Authors: Kat Latham
Playing It Close (2 page)
Try line:
the equivalent of the start of the end zone in American football (known as the
in-goal area
in rugby).
Backs
and
forwards:
Instead of being divided into offense and defense, rugby positions are made up of
forwards
and
backs.
Forwards tend to be bigger and more aggressive, while backs tend to be faster and more skillful—but I would never say that to a forward’s face.
Scrum:
A scrum is a way of restarting a match. The eight forwards from each team bind together, crouch down and slam into the other team’s forwards. They try to push the other team back while fighting for possession of the ball with their feet amid much grunting and sweating.
Front row:
This refers to the front row of the scrum, comprising three players—the two props and the hooker (which is a rugby position, not a sex worker). The three players in the front row put their arms around each other’s shoulders, crouch and collide against the front row of the opposing team, trying to gain ground by pushing the opposition back while the hooker attempts to “hook” the ball with his feet and push it back to his teammates in the second row.
Second row:
This refers to the two players in the second row of the scrum—the locks. They are usually the tallest players on the team...and I mean
really
tall.
Back row:
You guessed it. This is the back row of the scrum. It’s made of three players: the number 8 (that’s the name of the position) and two flankers. So in a scrum, each team binds together in three rows, with three players in the front row, two in the second row and three in the back row.
Fly half:
One of the busiest positions on a rugby team, and a key decision-maker on the pitch, the fly half has to excel at passing the ball, running and kicking. This is the position Liam Callaghan plays.
Some of the other rugby positions I mention in this book are
scrum half
,
lock
,
open-side flanker
and
tight-head prop
.
The posts:
Just like in American football, there are two metal posts connected by a crossbar at each end of the pitch. The posts are sometimes referred to as
the uprights
. A team can score points by kicking the ball over the crossbar and between the posts—three points for kicking a penalty or a drop goal, two points for a conversion after a team scores a try. Kicking is often the fly half’s specialty.
Kick a penalty:
When one team has done something naughty, the referee might allow the other team a chance to score three points by kicking the ball through the posts.
Capped for England:
playing on your country’s national team (in this case England’s). If a player has been
capped ten times
, it means he or she has played ten games on the England team.
Contents
Chapter One
Warm seawater sliding over naked skin.
That’s
how Tess wanted to end her second night in Venezuela.
She stood on the moonlit shore and gripped the hem of her T-shirt, battling her misgivings as she scanned the beach. No one. She was completely alone. If she pulled the shirt over her head, no one would see that she’d ditched her bikini top in her room and only wore a pair of frilly pink bikini bottoms. No one would see if she slipped those off too.
Her hand relaxed its grip on the soft cotton before fisting it again and inching it up.
Do it.
But there could be cameras.
She scanned the shore from left to right, then turned to face the beachside hotel and did it again. The moonlight shone brightly—too brightly. The journalists who’d hounded her for eight months wouldn’t even need to use their flash if they wanted a decent picture of the Scourge of the City cavorting naked and alone in the Caribbean. How much would the London tabloids pay for a photo like that?
Enough that she might be tempted to send them one herself.
Idiot.
You’re at a remote eco-lodge halfway around the world.
No one here cares or even knows who you are.
Still...
Resolved, Tess let go of the shirt hem and took determined strides toward the water lapping at the shore. She had five more nights here. Plenty of time for the moonlight to die down. She could wait for a cloudy night—if northern Venezuela experienced such things. Tonight she would simply enjoy swimming lazily through the calm water with her T-shirt protecting her dignity.
Although it was past midnight, the sand was still warm from the strong rays it had soaked up throughout the day. The water cooled Tess’s sun-kissed skin as it swirled around her knees, her hips, her waist. She brought her hands over her head and dove in, kicking her feet and pulling her arms back in an underwater breaststroke for as long as she could hold her breath.
Freedom.
Under here, no one could touch her. Under here, her life was her own.
After ten minutes of paddling around, she swam for the shore and stepped onto the soft sand. A breeze swept over the sea, chilling her skin, and Tess realized she’d forgotten a towel. If she’d stripped her shirt off before getting into the water, she would have had a dry shirt to put on. Now she was half-naked in a translucent white T-shirt. Fabulous.
She shoved her feet into her sandals, crossed her arms over her chest and rushed through the hotel’s beach entrance.
Please let everyone be in bed.
No such luck. As she entered the lobby, the receptionist was handing a man his room key.
Bugger.
She’d have to walk right past them to get to the stairs. Fortunately the lift was right here. She ducked her head and pressed the up arrow, muttering, “Come on, come on.”
“We hope you enjoy your stay, Señor Jones,” the receptionist said.
“Cheers, Maria.”
Come on come on come on!
The lift whirred, dinged and opened.
Yes!
Tess hurried into it and hit the button for the third floor a thousand times, like a hyperactive child on a sugar rush—the kind of child she used to be.
A deep voice called out across the lobby. “Hold the lift!”
Oh
,
hell no.
She pressed the door-close button and let out a sigh as it worked its magic—
A foot jammed itself between the closing doors, followed swiftly by a deep-throated “Fucking hell!” when the doors didn’t bounce open automatically but clamped together instead.
No!
Tess swallowed her cry of defeat as a pair of very big, very masculine hands braced themselves on the edge of one of the doors and pushed. Hard. Like, Superman hard. Within seconds, the man created enough space to squeeze himself and his travelers’ backpack through the gap. When he leaped away from the doors as if they might bite him again, Tess had to press herself against the wall to avoid being flattened.
“Are you crazy?” she yelled as the lift’s doors bounced closed behind him. Her voice reverberated around the small space, making the thin walls vibrate behind her back. “You could’ve been killed!”
A niggle of familiarity passed through her at her first glance at him, but then she noticed he was glaring at her hand. She followed his gaze to find she was still pressing the door-close button. Drawing back her arm, she crossed it with the other one over her chest. “Oops. Wrong button.”
“Mentalist,” he muttered. He pressed the button for the fourth floor and turned his back to her, dropping the weathered blue backpack from his shoulders. The lift shook from its weight.
Holy mother...
his shoulders took up nearly half the airspace in the lift. Tess breathed a silent sigh of relief as the lift jerked and started its ascent. Only a few seconds from now, the doors would reopen and this awkward moment would be behind her—literally, since she was getting off on the floor below his and would have to walk away with her wet T-shirt plastered to her skinny arse. He was so much bigger than her. Why the hell had she yelled at him when he first got into the lift?
Impulse-control: never one of her strong points.
Fortunately, he didn’t say anything more. She’d caught his accent. British, like her, he’d probably grown up well versed in how to ignore awkward situations.
The lift chugged, its erratic ascent making her imagine it was a bucket being hoisted upward by monkeys working a rope pulley hand-over-hand. She kept her attention on the buttons, counting them as they lit up, as if they were items on a to-do list that she had to get through before she could escape. First floor—done. Second floor—done. Nearly there—
The lift jerked to a hard halt, making her gasp and brace her hand against the faux wooden wall.
“What the hell?” her companion muttered.
The second-and third-floor buttons were both lit, but the doors didn’t open. The man banged his fist on them, as though they were a vending machine that had kept hold of his Snickers bar. “Open up.”
“Don’t think it can hear you,” she said.
Mistake. Her sarky comment brought his attention back to her. She could feel it, even though she kept her gaze firmly trained on the opposite wall, not eager to see whether he was ready to throttle or jump her. For several long seconds, she shivered under his silent scrutiny. The water hadn’t been as warm as she’d expected. Fine when you were in it, but stepping into the slight breeze had left her covered in goose pimples...and a couple of pointy parts she was desperately trying to cover with her arms, as if he might not have noticed that she’d left her bikini top in her room.
Damn it. One thing she’d learned from working in a male-dominated office was that she had to stand up for herself. She lifted her head to glare up at him, and the niggle of familiarity exploded into awareness.
No way. No
way.
Liam Callaghan? Liam Callaghan, rugby’s all-time leading points scorer? Captain of London Legends and, more recently, of the England squad? Liam bloody Callaghan? Her father would shit a brick when she told him.
She’d leave out the wet T-shirt part, of course.
He was staring at her too. Or, at least, at her hair. She just barely managed to keep from touching it self-consciously. She’d had a lot of funny looks the past couple of days—not surprising since her hair was currently bubblegum pink. After a second in which he seemed fixated on the horror covering the top of her head, Liam Callaghan turned away as if she wasn’t worth acknowledging—a posture she’d got used to during her years working in an industry dripping with testosterone—and banged on the door again, this time shouting for anyone who might be able to hear them. “Hello? We’re stuck in here!”
She tried pushing the third-floor button again. And again. Her finger became more frantic as the doors stayed solidly closed.
“Will you stop that?” he snapped. “That’ll make it worse. We’re probably stuck in here because you jammed the buttons in the first place.”
“Wait, are you accusing me of breaking the lift? Me? When you were the one who forced the doors open?”
His eyes went wide in patent disbelief. “Are you having a laugh? I wouldn’t have had to if you’d held the lift like any decent human being would do.”
She stuffed down her annoyance. He obviously had a point, though she would quibble with that
decent human being
bit if she weren’t half-naked and locked in a lift with a man who made his living knocking seventeen-stone men to the ground. “Look, let’s not waste our time arguing about this. How do we get out of here?”
The question was more to herself than him, and she’d already started scanning the doors, walls and ceiling for any indication of what to do in an emergency. No escape hatch in the ceiling, the way there always was in films. Not that she’d know what to do if he did boost her up there. Maybe convince the monkeys to get back to work? No telephone or emergency call button. No security camera.
“Shit. We’re fucked.”
“Maybe there’s a call button,” he said, clearly a few mental steps behind her as he peered closer at the panel.
“There isn’t. There’s nothing. We’re well and truly stuck.”
He scanned the ceiling and the corners, then ran his hands down the seam of the closed doors. She waited silently for him to catch up with her. “There’s nothing. We’re stuck.”
Echo much?
Saying the words aloud would be a bad idea. Another situation she’d learned how to deal with from working with sexist pigs for seven years. Don’t antagonize, and try not to respond. They harassed you because they wanted to see you lose your shit. If you didn’t, they’d realize it wasn’t much fun and stop doing it.
He beat the doors, and the whole lift shook from the pounding. Without thinking, she grabbed his arm to stop him, immediately tugging her hand back when she felt the power in his biceps. She would need three hands to wrap around them. “Please don’t do that. I’d rather be stuck between floors than plummet down to the ground floor.”
“The receptionist said she was going home after she checked me in. Maybe she hasn’t left yet. Hello! Maria!” He pounded and yelled some more before giving up with a curse. “Fan-bloody-tastic.”