Chapter 9
PACE – MID-SEPTEMBER
A Jugular at Stake
“You brought me a girl car?” Annie asks as she looks in surprise at the car I drove here. We’re all standing out on the porch.
“It’s on loan,” I tell her, glancing to Colton, though I’ve already covered this with him.
Drummed into him in fact that this car loan is for my own personal safety and to avoid another bath in cow excrement.
I didn’t want to lie but if I’d told him I’d bought his sister a new car, the conversation would have gone one of two ways, the most likely that he’d have assumed I’m trying to get my dick wet.
Which I’m not. I genuinely consider this a gift of self-preservation, for me, until Annie passes her test.
“It’s my sister’s,” I explain, “for when she visits me. She’s on the road right now, so this is sitting on my driveway not being used and I figured it would be easier to learn in than the truck.”
Taking away the clutch and stick might stop me from getting car sickness or whiplash every Tuesday, and working aircon will mean I can roll up the windows when Annie looks like shitplaning the car out of control.
“Tanner, this is…” She looks my way, then back to the car, gleaming red under the sun. “So cool. And so kind. Has your sister been in this car? I’m going to totally fangirl in there. Does she know you’re letting me use it?”
I avoid lying by mocking her instead. “It’s like no one ever loaned you anything, Annie.” But I’m delighted she likes it. Buzzing that she’s so happy.
“Can we take it out?” she asks.
“Sure, we’ve got Nelson,” Sas says.
So I take Annie out in the shiny new automatic that still smells of fresh leather.
Without a shifter or a clutch to worry about, she’s a (marginally) smoother driver.
Any worries I had about this gift being too much – or Colton thinking it’s too much – are obliterated.
I can be kind without ulterior motive; I’m a grown man and a wealthy one.
When we get back to the ranch, Sonny and the team are back at the corral with the kids here on respite.
Colton and I are pulled into requests for photographs and autographs, which is zero hardship.
I swear I’ve never made so many people as happy in the space of a couple hours – outside a playoff game.
I’m focused on the kids but overhear as Annie tells Sas, “It’s so much easier in this car. Maybe the problem’s been the vehicle all along.”
Relatively, it’s true that she drove the Audi better than her daddy’s rusty truck. She didn’t commit a felony or get me covered in animal excrement. Would I trust her in a populated area, though? Ninety-nine percent no.
“Will you play football with us?” The request comes from a kid called Alvarez, who’s maybe ten or eleven, but the group all jump on it, begging Quinn and me for throw downs.
Colton and I will be heading to Florida with the squad bright and early tomorrow, so I could use an early night, but dinner turns into s’mores by the campfire.
Technically, I’m being forced to stay, since I’m reliant on Colton and Sas to get me back to the city but honestly, I have no qualms about it. If anything, I’m reluctant to head home to my own place where there’s nothing but Grand Theft Auto waiting for me.
I don’t do relationships during season. In fact, I don’t do relationships at all.
I’ve always said there’ll be plenty of time for that when I retire.
But this off-season was the least active with the ladies that I’ve had since I was a pimpled teen, and I think it’s Sas’s fault.
Watching her and Colton fall for each other last season was…
nice. It got me wondering what it would be like to have someone sitting on my sofa when I come home from my games or running me a bath of effervescent salts – preferably Bergamot scented.
I don’t know where these thoughts are coming from, but this is what I’m mulling over as I stare into the flames and floating embers of the campfire, listening to the camp leaders tell stories of dragons and witches.
“Dime for your thoughts?” Sas asks, rolling her hip into mine where we sit together on a log.
I give her an abbreviated version. “I can see how you got sucked in by the Quinns and the ranch.”
“Yeah, it’s a special place.” She smiles warmly. “You know, it’s interesting that I stayed at your place for most of last season and I never noticed an Audi on the driveway.”
I run my tongue along my teeth, buying myself a second, then tell her, “Maybe you were so busy trying to get into Colton’s pants that you didn’t look.”
With her signature pout in place, she gives my shoulder a pathetic shove. “You know something I have observed?” she asks, and for some reason that question has me swallowing so hard I feel it in my cheeks. “That your beard gets more silver every time I see you.”
Relieved, I smirk. “You be careful there. When I get too old, I’ll stop lining yours and your dad’s pockets with agent commission.”
“Then you better do some things to keep you feeling young, old man.”
Or someone, I think, picturing Annie. The thought hits me like a lightning bolt, making me twitchy on the log. Where did that come from?
“I don’t know what you’re insinuating, firecracker, but you know I don’t mess during season.”
“Noooooo, you don’t do relationships during season but I’ve got your number, Casanova.”
“Yeah, you and the rest of the world, right?”
Even though we banter about my reputation, I feel guilt that wouldn’t exist if I was doing a better job of fighting how much I enjoy spending time with one woman. My teammate’s much younger sister.
Speak of the devil, Annie and Colton come from inside carrying two boxes of skewered marshmallows.
Accepting Nelson from Annie while she roasts s’mores for the kids, then us, I settle him onto my lap.
He’s mesmerized by the fire, and the only thing that distracts him is watching the roasted marshmallow Annie hands me on a stick.
“D’you want me to take him?” she asks.
“No, we’re good. He’s neat as a button in this sturdy arm, aren’t you, Nellie Bellie?”
I chuckle when Annie glares at me. Then, she starts chatting to Sas about her new client. Richie Davenport was a first-round draft pick for Louisiana this year and he’s Sas’s first client at her dad’s sports agency.
I have half an ear on the conversation because football is my world, but I’m not going to let the little man on my lap miss an opportunity to taste his first s’more behind his mama’s back.
“You want some, Nellie Bellie?” I whisper. The kid beams. He gets it.
I heat test the sweet treat with my fingertips, then, satisfied it’s cool, I tease off a stringy wedge. “Open up, buddy. We’ve got to be quick.”
He nearly chomps off my fingers when I put the food inside, up against his mostly toothless gums.
Annie is suddenly in front of me, hands on hips, legs going on for days beneath her skirt. “Tanner Pace, I know you aren’t feeding my baby marshmallows.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But Nelson chooses now to let me down. Turning his head further on that stanchion than I’ve seen him do before, he looks right at his mama and opens his mouth, which is full of stringy marshmallow, melted and gooey and stretching from the top to the bottom of his mouth.
“Well now, there’s no hiding that,” Sonny says from across my shoulder, and while I’m braced for a tongue lashing from Annie, we all fall into laughter.
“Come on, buddy, I thought we were on the same team,” I tell Nelson, tickling his tummy through his sleep suit.
Despite the sugar, he falls asleep in the crook of my arm shortly after our moment of deviance and Annie leads the way as I carry him up to his bedroom.
At his crib side, I press my lips to his scalp and set him down. “Sweet dreams, kiddo. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Then I’m thrown into an absolute spin as I realize what I’ve done, that I’ve overstepped, but that it felt like the most natural thing in the world to care for this little boy.
What makes my entire torso feel even more like a laundry machine on spin cycle is the way Annie is looking at me, eyes glossing over. It’s so intimate that I should look away but she’s as enthralling as the flames of the fire outside and I just… can’t.
“Why’re you being so nice to me?” she asks quietly, almost to herself.
I could say I can’t help myself. She’s good people and deserves a break. I like being around her. But something tells me she’ll take any of that as a pity party.
“That’s a question the team psych could write an essay on,” I tell her instead. “Childhood trauma. Daddy issues. Countering guilt over everything I have because I didn’t grow up with much. The need to be a people pleaser. Because I crave feeling wanted. Self-gratification.”
She raises one eyebrow, a slight twist in her lips. “So you’re helping me because you’re a fellow hot mess?”
I find myself smiling at my feet, an alien sensation of heat in my cheeks. “Something like that.”
Before questioning my motives, I press a soft kiss to her cheek, the contact traversing everything north of my waistline and culminating with a beat in my chest. “Goodnight, Annie Quinn.”
“Goodnight, Tanner Pace.” I head out of the room, looking back to see her unmoving, hand to her cheek. Yeah, I felt something then, too.
Something I need to turn off.
I’m too old. She’s been through too much. Her family has been through too much. I’m not a guy who has managed to stay in a relationship ever.
The last time she fell for her brother’s best friend, he dicked all over her.
The most romantic thing I can offer her is to leave well alone and promise that I will never hurt her the way Auston Rogers has.
Not least because my position as a friend and captain, and the very jugular in my neck, are resting on me not messing around Quinn’s baby sister.