“I could, but I’m not about to lower myself to your level.” I adjusted the blanket with my free hand, making sure I wasn’t flashing my underwear at him. I also pulled it up to cover my nipples. And even if he was right about why they were hard, he was still an asshole for pointing it out. I couldn’t help it if my nipples hardened at the slightest hint of arousal.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Try to make me laugh. And being yourself doesn’t count.”
“Ha. Ha,” I said dryly. “And you can’t just tell someone to make you laugh on command. I’m not a stand-up comic.”
“No kidding. Use a prop then. Give me your best ‘this guy just handed me a pickle jar’ joke.”
I shook my head. “This is dumb.”
“Dumb is fun. Try it.”
“I don’t know? Were these the biggest pickles you could find?”
Chris winced. “Wow, yeah. You really aren’t very funny, are you? Try to think more like a middle schooler. Channel your inner ridiculousness.”
“Sorry, it’s a little hard to think straight when I’ve got your pickles on my mind.”
He cracked a smile, then let out a genuine laugh. “Stupid, but I like it.”
I gave him a small smile in return. “You know, you’re not anything like I would’ve imagined. I mean, from seeing you on TV. I would’ve pictured you being more like your brother. All growls and death glares.”
“My brother doesn’t know how to have fun. I do.”
“Maybe you’re too good at having fun. That’s why you’re in this mess of a fake engagement in the first place.”
“And yet the solution to my problem is turning out to be fun.” He gave my foot a little wiggle, but I kicked him away.
I’d been smiling, but I felt the humor drain away. “This isn’t normal. At all. You realize that, right? I mean, you’re paying me to pretend to be with you.”
“And?”
“And—wait,” I tilted my chin to the side. “Why were you knocking on my door in the first place?”
“Oh, right.” Chris dug in his back pocket and pulled out a box. He hopped off the couch and got on one knee, clearing his throat. “Will you be my pretend wife and make me the happiest fake-ly engaged man in New York?”
I plucked the ring out of the box. “Is this a different ring than the one you gave Mindy?”
Chris shrugged. “Couldn’t find her to get the ring back, so I grabbed this after practice yesterday.”
I inspected it. “You just grabbed this? What did it cost, like fifty thousand dollars?”
“How am I supposed to remember? Well, are you going to say, ‘I do’ or what?”
“The woman says ‘yes’ for a proposal and ‘I do’ at the wedding. You’ve got so much to learn if we’re going to get you through this wedding without everyone realizing its fake.”
“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. If we’re going to pretend to be in love, we’ll probably need to get to know each other. I was thinking we could spend some time together. Let me tag along while you do wedding planning things or whatever.”
“Tag along…”
“Yeah. I’d be your famous, mega talented sidekick.”
“Why do I feel like you’re not telling me your real motivations here?”
Chris stood up and dusted off his knees. “Because you’re unusually perceptive? So what are you doing tonight?”
“Looking up venues for the wedding.”
“Great. What time should I meet you?”
“Meet me? I’m going to be right here on my laptop. In like… I don’t know, however long it takes me to finish cleaning.”
“Wait,” Chris lifted up the blanket to see my sock-clad feet. Then he looked around for a second, head swiveling.
“What are you doing?”
“Just trying to find… Ah!” He found my speaker, then hit play. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” resumed blaring through the apartment.
I tried not to be mortally embarrassed, but my cheeks were already burning.
He hooked his thumb toward the speaker. “You were absolutely doing that thing from that old movie, weren’t you?”
“Will you please leave?”
Chris started bobbing his body and dancing his way out of my apartment, mouthing every word to the song as he went. He was in the middle of silently singing when the door closed behind him.
I got up, turned off the music, and looked at the pickles in my hand with utter confusion. Chris Rose was turning my life and my brain into a scrambled, confusing mess.
And then my phone buzzed. I glanced at the text that just came in and felt a jab of pure panic hit when I saw who it was from.
Lance Carter.
14
Chris
The tune of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was still stuck in my head as I sat through a team meeting at the facility. Unfortunately, I did occasionally have to “work,” but unless coach went on one of his occasional rants, I’d still be out in time to crash Belle’s wedding planning session on her couch.
And damn, I was looking forward to it.
I sat in the back of the meeting room and took notes. One thing nobody ever seemed to get was that when I was at the facility or in a game, it got my entire focus.
Okay, sometimes it might’ve been more like ninety, and today I might’ve been rocking more of an eighty or seventy. But I couldn’t help it. I’d gotten a glorious view of Belle’s white-panty clad ass when I broke into her apartment.
Magnificent.
I felt my cock stiffen at the memory, which led me to thinking of our encounter in the airplane bathroom for about the hundredth time since it happened.
I was packing up my stuff to leave after the meeting when one of coach’s assistants stopped me. “Hey, Coach wants a word in his office.”
Dammit. I had somewhere to be, but I knew I was on thin enough ice as it was. I grudgingly headed to his office.
Coach Mackie was sitting behind his desk, completely decked out in the black and red team colors. He looked like a bulldog who snuck into a Golden Corral after hours that hadn’t been found for about a week.
“Sit.” Coach Mackie pointed at the chair across from his desk.
I obliged, slinging my bag to the ground beside me. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to make something crystal clear to you. I don’t like you. I don’t like the bullshit you get into. I don’t like looking at your stupid pretty boy face. And I’m only tolerating your ass on my team because of the numbers you put up.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Thank you?”
“No. I’m telling you that if you don’t play out of your mind for the rest of the season, you’re done here. And I’ll do everything I can to make sure every other team in the league knows what a pain in my ass you were.”
“Honest question. How long has it been since my last incident?”
“Get out of my office.”
I shrugged, then stood. “Coach. It was really sweet of you to call me pretty, though. That means a lot.”