Second Kick (Southern Knights Football Family #1)

Chapter 1

GRIFFIN

“Excuse you.” A woman’s shrill voice chirps as she smacks into me.

I turn to see her teetering on heels and hardly clothed. She rolls her eyes as she pushes past me with her tiny dog in tow. “Are you in or out? Make a choice, darling, and make it quick.”

“With you? Out. Definitely out,” I grumble.

“You should be so lucky.” She cuts her eyes at me, but the white and tan puffball in her arms wags his tail.

Poor dog, stuck with that nightmare.

I reach out to pat the pup on the head when the woman flips her hair and struts toward the crosswalk with her phone already pressed to her ear. The little Pomeranian’s leash dangles loosely from her manicured fingers.

I shake my head. I used to own this damn town. I was royalty around here... How could I not have been?

I played three seasons as a first-round draft pick with the Southern Knights before I was traded to Nevada. Now I’m standing outside Bluemoon Coffee Shop, staring up at the familiar purple awning and wondering when everything went so spectacularly wrong.

My knee throbs. It’s been throbbing since I got off the plane. It’s that familiar deep ache that never quite goes away no matter how many pills I pop or how much ice I use. I shift my weight to my good leg and catch my reflection in the coffee shop window.

I barely recognize the guy staring back at me. Dark circles under his eyes. Jaw tight with tension he can’t shake. He looks tired. He looks old. He looks like a guy who peaked at twenty-five and has been sliding downhill ever since.

Magnolia Landing, the little town right outside of Charleston that I’ve found myself in, hasn’t changed.

The palmetto trees still sway in the salt-kissed breeze.

Tourists still clog up Main Street with their shopping bags full of handmade art and their skin blistered with sunburns.

The air still smells like jasmine and possibility.

It isn’t different here, but I sure as hell am. The man who walked out of this city had the world at his feet. The man walking back in is a cautionary tale with a busted knee and an empty bank account.

A sharp yap pulls me from my thoughts.

The woman’s Pomeranian has spotted a seagull pecking at something across the street. In an instant, the dog lunges. The leash slips right through the woman’s fingers as she gestures dramatically into her phone.

“Sebastian! Sebastian, no!”

But Sebastian isn’t listening. Sebastian is halfway to the damn curb, and there’s a delivery truck backing out of the alley. The driver checks his side mirror, but is completely blind to the ten pounds of pure stupidity darting into his path.

I don’t think. My body just moves.

My knee screams white-hot and vicious as I push off and lunge for the dog.

I reach him just in time to scoop the furry little monster against my chest and stumble backward.

My bad leg buckles as I hit the sidewalk hard.

The truck rumbles past, close enough that I feel the exhaust warm against my arm.

Sebastian licks my face like I’m covered in bacon grease.

“Oh my God.” The woman totters over, heels clicking against concrete. She snatches the dog from my arms and clutches it to her chest, checking it over for damage. “Sebastian, baby, are you okay?”

I’m still on the ground. My knee is on fire. I’m pretty sure I scraped my palm on the sidewalk. The woman looks down at me. For a split second I think she might actually say thank you.

“You should be more careful,” she sniffs. “You almost scared him to death.” She turns and walks away without another word.

I sit there for a moment with my hand braced against the warm concrete, waiting for the fire in my knee to die down to its usual dull roar.

A couple of tourists give me a wide berth.

I don’t blame them. They probably think I’m drunk or insane.

.. or both. I can confirm that the first isn’t true, but the jury’s still out on the second.

I haul myself up and test my weight on the knee. It holds, but just barely. This is what I have to work with. This is what I have to rebuild into something worth a damn.

My ACL didn’t just tear. It shredded. The damn thing took my meniscus along for the ride like some kind of anatomical murder-suicide.

The team doctors used words like “career-threatening” and “significant structural damage.” Meanwhile, I lay on that operating table, staring into the white, fluorescent lights, and wondering if this was how it all ended for me.

I’ve never been worried about being taken out.

Everyone knows a career in football isn’t for life.

But I always imagined when I did go, I’d leave in a blaze of glory.

Maybe with a Super Bowl ring on my hand and a tearful retirement speech.

Hell, before I met Jess I thought maybe I’d even go out like Travis Kelce on the arm of a billionaire pop star and with a whole new media career just out ahead of me.

But I never thought it’d end with a sickening pop and a stretcher.

In the NFL, there aren’t any second chances. But I must be the luckiest son of a bitch on the planet because Coach Andrews gave me one. The league said I was finished, but he swooped in with a one-year prove-yourself rehab contract that brought me back to where it all started.

Now I have until training camp to fix my knee or clean out my locker.

The other deadline, the one I’d been counting down for five years, was finally running out too.

I’ve got one shot to show the world I’m still worth a damn.

I have to prove I still have my mobility, timing, and leadership.

Otherwise I won’t just be benched. I’ll be cut.

I refuse to be just another aging quarterback with a bad knee and better days behind him. It isn’t just my ego that won’t let me. It’s the money. Or rather, the complete absence of it. Because somehow I fucked that up too.

I didn’t come from money. I came from a small logging town in the middle of nothing. Not too many millionaires out of Lumberjack Lagoon.

So when I found myself with an NFL contract and a truckload of it, I trusted Richard Holmes with everything I had. The dude helped my parents with their taxes when I was in diapers. He seemed like a safe bet.

Richard smiled at me across a mahogany desk and promised returns that would set me up for life.

Everything he said from there was over my head.

.. Diversified portfolio, safe investments, a trust fund to keep it all out of harm’s way.

The way I saw it, I didn’t need to know anything else.

I signed on the dotted line. By the time the bank came knocking, Richard was somewhere in the Caymans with my money and a woman half his age.

The memory makes my heart rate tick up. What an asshole.

I brush off my jeans and wince at the fresh scrape on my palm. Then I push through the door of Bluemoon Coffee. The silver bell chimes that familiar little melody.

The smell hits me first. It’s something cinnamon and something citrusy. For a moment, I’m twenty-two again. Standing in this exact spot, palms sweating, working up the nerve to ask the pretty barista with the sunshine smile if she wanted to get dinner sometime.

That was the beginning of everything good in my life. It was also the beginning of the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, and this town screams her name.

The coffee shop is crowded for a Tuesday morning. I recognize a few faces here and there. An old trainer, a former teammate’s mother, and the guy who used to cut my hair before I left. They notice me too, and I tug my hat down over my eyes.

But phones appear and the whispers start.

I can already see the headlines forming.

Griffin Callahan returns to Magnolia Landing.

Griffin Callahan riches to rags. The national press may have forgotten about me.

Hell, some say I’ve never quite lived up to the hype.

Always solid but never spectacular. But here, everyone dies famous. This town remembers everything.

I keep my head down and get in line. I keep my eyes trained on the menu board like I’m not going to order the same damn dark roast I’ve been drinking for years. Maybe if I don’t make eye contact, they’ll leave me alone. Maybe... My eyes dart to the woman across from me like a magnet.

“Jess.” The name escapes my lips before I can stop it.

Jess Hartwell stands three feet away. My chest tightens. She’s smiling and holding a cup of iced coffee. She’s even more beautiful than I remembered.

“Jess, it’s me.” I have to blink to make sure she’s standing here. But it’s really her.

She turns and her eyes widen as she takes me in. “Griffin Callahan.”

Her voice cuts through the ambient noise like a blade and washes over me. I’d know that voice anywhere. Hell, it’s haunted my dreams for years.

Every cell in my body screams the word mine... And she was.

Jess was mine so many years ago, and some primal part of me refuses to accept that anything has changed. Her dark hair is shorter now. It falls just past her shoulders in waves that catch the light from the window.

She stares up at me. Her whiskey-brown eyes that used to look at me like I hung the moon are blazing with an emotion I can’t quite name. I don’t know whether she wants to kiss me or hit me. I wouldn’t blame her either way. But it takes everything in me not to pull her into my arms.

I reach for her instinctively and place a hand on her arm.

She doesn’t pull away. The heat under my palm bubbles and electricity whips up and down my body.

I open my mouth to say something. Tell her how much I’ve missed her.

Or maybe to mutter an apology. Anything really.

Just being this close to her again is intoxicating.

But before I can form a single syllable, her eyes drop from mine and land on the place my hand connects to her arm. Her face shifts from disbelief to pure heat.

Then twenty ounces of cold brew hits me square in the chest.

There are a few gasps followed by a muffled laugh from somewhere behind me. Then the shop goes silent.

My shirt is soaked. Coffee drips down my chest and pools in the waistband of my jeans. My knee still throbs from the sidewalk. My palm still stings from the scrape.

And the only woman I’ve ever loved is looking at me like she hates me.

Welcome back.