What He Bargains (What He Wants, Book Nineteen) (84 page)

“I’m glad you came to see me,” she finally said, feeling lame at how it sounded in her own ears.

“Let’s get out of here,” Chase said, starting to pull her away from the building.

“I can’t just leave.”

As if on cue, someone began shouting her name from behind. “Faith!”

“Shit,” she said, spinning around and seeing Greg running towards them.

“Faith!” Greg shouted, coming closer as he continued running.

“Who’s this?” Chase asked, his voice suspicious and growling with dislike.

“That’s my boss,” Faith said, swallowing anxiously.

And then Greg had reached them, and he slowed down, his chest rising and falling as he gasped for air. “What…in the hell…are you doing?” Greg huffed. He glanced from Faith to Chase and then his eyes widened as he realized who he was looking at.

Chase pulled his hood back. “She’s with me,” he said with a dark undertone to his voice.

“Hey, you’re…you’re that guy…Chase Winters.” Greg turned and looked at Faith, his eyes narrowing. “That’s that new quarterback,” he said to her.

“Greg, could you please give us a minute?” she pleaded.

“No, I can’t.” Greg turned his attention back to Chase. “Look, she works for me, buddy. I understand you might be a big shot and all, but—“

Chase stepped forward and Greg’s mouth shut like a mousetrap.

“She asked you to give us a minute. I think you should listen to her.” Chase’s eyes were dead cold and unflinching.

Greg stepped backwards and now he looked at Faith. “Either you come back inside with me right now, or I’m going to have to let you go. You’ve been slacking left and right and this…this is the last straw.”

“You’re going to fire me because I went outside for five minutes?” she asked.

“She quits,” Chase told him. “She doesn’t need your stupid, worthless, pathetic job.”

“Fine,” Greg sneered, his lips pulling back from his teeth. He turned and started walking back to the building. As he went, he turned and shouted. “You two losers deserve each other! Fucking losers!” And then he ran, sprinted, as if he thought Chase might come after him.

But when Faith glanced at him again, Chase wasn’t angry at all. In fact, he was laughing, his shoulders shaking as his cheeks turned red. “That just made my day,” he said, trying to control his amusement.

“You realize you just got me fired, right?”

“So what? Screw that guy and his shit job.”

“Well I don’t have a multi-million dollar contract to fall back on,” she retorted. “I need that shit job.”

Chase looked at her now, his eyes penetrating. “No you don’t.”

“I don’t?”

“No.” He stood there, staring at her with an intensity she didn’t understand.

“I should go,” she said softly. “I need to see if I can beg for my job back.”

“Or you can come with me,” Chase said, his hand grabbing her hand once more. His thumb caressed her wrist and she broke into gooseflesh all over.

“Come with you where?” she asked.

Chase didn’t answer. Instead, the corner of his mouth turned up and he just smiled, and the smile said everything and nothing.

His smile promised that he would take her somewhere she’d never been—someplace dangerous, dark—someplace where she’d be completely out of control.

Faith had always, always been afraid of the dark. She’d used a nightlight for so long that her sister and friends had often teased her about it.

And then his lips were on hers, and she could smell him and taste him and Faith was overcome by her need for him.

Chase
, she thought. His name was like a prayer, and somehow he’d answered it, come here to kiss her, to love her, to show her something new.

Chase, I want you to make me scream. I want you to make me yours again and again and again. No matter what it takes out of me. I’ll do it.

I’ll do everything.

In that moment, Faith realized the most shocking thing yet.

It turned out that she liked the dark after all.

F
aith really didn’t understand
how she’d ended up in this situation. Her mind simply wouldn’t accept the reality of it.

So she tried to break it down to its simplest terms.

I’m sitting in a car right now. It might be a 2015 Alfa Romeo, but it’s still just a car. Like any other car, it needs gas, and regular oil changes. Sometimes it needs to get taken in for a tune-up, or for new breaks. It’s just a really really really nice car, but nothing more.

That was good. That was something she could hang onto, something to calm her racing thoughts.

And I’m sitting in this car next to a guy. He’s just a guy. Yes, he’s Chase Winters, the number-one draft pick and first-string quarterback of the New England Nationals. Sure, he’s handsome and sexy and every woman wants him and most men want to share a beer with him—and yes, almost every guy wishes they could be like him. But at the end of the day, Chase Winters is only a regular old human being.

But as much as she tried to tell herself these things, Faith’s ability to believe them was faltering. Because right now, she was sitting in this insanely expensive sports car as Chase Winters drove through the streets of Boston.

And if she was being totally honest with herself, there was absolutely nothing normal or ordinary about him.

There also wasn’t anything normal about the situation she was in right now.

Faith could try and soothe herself with the notion that this car was just a car, and this guy was just a guy—but in the end, it wasn’t really true. Chase Winters was like a comet blazing through the sky once every hundred years, and she didn’t want to miss her chance to experience it. As scary as that might be, she was going to stand next to him for as long as possible and hope that she didn’t end up getting burned to a crisp by the heat he generated.

For some crazy reason, he wants me in this car with him right now.

For some even crazier reason, he kissed me back in that parking lot.

Of course, he’d done a lot more than kiss her not so long ago. But that night already seemed like a past life to her now.

This was something different. Chase had sought her out, found out where she worked, and came to see her there because he wanted to be with her that badly.

“You’re so quiet,” Chase said, as he shifted the car into a higher gear and shot ahead of three cars by getting into the left lane and then scooting quickly back into the right lane when another car stopped to take a turn.

“I’m just thinking,” she said, trying to sound casual.

He gave her a quick glance, and now with the hoodie on his sweatshirt down, she could see the bruising below his eyes more clearly. And his split lip, that was healing but still swollen, the cut scabbed over. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just how weird this is.”

He laughed. “What’s weird?”

“Ummm…you showing up where I work out of nowhere, getting me fired—“

“You didn’t get fired, you quit,” he said.

“No, you quit for me,” Faith corrected him. And that reminded her—what was she going to do now? She needed that job and that money. As it was, she’d barely been keeping her head above water, and now things would be even more dire.

“You don’t need to work for an asshole,” Chase said. “I should’ve slapped him around a little bit.” He grinned.

Thinking about slapping around her old boss seemed to make him happy.

“I wasn’t working there for fun,” she said. “I needed the money. I still need the money, actually. Only now I won’t be getting any, and it’s going to be a big problem.”

She shook her head in dismay. The last thing she wanted to be doing was whining about money to Chase Winters. She wanted to be kissing him, to feel him inside of her again. That’s what she wanted to be doing—and if not that, at least flirting and being appropriately sexy. But somehow she was bitching about her finances to him instead.

Complaining about money is definitely not hot
, she decided.
I need to step up my game.

But Chase didn’t seem to mind. “I learned something a long time ago,” he said, continuing to maneuver in and out of traffic like he was in fast motion and everyone else was in slow motion. And maybe that was entirely the case.

She hoped she wasn’t in slow motion like the rest of the world.

“What did you learn?” she asked, genuinely curious.

“I learned that it was never a good idea to just settle for the easy road.” He gave her a meaningful glance before looking straight ahead once more.

“You’re saying I was taking the easy road by working a temp job to pay my bills?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“That’s not true. The easy road would have been for me to live at home like my parents wanted me to, and to work nearby, and hang out with the same people and date the same guys—do all the same things everyone I knew was doing. That would have been the easy road.” She felt her stomach tensing as she tried to defend herself, not even knowing why she was so offended by his rather innocuous comment.

“If you say so,” he replied.

“You’re judging me.” She shifted in her seat, trying to relax but not succeeding.

“I’m giving you some helpful advice that I wish someone had told me when I needed it.”

“Well maybe I don’t need your advice. You barely even know me.”

He smirked. “I know a lot more than you think I do, girl.”

She glared at him. “What is it you think you know?”

He laughed. “I’m just saying—I think you could be doing a lot more than slaving away at some cubicle farm for a jerk that makes you scrape and beg like that.”

“Not all of us were blessed with the natural gifts that you have, Chase. I wasn’t born a boy who’d grow up to be six foot five and two hundred and fifty pounds, with speed and reflexes and abnormal strength. I’m just a regular girl, and you have no idea what I had to do to get that job at the cubicle farm and keep it.”

“Fine, if you want to believe that, I won’t stop you,” he said.

What she couldn’t believe was the tone of his voice, the arrogance. It was so incredibly frustrating to her, and she tried to remember how they’d gotten into this silly argument in the first place—and she wasn’t able to. Somehow, here they were, and she couldn’t let it go.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” she told him.

He shook his head almost indiscernibly. “I never called you stupid.”

“But you’re acting like I’m an idiot. I can’t believe you think you can give me advice when you basically had every physical advantage handed to you on a silver platter.”

He snorted. “I did, did I?”

“Maybe if you were five and a half feet tall and somehow played in the NBA, I’d be more inclined to listen to your theories about following your dreams. But you’re a freak of nature, and you don’t even seem to realize it.”

“A freak of nature?” he said, chuckling.

“
Nobody
is like you, Chase. Football
is
the easy road for you. If you looked like this and you were a heart surgeon or a mechanical engineer—that would blow my mind. You being a professional athlete is like, the
most
sensible thing in the world.”

She saw his shoulders hunch a little as he took in her words. “I get it,” he said, nodding. “So you think every guy over six foot tall plays pro football?”

“No, obviously not—“

“Then you must think all these fat fucks who are like six foot tall and weigh in at three hundred pounds scarfing down Big Macs everyday could play in the NFL. Right? Because that’s what you’re telling me, Faith.”

“Obviously not. But you can’t deny that you were born with some genetic gifts.”

“Yeah, I happen to be tall,” he said. “But there are a lot of tall dudes out there. There’s a million guys with size who can’t come close to doing what I do.” He shook his head. “You don’t get it. You have no clue, and that’s why you’re in the situation you’re in, baby.”

She almost told him to fuck off. Almost. The words were perched on her lips, but she held her tongue. “That’s incredibly rude,” was all she said, and then her jaw was locked and she licked her lips, trying to remember why she was here and how they could somehow come back from this insane argument.

“It’s not rude. It’s just the fucking truth.” His hands gripped and then re-gripped the steering wheel. “You know, there’s a reason that I got to where I’m at.”

“I know that,” she muttered.

“And you think I haven’t heard your theory before? You think people haven’t constantly said that if they looked like me, they could be a star athlete too?” He smiled as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever thought of.

“Well, it’s kind of true,” she said.

He took a deep breath. “When I was in high school, I was tall for my age—but I wasn’t jacked. I wasn’t some huge dude who crushed everyone that came near me. I was skinny, tall, and not all that fast. But I had some talent, yeah.”

“Obviously,” she muttered, but lower this time.

Chase went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “But I still remember, a scout from one of the D1 colleges came around my sophomore year of high school, and he told me that I wasn’t going to make it to the big leagues. He said that I didn’t have the speed or the size to play D1 college ball. In fact, he told me I should focus on getting a scholarship to an Ivy League football program, because maybe they’d take a flier on someone like me.”

Faith turned her head and looked at him, seeing him differently somehow. “That really happened?”

He glanced over at her, smiling, but his eyes were hard. “Yeah, it really happened. You think I had such a cushy road to the NFL. You don’t have a clue what I went through.”

“I guess I don’t.”

He sighed. “That scout lit a fire under my ass, because I realized that he was right about me. I wasn’t that strong or that fast. Not compared to the guys who were heading to the top colleges. So I started working my ass off—going out of my comfort zone. I found a strength and conditioning coach to work with me. I had to pay this guy to come and kick my ass every day—to break me down and build me into a football-playing machine. I did what I needed to do to better my situation, even though there were no guarantees it would even work.”

“That’s remarkable,” she said, meaning it.

“And it didn’t end there, either. Every year, every season, I had to get better and work harder and find ways to switch shit up so that I’d be at the top of the mountain,” Chase told her. “Waking up early, working hard when I was sick, when my ass was dragging—skipping parties, saying no to the cute girl that wanted to hang out, refusing to play video games with my buddies, and all of that shit that made college so much fun for everyone else. I wasn’t the most naturally gifted. I just worked so damn hard that people assume I was.”

She wasn’t prepared for his vigorous defense of what he’d done to get to the top of his profession, and Faith realized that she’d been wrong about him. And not only that, but she hadn’t realized how smart he was.

His passion had somehow managed to turn her on. She felt excited, sitting so close to him, feeling the burning sense of need and intensity that Chase Winters brought to every facet of his life. She’d never felt so alive as she did when she was near him.

“I was wrong,” she said, after some time had gone by since either of them had spoken.

She saw his thick shoulders slowly drop a fraction, and his hands lightened their grip on the wheel. “My past might have been different from yours,” he said, giving her a sidelong glance. “But nothing about my life was easy.” The final sentence he spoke was choked with emotion.

Faith swallowed, her heart beating fast.

Chase had never sounded this raw, this vulnerable. And she loved that he was sharing this side of himself with her.

Her expression softened. “I made a bunch of assumptions about you and I’m sorry.”

Chase nodded. “It’s okay. Everybody does it.”

“I don’t want to be like everybody.”

He smiled. “You’re not. Far from it.”

Now Faith was smiling too. She loved that he’d set her apart from the crowd. She wanted to occupy a special place in his heart more than just about anything.

“I’m glad you gave me that advice about not taking the easy road,” she said, deciding it was true. Now that the harsh sting of his judgment had worn off, she realized that it had been pinpoint accurate.

Chase was right about her.

She’d been taking the easy path in a lot of ways. She’d been scared, and so she’d made excuses.

“Yeah?” he said, seemingly pleased with her change of heart.

“Who knows, maybe you’ll rub off on me.”

They were in Beacon Hill now, which was Chase’s neighborhood. The elegant brick buildings and homes were somehow reassuring to her. She felt a little bit like a princess being carted around by her prince in his chariot.

“I don’t know if you want me rubbing off on you,” Chase said. “Right about now, most people don’t think I have much right to be telling anybody how to succeed.”

“Why? Because of one game where your team lost?”

He laughed cynically, as they came to a stop and parked outside of his building. “There aren’t all that many games in one football season,” he told her. “And that was an important one.”

She stared at him, worried for him in a way that she hadn’t anticipated. “You shouldn’t listen to the critics, Chase.”

He smiled softly. “I don’t really. I mean, yeah, it burns me a little that people are so quick to write me off because of one bad performance. Shit, I’ve had plenty of bad games since I started playing football. If I took every loss to heart, I’d have quit a long time ago.”

“So you’re not nervous about your next game?”

“The other guys are the ones who should be nervous,” he said, his eyes locking on hers intently. “Because now I’m going to make them pay for what everyone’s been saying about me.”

I
t was
strange being back inside Chase’s Beacon Hill home once again. As he led her inside, she looked around at the familiar surroundings and reminded herself that this was real.