“Tampa sounds dreamy.”
“You haven’t been?”
She shook her head. “Orlando and Miami—that’s it.” She shifted so she could lean her side into the back cushion. “What made you retire from football?”
“It’s a layered answer.”
“I’m sorry, you don’t have to talk about it—”
“No, no, it’s all right. You know, for a lot of the football season, I was on the road, and when you’re a single dad, that makes things hard. I have an incredible nanny, and I wouldn’t have been able to play ball had she not been with me. She even moved with us from Tampa to Boston, but being that Ben doesn’t have his mother in his life, he needs me. My team also needed me. It was one hell of a mental battle.”
She was quiet for a moment before she replied, “I can’t even imagine.”
“And then there’s the body.” I pushed up the sleeve to my long-sleeve T-shirt. “It can only handle so much, no matter how well I treated it off the field. I was lucky—unlike some of my teammates, I never got an injury that made me miss any games. I hurt like hell, but nothing that required surgery or time off. But, again, it all came down to Ben. I needed to be my best for him, and ultimately you can only be lucky for so long. Trying to care for a young kid with a torn Achilles or rotator cuff—I couldn’t let that happen. So I made the decision to retire, and the timing happened to be perfect.” I smiled. “My last game, we won the Super Bowl.”
“Epic.” She took a sip.
“It was.”
She swiped her thumb over her lips like she was trying to dry them. “And what’s cool is that you’re still deeply involved with football. You’re just coming at it from a different angle.”
Worthington Enterprises was a company that began with Bettie’s financial backing many, many years ago, my parents paying off every dollar they borrowed from her and, with the help of my brother and me, building it into the empire it was today. We owned every professional sports teamin Massachusetts, and we had an extremely large portfolio of residential high-rise apartments.
We wanted to dominate Boston, and we were well on our way.
“An angle I really enjoy,” I told her.
But what I was really enjoying was this view, an almost full shot of her front, a hint of her side, how her legs were now crossed, the material pulling tight so I could see the outline of her thighs.
It was more than just her beauty that was making my dick achingly hard. There was something about this one, and fuck, I didn’t know what it was.
“Are you a go-into-the-office-every-day kind of guy? Or do you oversee things from home? And do you ever travel with the team?”
“I do it all.” I pushed up my other sleeve and drained the rest of my scotch. “More office than home since home, sadly, doesn’t allow me to get much work done. Although Ben is involved in things after school and my nanny is here, it’s not easy keeping a seven-year-old from bursting in, given that he always wants to be around Dad.”
She laughed. “The most adorable work nightmare ever.”
“Exactly.” I stretched my arm over my head, lowering it to grip the back of my neck. “As for the away games, I don’t attend all of them but I attend enough. Same with baseball. Jordan focuses on basketball and hockey—we divided the sports between us. For the real estate part of our business, the two of us dabble. Decision-making, brand, concepts, acquisitions—those types of things, we’re largely a part of. The rest, our team handles.”
“Fascinating.”
“It’s just business.”
“I wasn’t talking about your job.” She finished her drink too. “I was talking about you, Gavin.” As soon as the words left her mouth, I could tell she was lured in as deep as I was.
“What about me do you find so fascinating?”
When her thumb left her lips, I couldn’t look at anything but them. I wanted to know how they tasted. I wanted to know how hard they could suck.
I wanted to know how loud they could moan.
“I get the feeling—and maybe I’m wrong—that you could have easily stopped working after retiring from the NFL. But you didn’t, and the job you have now doesn’t sound easy at all.”
“I thought you said this fascination wasn’t about my job?”
She smiled. “You’re right, I said that.”
I chuckled.
