Down by Contact - A Seattle Lumberjacks Romance (2 page)

This year would be different. He’d taken a
hefty pay cut to sign a one-year contract with this team just for a
chance to win a ring in what might well be his last year. For a
linebacker who played as hard as he did, thirty-four bordered on
ancient. Or so his body told him.

Reluctantly, Zach took his seat across from
Harris. Thank God, Lavender sat to Zach’s right because Zach adored
her. She shot him a friendly smile. Knowing it would piss Tyler
off, he grinned back. “You’re as pretty as a dandelion in a weed
patch.”

Lavender laughed and patted his arm. “You
silver-tongued devil. Thank you. You cut a dashing figure
yourself.” A few of the guys around the table snickered behind
their napkins.

“A dandelion is a
weed
.” Hoss Price,
their three-hundred-pound center, snorted so hard Zach expected his
wine to come out his nose. Harris glared at Zach as if he’d called
Lavender fat or something equally offensive.

Zach ducked his head. He liked dandelions.
They were the only flowers that had grown in his Grandmother
Lo-Lo’s front yard. He’d screwed up again. He’d meant his statement
to be a real compliment, but everyone took it as humorous.

“I didn’t know Wal-Mart sold tuxes. Must be
a new line or something.” John Myers, a prima-donna wide receiver
chortled, and his teammates joined in.

“From you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Zach looked down at his black tux. He didn’t see a thing wrong with
it. He’d bought it at a bargain price at a decent menswear store
for his cousin’s wedding a few years ago. It seemed perfectly
functional to him. Sure it was a little small in places, the pants
a little short, and it had a few wrinkles, but he didn’t see it as
a big deal. Off-the-rack clothes never fit him right. He was used
to it. He’d be damned if he’d spend five figures on a custom suit
with some dumbass designer’s name on the label like Harris did just
to impress a bunch of people he cared less about.

“Lapels like that went out of style years
ago.” John couldn’t keep his trap quiet.

Zach clamped his mouth shut. Who gave a shit
about out-of-style lapels? Not him. He didn’t give a hoot about
style.

“Zach, you look great—for a hick.” Bruiser
grinned at him. He liked Bruiser usually, but not so much right
now.

“Hey, he’s prepared for the rainy season,
too. Those pants legs are above the high-water mark.” Hoss choked
on his wine, spitting some of it across the table. Too bad he
missed Harris’s face by a mere inch. Hoss didn’t have any better
social graces than Zach, but his elegant girlfriend dressed him for
these occasions. Zach didn’t have a woman to make sure he looked
put together.

“Zach looks fine.” Lavender pinched
Bruiser’s arm while Tyler yelped. She must have kicked him under
the table just for good measure. Zach needed to find a woman like
her.

“Zach, you’re a handsome devil. These guys
are just jealous.” Rachel, wife to all-pro wide receiver Derek
Ramsey, shot a shut-up-or-die glance around the table, pausing with
John. The cocky jerk just grinned.

Being defended by women stung Zach’s pride
and booted his ego to the basement, but the ladies meant well. He
couldn’t fault them for that.

Harris narrowed his gaze, seeming to zero in
on Zach’s blue shirt. Obviously, the quarterback didn’t care much
for blue. Zach reached across the table for the basket of bread,
but John yanked it out of reach before he could grab it. “What the
fuck? You got the manners of a stray dog. Didn’t your mama teach
you any better?”

Zach cringed. He hadn’t a clue what he’d
done wrong. Besides, his mama didn’t teach him a damn thing. She’d
been too busy drowning in a bottle or shooting up.

“Hey, why do you think his old team called
him
wolf
?” Hoss hooted louder than a train bearing down on a
busy intersection.

“Here I thought it had to do with his
prowess on the field.” Harris started to laugh then flinched. He’d
be sporting some nice bruises on those shins of his.

“Hey, being a wolf is a good thing on the
football field. Wolves are fierce.” Tomcat rose to his defense.
He’d known Cat since college. His real name was Thomas but the
defensive end stalked unsuspecting quarterbacks like a tomcat on
the prowl, hence the nickname. Tomcat had followed him from their
old loser team and taken a pay cut just like Zach for one last
chance at a ring.

Zach ignored them all. Hell, they were just
having fun hazing the new guy on the team, except for Harris. That
guy enjoyed every minute of Zach’s torture. Eventually the
conversation shifted to Sunday’s first regular season game.

Heart sinking, Zach stared at the confusing
array of eating utensils, plates, and glasses. Nobody needed this
much stuff just to eat dinner. Hell, where he came from, he’d been
lucky to eat with a fork. This fancy crap reminded him of how much
his lowly upbringing still shaped his present.

As the waiter placed the first of many
courses in front of Zach, he glanced around to see which fork to
use. Harris eyed him like a man probing for an enemy’s weaknesses.
Pretending to study his oysters, Zach flicked his lowered gaze to
Lavender’s plate. He picked up the little fork just as she had.
Grasping an oyster in his big hand, he tried to dig it out of the
shell. The damn thing popped out and flew across the table. It hit
Derek’s jacket and slid downward, leaving a slimy trail. Harris
broke into laughter with the rest of the table following suit.
Zach’s ears burned, but he held his head high, refusing to let
these vultures pick his embarrassed carcass clean.

“Hey, man, no big deal.” Derek, who also had
the misfortune of being Harris’s cousin, smiled sympathetically at
Zach, while Rachel wiped off his lapel.

“Why don’t you go back to the trailer park
where you belong?” John sputtered, laughing too hard to get a
breath. Harris just smirked.

Zach ignored them both and pushed the plate
away. He’d be damned if he’d try to eat another, never liked the
fucking things anyway.

“Hey, man, that isn’t funny.” Tomcat jumped
in.

“It’s all in fun. Murphy knows that.” John
nodded at Zach.

Zach concentrated on a spot across the room,
faking interest in the crappy painting hanging on the wall, the one
simply titled,
The Cat
. Hell, the kindergarten class from
his hometown of Cactus Prairie, Texas, painted better pictures. At
least a cat looked like a cat, not an alien space ship spraying
people with spaghetti sauce.

Then he saw
her
.

Zach’s day went from calamity to
catastrophe. He broke into a sweat. Pain shot through him as if
he’d dropped a two-hundred-pound barbell on his chest. He couldn’t
breathe, couldn’t muster a coherent thought in his shocked brain,
couldn’t drag his eyes off her.

The woman of his dreams and his
nightmares.

Kelsie Carrington glided across the room
straight toward him. His Cactus Prairie High School crush here? In
Seattle? What the fuck? Wasn’t halfway across the country far
enough to escape her and those painful memories? He blinked several
times, but there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with his vision. His
one-date disaster balanced on a pair of heels so high the altitude
should require an oxygen mask. Her blond hair shone as brightly as
the gold in a coveted Super Bowl ring. Each graceful step of those
long legs carried her closer to him.

He held his breath and prayed she didn’t
recognize him. Just like old times, Kelsie looked right through
him, as if he didn’t exist. Her patent beauty-queen smile was
plastered across her perfectly made-up face. Damn, seeing her
transported him back to being an awkward teenage boy who only fit
in on the football field. Her fake smile reminded him how stupid
he’d been to fall for her particular brand of poison. Her perfect
face dredged up a shitload of painful emotions.

Oh, yeah, painful all right. Zach Murphy had
fallen in love once and been carried out of the game on a
stretcher. He’d stick with football. Football gave him life, while
women sucked the life out of him. Football made sense to him. Women
didn’t.

Especially this woman.

He glanced to either side to see if any of
his teammates noticed the fucking bleeding heart dangling on his
sleeve. They were too busy staring at Kelsie—she’d always had that
effect on men. Well, except for the king of asshole quarterbacks,
Tyler Harris. Zach gave Harris a few grudging points for tossing
out his womanizer ways and only having eyes for his sassy
girlfriend.

Yet something on Zach’s face must have clued
Harris in. Like a hungry hyena catching the scent of wounded prey,
Harris’s sharp gaze moved from Zach to Kelsie and back again. The
quarterback possessed this uncanny ability to dissect an enemy’s
weakness—and despite being teammates, they
were
enemies. One
corner of the fuckhead’s mouth turned up in a knowing smirk. He
nodded briefly at Zach and returned to his conversation with his
hot little girlfriend, even though Zach knew damn well the jerk
kept one eye on him.

Ignoring Harris, Zach scratched his chin and
studied Kelsie. What the hell was the cause of his most humiliating
moment in a lifetime of humiliating moments doing here a thousand
miles from Texas, invading his territory?

He blinked a few times and looked again.
Really looked beyond the beauty-queen face and body. Something was
very wrong with this picture. A loaded tray of drinks teetered
precariously on the palm of Kelsie’s raised hand as she moved in
and out of the crowd. Rich girl Kel had never worked a real job in
her life. Yet, he doubted she was serving drinks just for the
unique opportunity to slum with the common folk.

Damn, maybe his life wasn’t the only thing
that’d changed.

Kelsie scanned the room then did a double
take. Their eyes met and crashed with the intensity of a wrong-way
collision on I-5. The fake smile faltered. The gliding stopped. She
looked around the room as if planning an escape route. Then she
straightened her shoulders and turned on the charm, gracing him
with her halogen smile—perfect white teeth and hot red lips. Really
hot. As if she were happy to see him.

Bullshit.

Zach scowled his best don’t-fuck-with-me
scowl.

Kelsie faltered. Her stride went from
graceful to jerky. The smile slipped off her face, replaced by what
appeared to be panic. She pivoted on her impossibly high heels and
fired up the after-burners.

Oh, no, she wasn’t getting away this easily.
Zach jumped to his feet and gave chase, single-mindedly focused on
confronting her, something he’d been dying to do since his senior
year of high school. Yeah, stupid idea, but he’d never been one for
thinking before reacting, a trait which worked well in football,
not so well in real life.

She glanced over her shoulder, her blue eyes
filled with what looked like fear, as if she expected him to do
physical damage to her or some stupid-assed thing like that.

Zach cornered her near the head table.
Kelsie changed directions and charged past him. He spun around to
follow, refusing to let her off that easily. He clipped her full
tray drinks with his elbow. She lurched with the tray, but it was
too late. Helpless, Zach watched the disaster happen in slow
motion.

The tray teetered back and forth, as Kelsie
desperately fought to gain control. The tray won. Glasses of wine
sprayed red, white, and pink across the tablecloth, looking like a
tie-dye session gone mad. Goblets shattered. Women screamed as wine
drenched expensive evening gowns. The team owner leapt to his feet,
his sputtering laced with profanity as red wine coated his
custom-tux and white shirt. His spoiled daughter, Veronica, didn’t
hold anything back either, loudly insulting the size of Zach’s
brain and his dick. Closest to the debacle, the governor’s wife
leapt to her feet, her low-cut sequined evening gown hung on her
like a limp rag. Red wine and mimosas dribbled down her neck and
chest and disappeared in her cleavage. Zach grabbed a napkin and
desperately blotted at the wine. In his panic, he swiped the napkin
across the plump mounds of her breasts. She screamed as if he’d
purposely groped her. HughJack, the team’s head coach, grabbed him
and pulled him away.

“I’m sorry. Oh, fucking hell. I’m so sorry.”
Zach wanted to crawl under the nearest boulder.

“What did you think you were doing?” Coach
spoke in that deadly calm, quiet voice that struck fear in the
meanest of linemen. Zach preferred HughJack’s ranting and notorious
clipboard throwing to
that
voice.

“I—I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Veronica, still sputtering and looking for
blood, turned on Kelsie. “You! How could you be so stupid?”

“I—I—” Kelsie shoved her fist in her mouth,
obviously horrified at the carnage she’d helped cause. She lifted
her gaze to Zach’s. Anger blazed in her stormy blue eyes.

Wait one fucking minute. She blamed
him
? He hadn’t done one damn thing other than be where he
was supposed to be—a charity benefit for a charity whose name he
couldn’t even remember. She was the one who didn’t belong here.

Jerking her gaze away from his, Kelsie
dropped to the floor and started wiping up the mess with any napkin
she could confiscate from the nearby tables. Several other staff
joined in the fray, wiping tables, cleaning up the mess, and
comforting wet, angry guests.

Zach debated on whether or not to fade into
the background or make her night that much worse. Once again, she’d
made him look like a backwards hick, her special talent.

A fat, sweating chef with chocolate stains
on his white apron waddled out of the kitchen and spoke in a harsh
whisper to Kelsie. “You idiot. Did you do this?”

Kelsie didn’t look up, just worked
frantically to clean up the mess. The chef bent down and pointed a
pudgy finger in her direction. “You’re fired. Get the hell out of
here. I’ll be contacting you for reimbursement for the damages.” He
kept his voice low, but Zach heard him.