Taming The Reckless Rookie (NYC Empires #4)

1. Chapter 1 — Ty

She's been shutting me down for twenty minutes.

I know this because Prentiss just told the whole room. He's grinning like he's won something. Collins took a step back, which is the smart play.

I should have taken the step back.

"I've never met a no that stayed a no." I lean in just slightly. Full grin. The one that has, historically, worked. "And the way you look right now? Your mouth is saying no but everything else is having a completely different conversation."

The immediate three feet around us goes quiet.

She looks at me for one full second.

Then she tips her cocktail glass forward.

The cold hits my chest like a verdict. It soaks through my shirt in about two seconds flat. Prentiss makes a sound. Collins takes another step back.

She hands the empty glass to a passing waiter with the efficiency of a woman completing a task.

Smooths the front of her dress.

Looks at me.

"Now it is," she says.

She turns and walks away. Perfectly composed. Red dress moving through the crowd like she planned all of it, which maybe she did, which I cannot stop watching.

The room comes back. Noise and laughter and Prentiss saying something I don't hear.

I stand there, soaking wet, watching her cross the ballroom until she stops beside —

Oh.

Oh no.

***

She stops beside a man I know the way every person on this roster knows him.

The way every person in professional football knows him.

Silver at the temples. Posture like a man who hasn't relaxed in thirty years.

Eyes that move across a room with the specific patience of someone who has already seen everything in it and categorized it by threat level.

Coach Ruiz.

She says something in his ear. He doesn't look at me.

He doesn't have to.

"Knox."

Marcus Hale materializes at my shoulder the way he does — large and quiet, like the building just produced him. He looks at me. Then at the woman now standing beside Ruiz. Then back at me.

"Do you know who that is?"

I watch her say something else. Watch Ruiz nod once. Watch her lift a fresh cocktail from a passing tray like nothing happened.

"I'm starting to figure it out," I say.

"Ava Ruiz." Marcus's voice is even. "Youngest daughter. She's been in the building twice this week for capstone intake meetings." He pauses. "She's also the reason Coach has been in a specific kind of mood since Saturday."

I look at Marcus.

He looks back with the expression of a man who never had the chance to say I told you so and wouldn't anyway. Marcus isn't that guy. He doesn't need to be. The situation is saying it for him.

"How bad is this?" I ask.

Marcus considers it with the seriousness it deserves.

"Coach Ruiz's daughter just threw her drink on you," he says. "At the franchise gala. In front of approximately forty witnesses." He looks back at the room. "On a scale of one to ten."

He doesn't finish the sentence.

He doesn't need to.

***

Here's the thing about the NYC Empires annual gala.

It's mandatory. Black tie. Open bar. Sienna Hart runs the room like she built it — which she basically did. Her partner Declan owns the franchise. Marcus is the captain. Everyone else is furniture until proven otherwise.

I am, by every measurable standard, furniture.

Fifth-round pick out of Indiana. Twenty-two years old. One decent season so far and a reputation for talking too much, smiling too much, and staying exactly one bad headline away from the kind of disaster that ends careers before they start.

Marcus told me once that my superpower is making problems look like charm until they're already on fire.

He said it three weeks after I almost torched Dante Rivera's reinstatement by talking to two freelance reporters in a hallway.

I thought I was helping. I gave them nothing real.

Except Sara Reed had to spend the next four hours explaining why "he didn't do anything" counts as a confirmation when a league rep is on-site.

Dante never said a word about it. That was somehow worse.

I knew all of that when I walked in tonight.

I also knew I was going to talk to her the moment I saw her.

She was standing slightly apart from the nearest cluster of people, cocktail glass in hand, expression calibrated to polite interest in everything and actual interest in nothing.

Dark hair. Red dress doing significant damage to my ability to concentrate. The posture of someone who has been in rooms like this her whole life and finds them useful rather than impressive.

She was not furniture.

I crossed the room.

She clocked me coming from about fifteen feet out — the slight shift in her focus, the recalibration. Filing me before I opened my mouth.

"Ty Knox," I said. Like she asked.

"I know who you are." Even. Not warm, not cold. Precise.

"Good start." I positioned myself beside her, facing the same direction, looking out at the room. "You have the expression of someone who's been to this thing before."

"Eight years."

"So you know everyone here."

"By function." She took a sip of her drink. "Not necessarily by choice."

I smiled. She didn't.

"What function are you here in tonight?"

She looked at me directly for the first time. Brown eyes. Sharp. The kind already running the numbers on whatever you said before you finished saying it.

"I'm here as my father's daughter," she said. "And as a Stern MBA candidate doing a capstone research project on the franchise."

"Which one is the real answer?"

Something shifted at the edge of her expression. Not quite a reaction. More like she noticed one was coming and redirected it.

"Both," she said. "They're not mutually exclusive."

"Who's your father?"

She looked back at the room. "Someone who would prefer you walked away from this conversation approximately thirty seconds ago."

That was the most interesting thing anyone had said to me all night.

I stayed exactly where I was.

And twenty minutes later, she threw a drink at me.

To be fair, I earned it.

***

I get through the rest of the evening on muscle memory. Handshakes and small talk and at least three conversations I have no memory of.

I do not look at Coach Ruiz. I do not look at Ava Ruiz. I hold a fresh champagne glass I don't touch and think about all the ways I have ended my own career in under three minutes.

My phone buzzes at nine-forty-seven.

Group chat. Twenty-seven messages in forty seconds.

The first one is a gif. Slow-motion water splash. No caption needed.

The messages after it are creative. I'll give them that.

The last one is from Jax: We need to talk tomorrow.

I put my phone away. Look across the room one more time.

Ava Ruiz is standing near the terrace with a fresh drink, talking to someone from the front office, completely composed. She doesn't look in my direction.

She doesn't have to look in my direction for me to feel it.

That's the part I can't explain. The part that's going to be a problem.

Because I've been read wrong before. Underestimated. Dismissed. Catalogued in the wrong column by people who looked at the grin and stopped there. It rolls off me. Always has.

This woman looked at me for twenty minutes and saw exactly what was there.

And then she threw a drink at me for it.

I should be relieved she walked away.

I am not even slightly relieved.

I finish the evening. Shake the right hands. Say the right things. Ride back to my apartment in a car that smells like someone else's cologne and stare out the window at Manhattan going past in the dark.

Monday morning she walks into the Empires facility with a visitor's credential and a capstone research project.

Monday morning I have to figure out how to be in the same building as Coach Ruiz's daughter without ruining both our lives.

My phone buzzes again. Just to me. Just from Jax.

Seriously. Monday. Early.

I look at it for a long moment.

Then I type back: I know.

I put the phone in my pocket. Look back out the window.

The city doesn't have an opinion about any of this. That's the thing about Manhattan — it's been here longer than anyone's problems and it'll be here after. It just keeps moving.

I'm going to need to learn something from that.

Starting tomorrow.