Chapter 1 #3
“I’m not even your lawyer, for Christ’s sake!
But Camille doesn’t know who else to call.
That’s how bad it looks. I have to be in court at nine-thirty to represent someone who pays me a lot of money to be on my game twenty-four-seven, and now I’m going in distracted with no sleep because I had to bail you out of jail! ”
She huffed out the last sentence, voice rising with frustration as her neck flushed red. Her chest heaved, the sharp line of her jaw set in anger. I hated that my mistakes and my stupidity were bringing this out in her. She was always so easy for me to read, especially when emotions came into play.
And she was pissed. She had every right to be. This was bad. It looked bad. It felt bad.
My PR agent, Cami, just so happened to be her best friend and married to my best friend. And Cami only called Sloane for emergencies.
Not just for me; I wasn’t the only troublemaker on the team. Cami represented several of the Bandits, and when you had a bunch of single guys with a shit ton of money and a love for partying, crisis control and legal issues were often handed off to Sloane.
As they should be. She’d worked her ass off to earn her position as one of the top sports attorneys on the East Coast. She was made for it.
I’d always told her she was born to argue. Sometime in high school, it just clicked. Our lives seemed to figure themselves out. I knew my goal was the major leagues. I also knew wherever that took me, I needed Sloane there, too.
She fell in love with sports law, and it had paid off.
Big time.
The last time we talked about salary, her paycheck came pretty damn close to mine.
I was so fucking proud of her. She practiced in a predominantly male field and kicked ass, never letting anyone trample her.
Although that headstrong personality wasn’t necessarily working out for me at the moment.
I took a deep breath, the pounding in my head growing more and more intolerable by the second.
I just wanted to go home, pop a Tylenol, down a vat of water, and pass the fuck out.
But I couldn’t do any of that with her looking at me like that.
“Look, Pip. I’m really fucking sorry. I don’t—” I paused, palming the back of my neck and exhaling slowly, “I don’t know how this happened. ”
That might have been a half-truth. I knew that. Shit, Sloane probably knew that.
She offered nothing more than a hum in response, letting me know she had seen right through my bullshit. “Get in.”
“What?”
I watched as she rounded the car, her purse hitched on her shoulder as she threw an annoyed look at me. “Get in the damn car, Rhys. You’re sleeping this off at my place. I gotta make sure you don’t do anything else stupid before I talk to Cami.”
Any other night, I probably would’ve argued. I probably would’ve insisted that I was fine to go home alone, but I also knew that look of determination on her face. There was absolutely no way for me to derail this train of thought.
***
The ride back to her place was completely silent. Usually, any silence that we shared was comfortable and lighthearted. But there was absolutely nothing light-hearted about the wall of tension between us.
Her shoulders were rigid, her jaw clenched shut. I swore I could hear her teeth grinding together in the silence. As if her obvious silent treatment wasn’t enough to tell me how annoyed she was, her chest and neck were still burning red.
And I was still scolding myself for looking.
I would never bring it up, but she looked fucking tired on top of everything else.
She had bags under her eyes concealed with makeup, but I could see through it.
As guilty as I felt for pulling her out so late, I could also tell it was the kind of exhaustion that had settled in her bones. It’d been around for a while.
But I didn’t know enough about her life to know what was keeping her up. I sure as hell hadn’t done anything to earn that right recently.
I shifted around in my seat the entirety of the fourteen-minute drive, trying to figure out the best way to approach the situation and apologize without pissing her off even more.
I knew she wasn’t looking for an apology, but I couldn’t let that stop me from trying to show her just how horrible I felt.
Every so often, I’d open my mouth to speak, and then immediately snap it shut after glancing her way and catching a glimpse of her irritated expression. This was so much easier when the crime was just stealing her food and not actually illegal.
“I was just blowing off some steam, Pip.” Almost immediately, I curled inward, digging the heels of my palms into my eyes. That was terrible—a shitty excuse and even worse delivery.
An extremely sarcastic and very unamused laugh boomed from Sloane as she pulled into the parking garage of her luxury apartment complex, and I knew this was hopeless. She was pissed, and I should’ve known that nothing I said tonight, or possibly for the next thirty years, would change that.
Fortunately for me, some other asshole on the team would fuck up soon. So I would just have to suffer through the next couple of weeks before something distracted her enough to forgive me. Hopefully.