Protecting the Quarterback
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Kristina Knight
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HarlequinChapter One
JONAS NASH SAT back in the high chair, watching the bustling backstage area. Mandi, a model he’d known for a few years, came up behind him and planted a kiss on his neck. The makeup artist swiped the mark away with a tissue and glared at the model. Mandi rolled her eyes.
“So, what’s the plan after your presentation?”
The plan was to go back to his hotel, pack a bag and get back to Kentucky as quickly as possible. As if the model cared.
The makeup artist swiped more powder over Jonas’s forehead and then leaned back to observe her handiwork. The lights flashed.
“You’re ready,” she said, and Jonas stood while another presenter slid into the now empty chair.
He straightened his bow tie and smoothed his hand over his close-cropped hair. It still felt a little weird to have basically no hair on his head. He’d kept his dark hair long nearly as long as he’d been playing football.
Mandi linked her arm with his, pulling him to a darkened corner of the stage. Jonas winced and withdrew from the contact. Mandi didn’t know the extent of his injury. Very few people did. He intended to keep it that way. By the time the next season started he would be back on the field. Back in control.
“I thought we could hit one of the clubs downtown,” she was saying. “A little dancing, have some fun. I can’t remember the last time you were in town.”
Jonas could. It was last November, when his team played the Gladiators. They’d lost by twenty points, his star running back had gone out with a pulled hamstring, and Jonas had missed the team flight back to Louisville in favor of spending a night wrapped up in Mandi’s sheets.
Instead of spending the night in her bed, though, he’d spent it in lockup while she scavenged for cash after instigating a fight between him and a tattooed giant wearing a dog collar. By the time he finally made it back to Kentucky, all the newspapers and sports talk shows were talking about how out of control Jonas Nash was, and what a blemish he was to the sport of football.
And he hadn’t cared. He’d gone back to his condo, taken a few of the other players out to a favorite club and thrown for two hundred yards—and a win—the following week.
“So what do you say? Dinner and dancing and we’ll see what happens next?”
A pretty blonde across the room caught Jonas’s attention. She was a sportscaster, he thought, and she hadn’t looked his way all night. He’d been watching her, though, from the moment she walked out of the dressing room in those screw-me heels.
He didn’t want to go out with Mandi tonight. Hadn’t wanted to go out with women like her for almost a year. What he did want was a little peace and quiet. To get back on the football field with his teammates and not worry about whether or not his shoulder would hold up.
But there was an awards show to put on, so Jonas pushed the bleak thoughts away and refocused his attention on Mandi.
“Dinner and dancing, huh?”
She smiled and ran her hand up his arm. A year ago that move would have turned every hormone in his body on. Tonight, he felt nothing.
“And whatever else might come up,” she said.
Jonas sighed. He didn’t feel a damn thing.
The stage manager motioned him over, and the pretty blonde from the makeup tables caught his eye again. A spark of something hit his belly.
Weird.
“You’ll present with Miss Smith, entrance here at stage right. After the presentation, you’ll exit stage left together,” the man was saying.
Mandi tugged on his tuxedo jacket and he glanced her way. She made some kind of motion with her hand, but he didn’t quite catch it because the pretty blonde stood and smoothed her hands over the tight dress.
Navy and sparkles shimmered before his eyes, and his mouth went dry. She ran her hand over her hair and something hot began to crawl around his stomach. There. There was something normal. A normal reaction of man to woman.
Something he hadn’t felt in...too long for mental math.
Not that it mattered. He didn’t go chasing after every woman he met anymore. Mandi made another gesture from the side of the stage. He didn’t even chase after women he knew wanted to be chased. That was part of his past. Part of the Jonas he didn’t want to be any longer.
Still, it was nice to know all the equipment still worked.
He watched the blonde for another long moment. Definitely nice to know the equipment still worked.
* * *
THE LIGHTS FLASHED, signaling two minutes to go. Two minutes until she could return to her hotel to get out of this ridiculous dress. Brooks Smith tottered on four-inch heels toward the stage manager, who held a gilded envelope. She’d accepted the hosting gig at the International Sports Awards before she knew she had also been nominated in a completely new category: Hottest Female Sportscaster. Had she known about that award, she would never have agreed. And to have won it... God, another reason for the boy’s club of professional sports broadcasting not to take her seriously.
“No peeking,” the balding man said, and she could practically hear the “tsk tsk” in his voice. “Either of you.” He looked pointedly from Brooks to her presentation partner, Jonas Nash, star of the Louisville Kentuckians, one of the worst professional teams in the North American Football Federation. Which made it odd that he was up for not only Athletic Performance of the Year, but also Player of the Year.
Just went to show what a good PR team could do, she supposed. That and the fact the man looked like Hollywood’s version of a football player, from the reckless gleam in his chocolate-brown gaze to the muscles clearly outlined under the smoothly tailored lines of his Hugo Boss suit.
Brooks plucked the envelope from the manager’s hand. “You might want me to carry it, then.” She shot a pointed look to the man beside her. Six feet five inches of muscle and bad-boy reputation. Six feet five inches of charisma.
Six feet five inches of ball hog.
Which partially explained the Performance of the Year nomination.
“I don’t peek.” Jonas held a hand to his chest and his full lips spread into a wicked smile. “Much.”
The bleach blonde standing beside him near the entrance to the stage offered a finger wave and an air kiss. “See you in the limo,” she practically purred before turning on her heel and disappearing in the hubbub of the backstage area.
“I can make this presentation without you if there is somewhere more important you need to be,” Brooks said.
“No place I’d rather be,” Jonas said, as if the bottle blonde hadn’t just offered herself as his backseat entertainment for the evening.
Why the thought of Jonas with the woman bothered her Brooks couldn’t say. It wasn’t as if she really knew the man. It also was no secret that he’d left a bevy of blondes, brunettes and redheads in his wake for most of his football career. But it did bother her. Brooks pushed the image of the woman from her mind. She needed to focus on the presentation.
The manager ushered them onto the stage as the host for the International Sports Awards introduced them as “Kentucky Football Royalty,” whatever the heck that meant. Brooks rolled her shoulders and pasted a bright smile on her face as they walked into the spotlights. Jonas took the stage with his palm against her lower back, seeming to burn a hole through the silk and sequins of her navy dress.
“Slow down there, Slugger, we stop at the podium, not the next curtain.”
As if.
She didn’t run. Well, except when she ate her weight in salted caramel ice cream.
“I know how to work a stage,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, making sure she kept her smile in place. The problem was being center stage wearing sky-high heels and with nothing to do with her hands. Standing before a single camera in her ballet flats and with a microphone in her hands was so much...simpler.
Jonas waved to the crowd, a big grin splitting his handsome face. “Then try actually smiling for the cameras and waving to the crowd.”
“I am smiling—”
And then her feet betrayed her. Brooks’s left foot slid on the smooth marble floor in the middle of the stage. She tried to grip with her right but she wasn’t used to more than a kitten heel. With sickening clarity Brooks saw the headlines and internet memes and goddamned internet gifs in her mind. Ridiculous hair, ridiculous makeup, ridiculous Brooks sliding across the stage at the International Sports Awards while perfectly dressed, never-out-of-sync Jonas Nash looked on.
Then the strong arm at her lower back seemed to turn to steel as it slid around her abdomen, steadying her. Her face warmed and she couldn’t catch her breath. Heat seemed to envelop her, sizzling across her lower back, dangerously close to where Jonas Nash’s arm held her so tightly, making her stomach clench. And she knew why she made that catty comment to Jonas.
She was attracted to him. God, she’d thought she was over this part of her life. Past being attracted to the men she worked with on a daily basis. She arrived at the station house or the stadium, did her job and went home to her empty apartment to get ready for the next game.
She didn’t feel awkward interviewing half-naked athletes in the locker room. Not once in the five years since she took her first reporting job had she allowed herself to wonder what it would be like to be with one of them. With Jonas’s arm at the small of her back all she could think was how much more heat she would feel if there weren’t several layers of clothing between them.
Brooks swallowed hard and straightened her spine.
“The objective is to arrive at the podium on your feet, not sliding into home,” he said, and this time there was laughter in his quiet voice.
Brooks took a steadying breath, as they continued across the wide expanse. Just a jolt of attraction. She’d had those before. But they’d never left her quite as dry-mouthed or made her heart beat quite so erratically. Probably the cottonmouth feeling and the raging pulse rate were ninety percent fear, and ten percent attraction.
She tried to look past the bright footlights, but only saw shapes. And still her back burned where Jonas’s hand and arm had touched her.
Maybe seventy percent fear, thirty percent attraction.
No laughing faces. She couldn’t hear any telltale titters of derision, either. Maybe no one had noticed.
Jonas’s fingertips trailed across her lower back once more, and the sizzle intensified.
Probably fifty-fifty, but standing next to six feet five inches of pure male perfection, who wouldn’t be attracted? And he’d saved her from an embarrassing fall on international television. That had to add to it.
They reached the podium a second later. Jonas leaned down and whispered, “You’re welcome.” His breath tickled her ear, the slow drawl of his Southern accent seemed to tickle the hairs at the back of her neck, and the heat from his palm at her lower back seemed to scorch another degree higher.
Okay, so it was sixty-forty with attraction making a comeback.
“Thank you,” she said, and the words seemed to echo around the auditorium. The microphone had just switched on. Hot embarrassment flooded her cheeks, but Brooks refused to follow her instincts off the stage and into the blessed comfort of the non-spotlighted backstage area. She chastised herself for the flub.
Cameras and stages were nothing new, but normally she was talking about a great pass or defensive play, not sent out in full hair and makeup as the center of attention at an awards show.
“For accompanying you to the stage? It’s always my pleasure to escort a gorgeous woman,” Jonas said, deadpan. “But it’s not every day I get to escort the Hottest Female Sportscaster. So maybe I should thank you.”
She felt her face flame hotter and closed her hands more tightly around the envelope in her hands. “Maybe we should just stick to the script,” she said, begging him with her eyes to start reading from the teleprompter. Miraculously, he did.
Jonas introduced the first nominee for Most Inspiring Performance, pausing as the producers of the show replayed the highlights for the audience at home as well as the people in the live audience. Brooks concentrated on the clips rolling across the screen and stepped in to announce the second. They traded back and forth for the next nominees and then she waved the envelope. One more minute and she was home free, would be off the stage and could go back to being her ponytailed, flat-shoe-wearing, sports nerd self.
“And the award goes to—” she said, but the envelope wouldn’t open. Brooks tugged on the vellum, tried sticking the long, fake nail the makeup artist had glued to her finger not twenty minutes before under it, but nothing worked. The stage manager had nothing to worry about as far as peeking went: these envelopes seemed to be sealed with atomic-strength glue. Brooks tugged once more. Her hand flew off the vellum and smacked right into the microphone. It popped and hissed. “Apparently these envelopes weren’t sealed with Post-it glue,” she said, and the audience chuckled. Brooks felt the tension ease in her shoulders. Okay, it was going to be okay.
“Let’s just rip it off and see what happens, Brook,” Jonas said and she didn’t even feel the usual annoyance at someone mispronouncing her name. She didn’t care. She wanted to read the winner, hand off the trophy and get the heck off this stage as quickly as possible. She handed the envelope to Jonas.
“Normally, I’m all for a woman doing a man’s job,” she said, “but this time, I’ll just let Muscles, here, do the heavy lifting.”
Jonas tore the edge off the envelope, and a moment later the room swam in applause as a short, balding golfer took the stage to accept the award. Brooks knew she should recognize the man, even if sports wasn’t her job she should recognize him, but all her mind could focus on were Jonas Nash’s hands, trembling as he handed the heavy trophy to the older man, who took it without batting an eye, as if it weighed nothing. She turned her gaze to the man beside her. His face was impassive, his gaze calm, as if nothing in the world was off.
His hands were still trembling. Strike that. Not hands. Hand. His right. His throwing arm. Her mind went back to a cold December afternoon, the last game of the season for the Kentuckians. Jonas had been sacked, driven hard into the frozen field turf. Had that injury been bigger than the team insisted? The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as she sensed a story. A big one.
The golfer started his speech and Brooks and Jonas faded into the background. In the shadows of the stage she heard him exhale a long, slow breath. And then he shifted his shoulder.
The worst injury Brooks had faced when she was playing softball was a hairline fracture in her wrist, but there was something about the way Jonas moved that screamed pain.
“Jonas—” she began, but he was already hustling off the stage, turning his toothpaste-commercial smile on the model waiting to lead the golfer back to the interview area. Hands shoved in his pockets, which was odd. In every picture she’d ever seen of him—and there had been many—in every interview, every locker room, Jonas Nash stood with his hands either at his side or gesturing wildly. The man was never still.
Her pulse ratcheted back up.
Make that twenty percent nerves, thirty percent attraction and fifty percent pure, unadulterated curiosity.
Adrenaline pumped through her veins, the way it seldom did now that she was off the field and behind the microphone. Jonas Nash had a story and she would be the one to figure out what it was.
* * *
JONAS NASH SLID into the backseat of his limo, wanting nothing more than a strong hit of whiskey. He’d nearly blown it. His injury was no secret—nothing in the sports world stayed a secret for very long—but only a handful of people knew the extent of his injury.
He’d nearly outed himself on international television with that trophy stunt. He should have left it on the podium. Why hadn’t he left it on the podium like every other presenter?
“Hey, baby.” The model he’d flirted with backstage slid off the side-facing seat as the limo pulled away from the curb.
“Hey, Mandi,” he said, trying not to feel annoyed with the woman who wouldn’t be here if he’d kept his freaking mouth shut backstage. But he’d felt out of sorts, and he’d found it hard to look away from Brook Smith across the prep area, and then he found himself falling back into old habits. Flirting with anything that moved, talking loudly and acting as if life was a twenty-four-seven party.
Mandi’s hand slid up his leg, resting mere inches away from his package. A few months ago he would already be hard. Would ignore the pain in his shoulder, rip off the dress and do whatever he wanted to the blonde. She caressed the back of his head with her fingertips and nuzzled her head against his shoulder.
He felt nothing.
Scratch that. He felt annoyed. He wanted to drink, and he wanted to do it alone.
Mandi kissed her way up his throat, nipped at the cleft in his chin and then settled her mouth over his. He kissed her back, but half-heartedly. She didn’t seem to notice as she inched the hand on his leg closer and closer to his junk.
Jonas hit a button on the armrest and felt the car come to a stop. He pushed his hands gently against Mandi’s smooth shoulders.
“What’s the matter, baby?” she asked as her hand finally made contact with the bulge in his pants. So maybe he wasn’t as uninterested in her as he’d tried to convince himself.
Didn’t matter. He wasn’t screwing Mandi-the-Model in the back of this limo. The thin glass between the driver and them rolled down.
“Take us back to the theater,” Jonas said, and the driver nodded.
“Did you forget something?”
Jonas shook his head. “No, just...” What to say to a woman he’d had no problem sleeping with any number of times in the past? “I’m tired. I want to go back to the hotel—”
“Not a problem,” she said, squeezing her hand gently around his package. Jonas inhaled a sharp breath, and then took her hand in his, removing it from his pants.
“Not tonight,” he said and slid another inch away from her across the seat.
She watched him for a long moment, and then crossed her arms over her chest. “Did I do something wrong?”
Nothing but everything. He was a doctor’s report away from being a washed-up quarterback. Mandi might not expect anything from Jonas, but he’d learned over the past four months that he expected something from himself. He just didn’t know what, exactly, that expectation was. Until he did, he couldn’t just be party-boy Jonas.
He could make out a line of taxis outside the venue and took a few bills from his pocket. “Not tonight. I’ll pay for your cab back home.” The limo stopped at the corner, but Mandi made no move to leave. “I’ll, uh, call you the next time I’m in town,” he said.
Mandi took the money. “Don’t be surprised if I don’t answer,” she said as she exited the car. A few flashbulbs went off as Jonas pulled the door closed with his good arm.
“Take me to the airport,” he said, not wanting another night in the too-familiar hotel. He wanted out of New York.
Once the limo was cruising toward the airport, Jonas shrugged out of his sport coat. Shrugged out was so not the way to describe what he did to contort his body out of the coat so that his shoulder didn’t scream in pain. It merely whimpered. Loudly. He grimaced.
Damned shoulder, anyway. Stupid way to get hurt. No one noticed his hand. No one besides Brook Smith was close enough to see, and she’d been so petrified of the lights—what broadcaster was afraid of a few lights, anyway?—that he would be surprised if she even knew he was her co-presenter tonight.
With his good arm Jonas threw the coat across the car, unbuttoned the sleeves of his shirt and rolled up the cuffs. Dared his right arm to tremble.
Nothing.
Not even a hint of movement. He stretched out his arm at shoulder height. Winced against the pain and willed it not to move. The tremble started in his triceps before shooting through his arm to his fingertips.
A few words his Southern mother had taught him never to say in mixed company painted the inside of the limo red. Didn’t matter. The surgeon said it would take time. He had nine more weeks before training camp. Nine more weeks to figure out why simple tasks like taking off a shirt caused more pain months after the accident than deadlifting two hundred pounds had before he’d ever been hurt.
His phone rang and he nearly tossed it aside because the number was unknown. Something made him answer.
A smooth Kentucky accent poured through the cell, making his muscles clench and his mouth go dry.
Brook Smith. The sound of her voice through his phone was enough to make him...wish she’d been the one with him in the limo instead of Mandi. Before tonight he’d never met the pretty reporter in person. Her legs were longer than he’d imagined, peeking through the long slit of her gown as she’d walked with purpose across the stage to the podium. Her skin had burned him through the thin silk of her dress, and he could still smell the light scent of vanilla that accompanied their trip across the stage. A scent that had nearly made him forget they were in front of an audience for the first sixty seconds of their acquaintance. Now her voice was close, too close, in the limo, and it seemed as soft as he’d imagined the honeyed strands that had escaped her fancy hairdo would feel against his skin.
“...so I’m going to be in Texas next week to do a sit-down with the Bulls for the network, I’d love to chat with you, too.”
“About how I played Prince Charming to your clumsy Belle at the awards tonight?” he asked, trying to throw her off balance.
“Prince Charming ends up with Snow White, not Belle—”
“But the Beast would have let you fall right into the floodlights. Prince Charming always rides to the rescue.” Probably he shouldn’t have mentioned the Beast, not because now she would equate him with the fairy-tale character, but because men like him weren’t supposed to know about fairy tales. He was beer and football and Vin Diesel movies, wasn’t that the basis of a three-week tell-all his last girlfriend sold to the tabloids? Jonas frowned at the phone.
“The Beast would have swept me into a waltz and danced me straight to the podium,” she said, and there was what could only be described as starch in her voice. “After this year you’ll have free agent status and can go anywhere. Fans all over the world want to know if you’ll stay a Kentuckian or find a football home somewhere else.”
Everyone wanted to know. Hell, he wanted to know. Unlike many of his football brethren, Jonas had joined the league with the intention of being a one-team star. He liked the money that came with football, but a strong team was more important. Then he’d been drafted by the Kentuckians and for the past five years he’d only been playing for the money.
Now, if his shoulder was really junked, no other teams would even look.
Then he’d be an athlete without a team. The mere thought made his heel tap against the carpeted floor of the limo.
“Free agency could totally change your career, unless there was more to that injury than the team let on.” She waited a beat. “Jonas?”
He had no skills outside of football.
“Mr. Nash?”
His degree was in freaking Hospitality, for crying out loud, because it gave him more time to concentrate on football. He was goddamned Mr. Football to fans all over the world. He was not, repeat not, sitting down with Brook Smith to chat about his career plans, the injury to his shoulder or whatever else was on her greedy, reporter mind. Not until he was sure he was over football. Right now all he was sure of was that he wanted one more season calling the plays.
It might already be too late, the sly voice in his head said. The voice that sounded a lot like his mother.
“I can make myself available. Whatever works for you, I’ll work into my schedule.” Her voice was cool, at odds with the rising temperature in the limo.
Unsaid questions peppered his mind. What if the rest of rehab went by with as little improvement as he’d seen in the past weeks? What if the Kentuckians didn’t want him? What the hell kind of life could a man have if he was washed up before the age of thirty-two?
“I’ll be in Kentucky, but maybe next time.”
