“What’s goin’ on, G?”
“Nothin’ but the rent. Got your chair ready, and the weave you want braided in for that red streak.” The woman who had to be Georgiana blinked at Charlotte. “Who’s this?” she asked him.
“A trainer.”
Georgiana frowned, skeptical. “For the Slayers?”
Charlotte introduced herself, unable to resist adding that she herself had partaken in competitive sports growing up and had trained college athletes. “TreShawn let me tag along today. I’ve never been here. It’s an amazing place.”
“I like to think my shop’s the diamond in this rough neighborhood,” the stylist said, seeming pleased with the thought. When TreShawn settled in at Georgiana’s station, she gestured for Charlotte to take the adjacent styling chair. “Now Boo can do a little somethin’-somethin’ with your hair. Hey, Boo!”
Charlotte opened her mouth to protest but right away another stylist appeared at her elbow, already eyeing Charlotte’s untamed high ponytail, a utilitarian minimal-effort style her sister Martha dubbed the “half-assed updo.”
TreShawn must’ve caught her hesitation, because as he adjusted his black cape, he said, “Never mind, y’all. She’s not staying.”
Another dare? The man just wouldn’t stop testing her. What would it take to prove she wasn’t going to haul ass out of the salon, that she wasn’t going to abandon him when clearly abandonment was what he’d become accustomed to?
Night Games Page 9