Page 13 of Play for Keeps

Millie blew out a breath and let her head fall back. “Bullshit.”

Ty just grinned in response. She made it through the part about seat cushion flotation devices before she glanced at him again. “What happened to your mom?”

He tossed the question off with a weak shrug. “She left when I was four.”

A small gasp escaped her, and he squeezed her fingers to show both his appreciation and to reassure her. “We were fine.” He chuckled. “That’s what my dad kept telling me. ‘We’re fine. We’re gonna be fine.’”

“You never heard from her?”

He answered with a bitter little laugh. “Oh yeah. She showed up when I was playing college ball. The second the press dubbed me the next Michael Jordan, she came flitting around doing the old ‘that’s my boy’ routine, but I shut her down.”

“How?”

He gave her a sad shadow of a smile. “Distract, deflect, deny. You’d have been proud of how well I handled her. Eventually, she went away.”

“How long did it take?”

“She hung in for a couple of seasons after the draft. When she realized she wasn’t getting a slice of the pie, she tried manufacturing stories for the tabloids.” He looked up to find the attendants stowing their props. The plane began to taxi toward the runway, but his heart slowed to almost a stop when he saw the stark outrage on Millie’s face. “What?”

She narrowed her eyes, not the least bit put off by his inane question. “Nothing. I hate when people fumble planting a fake story. It’s so damn easy, a child could do it.”

Ty laughed. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t quite Kobe Bryant and nowhere near M.J. in terms of success. I think Kris Humphries ended up with a better Q score than I ever did, but I didn’t have to get hitched on TV either. Why bother with a headline about a guy no one cares about?”

Twisting in her seat, Millie crossed her slim runner’s legs and angled toward him. “I love that you know about Q scores.”

“I think I peaked when I was twenty-two.”

She shrugged. “Most men do.”

He grinned. “A myth.”

“So you would have me believe,” she retorted without missing a beat.

She gave his hand a gentle squeeze as the plane started down the runway with a roar of engines. Enthralled by the contrast of her skin against his, he traced the lines of her long, slender fingers with his free hand. “I’d like nothing more than to prove my…stamina to you over and over.”

“You’re a married man.” She uttered the reminder as the nose of the plane lifted. The moment they were wheels up, Millie straightened her fingers in an unspoken demand he release her. “I’ve spent the last week telling the world what an upright kind of guy you are. Don’t make me a hypocrite.”

Reluctantly, he let her go. But she didn’t put the expected distance between them. Instead, she loosened her seat belt a little, pushed the button to recline, and shifted fully onto her side.

“It isn’t that I’m not interested,” she said bluntly. “I think we both know I am. I know you are. We like each other, which is both a bonus and an obstacle—”

“How do you figure?”

“Bonus, because, hey, we like each other,” she said, throwing up her hands. “It’s also an obstacle because, hey, we like each other.”

Her delivery on the second part held a note of warning that rang too true to suit his purposes, so he ignored it. The crew moved through the dimly lit cabin, working with the kind of hushed efficiency he equated with hospital waiting rooms and the lobbies of funeral homes. But he wasn’t anyplace so morose. He was on a plane winging his way to the most vibrant city in the country with a woman he’d found fascinating since the day they were introduced. He didn’t want to be hushed or quiet or, heaven forbid, circumspect. For the first time in years, he wanted to draw attention to himself. To her. To the fact that he was the guy she chose to sit beside.

But of course, she hadn’t really chosen to run away to New York with him. She was going because leading him through the press steeplechase was her job. He was her project. The pathetic part of this whole mess wasn’t his wife leaving him for another guy. No, he worried more Millie could be playing him with this whole “we like each other” spiel, and he was falling for her line. She might be humoring him. Or worse, babysitting to be sure he didn’t go off the deep end live on the National Sports Network. And the only defense he had was to play his kind of up-tempo offense.

“And your folks?” he asked, pretending their conversation hadn’t taken a sharp left turn at sexual hypocrisy.

She blinked, and her forehead creased. “What?”

Pressing his shoulder into the seat, he mimicked the intimacy of her body language as much as the space would allow. “Your parents. Tell me about them.”

The lines of her brow smoothed, and the wariness in her eyes melted into something close to gratitude but not nearly as standoffish. “What about them?”

“Anything.”

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