Page 45 of Only Between Us

The happy mask must slip right off my face, because Brooks reaches for my waist and pulls me close. There’s a railing between us from the hips down, so our bodies don’t quite meet. But I’m close enough to breathe him in when he wraps his arms around me.

Brooks’s brows are pulled together. He seems as baffled by my concern as I am. There’s nothing fake about it. “I’ll be all right, Pip.” With a glance at our audience, he lays his forehead on mine. My lungs seize. “An injury right now would kill my chances. The news would make its way around the league in a second. I have to play through it.”

My arms go up around his neck. “Brooks, no. This is the moment we planned for—I’ll flash them, and we’ll hightail it out of here. They won’t know what hit them.”

My sheer relief at the sight of him genuinely laughing catches me by surprise. And I’m just taking liberties now, leaning into thefakeof it all and the prying eyes around us, when my fingers slide through the thick, short strands of hair at the back of his head.

His lips part with an exhale.

There’s still that damn fence in the way, but when he tugs me closer, this time my breasts press into his pad-covered chest. My thighs push into the barrier, metal cooling my heated skin.

“It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.” Brooks’s gaze falls to my mouth. “Hopefully… hopefully it can get fixed when we get home.”

One of the hands on my back slips lower, fingers tightening over the upper swell of my ass, and I arch into him, flattening into the hard padding covering his upper body.

For the sake of the prying eyes.

“So, listen,” Brooks says slowly. “I called the hotel to make sure we could have separate rooms this weekend, but it doesn’t look like that’s in the cards. They’re hosting the gala, and it’s completely booked up.”

I pull back a fraction to look him in the eye. “And you’re just telling me this now?”

“I didn’t want you backing out.” His fingers curve, digging into my ass. “I’m sorry.”

“Really?” I eye the tiny uptick to the corner of his mouth, fighting off my own smirk. “Because you don’t look sorry at all, Brooks Attwood.”

His grin grows just as the sharp, prolonged sound of a whistle cuts through our bubble.

“Can we cut it out with the free porn and get back to the fucking field?”

We turn toward the sound, to the players tossing water bottlesonto the turf. Some of them openly stare at our scene, others stare from out of the corner of their eye, and all of them are laughing at our guilty looks. The red-faced Tigers coach rolls his eyes.

Brooks chuckles. “I think we convinced them.”

Given the accelerated pace of my heart, I think we might have convincedme.

He splits away but I catch the front of his jersey before he can get too far. “Brooks, are you sure about this?”

He untangles my fingers from his jersey before kissing the center of my palm. “I’ll be all right.”

Brooks dons his helmet as he goes. He’s moving a fraction slower than usual, but he’s as sure-footed as ever. His hands are clenching and unclenching at his sides, but there’s no limp in sight.

Still, I can’t help thinking he’s being blind to the big picture. That maybe he can get through this scrimmage, but it’ll be at the expense of an easier recovery from what’s currently a simple injury.

He’s an overconfident athlete if I ever met one, and I’ve met plenty. They all think they’re infallible, can push their bodies to their limit and bounce right back the next morning to do it all over again.

From what I’ve seen, it always has a way of catching up to them.

Brooks drops our bags onto the carpeted floor of our hotel room and releases a desperate groan of relief when he sags onto the mattress of the solitary king-sized bed.

Through sheer force of will, he managed to pull through the rest of the scrimmage and an entire team dinner with the Tigers without a hint of discomfort. But he seems to be paying for it now, and I don’t know how we’re supposed to make it a whole other day tomorrow without letting on about it. Brooks kicks off his shoes and grips below his knee with both hands, attempting to rub at it without aggravatingthe injury. I can’t make out his full expression with his chin tucked down, but there’s a curve in his dark brows that makes me uneasy.

“What did your friends say about it?” He’d called his physical therapist friends as I took over driving for him after dinner, barely giving them one-word answers. He hasn’t said much since.

“They don’t think it’s a sprain, seeing as the swelling isn’t bad. Said it sounds like the muscles just locked up.” He stares at his knee despite what sounds to me like a positive prognosis. There’s no mistaking the way his shoulders, usually squared with confidence, deflate. “I couldn’t even make it through a single game without falling apart.”

The defeat in his voice has my heart sinking. I scramble for the right words. “It’s just your first game. There was always going to be an adjustment period, wasn’t there? This is… minor. Doesn’t mean anything for your prospects.”

“Doesn’t it?” Brooks meets my eye at last, and I almost wish he hadn’t. With his brows curved and the tight, almost lost expression in his brown eyes, he looks devastated. Like he’s already written himself off. It’s so unlike the man I know, who radiates self-assuredness like he’s got endless reserves of the stuff inside him. Even on the sideline, he seemed confident in his ability to keep playing. Had he been faking that, too? “One game, Pip. A low-impactscrimmage, of all things. I couldn’t keep up.”

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