Page 79 of Hard to Score

She nods as her teeth sink into her bottom lip and she looks down at my cock, which is hard and pressing against my shorts. Her eyebrows lift.

“I really should go.”

Her laugh is throaty when it hits my ears and does nothing to dissipate the desire.

“Thank you for today, Drew. For remembering old memories and for making new ones with me. For talking. For laughing. For kissing me goodnight after our first date and being a total gentleman.”

She steps forward on her tiptoes and kisses me again. This time it’s slow and sweet and like a pleasurable torture I can’t get enough of.

“Goodnight, Bratty Brex,” I say.

“Goodnight, Dreadful Drew.”

And when she shuts the door, I rest my forehead against it, hands fisted against the jamb, and emit the longest sigh in the history of sighs.

I told her about my dad.

There’s gravity to that. An acknowledgment that I just let her in.

A part of me feels . . . relief at the thought. I’m no longer completely alone.

The rest of me is terrified. What if I’m betrayed?

CHAPTER FORTY

DREW

6 years earlier

“DO YOU THINK I DIDN’T know who you were, son, when I recruited you?”

I look over to Roger Molleman, general manager of the Tennessee Tigers, and fight down the emotion that’s paralyzing me.

“That I don’t remember holding you as a baby or tossing the football with you when you were four or five?”

He twists the championship ring around on his finger, and that’s all I can focus on. I can’t meet his eyes.

“I knew who your dad was and yet I still took the chance on you when the other coaches would have looked the other way.”

My hands fist and jaw hurts from clenching it so hard. It drowns out the pain from being sacked more times than I care to count tonight. The aches from the physical hits have nothing on the pain I felt earlier.

On the pain I still feel bone-deep after getting the news.

“And now . . . fuck, Drew . . . after eighteen games of absolute goddamn brilliance, tonight looked like a fucking repeat of what your dad did all those years ago.”

Drew, it’s your dad.

“Please tell me you didn’t throw the game, Drew.”

He was in a really bad accident.

I meet Roger’s eyes for the first time and shake my head in disbelief. “How can you ask me that?”

His legs locked up. He couldn’t control them. The doctors . . . he’s been diagnosed with ALS, Drew.

“It’s what everyone’s going to be asking. You’ve got a second string QB dying to play and he had no problem connecting the dots and saying it publicly tonight. To the press. He’s talking about seeing you with a bookie in the parking lot after practice. He’s saying he watched you give him money.”

“That’s total bullshit, Roger.”