Playing Hard (8 page)

“I think that’s called changing the subject. That looks worse than just a sprain.” She nodded at the black boot thing on his foot.

“No, it’s definitely just a sprain. I’ve been scanned and x-rayed six ways from Sunday to make sure. Lucas would’ve preferred me to be on two crutches to keep it immobile for a while but that’s not going to work with this.” He lifted his injured hand. “So it’s a walking boot and a stick for me for a couple of weeks. Which means I deserve gummy bears.”

She tore the bag open and handed it to him. “There. All the sugar a man could want. One hundred percent nutrition-free.”

“I assure you my fridge is stashed full of nutritionally balanced food,” he said. “Maggie and Sara—that’s Lucas’s wife, did you meet her at the party?—were here earlier and they stocked me up.”

“Maggie Winters?” She couldn’t quite keep the hesitation out of her voice.

“That’s the one.” He stopped, lifted his eyebrows. “Let me guess, your friend Finn told you that Maggie and I used to date.”

“He may have mentioned something about it.”

“Did he also mention that it was before she went to college? Or that she’s very happily married to my boss?” He wagged a gummy bear at her. “She’s a very good friend. She’ll always be a good friend. But you have nothing to worry about. Maggie is not interested in me and I got over my yen for her a long time ago.”

She wanted to believe him. She had no reason not to. Though if tall leggy brunettes were his thing, she wasn’t sure why he was interested in her. She was none of those three. Well, her legs were okay, but she was firmly in the middle height range whereas Maggie had to be about five foot ten. And her hair couldn’t decide what color it was, let alone shape itself into the sleek dark-chocolate waves that Maggie Winters’s did. She’d only met the woman twice but there was no denying she was beautiful. Whereas Amelia was just …

“Amelia,” Oliver said.

She blinked. He was watching her with a very smug expression.

“What?” she said, feeling flustered.

“You were checking up on my past. That means you like me.”

“You’re right, you need the gummy bears. You’ve obviously got low blood sugar and it’s making you delusional.”

He laughed. “I like you, Amelia. And you like me, too.” He offered the gummy bears to her. “Want to share my sugar?”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she said waving him away.

“Nope, I can honestly say that you’re the first woman who’s tried to seduce me with gummy bears.” He laughed again, and bit the head off the bear he’d been waving around. It was unfair that he managed to look sexy eating a gummy bear.

“Who says I’m trying to seduce you at all?” The thought of just how many women might have tried to seduce him over the years—and how many he might have said yes to—was a little depressing. Most of them probably had far more lethal weapons in their arsenal than knowing his weakness for weird candy and Scrabble.

But his past was just that: the past. And given she didn’t believe for a second that he was Mr. Right rather than Mr. Right Now, his past shouldn’t bother her that much.
Shouldn’t
being the operative word. One she wasn’t ready to confront. Time for a change of subject.

“I don’t see a Scrabble board,” she said, surveying the gleaming wooden coffee table. Its surface was bare apart from a half-empty coffee mug, a copy of
USA Today
open to the sports pages, and an orange pill bottle.

Oliver looked slightly embarrassed. “I forgot to ask Maggie to grab it for me. It’s somewhere in the closet in my spare bedroom. Do you want to look?”

Playing Scrabble was clearly a safer option than just sitting here talking to the man. That could lead to disaster in so many ways. “Do you really want to play?” she asked. He looked slightly better than he had the previous day—for a start he’d shaved—but he still looked exhausted.

“Scared I’ll beat you?”

She stuck her nose in the air. “You’re the one who should be scared. Point me at the closet, Shields.”

He nodded toward the door. “Down the hall. Second door on the right. Games are on the shelves to the left, I think.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Curiosity spiking, she followed his instructions. The hall was lit by a series of bright downlights that cast a line of shining circles on the polished concrete floor. They led all the way to the room at the very end of the hall. She wondered if that was his bedroom. Then she dragged her thoughts back to where they should be. The hall walls were dark gray and hung with vintage sports posters, not all of them for baseball. When she stepped into the second room on the right, she was expecting more dark and masculine decoration but the walls were white and the spread covering the bed had vivid abstract splashes of bright blue and leafy green.

On the far wall was a series of black-framed photographs. Unable to help herself, she took a closer look. Family, she decided. A dark-haired man and a woman with equally dark wild curly hair grinned at the camera from half the photos, their arms wrapped around Oliver at various ages as well as two younger girls. Sisters. She hadn’t thought about Oliver, the baseball bad boy, having sisters. Most of the other pictures showed Oliver in baseball gear. Starting from an age when the bat he held was almost taller than he was.

His face changed from chubby-cheeked and adorable to gangly and adorable to something that was like a less well-defined version of the man he was today. In the last one he wore a Saints uniform—not the current version, though. Seventeen, she remembered. Practically a baby. But he wasn’t a baby any longer. Nope, he was 100 percent man. One that made her want to do things that involved words you couldn’t play on a Scrabble board.

Scrabble. Right. She remembered what she was supposed to be doing. Finding a board game. If she took too long Oliver was going to think that she was snooping. Which she was, but she wasn’t ready to let him know that.

Turning her back on the pictures, she moved to the closet. The door opened easily, revealing neatly stacked shelves that were way more organized than hers back in her apartment. Was he neat, or was his housekeeper?

Either way, it made her search easy. The top shelf on the left was full of small plastic storage boxes, the one below that had a good assortment of trophies that she would have liked to dig through, and the next one had just about every board game under the sun. Clue. Trivial Pursuit. Pictionary. Something called Settlers of Catan. Risk. Snakes ’n Ladders. Candy Land. Star Wars Monopoly, which made her laugh. The Scrabble box was easy enough to spot and she pulled it out after moving a little black box labeled
CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY
that rested on top of it.

“What’s Cards Against Humanity?” she asked when she got back to the living room with her prize.

Oliver shook his head with a grin. “Something that requires more people and a lot of booze.” He held out his left hand for the Scrabble set. “Speaking of booze, do you want something to drink? Or eat? I’m sorry, I can’t be much of a host right now. But help yourself to whatever is in the fridge.”

She’d eaten a salad earlier at her desk but she was still hungry. “Wait here. I’ll go look. Do you want something to chase down the gummy bears?”

“I think there’s some ginger ale in there,” he said. “Maybe some of that?”

Ginger ale. That gave her pause. “Are you feeling okay?”

He nodded. “Yeah, just not very hungry. Don’t fuss. I like ginger ale. I drink it a lot when I’m not in training.”

His expression went dark for a second before his smile returned. But not quickly enough for her to miss it. Not in training. Which he wouldn’t be for months, thanks to Finn. She felt her own smile start to slip and turned on her heel to go fetch him his drink.

*   *   *

Oliver watched Amelia head toward his kitchen and took advantage of the opportunity to admire the way her neat black skirt hugged her curves. She looked like a sexy librarian and brought him gummy bears just because he’d asked her to. He liked this girl. Maybe a little too much.

Which was a pity, because he definitely couldn’t do much about it at the moment. He turned carefully and set the Scrabble set down on the coffee table, easing his leg—awkward in the walking boot Lucas had forced on him—into place in front of him. The position made it difficult to lean forward and try to put the board out onto the table. The movement jostled his ankle, sending a spike of pain up his calf.

He bit back the curse that sprang to his lips. Deep breaths. Breathe through the pain. He was used to dealing with the odd injury and sore muscles, and it wasn’t the first time he’d sprained an ankle. He could handle it. And truthfully the throb in his ankle was less painful than his hand. Which ached like a son of a bitch despite the painkillers. But he could handle that, too.

He had to handle it. He had to get back in the game.

He would get back in the game. No room for doubt.

He wasn’t done yet.

“One ginger ale.”

Amelia’s voice startled him and he knocked the tray of tiles off the table. Then realized he couldn’t bend down to pick it up in his current position. He bit down the
fuck
that rose in his throat and tried to look as though the whole damned situation wasn’t pissing him off. He didn’t want to scare her off because he was being a miserable prick.

“That doesn’t look comfortable,” Amelia said. She had a plate of cheese and crackers balanced on top of a glass of water in one hand and his ginger ale in the other.

“Nothing is particularly comfortable at the moment.” He managed not to snarl. Just. None of this was her fault.

“Well, lucky for you I can do more than just deliver gummy bears.” Without any fuss she put the food and drinks down, slid the glass to where he could reach it, sank to her knees, and started picking up the tiles. When she’d gathered them all, and put them and the tray that held them on the table, she sat back on her heels and studied the board for a moment before she looked back up at him. “So, you like board games, huh?”

“My nephews and nieces like board games. I like my nephews and nieces,” he said.

She peered at him over the top of the tortoiseshell-framed glasses she wore. “That doesn’t explain the one that requires booze.”

He liked her in glasses. Looking at him like that with amusement glinting from those blue eyes. Hot. “So I like them, too,” he admitted.

That earned him a flash of her pretty smile. “Competitive streak?”

“Who, me? Nah, I leave that for the baseball field.”

Her amused look deepened. “Now, why do I find that hard to believe?”

“Trust me, I’ve mellowed in my old age.”

“You’re hardly old.”

“In baseball years, I’m close to geriatric,” he said. And for the first time ever he was feeling like that might be true.

She snorted. “Now you’re just angling for sympathy.”

He put on his best pathetic face. “Is it working?”

“Nope,” she said. “Though I think there’s a better way to do this Scrabble thing.”

“Is it wrong if I hope that means you want to play the dirty version?” he asked, more to see what her reaction might be than from any belief that that was what she wanted. Or that he was up to doing what dirty Scrabble might lead to.

She put on a stern expression but he was fairly sure from the laughter in her eyes that she wasn’t upset. “Why, Mr. Shields,” she said. “I’m not the kind of gal who dirty-Scrabbles on a first date.”

Whether he was up to it or not, he couldn’t help feeling disappointed. But cheerful that she wasn’t offended. “This is our third date.”

“You wish. And no, that wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“Pity. I’m sure that would cheer me up even more than gummy bears.”

“Sorry, you’re just going to have to stick to getting your thrills from sugar for now.”

“For now?”

She pointed one of the tile holders at him, expression stern. “Stop changing the subject.”

“To be perfectly honest, I can’t even remember what we were talking about.” Because his mind had wandered off down a very interesting tangent involving Amelia and getting some thrills. It was a good tangent. He wanted to stay there a little longer. Enjoy the scenery. But that didn’t seem wise when he had the real live woman here in front of him. Wearing more clothes, perhaps, but no less enjoyable.

“We were discussing my brilliant plan to make this a bit more comfortable,” she said. She picked up a cracker, popped it into her mouth, and chewed happily.

“Which is?”

She swallowed and then fished her phone out of her purse. “There’s this app that’s pretty much Scrabble. Words with Friends. Do you have your phone?”

He shook his head. “It’s switched off for now.”

“Why?” She looked confused.

“Because I don’t feel like answering thousands of questions about my injuries and my future,” he said. He needed to get someone to organize a new number for him. Plus his phone—which had been in his jacket pocket when he’d had the accident—had a crack across its screen. He had no idea why it hadn’t fallen out when the car had rolled, but it hadn’t. So a new number and a new phone. “The press sucks sometimes.”

Amelia looked disappointed. “Oh. I didn’t think about that. They should leave you alone. I know social media drives Finn a bit mad, and you’re a lot better known than he is.” She chewed her lip. “Do you have a tablet?”

“It was in my bag in the car. I haven’t gotten my stuff back yet.” His car had been towed after the accident, but he hadn’t yet bothered to find out where it had been taken. It wasn’t like he was going to be driving anytime soon. The car was a write-off anyway. He needed to add “new car” to the list of stuff to buy.

She winced. “Sorry.” Then her face brightened. “I know, I have my iPad in my purse. I’ll log out on that and we can make you an account and I’ll play on my phone. It should be easy enough for you to use a tablet with your left hand.” She made a little shooing motion at him. “Put your leg back up while I get this organized.”

He was about to protest that there was no way it was going to take him that long to move, but then he realized it probably would. Stupid ankle. He grabbed a gummy bear and bit its head off savagely before he eased back onto the sofa. Which hurt both his ankle and his hand when he bumped the splint against a cushion. He checked his watch. Thirty more minutes before he could take the next dose of painkillers. And given he’d insisted on switching to Advil, even taking another dose wasn’t going to help that much. He was just going to have to suck it up. So he pushed the pain away and smiled at her as she handed him the iPad.