Getting Inside

by Serena Bell

  Getting Inside is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Loveswept Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2017 by Serena Bell

  Excerpt from Hard Stick by L. P. Dover copyright © 2017 by L. P. Dover

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Hard Stick by L. P. Dover. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  Ebook ISBN 9780425284278

  Cover design: Derek Walls

  Cover photograph: © Michael Drager/Shutterstock

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Serena Bell

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Hard Stick

  Chapter 1

  Iona

  We’ll miss you, Coach Thomas!

  My eyes fill with tears when I see the hand-lettered banner. The girls duct-taped it along the top of the chain-link fence in the park where they play. Under the banner, they’ve set up a rickety card table with a cake decorated to look like a football field.

  They mob me in a giant group hug, a noisy bundle of teen energy and good wishes.

  “Why do you have to go?” Kira says.

  Tish, who knows everything, crosses her arms. “Duh. You’d go, too, if you had a chance to coach in the Professional Football League.”

  “If you had the chance to coach Ty Williams!” Amy crows.

  “He’s sooooooo hot,” Kira declares.

  There’s a chorus of agreement—“blazing,” “keep it,”—and, of course, “I’d swipe right.”

  “No one is swiping right or left, right?” I demand sternly, and they all swear they’ll stay off Tinder till they’re old enough. I figure my job with them is one third teaching them to play football, two thirds keeping them out of trouble.

  I love these girls so much. Even though I’m just their once-a-week volunteer coach, I live and die their heartbreaks with them—Kira fracturing her foot and being unable to play flag football for eight weeks, Amy getting dumped by her boyfriend of two months, Tish longing for her dad to come home from the Middle East, where he had been deployed. Of course I’m going to miss the pro women I coach, too, but these girls—well, they remind me so much of me at their age.

  “How you gonna coach him?” Tish asks. “I’d be all ‘Panties on fire! Panties on fire!’ ”

  Sigh. These girls are way too mature.

  “I have armored big-girl panties that are football-player-proof,” I tell the girls.

  I hope that’s true.

  Because Tish has a point: Ty Williams is panty-meltingly hot. Still, I’ve worked with a lot of big, strong, good-looking men in my day, and I’m confident I can do the same with Ty Williams and the other guys in the Seattle Grizzlies linebacker corps. Even men like Williams, who come across as sex on a plate in photos and on TV, are just ordinary guys when you coach them up close. Plus, Ty Williams is in the news more often for his latest conquest than for his most recent quarterback sack, and that makes him, officially, not my type.

  Also, I know full well that in my new coaching job, all eyes are on me. I basically can’t afford to sneeze out of line unless I want the whole world to know about it. And the last thing I want is to draw negative attention. I want to keep this job. Because Coach Thrayne, the Grizzlies’ head coach, and Coach Cross, their defensive coordinator, are two of the best in the business, and I want to learn everything I can from them.

  “Can you get us tickets to a game?” That’s Amy.

  “So here’s a secret about the PFL,” I say. “Everyone thinks the players get millions of tickets to give away, but sometimes the guys can’t even get tickets for their own families. And coaches, pretty much never. But if you guys are ever in Seattle, I will do everything in my power to get you into a practice or to a game, okay? And if I can’t, I’m pretty sure I can at least get autographs.”

  “Do you get to go in the locker room?” Tish asks.

  I shrug. “If I need to talk to my guys and they’re in there, yeah.”

  A murmur of awe ripples through the circle around me.

  “Can you take a photo of Ty Williams naked and text it to us?”

  Tish, of course. There’s a buzz of adolescent excitement and a few raunchy comments.

  “I’m going to let you guys guess on the answer to that one,” I inform them drily.

  “My dad says Ty Williams is the best in the game.” Tish’s dad is finally home from his three nearly consecutive years of deployment, and there’s a lot of “my dad says” coming out of her these days.

  I grin. “He’s great. But you guys know, right, that there’s always something new to learn? Look at you, Tish. You thought you knew everything. And what did I teach you?”

  “Hold onto the ball,” she recites. “Squeeze it, love it, cherish it, protect it.”

  I laugh. “That’s right.”

  Tish is the captain of the girls’ flag team, a brilliant football player and natural athlete. She’s good enough that she’s bent on trying out for the high school tackle football team next year. “But Ty won’t need to learn to hang onto the ball.”

  “Nope,” I agree. “So what I gotta do is figure out what he does need to learn. How to make him better. You figure out how to make a football player better, and you’ve got their undivided attention.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having Ty Williams’s undivided attention,” Amy murmurs, and then we’re down that rabbit hole, but I don’t mind. I take a piece of cake and listen to them rank where Ty Williams falls compared to Aaron Jordan or Blake Griffin in the ten-hottest-male-athletes-ever stack-up.

  And I feel strangely contented. I’m so sad to leave them, but aside from that maybe the happiest I’ve ever been, looking forward with so much excitement to what’s coming next, because my new job is everything I’ve ever wanted, everything I’ve worked for.

  I can’t wait, and there’s no way I’d let a little thing like Ty Williams’s good looks throw me off my game.

  Chapter 2

  Ty

  “O,
man. You don’t need a new car.”

  “But look how badass that is.” O—Michael Ohalu—pokes a glossy brochure with one finger, his eyebrows pleading with me. He wants a Camaro so he can get this guy he knows to trick it out with a mean set of custom rims.

  I know what’s going on. Practice sucked, Coach Brogan took him apart, broke him down, and now O thinks the buzz he’ll get off spending money and driving a brand-new weapon of destruction is going to make him feel like a man again.

  I have walked in these shoes. Every guy I know, especially early in his career like O is, falls for the lure of something—illegal substances, expensive houses, shiny vehicles—as a mood booster. As a man who often succumbs to the siren call of pretty faces and therapeutic sex, I know what this situation calls for.

  “You don’t need a tricked-out Camaro. You need a milkshake.” I’m texting the guys as I speak. Two minutes later Zach Jones, our QB, and Calder Blake, our star cornerback, amble down the hall.

  “Did someone say McDonald’s?” Zach inquires.

  We pile into Zach’s R8. It’s like a clown car, with Zach, O, me, and Calder squeezing in. If you’ve never seen two-fifty, three-hundred-pound six-foot-plus guys maneuver themselves into a sports car, it’s pretty fucking funny. Unless you’re one of the guys, in which case you sympathize with sardines. Luckily we get along okay. The Grizzlies are a tight-knit team, the four of us maybe tightest knit of all. Some guys would say “like brothers,” but not me. “Like a brother” isn’t a compliment in my book.

  Ten minutes later O’s hoovering the thick drink through a straw and putting away fries. The rest of us are working our way through burgers, and there’s no talking, only chewing.

  “Better?” I ask O. O told me once, early on, that whenever things went to shit at home, his mom would take him to McDonald’s and buy him fries and a shake. It does the trick every time.

  “Better,” he confirms, and I grin. He sucks till the milkshake sputters, then announces, “I’m gonna work harder from now on.”

  All the warm fuzzies blow away like dandelion fluff, because that’s what our fucking linebacker coach, Dave Brogan, had been saying to O an hour earlier, that he needed to work harder, and it’s total fucking bullshit.

  “O,” I say. “Look at me.”

  He does, unwillingly.

  “You’re doing great. Dave Brogan is full of shit. You’re kicking ass out there. You’ll kill yourself if you try to work any harder.” I’ve never seen anyone buckle down like O, not only on the field and in the weight room but also the way he takes care of his elderly parents. And the only thing wrong with the way O’s playing right now is that Brogan keeps tearing him down instead of building him up. “Stop listening to that asshole.”

  He brightens. “Yeah?”

  “O. Have I ever lied to you? Ever? Was I right about the milkshake?”

  He nods.

  “Don’t listen to Brogan. You just keep playing your game your way. Shut his voice right out of your head, and I guarantee you things’ll turn around.”

  I’m rewarded with a watery version of O’s gold-flecked smile.

  Zach catches my eye, gives me a tight nod out of O’s line of vision. Zach’s a great quarterback, not just the way he plays the game but the way he leads. If there’s one guy on the team I look to as an example, it’s him.

  “Yo, O? You done with those fries?”

  “Get your own damn fries,” O tells me.

  I grin. He’s got his balls reracked. The rest of the ride home, the guys kid around with one another, same as we always do. Coach Brogan and his assholery are forgotten.

  Only I can’t let it go.

  —

  Back at McElroy Athletic Center, I go looking for Coach, ready to tell him exactly how bad Dave Brogan is for the linebacker corps, and especially for O.

  He’s in his office, sitting with our defensive coordinator, Abel Cross, and a black woman with a head full of those springy natural curls that are hot right now. As she turns her head to take me in, I see a flash of a dangly gold earring and a splash of deep red lipstick. She looks vaguely familiar—media? Personnel? I know I’ve seen her around somewhere.

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt,” I say.

  “I actually just sent someone to find you,” Coach says. “Abe, can you take Ms. Thomas for a cup of coffee and give us a few?”

  She stands up to follow Coach Cross out, and I get a good look at her for the first time. Her suit tucks in tight at the waist and flares out over her hips. And the spiral curls are crazy sexy on her. They’re playful—I want to tug one and let it bounce back into its tight-knit mass. Or just keep staring at her, because she’s one of those model-beautiful women with high cheekbones, a slight pout to her lower lip, and long-lashed dark eyes, and I can’t take my eyes off her. Her warm brown skin is a couple of shades lighter than mine and perfectly smooth, and I want to reach out and cup her cheek and run my thumb over it to see if it’s as supple as it looks.

  I just described seeing her like it happened in slow motion, but what actually happens when she stands up is more like this:

  Wow.

  Hot.

  Want.

  Followed immediately by:

  Nope.

  Because if she’s anyone who has anything remotely to do with the team, she’s off-limits. Especially media or personnel.

  Which is a huge bummer because my mind has gone on a porno trip involving my hands and her curves, and I have to rein it back in.

  Coach Cross says, “We’ll be back,” and the two of them step out of the office. I hesitate for a moment, then sit in the seat vacated by Ms. Hotness. It’s warm, and for some reason, that gets me going. Guess it’s been too long…

  “So what’d you want to see me about?” Coach asks.

  No point in beating around the bush. “Coach Brogan.”

  Coach gives me a long, level look. “I wondered if it was that. I’ve got some news I think you’ll be happy to hear. We let Brogan go.”

  Well, whaddya know about that? I school my face and don’t let my joy show. It took me awhile to figure this out, but in the pros, it doesn’t pay to have an opinion unless you’re asked.

  “I know how difficult Mack’s death was for you, Ty.”

  Yeah. Well. Not gonna get into that.

  “We know no one can replace Mack or mean what he meant to you,” Coach says. “We hired Brogan because he supposedly shared Mack’s philosophy and we thought the transition would go easier, but we were wrong.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Look. Ty. I’m going to level with you. Brogan’s been saying for weeks that he can’t work with you. He wanted us to release you. Said it was you or him.”

  Shit. I should have seen something like this coming. We’re 1–6 and when you’re losing that badly, people get twitchy and start to point fingers.

  “And there are some people—people whose opinions count—who bought his version of things.”

  “That’s—” There’s an iron grip around my lungs.

  Coach shakes his head, cutting me off. “Obviously, I’m not one of them. And obviously, my side won out. Brogan’s gone. But Ty—what the fuck was going on with you guys?”

  I gulp air around the tightness. “He was breaking them. You know? Like trying to crush their wills, like he thought they were horses or something. And I can take it, but it was ripping O to shreds. You can’t play good defense—hell, you can’t play any kind of football—like that.”

  “So you’ve been fighting Brogan because you’re standing up for your teammates.”

  That makes it sound nobler than it was. I’ve been getting so goddamned pissed on their behalf that I can’t keep it under wraps most of the time. So in answer to Coach’s question, I sort of…shrug.

  Coach nods thoughtfully. “Yeah. I told them you had your reasons.” He leans forward, face growing even more serious. “Jesus, Ty, you should’ve said something.”

  But we both know the squeakiest wheel g
ets the boot—just look at where Dave Brogan is now.

  He sighs, acknowledging what neither of us have said. “Here’s the thing. I need you to show me—and them—that I’m right. That you can get along with the next coach and demonstrate the level of professionalism we know you’ve got in you.”

  I hear the implied threat. Everyone in the PFL is dispensable. For every guy playing pro football, there are hundreds waiting to take his job if he can’t pull his weight, not just as an athlete but as a man.

  Mack would be pissed at me right now. He always said, Attitude is everything. I take a deep breath, look Coach right in the eye. “Okay. Yeah. I won’t let you down, Coach.”

  He nods. “Thanks, Ty.”

  I think the conversation’s over, and I’m about to get up, when he says, “We hired a replacement.”

  “Wow. That was fast.”

  “I got lucky. We made the decision on Brogan a little over a week ago, and my first choice flew in to interview sixteen hours later. We’re doing a press conference Wednesday morning…” Coach picks his phone up from his desk and taps out a text. “We wanted to give you a heads-up so you could have some time to get used to the idea.”

  “Used to—what idea?”

  “She’s the very best. I wouldn’t have brought her in if I didn’t believe that. And if I didn’t believe she’d be good for your career, in particular. I worked with her in San Fran, and if it had been my choice, I would have hired her then.”

  She. Her. He did just say that, didn’t he? I didn’t hallucinate.

  Holy fucking shit.

  “Her?” I repeat stupidly.

  I feel like I’ve had my bell rung by a hard hit. The world gets silent and buzzy, then suddenly too big and bright as it reorients around me.