Unlike Kayla, I had no problem keeping how I was really feeling behind a stone façade. But at that instant, I had to suck in my abs to hold back a laugh.
“Tell ya what.” I schooled my face back to serious. “I can promise a night with me will be the opposite of that middle school sleepover.”
She smiled at my new pull line. But then opened her mouth for what I could tell was about to be another polite no.
“Sorry, Mick-o,”she might say.“Good girls like me don’t agree to hook up with bad boy strangers like you.”
I roamed my eyes over her features one last time, knowing this would probably be the last chance I got to do so before the incoming rejection.
“Thank you for inviting me to your hotel room, even after that embarrassing crying jag.” Her polite letdown came down the tunnel just as expected as the first train of the morning from Manchester to London. “That was super sweet of y?—”
“La machine hôte redescendre a débuté venir gagner….”
Kayla cut off to listen to the pilot’s landing announcement, delivered in French first, then in English.
As soon as the pilot wrapped up the usual instructions about returning our seats to the upright position and buckling up for the descent, she swiveled back toward me, her eyes brimming with concern.
My stomach tightened for reasons that had nothing to do with our sudden descent into Paris. Did she really reckon my pride was so fragile that I couldn’t handle her incoming rejection?
“Yeah, I knew this would be hard for you.”
Forget concern. Now she was looking at me with straight-up pity.
Alright, maybe it was. I clenched the armrest, knuckles gone white. Couldn’t say I was fond of this empty pit in my chest as the bloody plane started its descent.
But, determined not to let on how I was feeling, I kept my face stony.
But then, she somehow managed to slide her hand underneath mine on the armrest. “Here, just hold on to me. It will be over before you know it.”
That was when it hit me that she hadn’t been talking about turning down my offer again, but about my fear of planes.
All my annoyance faded away when I realized she was giving me something other than a cold hunk of metal to hold on to as I got through my least favorite part of flying.
She’d remembered. She remembered that little thing I mentioned about hating flying at the start of our chat.
I was a grown man. A pro-footballer known throughout the worlds as one the meanest and nastiest players on the pitch.
But she was right. I despised flying. Hated not being in control and the fear that came with letting someone else take the wheel—in the bloody sky, of all places.
With a thundering heart, I took her gift, gripping her hand tight as we descended, then finally bumped to the ground.
“Oh, yay, we made it safely.” Her voice soothed my nerves better than the shots of whiskey I usually knocked back before the descent ever could.
And when she turned her head to smile at me, it felt like the first glimpse of spring sunshine after a too-long English winter. My heart slowed, filling with an emotion I couldn’t quite pin a name to.
“Don’t worry. It’s all over.”
It’s all over.Those three words froze everything she had warmed up inside my chest.
I was a world-famous footballer, always in the top five onThe Sport Review’s annual Hottest Footballer Bachelors list. Walk into any club in Paris tonight, I’d not only get the VIP treatment but my pick of any woman I wanted.
But I didn’t want any of those women.
Kayla. The woman who’d interrupted her rejection to hold my hand on the way down, that was who I wanted. More than anyone or anything else right now.
“It doesn’t have to be over.” No more Mr. Smooth. My voice came out guttural, with a faint hint of desperation—something I hadn’t felt since I was sad Andrew Michael Atwater, still living with the shitty set of parents I was determined to shed when I signed on with FC Greenwich.
I felt embarrassed for myself. But I couldn’t bring myself to let go of her hand. Couldn’t stop myself from staring her down as I all but pleaded, “Don’t say no, Kayla. It doesn’t have to be over. Meet me at my hotel after you’re all sorted in yours. One night. One night is all I’m askin’.”
