“Stop what?”
“Making me want to go home and take all my clothes off for you.”
I groaned into her shoulder and smoothed my hands down her thighs. “We can do that, you know.” I brushed my lips along the softness of her skin. “We’ll just make the time up to Adam by visiting him in L.A soon. Next weekend if you want. Or tomorrow.”
Holland giggled as she rolled her head back onto my shoulder. “I don’t think you realize how crazy you sound right now.”
“I don’t think you realize how completely in love with you I am.”
She stilled, pausing for a moment. Then she turned in my lap to look at me with her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright. But just as she opened her mouth to speak, I heard a familiar drawl to our right.
“No fuckin
’ way.”
My brow furrowed before I even turned to confirm who I knew I’d see there, but once I saw him, my frown deepened further.
Because standing three feet from us was a grinning, bleary-eyed, already-drunk-as-hell Shane Watt—who was not only my client, but the one who had initially spotted Holland at the bar the first night she came back into my life.
He was the one who’d said every filthy thing under the sun about her.
The one who’d inspired me to get her fired.
So yeah. Definitely had more than a few reasons to be less than pleased.
On a professional level, it was still the middle of the season and he was supposed to be rehabbing a recent elbow injury, not getting shitfaced at a bar.
And on a personal level, he was staring at Holland in sheer delighted surprise, leering so openly at her right now that I felt her shirk back into my chest. Instinctively, I held her tighter, but when it was clear Watt wasn’t going anywhere, I murmured in her ear to go to where Adam and A.J were across the pool table.
And once she did, I rose to my feet. “This can’t be good for the rehab, Watt,” I said.
“Don’t worry about me, Thorn, I know what’s best for me. At least I do now,” he sneered.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked while taking a quick glance around to survey the number of eyes on us. More than a few pairs considering Shane Watt was a pretty recognizable figure in a New York sports bar.
“It means I thought I was crazy, but now I’m feeling like I shouldn’t have trusted you,” Shane said.
And when I asked if we could step somewhere private, he spat a hard no, so I asked patiently, “Why shouldn’t you have trusted me, Watt?”
“Well, for starters, the contract,” he said easily, referring to the very endorsement deal I’d been talking to him and Ty Damon about that night we saw Holland. The deal he’d been perfectly fine with until he saw in the news that Damon was earning forty percent more.
“We talked about this,” I said. “Endorsement deals are always bigger for sluggers. They hit home runs. Fans love them. That’s just how it goes.”
“Yeah. And I don’t matter cause I’m just a fucking lowly reliever, right?”
“There’s nothing lowly about your role on this team. You’ve helped the Empires to two consecutive championships. You come in when it matters. You’re crucial. You know that.”
“Yeah, well… we’ll see how crucial I am now that you got Perez traded over here to replace me.”
Christ.
“I got Perez traded because he requested a trade, Watt. I didn’t get him traded here to replace you. I understand your mind can go to dark places when you’re on the injured list, but that’s the very reason you need to use this time to take care of yourself,” I said. “Beyond that, you’ve been in the league long enough to understand that this is how the business works. When you were traded to the Empires four years ago, you wound up taking over someone’s job. And whether or not Perez takes yours is beyond my control. My job as your agent is to get you the paycheck you deserve. If and when your manager decides to give you the ball isn’t up to me.”
“I don’t know, Thorn… just feels like you’re doing everything against my best interests,” Watt said, back to smiling big despite the fact that I knew he didn’t find anything funny. “Hell, man.” He shook his head and clucked, rubbing his jaw while gazing down the pool table at Holland. “You even got Blondie fired so I couldn’t fuck her.”
My pulse kicked up as I peered over at Holland. She was standing between A.J and Adam, who looked tense and torn as he watched me closely, ready to step in when he needed to, but unwilling to jump the gun since we were both agents. We knew the delicate balance we had to strike with clients.
We also knew we were in public with people watching.