‘Oh, sweetheart, if that’s the case you’ve been playing with the wrong people.’ Attentive eyes flick over my body before returning to stare into mine with a multiplying intensity. His hand falls to the bare skin of my forearm, resting lightly over my sensitive skin. Electricity pulses between us, the type of chemistry I’ve only ever dreamed of experiencing.
‘I assume you’re no longer talking about rugby, or any other televised sport for that matter.’
‘Ha! It’s televised if you’ve got the right channels and a credit card.’ Devilment sparkles in his glittering irises.
‘It sounds dull, like everything in Dublin. In London, I used to at least attempt to experience the excitement first hand.’ The champagne must have gone straight to my head because I don’t recognise the brazen whore controlling my lips. I am playing with fire.
Ollie’s voice drops and he closes the distance between us, his lips barely an inch from mine. ‘Leave with me now. I’ll show you excitement first hand, I promise.’
Lust sweeps shockingly through my entire body and I can’t help but believe him. Every nerve ending thrums to life, pleading, begging me to run out the door this second before anyone can stop us, before he realises who I am, before he realises he can never touch me. For once in my life could my inability to say nofinallybe a blessing?
Ollie hunches his huge physique towards me, his face perfectly neutral, the picture of innocence even. But the heat exuding from his burning eyes hints he’s more than capable of fulfilling his promise. ‘Is it me? Or is the chemistry radiating between us like this crazy magnetic force that you only hear about in movies?’
Either, he’s a mind reader, the feeling is mutual, or he took that line out of the best book of chat-up lines ever written.
If the fervent, urgent attraction is anything to go by, he could be the first man, the only man, to offer me any hope of reaching the big, all-important but so far elusive O. It’s an effort to retain my features in their rightful position when it feels like an inexplicable force is drawing our bodies together, tethering them with an invisible thread.
Geri has another saying:It’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission. The champagne has definitely gone straight to my head, so much so that I’m seriously considering Ollie’s offer, wondering if I could sneak away with him. Because whatever this connection is between us, the need to explore it further is overriding all rationale.
Before I can decide either way, my brute of a brother charges across the room with the stealth of a hungry cheetah, a thunderous expression carved on his face.
‘Ollie, I see you’ve met my little sister.’
Like sand dropping through an old-fashioned timer, the colour physically drains from Ollie’s cheeks.
‘Your sister?’ It’s almost a stutter, his tone weighted with unconcealable shock.
‘Yes, my sister. Amy is the baby of the family.’ He ruffles my hair in the same familiar patronising manner he always adopts around me. If he was a dog he might have actually peed on me.
I purposefully stalk towards the collection of pinstriped suits without so much as a backward glance, determined to follow through on my primary mission before all reason is stripped from me, along with any hope of my sister’s little black dress being removed too.
ChapterFour
OLLIE
I down my drink and eye the exit, desperate to make my escape. I’ve never spent much time in the players’ lounge, usually preferring to head back to Westport after a game. Hell, if I’d spent any time here at all, I’d have known better than to proposition Amy fucking Harrington. It’s entirely typical that the only woman I’m irresistibly attracted to since Anita, is the one woman I can’t have.
Eddie tugs my arm as I pass by him. ‘You’re not leaving already?’
‘I am.’ I don’t add that it’s safer that I do because his little sister has my pulse racing in a way that no woman has achieved in the past few weeks – and there have been plenty.
In the weeks since I learned I’m getting a new sister-in-law, I took the boys’ advice. I’m not proud of it, but the only way to blot out previously sacred images of Anita was to replace them with images of others. Screwing nameless, faceless women most evenings eradicated the sentiment of being with just one woman. Twice I’ve woken up with two women in the bed and no idea how I got there, or what went on. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, lawyers, strippers, teachers, I haven’t been fussy. It’s only by sheer luck that pictures of my hairy arse haven’t been plastered over some cheap tabloid yet.
The guys were right, women throw themselves at athletes from every direction, giggling women of all ages, backgrounds, shapes and sizes. There’s no challenge, no chase, no real reward and certainly no affection. Each encounter becomes more meaningless than the one before. Which has been ideal, because look where my ‘affection’ for Anita got me.
Until tonight. There’s nothing ideal about any of it.
Amy Harrington is an entirely different ball game. Dressed to kill a boardroom full of men, and with an attitude to match, she’s the first woman in weeks who didn’t drop at my feet, and quite frankly, it’s a relief, for more than the obvious reason, now I know who she is. It would be less of a disaster if she’d said she was married – but Eddie’s baby sister? Crossing that line, breaking the bro code, is well and truly forbidden.
With my head bowed down, I shoot one last glance back over my shoulder as I reach the door. Amy’s heart-shaped face tilts towards me from where she stands beside two of the directors. She arches an eyebrow and something that looks like regret flashes across her face, but she turns her back again before I can analyse it further.
Opting to try the only thing that’s worked for me so far, I brave the crisp dark evening and hop in an Uber. It’s hard to go out and not get recognised. Lately I’ve discovered the safest bars to hang out are the ones other celebrities frequent, the real celebrities, I privately refer to them as. In those places I’m no one. Well, no one interesting enough to stand out from a crowd.
One such bar is located a stone’s throw from my apartment, staggering distance in fact, and after today’s events I plan on staggering, maybe even crawling. The luminous neon writing above the doorway boasts the club’s name ‘Candy’. A queue of young men and women line the pavement outside, umbrellas doing little to shield them from the usual Dublin drizzle. Heading for the side entrance, I nod at the bouncer. Eddie introduced me to him a few weeks earlier. I slip him a fifty euro note and he opens the door for me, not before a gang of lads hurl abuse at me.
‘Fucking think you’re something special coz you’re a fucking rugby player!’ one leather-clad biker shouts.
‘You’re nothing special, mate. Join the fucking queue like the rest of us,’ his friend adjacent to him calls with venom oozing from every pore. Two others hover nearby with equally aggressive expressions.
