“I was a shitty dad.” He pops his hat back on his head. “Emery’s angry. She’s trying to hurt me.”
“Can’t say I blame her.”
His face reddens and I prep for him to yell in my face, tell me to mind my own damn business, but like a popped balloon he deflates. “Yeah. I need you to stay away from her.”
In that we agree.
“Last time I visited her at school she was a fifteen-year-old kid with a lot of…issues.” He blows out a breath. “We have a lot of work to do to repair our relationship; her using my players to hurt me is a complication we don’t need.”
I understand.
What I don’t understand is why I’m feeling strangely protective of her. I know the little kitten can take care of herself—she’s unapologetically vicious. But I also know what it’s like to be young and abandoned by a parent, to be handed over and forgotten. Emery was left to teachers and dorm supervisors to be raised. I was handed over to a stepdad who brought me up with a heavy fist and a bottle of malt liquor.
“We clear?”
I blink down at him seeing him through different eyes. The big intimidating man seems smaller, vulnerable, weak even—testimony to the lovely Emery’s power.
“Yeah, man. Crystal.”
He stands to his full height. “Coach. I’m not your man. Now get your ass back to your team for drills.”
Chapter Five
Emery
The sun is barely up when I walk into Bean Madness, the campus coffee shop. I don’t have any class work due, but I have to catch a ride with my dad to campus every day so that leaves me two hours before my first class. Usually I’d find a spot in the grass to read or listen to an audiobook, but the sun is coming up later and later and the chill in the early morning has me craving coffee.
“Emery, is that you?”
I turn around to see the redhead I met four days ago. “Rowan, right?”
She’s wearing a Bean Madness apron and has her long hair pulled up and out of her face. “Yeah.” She fidgets with a wet rag she uses, to wipe down tables. “What can I get for you?” She makes her way around the counter to the register.
“Coffee. Black, please.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Black? You sure you don’t want to try a triple fudge brownie mocha? Or a caramel drizzled vanilla latte?”
“Those sound like sundaes, not coffee.”
She laughs and pours me a coffee in the biggest insulted paper cup. She hands me the cup and when I hand her my card, she waves me off. “It’s on the house. Consider it your welcome to Bear State coffee.”
Something warm and wholly unfamiliar expands in my chest.
“Are you enjoying BSU?” She follows me to a nearby table but doesn’t sit.
“So far so good.” If I’m not counting the fact that I can’t get a certain rebel football player’s attention. I admit Theodore’s inked skin, piercings and perma-scowl caught my eye. He would be the perfect partner in my plan to make my dad miserable. I didn’t expect, given the explosive sexual chemistry between us, that he’d play hard to get. “I like my forensics classes.”
“Forensics?”
I sip my coffee. “That surprises you?”
She takes in my tailored oxford shirt, the string of pearls on my neck and the satin scarf tied around my ponytail. “You strike me as a pre-law kind of girl.”
“Nope. I’m mostly interested in how to kill people and get away with it.” I wink, but it doesn’t take away the look of horror in her eyes.
Some people are so easy.
“I’m kidding.”
“I know!” She laughs uncomfortably. “Do you live on campus?”
“I wish.” The inheritance my mom left was enough for my dad to pay for ten years of boarding school tuition, but left me with only a few thousand dollars in my bank account and is the reason I’m stuck living with him now. I need a job so I can save money and get an apartment, which I was surprised to learn is actually cheaper than living on campus. “Is the coffee shop hiring?”
“We have a part time position, nights. It’ll include weekends.”
“That’s fine, I don’t have a social life.” And it’ll get me out of the house so I don’t have to do the awkward dance of silence with my dad at the dinner table every night.
“Have you worked in food and beverage before?”
Heat of embarrassment makes a slow climb up my neck to make camp in my cheeks. “No, actually, I’ve never had a job before.”
“Oh.” She frowns, then shrugs and grins. “No biggie. I’ll train you. It’s not rocket science. I’ll grab you an application.”
I spend the next twenty minutes filling out the application forgoing all the questions about job experience, and adding my years of community service instead, which includes working in the dining hall of a retirement home. I turn the application in and by that time the coffee shop is slammed with college students and professors. I bury my nose in my Anatomy of a Motive textbook when I feel someone nearby staring at me.
Well, I’ll be damned.
Theodore Web.
His dark hair is a little overgrown and curls around his ears in a boyish way that takes the edge off his neck-to-toe tattoos. His body is covered in colorful ink that would take days to explore and discover all the pieces of art on his body. His green eyes are tight, and he uses his top teeth to toy with the ring on his lower lip. His knuckles are white on backpack straps pulled tightly over muscular shoulders and a wide chest.
He’s every woman’s dirty fantasy.
And every dad’s nightmare.
I hold eye contact with him for an uncomfortably long time.
He finally gets restless and saunters to my table. He doesn’t sit down. “Are you stalking me?”
“Is my pursuing you in an obsessive manner upsetting?”
His gaze darts from my eyes to my lips, my hair and not so subtly to my breasts before making the trip back up. “Yes.”
I close my textbook and fold my arms on the table, leaning into them and tilting my head to look up at his six-foot-something height. “Do you want me to stop?”
“We had this conversation yesterday,” he growls.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Coach warned me to stay away from you.”
I bet he did, controlling prick. “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who does what he’s told.”
His eyes narrow. “How old are you?”
“How old do you want me to be?”
“Don’t fuck with me,” he says under his breath. “You told Ro you just graduated. But you were in the bar the night we—”
“I have a fake ID.” I smile seductively at the thrill of seeing flickering dread behind his eyes. “I’m nineteen. Don’t tell me you actually care.”
He runs a hand through his hair and scratches at his jaw, dusted in a day’s worth of beard growth. I have an urge to rub up against it and feel the burn against my skin. Lick from his throat to his lips—
“Stop looking at me like that.”
I uncross my legs under the table, feeling restless and hot. “Like what?”