Page 14 of Ready to Score

“So now you’re a mind reader?”

Lim shrugged. “I think I can read you pretty well, at least.”

Jade kept silent, her arms still crossed tightly over her breasts, now heaving as her heart rate increased. She didn’t like that. Not one bit. Had she ever met anyone as presumptuous as this woman? They barely knew each other, and yet she thought she somehow knew everything there was to know about Jade?

“You’re so full of shit,” Jade said, lip curling.

“It’s not that serious.” There was that fucking shrug again, like everything was cool and nothing mattered. “You wear every emotion on your face, Dunn. Reading you is like reading a picture book.”

Lim grinned then, and Jade’s heart stuttered. That was offensive, wasn’t it? And wrong. Jade prided herself on being unreadable. Most people, especially those who weren’t close to her, never seemed to know what she was thinking. Honestly, they just assumed she was mad all the time. That was one of the not-so-hidden truths of being a Black woman, though. Any emotion that wasn’t explicitly happy read as mad to people who couldn’t be bothered to examine their own bullshit.

Right now, though, shewasangry. Or at least she thought she was. She didn’t know what other emotion could cause such heat to sear through her entire abdomen or make her knees feel so close to buckling.

“What do you see now, then?” she asked, her throat dry, finallyuncrossing her arms so she could shove her sweaty hands in the pockets of her shorts.

“You want me,” Lim said simply.

“Bullshit.”

Lim’s eyes ventured to her chest, and Jade knew immediately that she could see her hard nipples through the thin material of her shirt.

“That always happens when I’m mad,” Jade lied. “It definitely doesn’t mean I want you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Jade took a deep breath. “How about I tell you what I do want, then? I want you off my field. I want you to take those stilts you call legs over to Coach Landry and tell him that you’re not coming to poker on Thursday because you’ve finally come to your senses and realized that you’re simply not qualified to coach at this level.”

“Hmmm.” Lim tapped a finger on her chin like she was thinking about it. “No, I don’t think that’s what you actually want.Ithink you kind of like having me here. I think you like my company. I also think you want to kiss me.”

It was Jade’s turn to snort, but it was half-hearted. “I think you are loathsome and full of shit.”

“And I think your lackluster offensive line is the reason this team hasn’t won a championship title in five years.”

Every ember that smoldered in Jade was stoked by those words. Her upper lip curled, mouth preparing to release something viciously nasty, but before she could get the last word in, they were interrupted.

“Ms. Lim,” Coach Landry said, and from the way his eyes had widened, he seemed to sense that something was happening between them. “The offensive line boys are about to run some dip-and-rip drills. You want to help us over there? Give me a chance to see how you handle running ’em.”

Lim gave Jade one last long look, and this time she wasn’t smirking. Jade couldn’t quite read it, but she could tell the other woman wanted to say something else. She didn’t, though. She gave Landry one curt nod before jogging off to where the other O-line coaches were rounding the kids up.

“You good, Dunn?” Landry coughed.

“Yes, Coach.”

When she finally calmed herself enough to look him in the eye, his were concerned.

“What just happened there?”

Had she been willing to play dirty or be a snitch, she might have told him what Lim had said. But she wasn’t. She was going to beat the other woman’s ass at this, and she was going to do it clean too. Jade didn’t need to tattle to their boss to get what she wanted. She needed to figure out how to get in Lim’s head.

“Just a little friendly competition,” she told him with a sickly sweet smile. “Ms. Lim’s trying to throw her weight around a bit.”

Their eyes turned to across the field where Lim stood, now in front of the other coaches, with a whistle around her neck as she talked to the boys.

“I’m giving her a fair shake,” he said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re shooting for.”

His words made something twinge in her belly. It was the kind of feeling you got when you knew you were wrong about something and felt guilty, even though you were going to stand in your wrongness. All that talk of solidarity and sisterhood seemed to have flown out the window for her. Somewhere deep, deep down in her chest, she got the feeling that Landry was right. That Lim’s presence on the team didn’t hurt her own. But out here in the real world, she just couldn’t make that truth curl all the way over for herself.

“Sure it does, Coach.”

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