Page 27 of Hard to Hold

“I do . . . but this is my life.”

“And it will continue to be, it’ll just take time for the ashes to cool off.”

“Okay.”

“Call me later and tell me how everything goes today. I promise it won’t be as miserable as you think it will be. It’s a paycheck—”

“I have more bloody money than I could ever spend, Finn. I don’t need a paycheck unless it’s from Liverpool.”

“Or the like,” he adds again, then goes silent as his words settle on the line and hit me harder than expected.

I’ve played with LFC my entire career. Starting with that damn scholarship when I was fifteen, I worked my way through the ranks, until I got to where I am today—starting center forward for LFC and next year’s captain.

If there is a next year.

“Playing elsewhere isn’t an option.”

“It might have to be.” He sighs and I hate the sound of it, because I always know something more is coming. “You being here is a public but not public way to show that you’re not hiding. It comes off like you’re here in the US for a job rather than the truth—that you’re trying to ignore everything till it dies down. It’s passive-aggressive in a sense, but says you’re not afraid to show your face and that you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m just on edge.”

“I know, but you can practice anywhere. You don’t have to be back home to stay fit.”

But I need to be back home to live my life.

We finish the conversation and when I hang up, I don’t feel any better about the current situation. It doesn’t help that when I go to close out the apps on my phone, the image sitting front and center on Instagram is his, the reason I’m in this current predicament.

It sours my mood even more.

I start to head back into the house when I see her—Lennox—the woman I haven’t been able to shake from my mind since the pool yesterday and the bathroom last night. She’s standing in the kitchen with a tea towel balled up in her hand, laughing at something Johnny said.

What’s her story? What’s their story? Obviously, they’re close because one doesn’t just pick up the phone and ask to stay somewhere if they’re not.

Are they exes? Do they like each other but are dancing around the notion of it? Or are they just what they seem? Good friends.

But there’s the flirting—like what I’m watching now and what I observed when they were on the patio last night—that muddies the water.

The pang of jealousy is quick but fleeting, because it doesn’t matter what they are or what they aren’t. I know the way she looked at me last night, and I know interest when I see it.

And she was interested.

It takes a lot more than that to impress me.

I call bullshit on her comment.

The attraction was mutual. The need was there and ready to be tested.

As I watch her slide her ass onto the kitchen counter and swing her legs over its edge as she listens to something Johnny says, I run a hand over my jaw, thinking of the look in her eyes last night—confidence and want. I think of her perfume—light and flowery. I remember the goosebumps that chased over her arms when we were inches apart.

Sure, she was sassy and sarcastic, but damn it to hell, all of that mixed together was a heady mixture that begged me to test the waters.

It took everything I had not to kiss her last night.

It was even harder not to knock on her bedroom door and ask if the lacy pair of barely-there knickers that she “accidentally” dropped in the bathroom are part of her normal attire, because if they are . . . damn.

But there was something that stopped me from doing it. And now that I stand here and watch her through the glass—her blonde hair falling down her back, her tan legs swinging, her full lips smiling wide—that something just became so much clearer.

I want her too.