Game Day Box Set: A College Football Romance Read online

  Chapter One

  Megan

  I NUDGE MY WAY THROUGH a mass of bodies, yelling over the noise to Chloe. “Why did I let you talk me into coming here?”

  “Because if I didn’t talk you into going places, you’d never leave the apartment,” Chloe yells back over her shoulder. She grabs my arm and pulls me through the throng, bodies bump into me without looking to see what they’re hitting or apologize.

  The party thrums with bass-heavy pop music streaming through the speakers, some unknowable female voice. Over the music, the chant “CHUG IT, CHUG IT” bellows in beat. I look over toward the commotion to see Dwayne Sheehan pouring Jack Daniel’s into a beer bong. Reggie Davis is on the other end of the bong, drinking down the whiskey like it’s water. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. It irritates me that someone so cute is also so dumb—such a waste of all that hotness.

  The whiskey drains from the bong in record speed, and my stomach churns watching Reggie and Dwayne. Even if they’re both well over six feet tall and packing two hundred and fifty pounds, the idea of that much liquor just doesn’t seem possible. The bottle empties out, and Reggie flings the defeated bong across the room—flexing his arms and high-fiving everyone within arm’s reach. Why Reggie Davis feels the need to draw all eyes to him, when his looks alone will do that, is beyond me. I force my eyes back to Chloe. I don’t want to lose her in this crowd, she’s my lifeline of sanity in the midst of crazy.

  We make it out to the backyard, where the air is cooler and the kegs are set up on the deck. The house is big for Granite, Colorado, a college town where tiny bungalows and rickety Victorians dominate. In this part of town, the wear and tear of college students on these old homes makes most of them seem like they should be condemned. But even with its unusually large size, the party easily fills this house to bursting.

  I breathe in deep, letting my lungs fill back with air. “How can anyone breathe in there?”

  “Like this.” Chloe takes a deep breath and lets it out with a smile and a wave of her hand as she walks backward, like a school tour guide, so she can face me while still angling us toward the kegs.

  “It’s got to be easier than breathing on the top of one of those fourteen thousand foot mountains you love so much,” she chides. Mountains are one of the best things about Colorado. You can climb to the summit of one and feel like you’re on top of the world.

  “Thinner air, more space,” I say back, even though her comment was rhetorical.

  Expertly, she holds two cups in one hand and tilts them to the tap, letting the beer flow. Frothy yellow liquid fills up the red plastic cups, and even I have to admit it looks good. Cold and refreshing.

  “One beer,” I say, taking the cup from Chloe.

  “We’ll start with one and see where the night takes us.” She has a devilish smirk on her face. The smirk makes her right eyebrow raise and makes me bite the inside of my cheek. That smirk always seems to get us into trouble.

  “Do you have ulterior motives for the evening?” I gulp down a sip of beer, afraid of her answer.

  “Who, me?” She puts her free hand to her chest and drops her mouth open in mock surprise. “I would never.” Her eyes float past me as she sips her beer, scanning the deck for something she hasn’t quite divulged to me yet.

  She leans in close as she decides to confide her secret. “Okay, I’ll admit it. I heard that Jake was going to be here, and I didn’t think you’d come if I told you.” Her voice goes up an octave. “Please don’t be mad.”

  My lips twist into a scowl, and I have to press them together not to spit out something hateful.

  “He’s not all bad,” Chloe says quickly, speaking over me. “You just haven’t seen his good side.”

  “I’m not judging.” I’m totally judging. And she’s right, I definitely would not have agreed to come if I had known that we were going to a football party just so she could hang all over her cheating bastard of an ex-boyfriend.

  Her eyes suddenly dart beyond me, and her body straightens. “He’s here.” She wrenches my arm as I turn to look and hisses, “Don’t look.”

  Chloe shakes her fingers through her hair, trying to amplify the bounce of her curls. “How do I look?”

  “Like you’re too good for him.”

  She gives me a sideways glance. “I thought you said you weren’t judging.”

  “Okay. You look smoking hot and too good for any guy at this party.”

  “Thanks, babe.” She slaps my ass as she skips across the deck and leaves me solo by the keg. I stare into my beer cup. The bubbles have deflated and it looks less appealing to me now that I’m drinking alone. I discreetly check my watch, wondering how long I have to stay. Would it make me a bad wingman if I just leave? In all fairness, she led me here under false pretenses, just so she didn’t have to walk into the party alone. But now I’m going to be the one who’s alone for the rest of the night, standing awkwardly on the outskirts of the party and pretending someone is texting me so I look busy and not pathetic.

  No, screw this. My wingman duties officially ended when Chloe flew off on a solo mission.

  I take a deep breath as I mentally prepare myself to fight back through the house and out the front door, when a cluster of huge football players—Reggie Davis, Riley Brulotte, Weston Sawyer, and Dwayne Sheehan—fly out the door I was headed in and crowd around the keg. West looks on in amusement as the other three fill up glass boots that look like they could hold a gallon of beer.

  I try to edge around them, but feel the mass of one bump me into the railing that surrounds the porch. Reggie Davis turns, his dreadlocks swinging behind him as he catches the side of my arm. My heart stops as his firm fingers wrap around my arm. He feels so strong, and he’s barely touching me.

  “Sorry,” he starts, but then his glassy amber eyes snap into focus. “Hey … I know you.” A dreadlock falls in front of his face, breaking our eye contact, and I find myself staring at the ground.

  Reggie should know me. All of the football players should know me, since I’m one of their student sports therapists. We’re on the sidelines with them every week, but it feels like we fade into the background, as noticeable as one of the towels they wipe their faces with. I like the anonymity, honestly. We get our jobs done and don’t get involved with them. If Chloe hadn’t insisted on coming to this party, I wouldn’t have had to see the players chugging alcohol like it was Gatorade. I wouldn’t have to look at them at tomorrow’s practice and wonder if they’re moving sluggishly because they’re hungover. If one of them gets injured on a sloppy play, I won’t be able to stop myself from judging, and it’s best not to judge. It’s easier to live by the Hippocratic Oath that way. And like Chloe pointed out earlier, you’re less likely to judge if you don’t see someone’s bad side.

  Reggie wavers a little on his feet. It looks like the Jack Daniel’s and gallons of beer are working their particular brand of magic on him.

  He puts his arm on the bannister behind me, stabilizing himself. But the move shifts him so close to me, I can smell the booze on his breath, feel it against my skin. By all rights I should be grossed out, but Reggie Davis has a bizarre effect on me. Well, I guess it’s not bizarre if half the girls in the school feel the same way.

  “No, you don’t know me,” I say, trying to push past him.

  “You’re the hot sports therapy girl.” He says it with the conviction of the stone cold sober.

  I freeze, heat creeping up my cheeks. Did he just call me hot? I glance behind me, thinking he might be talking about someone else, and realize my back is right up against the railing. There is no one behind me. I don’t think Reggie Davis and I have ever spoken before. He’s never fallen to me in rotation. He’s clearly drunk, but he’s staring at me with such intensity that I wouldn’t know he was intoxicated if he didn’t smell like a still. I try to duck away, but his massive frame makes me feel trapped. He is a mountain, and the only way around him is climbing over. And that is not going to happen.

&nbs
p; “When’s the library closing?”

  “Huh?”

  Reggie fingers a button on my cardigan, the tough pad of his finger grazing against the skin of my clavicle. His warmth in the cool night air sends a shiver down my spine and I swallow hard—trying to look unaffected by his touch.

  “The sweater. You look like a hot librarian instead of a hot sports therapist.” He slurs on the word librarian, and I wince at the comment. He’s called me hot three times in two minutes, and it’s making me extremely uncomfortable. Being a student therapist isn’t exactly the same thing as being someone’s doctor, but there’s still a line of professionalism that Reggie is clearly crossing.

  “I was just leaving,” I say, trying again to duck my way around him.

  “No, wait.” His eyebrows knit together and he looks genuinely disappointed. The alcohol must be making him feel more sentimental than he would be sober. “I can get us good stuff. Not this crap.” He indicates his beer and sloshes a wave of amber liquid over the side of the glass. “Whatever you want, vanilla vodka, peach schnapps, hard lemonade. I can get it. I’m kind of a big deal here.”

  With my back up against the banister, I have to inch to the side to get away from the splash zone.

  “So I look like a girly drink kind of girl to you?” I don’t know why I challenged him. I should have just said no thank you and left. But I have to admit, my chest thrills at the look on Reggie’s face at my retort.

  His mouth stretches into a gorgeous smile, and then a second later he laughs—loud and warm and with abandon. “So no girly drink. Wild Turkey?” He raises an eyebrow, and I raise one in return. “You got it,” he says with a laugh.

  But he doesn’t move. He holds his glass boot of beer up to his lips and takes a big swig, emptying half the glass. Yet when he right the giant glass, he staggers backward and his already glazed eyes go unfocused. I don’t want to care. I want to let him drink himself into a stupor. But I keep envisioning him on the football field the next day for a practice scrimmage, going up against non-hungover players and getting injured. Even if he is being an ass. A complete ass, I remind myself. A completely hot ass. Regardless, I don’t want any of the boys injured.

  After the sex scandal last Christmas that gutted the team, the program can’t afford any more key players staying off the field. I reach for his beer glass, and he lets me take the boot from him. It’s heavier than it looks. I take a sip from the glass and purposely don’t give it back to him.

  I look around, trying to find one of his friends. Maybe they’d take care of him, but they’re off a ways now, completely unaware that they’ve lost Reggie from the pack.

  “Hey,” he says suddenly, pulling away from me a little. “Can I show you something?”

  What could Reggie Davis possibly want to show me? I don’t have time to protest, because Reggie is pulling his shirt up. “I have this really nasty bruise and I’m worried about bleeding.”

  “Bruises don’t bleed,” I say, trying hard not to look at his exposed abdomen, but his light brown skin and rippled abs are hard to ignore.

  “No, like on the inside.”

  My eyes drop, and he does have a dark bruise on the side of his abdomen that creeps down into the top of his shorts. His skin shimmers around the purple and green bruise that covers his hip and wraps around his side. I admire his perfect oblique muscles, my eyes traveling past the bruise and to his perfectly toned core. For medical reasons, of course.

  “Do you think it’s bleeding? It goes all the way down.” And then he does something that makes my mouth go dry. His hooks his thumb into the top of his shorts and starts to yank them down. I’ve seen the male form; I’ve touched a lot of athletes in places that would normally make me blush. But that’s on the field, in the therapy room … not on a porch in the middle of a party.

  Reggie has his shorts halfway down his butt, until I’m close to seeing where the trail of hair down the middle of his tight abdomen leads, when Riley Brulotte swoops in out of nowhere and grabs Reggie by the arm. The sudden movement makes me tear my gaze away from Reggie’s hip.

  “Whoa, Reg,” Riley says loudly. “I’m sure Megan doesn’t want to see that. No one does.” Riley laughs, but it sounds false. He hooks one large arm around Reggie’s shoulders and practically drags him away.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Weston Sawyer, the quarterback, touches my arm.

  “Yeah, sure. I’m fine.”

  “He wasn’t being too aggressive, was he?”

  “No,” I force a laugh, like I’m totally casual, and try hard not to blush, which is next to impossible.

  “It’s totally not cool,” West says, very sincere. “And we do not tolerate sexual harassment.”

  “West, it’s fine. Really. He was just asking me about an injury.”

  I suddenly want to get out of here more than ever. What did it look like was happening? What was I letting happen?

  Stuttering apologies, I bolt from the party, shoving through the crowd until I’m out the front door and onto the street. It’s not until I’m around the corner that I realize I’m still carrying Reggie’s boot glass. Most of the beer has sloshed out, but I dump the rest in the grass and consider dumping the boot itself until something stamped into the glass catches my eye. It’s Reggie’s name and jersey number. I clutch the glass boot tighter. He’ll want this back; I can’t just throw it away. But he probably won’t even remember talking to me. Or telling me I’m hot. I’m no troll, but someone like Reggie Davis probably wouldn’t look twice at a girl like me if he wasn’t blackout drunk.

  I start walking again, and the image of Reggie’s partially naked torso creeps into my mind. His finger hooked into his shorts, the edge of his hip bone exposed. If I let my mind go, I can imagine him taking those shorts the rest of the way down … or better yet, doing it for him. My pale hands on his dark skin, feeling the contours of all those thick, hard muscles—

  I walk faster, then start jogging, and then suddenly I’m running all the way back to my apartment, trying to exhaust myself and stop the image from popping back into my mind. I don’t want to be attracted to Reggie Davis. He’s an arrogant, boozy party animal who doesn’t care about anything but playing center for the Mountain State Mustangs. Totally not what I’m looking for in a guy. Not that I’m even looking for a guy. It’s just that he’s so damn hot, with that hard, muscled body and warm amber eyes and amazing smile.

  I just have to make sure it doesn’t happen again. After all, I’ve managed to avoid him the whole season thus far. I’ll just keep avoiding him, and then I won’t have to deal with all this messy attraction. Satisfied with my plan, I let myself into my apartment, put the beery boot in the sink, and undress for bed.

  And I only think about his body for a few more minutes before I pass out.

  Chapter Two

  Reggie

  THE POUNDING ON MY DOOR wakes me up, and the harsh sunlight streaming through my window makes my headache pound. The light feels like a bolt with a direct connection to my brain. My head throbs and my shirt sticks to my body through a layer of sweat that smells like the alcohol I drank the night before.

  “Get up, Reggie,” some holier-than-thou voice shouts at the closed door. “I’m leaving without you.”

  I grunt a response, but I doubt Ben Mayhew, my pain-in-the-ass roommate, can hear me. He is such an anxious prick sometimes. Like he can’t wait five minutes for me to put on some clean underwear and get my ass out the door. I roll over and click my phone to life. Fuck. It is late. Even if Ben leaves now, he might still be late to practice.

  I sit up too fast and hit my head on the ceiling. Double fuck. Why did I think lofting my bed was a good idea? Fitting the futon in the room was seriously not worth it. I jump down from the mattress, landing too hard and making myself wince with pain. Working as quick as my hangover will allow, I pull on some clean clothes and search for the keys to my scooter. I spend five minutes searching in vain before I stick my head out the window only to see Ben’s already gone�
��and he’s taken my scooter. Goddammit, Ben.

  The walk from the dorm to the practice field is short. It would have been shorter on a scooter, but I can’t say I blame Ben for taking it. I’ve done worse to him. I try to run, but I swear to God it isn’t possible. I’m actually thinking the extra ten minutes of recovery this walk is forcing on me might be worth being late.

  When I finally get to the field, I throw on a helmet and fall into position next to Riley Brulotte. He’s a better player than me, so maybe I can hide behind him for a while until my headache wears off. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s covered for me.

  The whistle screams, making me wince.

  “Is that really necessary?” I mumble to Riley. He smiles back at me, no indication he’d been drinking right beside me all night. Probably because he wasn’t. Beside me, yes, drinking, no. The man has too much self-control, if you ask me.

  “Davis!” The coach barks my name. Apparently I’m not getting away with slinking in after all. “Locker room. Now!”

  Coach Prescott leans against his metal desk with his arms folded and stares at me. It’s a good trick, but it’s one I know to watch for. I’ll wait until spoken to. No reason to start apologizing for things until you know exactly what you’re in trouble for.

  The silence stretches on, the only noise a fly buzzing around the room. Prescott’s hand shoots out and catches the fly in mid-air. He flicks it to the ground, the whole time keeping eye contact with me. I feel sweat prickling my forehead, even though the office is air-conditioned. I just hope Coach Prescott doesn’t have a superhuman sense of smell, or he’ll know exactly what I was doing last night.

  “Don’t you think you’re already wasting enough of my time, son?”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re standing there like you don’t know that you’re wasting my time—wasting the team’s time, since I’m stuck in here with you, lecturing you about stuff you should know by now.”