Page 24 of Second Down Fake

I grinned. “I have been called a once-in-a-generation athlete.”

His laugh rumbled over the phone, my stomach flipping at the sound. “Who called you that?”

“People. Lots of them.”

“Aren’t you the woman who once told me you’d never willingly stepped foot into a gym?”

“I don’t think that has anything to do with my athletic prowess.”

“Oh, it’s prowess, now?”

“You’re going to find out when I beat you at disc golf for a second time.”

“Tuesday?”

I bit my lip at the tempting offer “Can I get back to you? I don’t have a schedule for next week yet.”

“Oh.”

I couldn’t tell if he thought I was blowing him off or disappointed. “I’ll let you know on Saturday.”

“Sure, no problem. I might not get back to you until later in the evening, though. We’re playing our last preseason game on Saturday.”

“Exciting. Who are you playing?”

“Tennessee. At home, so that’s nice.”

I frowned. If Diego was anything like my sister, I wouldn’t hear from him much during the football season. Disappointing.

“Hey, the picture. You’re not in trouble for that, are you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Not really. James, my agent, found out who you are and thought I’d gone for the whole ‘fake dating’ route. He was pretty thrilled. Or at least as thrilled as he ever gets.”

“People don’t do that, do they?”

Diego didn’t answer right away. The silence on the phone pounded in my ear. Did people fake date? No, of course not. Probably.

“My agent seems to think so, and he’d know better than me. But until this point of my life, all my dating has been one hundred percent legitimate.”

“We could, you know.” The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them.

“We could…what exactly?” Diego asked after a beat.

“Fake date. If it’d help you out.” Diego’s silence only solidified that he thought I’d lost my mind. And maybe I had. “I mean, the gossip sites are already speculating about us, and it’s not like you’ve got time to date during the season. I’ll be gone by Christmas, so really there’s no risk.”

No risk? What the hell was I talking about? I clamped my mouth shut to stop babbling. Maybe Diego would politely retract his invitation for disc golf so I could assume a fake identity and flee the country.

“You don’t mean that, do you?” Diego said slowly, parsing out each word.

The invitation to speak renewed the torrent of absolute madness coming out of my mouth. “I mean, it’s not like it’d be a big deal, right? We’d get photographed a few times. Maybe I’d get some free football tickets. And then I’d disappear over the holidays. You get to start the new year with a clean slate.”

“I thought you didn’t like football.”

“I don’t,” I admitted. “But I do like free things.”

“So, I just need to bribe you with some swag rooms and VIP tables, and you’ll be my fake girlfriend for the season?”

“Swag rooms? There are entire rooms of swag? I’m in.”

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