The harder Archer fought his smile, the more pronounced his dimple became. The auction price for these issues just spiked a grand or two. The children’s hospital could thank me later.
“You know how this game works. I know how.” He paused, letting that settle in the space between us. “You just have to decide if you want to play.”
“Because you have decided?”
His bat pressed deeper into my back, drawing me impossibly closer to his body. His arousal settled hard into the side of my stomach. “Doc, I’m already playing.”
DID I WANT to play the game?
That was the question that had been playing on repeat through my head the past two weeks. I still hadn’t arrived at any answers though.
For as strong as Archer had come on, he’d backed off to the point of simple formalities. I wasn’t sure if that was his way of letting me work things out without any pressure from him or if he’d lost interest or if, hell, I’d imagined everything during that twenty-four-hour period.
Either way, I was still considering my answer. Do I want to play the game?
Typically that question would have been followed up with an immediate and inviolate no. But this wasn’t the typical guy asking. It was Luke Archer. It wasn’t the name or prestige that came with the name that had caught and kept my attention; it was the man behind the name. He was a good one—a decent one.
Now that I was watching Archer through a different lens than the athletic trainer one I’d observed him with before, I was noticing new things. Like the way he always made it a point to take time before and after a game to sign autographs on kids’ baseball gloves or balls or napkins or whatever they waved at him from the fence.
Or the way he embodied the role of a team player—never showboating after nailing a ball over the fences, never failing to pat a teammate on the back when they trudged back to the dugout after striking out.
Or the way he was the first one on the field to warm-up and stayed after to help pack up. As star athletes went, he was the only one I’d come across who didn’t behave like a star.
In terms of men to get involved with, he seemed like the best kind a woman could hope for. I just couldn’t decide if this woman was ready to get involved with anyone, especially someone on the same team. Especially the star player who had no lack of scrutinizing eyes and rolling cameras aimed his way at any given time.
No matter how discreet we tried to be, someone would always be watching. Someone would find out. It was inevitable. And I couldn’t risk getting caught sleeping with a player when I’d already had to fight tooth and nail to get noticed on my own merit.
I couldn’t afford to be that athletic trainer who’d clawed her way into the pros by clawing her nails down Luke Archer’s back. Was a few weeks or months of wild abandon with Archer worth the risk of losing all my credibility?
My frustrated groan rolled down the hotel hall as I stormed down it some time after two in the morning. I’d never been much of a sleeper, and ever since Luke Archer’s roundabout proposition, sleep had been that much harder to attain.
The exercise room was open twenty-four hours a day, thank god, because I needed to work out some serious pent-up energy. We had a big game tomorrow against the Orlando Rays, and everyone was on edge. On edge translated to being ripe for injury, which translated into the athletic training team being extra busy tomorrow. The Shock and the Rays were rivals, but that rivalry ran deeper than most rival relationships did. The players couldn’t stand each other, and the last time Reynolds’s nose had been broken was during a game against the Rays. I didn’t know where the rivalry came from, but I was dreading tomorrow’s game.
Waving my cardkey beside the exercise room keypad, I could just make out the whir of a treadmill behind the door. I’d been hoping I’d have the room to myself, but it sounded like someone else was an insomniac.
I threw open the door, moved inside, and stopped short. If the room hadn’t been lined with mirrors, I might have quietly backed out and found another way to vent my excess energy, but it was too late. Archer had already seen my reflection in the mirror in front of the treadmill he was running on.
A slow smile shifted into place as he lifted his hand in a wave.
The door clicked closed behind me, sealing me in that small room, alone with him. The scent of sweat and man was overwhelming, rolling over me in heavy waves. I wasn’t sure if this was what scientists meant when they talked about pheromones and their effect on the opposite sex, but shit, my body was practically writhing from the scent of Luke Archer filling the room.
The view of him didn’t help either.
“Couldn’t sleep.” Archer pulled the ear buds from his ears, glancing at me over his shoulder.
“Yeah, me either.”
“I don’t sleep for shit most nights, but it’s been impossible lately.”
I could feel his eyes on me as I moved across the room, grabbed one of the folded towels, and brought it over to him. He was drenched with sweat, beads of it rolling from his hair down his forehead. The rest of his body was just as soaked.
That tended to happen when a person was maintaining a . . . I leaned over the treadmill just enough to read the screens.
“Archer!” I chided, going into athletic trainer mode instantly. My finger punched the speed down until he wasn’t sprinting at speed Super Human.
He grumbled as he wiped his face with the towel. “Sorry, Doc. I didn’t think you’d be around to catch me in the act.”