Chapter 4
Chapter Four
NOAH
‘Are you going to eat that scone?’ The girl next to me grinned, full of mischief, and before I could answer she scooped it up and took a bite.
‘Hey!’ I exclaimed.
She raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘And what are you going to do about it now?’ She gave me a teasing smile and I couldn’t help responding.
Despite my earlier good intentions to stay aloof, it was impossible.
There was something about her, like she understood me.
Like she was doing her best to smooth away all the raw edges of my guilt and self-loathing – even though she didn’t know me.
And then there was the physical attraction. I’d have to have been in a coma not to notice the buzz between us.
I raised my eyes to meet hers. We stared at each other for seconds longer than we should and when I dropped my gaze to her lush lips again, I was gratified to spot the movement of her throat as she swallowed.
Her teeth caught her lip, but she held my gaze, and it felt like there was a current of electricity fizzing between us.
There had been quite a few lingering looks, on my part as well as hers.
From the minute she gave me that cheeky salute in the airport lounge, like we were comrades in disguise, something about her piqued my interest.
It’s kind of inconvenient when I’m supposed to be leading a totally blameless life.
With the sassy comments and that wild hair which, for a fleeting second, I could imagine spread across my pillow, this girl was definitely the sort of trouble I should stay away from.
The trip to New York, which hopefully would be short and allow me to be back in London before Christmas, was supposed to be taking me away from the headlines and instead rebuilding my reputation.
I wanted to do some hard thinking and focus on training and getting my mind set in the right place.
Unfortunately, all my good intentions were already being eroded by the obvious connection between us.
I was so aware of her sitting beside me; the subtle shift of her breasts as she breathed, the slenderness of her neck and the gorgeous, glossy corkscrew curls spilling down her back as well as the way she almost glowed as if fuelled by her own personal ray of sunshine.
I kept asking myself where the harm in a little light flirtation on the plane was. It wasn’t like I was ever going to see her again – although something about her looked familiar. I was sure I’d seen her someplace before.
‘So, what do you do when you’re not financial journalist-ing?’ I asked with a sardonic smile because it was such an obviously cheesy line and I kind of knew her answer would be entertaining. Now I’d started talking to her – despite my hopeless initial attempts to put her off – I couldn’t stop.
‘Oh, I do a bit of rally driving, mountain climbing and pole dancing,’ she said with a wicked grin.
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she shook her head, her curls bouncing. ‘Just the usual run-of-the-mill stuff, going out with friends, clubbing and sleeping. I’m quite ordinary.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything ordinary about you,’ I found myself saying. There was something about her. She definitely was not ordinary. Her eyes met mine and there it was again, that spark of something.
When the pilot announced that we were due to start our descent, I’d started thinking about asking if she’d like to meet up for a drink.
‘Are you staying in Manhattan?’ I asked. Most tourists headed to Times Square or somewhere central to stay.
‘I am,’ she said, those beautiful brown eyes lighting up and sparkling with some secret delight.
I suddenly laughed as something occurred to me.
‘You realise we’ve flown the whole way across the Atlantic and I still don’t know your name.
She laughed back, although the sparkle in her eyes dimmed, and for a moment she seemed a little diffident, as if she weren’t sure about something.
‘Or we can stay incognito, like some romcom movie,’ I suggested, so relaxed with her that I didn’t even think how this might be construed or even thinking what her response might be to my name.
‘I’m glad you said that and not me.’ She grinned at me, and my pulse sped up. There was just something about her that made me smile, despite myself.
‘I’m Evie, short for Genevieve, except no one ever calls me that.’
‘Noah Sanderson.’ I held out my hand. She went to take it and then at the very last minute, dropped her own hand away as if mine was a cobra about to strike.
‘Noah Sanderson. I knew I knew you from somewhere,’ she repeated, her shocked eyes staring at me with burning embers of accusation glowing in them, as if I should have come clean earlier.
‘Yeah,’ I said with a self-deprecating shrug.
I tended not to volunteer who I was; I don’t get off on the fame and celebrity thing.
Make no mistake, I loved playing football, but it was a job – my profession – and I took it seriously, although I hadn’t always.
Point is, it didn’t define me, not like some of the team or my former friend and teammate Gabriel.
‘I play for Fulham.’ I wasn’t mega famous but I was frequently stopped in the street and asked for a selfie with a fan or an autograph.
Not lately, of course.
That power of the tabloid press. Hero to zero in a matter of days. But aside from Villa fans, like the guy at the airport, most normal people were still civil to me.
I winced. All the empathy I’d imagined from her vanished in a second.
‘Noah Sanderson,’ she repeated, her lip curling. I closed my eyes because I knew what was coming. I could predict the disgust I was about to see in her eyes.
‘It was an accident,’ I said firmly, as instructed by my manager, my agent and my teammates but it didn’t matter how many times I said it or how true it was – it didn’t change the fact that my downright fucking dangerous tackle had finished Rick Menzies’ football career.
He was unlikely to play in the Premier League again and I will live that every day for the rest of my life.
‘It was a genuine tackle,’ I went on, gently, because I hated the thought that this girl would think that I’d done it on purpose.
She stared at me as if I were speaking another language.
‘Do you usually go around putting the boot in?’ she asked, a bitter twist to her mouth. Wow, she’d taken it personally – like a lot of Villa fans had.
I swallowed down my disappointment. She was right.
I’d made a risky tackle. I couldn’t contest my innocence; she had every right to judge me.
It was just a damn shame because there was something about her.
The kindness and impulsive willingness to help at the airport, combined with her sparky personality, was more than an attractive combination.
Fun and thoughtful. We definitely had some sort of chemistry, or rather I did.
‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ she asked.
I shook my head, feeling like I’d stepped into shark-infested waters with a bloody steak strapped to my chest.
‘I’m the woman you trashed online.’
‘What?’ I replied as something flickered at the back of my mind.
‘Evie Green,’ she snapped. ‘Remember now?’
Oh, shit!
Her angry glare was a far cry from the flirtatious smiles we’d been exchanging.
‘It must feel good, being so holier than thou,’ she spat. ‘Slagging off someone you don’t even know when you don’t even know the full story.’
‘It sounded quite cut and dry. The fact is you stole from your flatmates.’
She was referring to an interview I’d done when the interviewer had asked what I thought about the TikTok video everyone was talking about. It was difficult to reconcile the woman in front of me with the swollen-eyed, ragged-looking girl who’d been trying to protest her innocence.
Evie Green had gone viral. Everyone knew about how she’d fallen for a scam – which seemed pretty obvious to me – where she’d won a competition, an all-expenses-paid trip to New York and a stay at The Plaza.
The catch was that she had to pay upfront – I mean seriously?
I’d heard it was over four grand. She was supposed to be a journalist. Didn’t they fact-check and ask questions?
It was still unbelievable to me how she could have fallen for it …
and raided a savings account she shared with her flatmates.
Understandably pissed off, one of them had filmed her pathetic, half-assed apology where she claimed she hadn’t stolen the money, just borrowed it.
‘I borrowed it,’ she said with tight emphasis around every syllable. ‘I had every intention of paying them back.’
‘You took the money without their permission. How else do you define stealing?’
I winced. Stealing. It was a very sore point.
On day one at the football academy when I first came to the UK at the age of seventeen, I met Gabriel.
We got our first team breaks at the same time.
We blew our first pay cheques together. We played hard and partied hard.
We were the golden boys, foolish and arrogant thinking we were invincible.
Then Gabriel stole from me and lost his first-team place – failed a drug test. It was a wake-up call – that and the chewing out I got from my mom.
If it hadn’t been for her, telling me I was embarrassing the family, I might have fallen as hard and fast as Gabriel.
I thought I was being a good Samaritan standing by him, staying loyal and turning a blind eye when money went missing. I had plenty and I didn’t miss it – if I’d called him out and told it like it was – that it was stealing – it might have stopped his descent into addiction sooner.
Evie’s angry voice broke into my thoughts.
‘And thanks to your very public views, the matter was drawn to my boss’s attention – my boss and lifelong Fulham supporter. As a result, I’ve been suspended and then outed as a financial journalist which then made all the tabloid headlines.’
‘I can’t be held responsible for a decision your boss makes,’ I responded, getting angrier and more defensive by the second.
I knew what it was like to be at the mercy of those headlines.
I was on the plane to escape them. To escape the tackle.
The knowledge of how much I’d fucked up.
In the States they didn’t care so much about soccer.
I was a nobody there, which suited me just fine at the moment.
‘Besides you’ve not done badly out of it.
Here you are, in business class? And I heard you got yourself a sympathy stay at The Plaza.
’ Ouch, that was mean, but I was so mad at her.
She did a stupid thing and received a reward for it.
Gabriel did a stupid thing and nearly died; I did a stupid thing and ruined another man’s life.
Screwing up her mouth, she fiddled with the ineffectual screen thing which was supposed to offer some sort of privacy between the seats.
Of course, the bloody thing was broken.
She cursed under her breath, glared at me again and threw herself back into her seat, yanking on her earphones and folding her arms.
I glared back at her. Yes, I was responsible for finishing Menzies’ career, but I would have done anything to make up for that. At least I’d visited him to apologise and tried to make restitution by offering to pay for surgery.
She couldn’t even admit she’d stolen. And how stupid do you have to be to fall for a scam like that? Yeah, it happens, but she worked in finance, for fuck’s sake.
As she gave me the cold shoulder for the remainder of the flight, refusing to even look my way, I had a horrible thought. Oh, shit, I was booked into The Plaza for the next couple of weeks.
As soon as we landed, I’d be on the phone to my agent, Lara, to change the booking.