The Player Next Door (12 page)

“Tori’s not for you,” Mike said with a grunt as he tried to push his shoulder too far. “Besides, you don’t want her. She comes with too much baggage.”

Joey passed him a wussy two-pound weight and told him to start lifting it slowly. God, he felt like an idiot.

“What’s wrong with her? She got a twisted past? Abusive ex?”

“Idiot ex. He showed up last night at midnight. Leaned on the doorbell like Godzilla was attacking. Fucking moron.”

“He woke you?”

“It was my fucking house.”

Joey frowned a bit then finally understood. “First off, it’s my parents’ house. At my suggestion, they’re letting you house-sit. And second, the idiot banged on your door not hers?”

Mike dropped the tiny weight and breathed into the ache, letting the shoulder recover a bit before his next set. “He’s paying me a hundred bucks to keep an eye on her.”

Joey stared at him. “I don’t even know where to begin asking questions. A hundred—”

“Yeah, he’s a cheap bastard. Tori and I bought beer with it.”

“Now there’s a good idea.”

Then Mike thought back. “No wait. That was the sister’s five hundred. I won moron’s hundred by kissing Tori.”

Joey just grinned. And when Mike turned toward him, the guy gestured with his free hand. “Just keep talking. Clearly I have no idea what’s going on.”

“He showed me engagement rings.”

“Idiot ex?”

“Cheap idiot ex. Wanted to know if I’d been checking up on her and if she’d taken up with anyone.”

“You tell him you’d slept with her?”

“How the fuck do you know that?”

Joey started laughing. It was a small chuckle that grew. The more Mike glared at him, the more the man gave in to his humor until he was leaning against the weight rack and wiping his eyes.

“You done yet?” Mike groused.

“Never thought I’d see you this screwed up over a girl. Jesus, how long ago did you sleep with her?”

“None of your damn business.”

“I’m guessing about six nights ago. You’ve been a whiny bitch ever since.”

Mike told him succinctly what the man could do with his opinion. Which only set off some more laughter. Asshole.

“Look, the ex is planning on proposing. I told him to go buy a big damned rock and to not darken my doorstep again.”

Joey was smiling, but as the silence lengthened, his expression slipped away. “You’re serious. The guy is planning on proposing?”

“Yup.”

“And you slept with her?”

“Yup,” he said, his voice growing softer as he remembered. Damn, it was the best sex of his life, and he’d run away like a scared thirteen-year-old boy. He wasn’t proud of how he’d ended it with her, but damn it, this was why he was a star player with the NY Knicks: because he made the hard decisions and stuck with them. “It was a mistake.”

“Well it was someone’s mistake, we don’t know whose yet. So you think she’ll say yes?”

The very idea made his gut clench. Tori stuck with Edward for the rest of her life? Talk about marrying a dead fish. And a cheap one, too. But out loud, he repeated what he’d been saying to himself ever since the idiot had showed up at his door. “It’s not my problem.”

“Right. Because you’re not hung up on her at all.”

“God, no.”

“Course not. Just because she’s all you’ve talked about for two weeks now.”

“It hasn’t been two weeks,” he grumbled. More like twelve and a half days. “And you know why.” Mike was sweating as he tried his first exercise again. It was a simple damn thing. Walking his fingers up the wall, but shit…it felt like he was running a marathon one finger at a time.

“You know,” Joey said, his tone conversational. “I’ve listened to every superstition you nutcases can dream up. Lucky shorts, purple socks, three green beans with a steak dinner. I’m sure one of you dances naked and howls at the moon before every game. I’m all for whatever gets you to a winning season, but, Mike, your system is straight up stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. It’s about focus and time. There’s only so much—”

“Bullshit.”

Mike dropped his arm and glared at Joey. “You don’t have to understand it. Just know that it works.”

“Fine, it works. You’re a monk. But I’m giving you until your next barbecue to get your head out of your ass or I’m moving in.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a thing for smart blondes.”

Mike rose to his most intimidating height. “You’re un-invited.”

“I’ll crash it.”

“I could pick you up and throw you across the room.”

“Not without ripping up your shoulder, you can’t.”

It was a measure of how insane Mike was that he actually considered it. But after a few furious breaths, he realized the ass was right.

No reason Tori couldn’t date Joey if she wanted another jerk in her life. At least he was better than Edward, though only marginally. But first
—
before either of those losers made their move
—
he was going to make damn sure she understood what his “friends” were like.

“We done?” he asked, his tone surly.

“Yup. See you tomorrow.”

It took him ten minutes to shower, an eon to drive home, and then thirty seconds to get to Tori’s house. Though God knew when he found her, she wasn’t doing anything he’d envisioned on the way over. She hadn’t tumbled off the roof or redesigned her rock garden
—
again. And she hadn’t been baking, as far as he could tell. Nope. She was sitting alone in a dark house holding a flashlight between her teeth as she paged through a book on Mayan architecture.

“Tori?”

She jumped, obviously startled, and the flashlight fell out of her mouth. It dropped with a thud onto the still unfinished floor. “Mike! I didn’t hear you come in.”

He didn’t know how she could have missed him stepping through the back door and calling her name. But then again, his mother used to joke that a nuclear bomb could go off during practice and he wouldn’t hear it. That kind of focus was an asset as long as prowlers didn’t sneak into your house while you were deep in temple designs.

“What are you doing?” he asked rather than follow his own illogical train of thought.

“I got frustrated.”

“With the Mayans?”

“What? Oh! No. I’ve always been interested in Mayan religious thought, but I’d never looked before at their architectural feats.”

He nodded, guessing where her mind had gone. “So all this home improvement has got you thinking about the ancient way of building.”

“Not really,” she said with a smile. “More about how they lived without electricity.”

He looked at the floor behind her and saw the electrical how-to book. He scanned her fingers quickly. No burn marks that he could see, but then again, it was kind of dark in here. “What happened?”

She shrugged. “I broke my electricity.”

“How?”

“Well, if I knew that—”

“You’d have already fixed it. Right.” He squatted down before her. Her cheeks were rosy from the heat
—
the air conditioning was out with the electricity
—
and there was a light sheen of sweat on her face. It occurred to him that his mother would be screaming bloody murder if her electricity went out, even if she’d been the one to break it. His cousins, too, would be bitching about an electrician and cursing their bad luck. None of them would be sitting calmly in a corner and reading a book by flashlight.

“Do you want some help?” he asked, impressed again by her odd, level-headed approach to life.

She sighed, and her eyes dropped down in disappointment. “I’ve called an electrician. I just don’t have the focus to figure it out.”

He dropped down beside her on the floor. “It’s not a failure to hire a professional.” He looked around. “How old is this house anyway? It probably has some tricky wiring.”

She sighed. “It’s all tricky. Don’t tell Edward, okay? He’ll just claim I’ve come to my senses.”

He frowned at her. “Why would I tell him?”

“Why would he bang on your door after midnight and stay for a half hour last night?”

“Because he’s a moron.”

She nodded, clearly accepting his pronouncement. “Did you tell him about us?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “No. Because there is no us. That’s what I came to tell you.”

She frowned at him. “You already made that clear.”

He nodded. “Yeah, but I didn’t explain why. I want to now.”

What the fuck was he saying? He had no interest in sharing this with her, and yet here he was settling down beside her. And as he stretched out his legs, he realized that this felt right. Talking to her felt really…right.

“Want me to get some beer?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It won’t take that long.” A quick explanation, a warning about Joey and any of his other so-called friends, and he was out of here.

“Okay.”

Then she waited. She set aside the book and folded her hands in her lap. And she waited. While he wondered what exactly had possessed him to start this conversation.

“Um… So back in high school I developed a system. And, um, I had to refine it in college, but it’s worked for me. It got me to NBA.”

She nodded. “A system. Of behavior.”

The word “superstition” echoed annoyingly through his brain, but he ignored it. Instead, he looked out at the locust tree where it overshadowed her backyard and threatened her roof. One bad ice storm and it could crack and break through her newly shingled roof. “It’s about proper allocation of resources. About planning for the future and not just letting things happen willy nilly.” Like a tree growing to maturity in the wrong place in her yard.

Meanwhile, she stretched out her legs beside him, leaning back in much the same position as they’d been many nights ago. A wonderful, amazing night.

“Bullshit,” she said.

He’d been so busy thinking about her legs and what she’d done with them on that night that it took him a moment to process her words. When he did, he twisted to stare at her.

“What?”

“Bullshit,” she repeated. “It’s about a girl.” He opened his mouth to argue, but she kept talking. “You were talking high school and college. It has to be about a girl. Or two girls.”

“It could be about a coach. A great coach.”

“You said high school
and
college. You didn’t have the same coach.”

Okay. So she could make intelligent deductions. “Fine. It was about some girls.”

She grinned. “Tell me everything.”

He chuckled and began to speak.

Chapter Ten

Tori settled in to listen to his tale. She loved story time, and more than that, she was thrilled to learn anything she could about him. She’d already read everything there was on the internet and quite a bit that had been at the library in back issues of
Sports Illustrated
. He was her newest obsession, and she intended to glut herself on all things Mike. But first she had to keep him around. And talking.

“Come on,” she prompted. “Who was she?”

“The first girl,” he said, his mouth pulled wide into a superior grin, “was my mother.”

She nodded, knowing that culturally the African-American mother was a significant force in a young man’s life. Certainly more than her own mother had influenced her. His father had been the Caucasian guy who’d skipped soon after he was born, but his stepfather had stuck around. Still, it was clear his mother had been the stabilizing influence. “She raised a fine man.”

He smiled, and she could tell he still had a good relationship with his mother. “We weren’t dirt poor, which helped a lot. There wasn’t the pressure to join the gangs and I showed promise early in basketball. It was the only thing I really loved, and she tied everything to that. I couldn’t go shoot hoops unless my homework was done. If I didn’t do my chores, she’d drag me out of the playground by my ear.”

“Sounds like a fierce woman.”

“You have no idea. Once I got it in my head that I was too big for her to spank. I didn’t realize she had another weapon.”

Tori twisted, her thighs braced against his, the heat of his body thrilling hers. “What did she do?”

“Started telling stories to the guys on the playground. Stories about wearing my sister’s ballet stuff.” He shuddered. “Some of them still call me Tutu.”

She laughed. “Smart woman.”

“It wasn’t even true, but the more I denied it, the more the name stuck.”

“You did your chores after that?”

He nodded. “Never openly defied her again.”

She leaned into the wall and her hands brushed his. She liked the feel of his calluses and the way the afternoon light made his skin look warmer—like cocoa after the whipped cream had melted.

“So was the system her idea?”

“Not in so many words. Mom was all about staying the course, as she put it. My father had skipped when I was still in diapers.”

“I read that. I’m sorry.”

“Mom learned her lesson then. She wanted a man who would stay the course. And she’d be damned if her son grew up to be another here and there, disappearin’ man.” His voice took on the higher notes of his mother’s words. The woman must have said those words a million times.

“I’d love to meet her sometime,” she said. “She sounds like quite a woman.”

“She is.” His expression softened. “I think she’d like you.”

Tori laughed to cover the flash of pain at his words. “I doubt it,” she said, keeping her voice light even though she was exposing her biggest flaw. “I’m the female version of here and there, disappearin’ man.”

He frowned. “How many years were you with Edward?”

She waved that away. “That was laziness, not commitment.”

His expression shifted to confusion as he studied her face. “You really believe that, don’t you? That you’re flighty.”

She shook her head, uncomfortable with the shift to her own issues. “I live in my own world,” she said. “And my passions are many.” She waved vaguely at the boxes of books in the other room.

“And yet you’ve got a PhD, you teach at one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and you’re renovating a house all by yourself.”

She shrugged. “That means I’ve learned to manage my obsessions to personal gain.” That had nothing to do with her ability to hang with a man over the long haul. It wasn’t the man’s fault. She usually got bored with him way too fast. Which brought her back to her current obsession. “Back to your mom. I doubt she told you that you couldn’t have both a woman and basketball.”