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  Heat pools between my legs. Okay, the wine has to be the problem because I could swear this feels like attraction and I'm not attracted to guys like this – big, muscle-bound guys who look like they could pick me up and toss me over their shoulders and carry me up to their bedrooms…

  I clear my throat. "I'm not into that kind of thing, for the record. Those are your sex dolls. Like I said when I buzzed the gate. They were misdelivered to me. See? Right there?" I point at the address label on the box. "Mr. Dick Balsac."

  He glances down and chuckles. "Heh. Dick Balsac. Awesome." He looks up. "Who brings fruitcake to a neighbor?"

  "Huh?"

  "You said instead of fruitcake you were bringing sex stuff. Do people even eat fruitcake?"

  I exhale heavily. "Fruitcake, Bundt cake, whatever."

  "Bundt cake?"

  "I said whatever. I don't know what people bring to their neighbors."

  "A cup of sugar," he suggests, then pauses for a beat. "Or sex dolls and condoms."

  "You know, I usually try to not take my lessons in social etiquette from naked men with bongo drums."

  "Hey, you're the chick who showed up at my house with two girlfriends, bringing me condoms and – I'll admit, the blow-up dolls are new for me. I've never had a girl try to pick me up using inflatable –"

  "You think I'm trying to pick you up?" I ask in disbelief. "We've already established that you're the pervert ordering blow-up dolls. I'm just being a courteous neighbor and delivering your box. I have zero interest in picking you up. Less than zero, actually. I have negative interest in picking you up. And those aren't my friends."

  Mr. Dick Balsac steps forward, and even with the box between us, I smell him – masculine, like soap and cologne and - Oh God, I need to stop smelling him. He's an arrogant ass who clearly thinks he's God's gift to women, and just because I had two glasses of wine and apparently lost all sense of reason doesn't mean I should stand here sniffing this guy. "Zero interest?" he asks, looking down at me. "You sure about that, sugar?"

  I swallow hard. I wish he didn't smell so good. Has it been that long since I've smelled a man that my body is going haywire over one whiff of him? "Zero," I reiterate firmly. I clear my throat. "Less than zero."

  My body betrays me by sending goose bumps rocketing over my skin. I can feel my nipples harden under my bra.

  “Negative,” he says.

  “That’s right.”

  "That's too bad, because I'm definitely interested in picking you up." He pauses, and I suck in a breath of air between my teeth, my breath hitching in my throat. My heart pounds furiously in my chest. "In fact, I'd be very interested in picking you up, throwing you over my shoulder, and carrying you right into my bedroom."

  My God, he's brazen. No one has ever spoken to me like that. Hell, no one would ever dare speak to the President's daughter like that – certainly not the far-too-appropriate men I've dated, the ones who wear suits and have the best educations money can buy.

  This man is in no danger of being one of those too-appropriate men.

  His gaze doesn't waver, his eyes on mine as he speaks. "I'd pull up that conservative little mom suit you're wearing and yank your panties down your thighs – you are wearing panties, aren't you? If you weren't, well…" He makes a sound low in his throat, feral like an animal.

  That's what this guy is: a brute. An animal who just said he wants to throw me over his shoulder and pull off my panties. I open my mouth to tell him exactly who he can go screw (himself) after talking to me like that, but instead I hear myself whimper.

  I actually whimper.

  A small, self-satisfied smile spreads across his face, and I'm instantly mortified by my attraction to him. I should be absolutely repulsed. I should be high-tailing it out of here. This man has “bad choice” written all over him.

  I clear my throat like I didn't just practically moan at his filthy words. "I am not wearing a mom suit. What the hell is a mom suit?"

  He chuckles. "I just made it up now. It's like mom jeans, but a suit."

  I swallow hard, suddenly self-conscious. So my work clothes aren't sexy. I'm a professional running a foundation. I didn't think I looked frumpy, though. I smooth out my skirt with my palms. Why does the fact that he implied I look frumpy – a mom suit?! – make me embarrassed?

  "Some of us work," I say, my voice curt. "In professional jobs. Where we have to look appropriate and not run around naked with bongos."

  "Oh, so you think I'm not a professional?" he asks, smirking.

  "You're the one with the nudity and sex toys." I find myself acutely aware of the fact that this guy totally thinks I'm uptight, then irritated with myself that I care. "I'm leaving now," I announce primly, except I can't seem to make my feet move.

  "Obviously the box is a gag gift. Clearly, with all of this manliness I've got going on, I do not have to resort to inflatable pussy."

  I roll my eyes hard. "Whatever you tell yourself. Dick."

  "Dick Balsac isn't my real name, by the way. Just to be clear."

  "Oh, I wasn't calling you Dick Balsac," I clarify. "I was just calling you a dick."

  "Hilarious," he says flatly. "So you're a comedian. I assume that's the reason for your entourage over there?"

  "They're - wait. You don't know who I am," I say, suddenly realizing.

  He raises his eyebrows. "I don't know who you are? A little full of ourselves, are we?"

  "You're one to talk, Mr. I-Have-All-This-Going-On."

  "Well, that's not being full of myself. That's just a fact, sugar tits."

  "Excuse me?" Irritation surges through me. No matter how good-looking this man is, he's totally a pig. Then I stop. "Wait. What are you doing?"

  He's bending over, that's what he's doing. He's bending over right in front of me. "I'm setting this box down."

  "I don't need to see your -" I avert my gaze as he turns to set the box on the driveway, giving me a view from the side of his perfect naked ass. Okay, I didn't avert my gaze. I wanted to. I intended to. But it was so muscular and perfect and… biteable.

  Did I just think of this man's ass as being biteable?

  I quickly look away before he stands, but he laughs anyway. "It's an ass, sugar,"

  My cheeks warm again. He totally knows I was looking at it, but I interrupt him before he can call me that name again. "Yeah, there's definitely an ass in front of me."

  "I showed you mine. Maybe you'll feel more comfortable if you show me yours. Then we'll be equal."

  "I'm not aiming to be equal with a man who just referred to me as sugar tits, thanks anyway." No matter how perfectly muscular his ass – and the rest of him – is. "I'll see you later, Dick." I pause, my back turned to him, and take a deep breath. This caveman is not getting under my skin. "And enough with the bongos already."

  "You want me to get rid of the bongos?" he asks. "All right. If you insist."

  Brooks and Davis, both still facing him, don't crack a smile, but I can tell by the way their eyes widen what he's doing.

  "He set down the bongos, didn't he?" I ask them.

  "Yes he did, ma'am," Brooks answers, her gaze focused behind me. "Yes, he did."

  "Right, then." It takes everything I have not to turn around and satisfy my curiosity. Then I remind myself that a guy who calls me "sugar tits," threatens to throw me over his shoulder and pull down my panties, and plays the damn bongos is not a guy I need to see stark naked.

  Definitely not.

  4

  Aiden

  "What's that?" Noah plods down the stairs, his steps heavy. Being a six-four, two-hundred-and thirty-pound safety, he looks out of place in this historic house. Actually, both of us are fucking out of place in this house, but Noah is a savant when it comes to real estate – actually, he’s a savant when it comes to most things financial and political and generally nerdy. Not what you'd expect from a football player. He bought this place as an investment property because he said it was a steal and he was tired of living in the neighborho
od we were both living in where most of the pro players in town are.

  Too much fucking drama, he'd said.

  Noah's bright idea was to move out of his big-ass mansion close to the training center and into this place. He tried to convince me of the same – to "clean up our images." Noah is a contract holdout and I just signed a one-year contract with our team here in Denver, contingent on not publicly fucking up. It's not the best deal ever, but it's not like I've been angling for some big fat deal anyway. I'm a poor white trash kid from West Bend, Colorado. What the hell am I going to do with twelve million dollars a year? Noah is holding out for something better, mostly because he and our team’s head coach don't get along.

  Anyway, I'm not a grandma, so there's no way short of Hell freezing over that I'd actually move to this kind of neighborhood. Even if my ball-buster of an agent, the one with a mouth filthier than a sailor and a smoker's voice that comes from a pack-a-day habit, agreed with Noah: "Put a lid on all that frat shit, Aiden, and keep your dick in your pants."

  Noah and I have both been playing professional football in Colorado for the past few years. Noah landed a four-year contract here straight out of college in Florida, and I got traded back out here from Texas a year after that. Our head coach hates both of us, calls us hotheads, asshats, and whatever other expletive he can think of, but the General Manager loves us – me way better than Noah because, let's face it, I'm pretty damn good in front of a camera. Noah hates the interviews and photographs and autographs and dealing with fans. In fact, if he didn’t love the game so much, I’m pretty sure he’d be holed up out on his ranch totally shut away from the human race.

  Noah takes this stuff a lot more seriously than I do. I'm a work-hard-play-hard kind of guy. Football has always been my first love, but hell, if I can't blow off steam in my off time, what's the point?

  Noah loosens up every so often – mostly when moonshine or muddin' is involved – but otherwise he's nose-to-the-grindstone obsessed with the game. Most people think he's an asshole, but we've been best friends since grade school. His parents took in my sister and I during my senior year in high school after basically everything in my family fell apart.

  Last week after I signed the contract, Noah's mother – real name Bess, but my sister and I call her Mama Ashby – called and laid a big ol' guilt trip on me about setting an example for my younger sister and cleaning up my image so I don't waste the opportunity to stay here in Colorado. I can't really do shit to argue with that because I know it's true.

  So that’s why I wound up deciding to move into Noah's new place for the next couple of months while renovations are being done on my house. Apparently I need to lay low and act like an adult.

  Except I'm standing here not wearing drawers and holding a box of blow up dolls. So, all in all, I guess Noah is more of an adult than I am.

  "It's a box of blow-up dolls." I set the box on the living room floor.

  "The great Aiden Jackson is that hard up that he has to resort to inflatable women?" Noah gives me side-eye as he passes through the living room and heads toward the kitchen.

  "Of course not. I've got plenty of real live women throwing themselves at me. It was Moose screwing around. He sent it to Dick Balsac." The name makes me chuckle. Maybe I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old, but that shit's funny. Even if the very hot, infinitely fuckable girl next door thought I was some kind of blow-up-doll-screwing pervert.

  Noah has his head in the refrigerator pulling out vegetables and a family-sized package of ground beef. I can't see his face, but I know for sure his eyes are rolling hard because he thinks Moose's antics are stupid as hell.

  Moose, obviously nicknamed for his size, always sends prank shit to the team at the end of the season. It's a tradition, the same way I play the bongos naked before big games - and also randomly when the mood strikes, like this morning. The naked bongo playing started as a joke before my first game in Texas. I had too many beers and bought bongo drums and then thought it'd be funny to pull a Matthew McConaughey, since I was in Texas and all. Then we won, and clearly I could never stop playing them or we’d lose. That's how superstitions work. So the bongos have followed me around since then.

  Noah turns around and gives me a disgusted look. "Damn it, dude. Why are you coming into the kitchen with your junk all hanging out? I want to eat, not vomit." He pauses. "Wait. Were you in the front yard like that?"

  "I was playing out on the deck upstairs and the doorbell rang."

  "Some people put fucking clothes on to get the mail," he grumbles. "Get the hell out of my kitchen."

  "You could have answered the door, man. You heard me playing."

  Noah shrugs. "I was in the shower."

  "Anyway, it wasn't the mail guy. Ask me who it was."

  Noah sighs heavily. "Do I care who it was?"

  "You would if you got a look at your hot as hell next door neighbor. She came by because the blow-up dolls got delivered to her."

  Noah groans. "You went outside buck naked to get a package of blow-up dolls from the next door neighbor when I just moved into this neighborhood last week?"

  He emphasizes the words “this neighborhood,” which is a quiet, old money kind of place – not the kind where you see naked football players running around. In other words, it’s stuffy as hell.

  I shrug. "I don't give a shit about the neighbors. Some old lady was probably across the road looking at my ass through her binoculars and thanking her lucky stars that I moved in here."

  Noah snorts. "I'm sure the neighbors appreciate it."

  "The chick next door did."

  He groans. "Come on, man. Don't shit where you eat. I told you that you could stay here for the summer only if there were no shenanigans."

  “I swear to God, Aiden. When did you become an eighty-five-year-old woman? ‘Shenanigans’?”

  “Since I’m negotiating contracts,” Noah reminds me. “And yeah, shenanigans. The kind I get in trouble for and then wind up with a shitty team and a shitty contract because I'm a liability. The kind you get in trouble for and then lose your contract with the team.”

  “None of our shit has gotten us into any real trouble,” I protest, rolling my eyes. “We only got arrested one time, and that was when we were back home in West Bend.”

  "That was last year," Noah argues

  "We were only even in jail for a few hours. Racing a couple of tractors down Main Street ain't exactly the crime of the century."

  "You ran into Old Man Johnson's fence and the cows got out."

  "A couple of cows."

  "His whole herd. One walked into the church the next morning during the preacher's sermon."

  "One cow out of the whole herd. And that was awesome. Barbara Jo Andrews was in the middle of singing her solo piece."

  “Uh-huh. How about the chick who was all over the tabloids because she said you knocked her up?”

  “And I didn’t knock her up, did I? I didn’t even sleep with her. And I wrap my junk, thank you very much. The last thing I need are a bunch of little Aidens running around."

  "That's the last thing this world needs," Noah replies. "What about the time you streaked Coach Hardy’s front lawn?”

  “That was a dare,” I insist. “And fuck you! You were the one filming it. How were we supposed to know his wife would be home? Or that he'd pick that moment to walk outside? You’ve gotten into just as much trouble as I have, Mr. I-Screwed-The-High-School-Football-Coach's-Wife."

  Noah holds up a hand. "I did not screw Coach Tanner's wife and you know it."

  "Hey, I don't know what might have happened behind closed doors," I joke. Noah didn't screw our high school coach's wife, although she did practically hunt him down the day of our high school graduation. But neither of us are the kind of guys who'd bed another man's wife, so the cougar moved on to greener pastures. That didn't stop Coach Tanner from believing Noah screwed her, though, and coming after him with a shotgun – or me from giving him shit about it. "So don’t hassle me abo
ut shitting where I eat. I didn’t say I was going to bed your neighbor."