Page 58 of Game On

“Yeah, she can come with us.” It wasn’t the best idea. The look Donovan threw him confirmed it. But there was no way was he letting her out of his sight again tonight. “Tomorrow, I’ll put her on a plane to New York to see her friend. Hopefully the cops will have found Joel by then and he’ll be behind bars.”

Donovan continued to stare at him, his hands on his hips beneath his suit jacket, until he finally nodded.

Turning away from Donovan, Shane motioned for the kid to take Beckett. Carly looked up at him as she released the dog. The vacant look he’d noticed on her face earlier was still there. Gently he pulled her up off the step. “Come on, Dorothy, let’s get you packed.”

They navigated past a pair of officers who’d been gathering evidence upstairs. With their work finished, Carly was free to take what she needed before leaving. Shane heard her ragged intake of breath as she caught sight of the mess in her bedroom. It looked as if Joel had touched everything in her drawers. Anger was beginning to overtake the fear in Carly. “That little creep!” she said, lifting a ripped pillow off the floor and clutching it to her chest.

“Why don’t you grab what you need from the bathroom,” Shane said, gently maneuvering her out of the room. “I’ll throw some things in a bag. You can get new clothes tomorrow.” Treating it as if it were still intact, she carefully laid the ripped pillow on the corner of the bed before slowly shuffling to the bathroom.

Shane spotted her gym bag in the corner. It was empty except for a pair of sneakers. Clothes were strewn everywhere throughout the room. What had the guy been doing? Trying it all on?

He stuffed the bag with shorts and shirts and a pair of jeans. When he got to the lingerie, his hand froze. Most of it was in tatters on the floor. It looked like the pervert had shred it all. He swore for the umpteenth time as he fingered a scrap of lace. Reaching in the back of a drawer, he pulled out a pair of serviceable cotton bikini panties. Definitely not her normal repertoire, but they’d do in a pinch.

“Carly?” He zipped up the bag. “How’s it going in there?”

When she didn’t respond, he threw the bag over his shoulder and followed her into the bathroom. “Holy shit,” he swore again. Joel had left no room untouched. A plethora of obscenities were scribbled in lipstick on the mirror. Shane felt his anger ratchet up a notch—if that was even possible. Fear had paralyzed Carly again. She stood, white knuckles clutching the vanity, staring at the word whore smudged across the center of the mirror. Grabbing her toothbrush and some hair bands, he threw them in the quilted floral bag he’d found in the linen closet. Anything else she needed, she could pick up at a drugstore later.

“Come on,” he said, taking hold of her arm.

“No!” She wrenched her arm free and snatched up the lipstick off the vanity, snapping the top on it. Pulling open the draws, she whipped out hair brushes and lotions, tossing them in the bag. Her movements were manic. When he caught sight of her eyes in the mirror, they looked unfocused and wild. “I can do this,” she muttered.

He had to hand it to her; she wasn’t going to give the jerk any power over her. But she was straddling the line of hysteria and he wasn’t sure he could deal with the aftermath if she crossed it.

“Hey!” He grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to face him. It took a moment for her eyes to focus. When they did, he raised his hands to cup her face. “It’s okay. You’re okay. This is all just stuff. Leave it.” He brushed a kiss across her hairline.

“That’s easy for you to say,” she mumbled. “That was a thirty-dollar tube of lipstick he ruined.”

He grinned, feeling a stirring of pride at her surging resilience as he let his lips linger on her forehead. “Let’s get out of here, Dorothy. Toto and the Munchkin are waiting for us downstairs.”

It took nearly two hours and several minor miracles to get Carly out of her house, back to his place, and settled into his bed. The first obstacle was Carly’s refusal to leave her home looking like a war zone and occupied by police. Donovan turned on his ten-thousand-megawatt smile, assuring her that he would lock up and make arrangements to have it cleaned. Next, the Pretty Boy detective wanted to know how to reach her for further questioning. Donovan explained their plan for her to go to New York for a few days.

“I can’t go to New York!” she cried. “Julianne’s not home. She’s at a wedding this weekend.” The kid wasted no time piping in, inviting her to join them on the trip to the cabin.

Now, instead of one uninvited guest to his pre–training camp retreat, Shane had two.

Once they’d finally gotten home, the issue of where Carly would sleep cropped up. Troy was occupying the guest room, leaving Shane’s room and the sofa as possible places for her to land. Despite his reputation—and a burning desire to get another glimpse at her pink Hanky Panky thong—Shane played the role of gentleman and called dibs on the sofa.

There was another debate about where Beckett would sleep: the kid thought Carly would feel safer with the dog in the bed. Carly wouldn’t hear of it. “Beckett is your new friend,” she told him. Shane finally got both kid and dog to bed and headed off to a much-needed shower. When he emerged from the master bath ten minutes later, the lights were out in his bedroom and Carly lay sprawled across the bed. Light from the bathroom illuminated her long legs, uncovered except for where his well-worn Chargers T-shirt hit her mid-thigh. One arm lay across her belly and the other was slung over his pillow. As he reached for a pillow, her eyes flew open.

“Stay with me,” she whispered.

Despite the fact that his body began revving up for action the minute he’d seen her long legs stretched across the sheets of his bed, he knew what she’d been through the last few hours. “You sure?” he had to ask. She nodded and he flicked off the bathroom light, crawling into the bed next to her. Fortunately, he was wearing cotton sleep pants and a T-shirt because he didn’t think he could withstand skin-to-skin contact without making the moves on her. As soon as his head hit the pillow, she crawled on top of him, one leg pinned against his thighs, her hand tightly gripping his T-shirt as she burrowed into his shoulder.

“Hold me,” she begged, her breath warm against the bare skin at his neck. Tremors shook her body as he wrapped an arm around her, pulling the blanket over top of them with the other hand. Shushing her, he gently stroked her back, stifling a groan as he soothed her to sleep. It was the first time he’d had a half-naked woman draped boneless across him without doing something about it.

But something had changed inside him tonight. Not only had he put the kid in harm’s way, but Carly as well. The fear he’d felt as he raced into her house scared the hell out of him. He was responsible for Bruce’s son, and no matter what the circumstances of the guardianship, he vowed to himself in the now quiet bedroom to make sure nothing ever happened him.

Or to Carly. For once, he wasn’t even considering the ramifications to his career if something happened to her. He just knew he had to keep her safe at all costs. He tried to tell himself it was just because he felt a strong connection to her physically. Deep down, though, he knew it was something more.

She snuggled closer and his body jumped in response. Sainthood was not something he aspired to. But tonight, Carly needed to feel safe, so he’d do his best to hold his baser instincts in check. It was definitely a new experience for Shane.

EIGHTEEN

Shane was an idiot. A freaking idiot. He had two weeks to get himself rested and ready for training camp. As he’d done every other season, his plan was to spend that time relaxing, fishing, and boning up on his playbook at his cabin in the Allegheny Mountains. Alone.

Instead, he was playing babysitter and nursemaid to a chatty twelve-year-old and a very distracting, sexy woman who should be three hundred miles away writing up new rules about how tightly a player’s cleats should be tied. A long-suffering sigh escaped as he hefted four plastic bags filled with groceries onto the counter. The place was still a bit stuffy, but Carly was walking around the great room opening up the French doors to the A-frame cabin’s deck, letting in a light breeze. The sounds of Beckett barking and the kid laughing only added to Shane’s growing disgust with himself.

“This place is gorgeous.”

---