Page 8 of Branded
No fucking way.
I grabbed it, rolled it tighter, and…let it rip.
Four
Kailey
Normally, I would be in my own world, not noticing the noise that came from the locker room.
Making a special effort to avoid the locker room altogether.
To not even be on the same side of the building.
Because there were naked men in there.
Because…there was a naked Conner Smith in there.
And as I was now part of the team, I had all sorts of inside information about the team. Including knowing that Smitty enjoyed being naked.
That…
Created all sorts of problems—at least inside my head. Because I’d thought of the deep brown eyes, the mouth quirking beneath his thick beard, his strong hands steadying me…
Way too much in the last few days.
He’d gotten into my head.
And that spelled trouble.
I could blame it on a weird spell or the aforementioned trouble or just Conner being Conner. Or, I supposed, I could blame it on the fact that after my meeting with Luc and Oliver and several people from the social media strategy team about the new app the Breakers wanted to release to the public, I’d been off my game due to too much peopling. Or I could place that blame on Luc asking me to stay after that meeting, remaining in his office and talking about some bugs that had come up in the program I’d built to track player development, the reason I was here in Baltimore in the first place, drawing on my already faltering reserves and making my head a little muzzy.
Because now, it was late, and I was tired.
But I was going back to my office to get my purse, and instead of going home, I was going to Hazel and Oliver’s place.
Food.
A boardgame.
Cuddling with baby Dominic, who wouldn’t judge me for being weird.
Checking out Oliver’s new gaming computer. He’d just finished building it and considering we’d first met in an online Discord chat about one of our favorite games and had become virtual friends way before real-life friends, eating food, playing a game, and checking out some tech sounded like my idea of perfection…
Only second to spending the night alone in my bath with my book.
I was thinking about his processor, wondering if it’d be able to handle the latest update of the game we both still played, happy to be in my head for a little while because it meant that I could escape a bit from the socializing of the meeting.
Oliver was okay.
Luc…was problematic. Not that I didn’t like him. I did. A lot, actually. He was really cool and easy going and super smart. But he was my boss, in a way that was clearly my boss, not in the sort-of-friend, sort-of-boss way that described my working relationship with Oliver.
He let me do my thing.
I did my thing.
There wasn’t a lot of boss-employee overlap with our friendship.
With Luc, there was no overlap.
