Challenging the Center (Santa Fe Bobcats #6)(24)
The thought of him looking at her as a favor turned her stomach sour.
Does she like the chili?
That thought… is why people come to you for mentoring advice, not love life advice, Lambert.
Does. She like. The chili.
Michael snorted as he broke the roll he’d tossed into the oven ten minutes before they ladled up some soup. Kat has insisted on vegetables—something about maintaining her girlish figure, which he knew was a joke—and had put together small salads with oil and vinegar dressing. But so far, that’s all she’d eaten.
“Something wrong?”
He glanced up from the bread he’d torn in two. “What?”
“You made a sound.” Kat nodded at the roll in his hands. “Problem with the roll?”
“No, I… okay.” He set it down on the plate beside his salad. “It’s your turn.”
Kat watched him for a moment, then picked up her roll, broke it in two and put it back on her plate. “Now what?”
He glared, and she snickered. So he nudged her under the table with his toe. She kicked back. He tugged on the plain placemat beneath her food. She pushed at his until it nearly spilled into his lap. He managed to juggle the bowl of chili right on the edge.
Kat chuckled.
When was the last time he’d had a woman push his buttons so fully that he wanted to push hers right back?
“Tell me why…”
“Why what?”
“Why you’re such a brat?”
She threw half her roll at him, which he ducked. She played tennis, not softball. It wasn’t a challenge.
“Fine, then tell me why you’re so hell-bent on becoming a walking cliché. Athletes Behaving Badly,” he added when she tilted her head to one side in question. “It’s a cliché for a reason.”
“Ah, yes. The good old ABB. Corrupting young athletes since… I don’t know. Whenever we started paying people to play sports.” She grinned. He grinned right back at her.
“It wasn’t really a full-on decision to act badly, you know.” She tore the second half of her roll in two, then continued to pick at it so that fluffy white bread crumbs floated to the plate. Her eyes didn’t meet his, in what seemed almost like a retreat. “Well, you know about the tape…”
She let that sentiment hang, and he didn’t correct her or ask questions. That was answer enough for both of them.
“Nobody believed me. Nobody… nobody sided with me. Nobody,” she added in a small voice, shredding the remaining half of her roll on her plate. He watched as her slender, strong fingers methodically ripped each piece in half until there was nothing left to rip, then start on another piece. “I lost money, lost friendships—or maybe acquaintances that were friendly since I guess a real friend would have believed me. I lost credibility. No one wanted to bother listening to my side of the story.”
He nodded, taking a sip of water. If he spoke now, the spell would be broken. She’d clam up. He felt it.
“So… I figured why not stop toeing the line? Where did playing by the rules get me? A scarlet letter for doing nothing, that’s where. I wouldn’t say I intentionally started looking for trouble. I just… stopped avoiding doing things I wanted to do. Suddenly everyone is on my case about misbehaving.” Her head lifted then, and there was fire in her eyes. “Who gets to decide where the line is between misbehaving and just having fun?”
“I guess that’s a line each person reading the news story draws themselves. Opinions are like *s, after all.”
“Now who’s being cliché?” she teased.
He rolled his eyes.
“I don’t go out deliberately looking for trouble. I don’t want trouble. I want fun. There’s a difference in my head. It’s just that—”
“Trouble seems to find you?”
She scowled and ignored that. “There’s a double standard any way I slice it. I go to a bar and join an innocent lip-sync contest? A guy might do that, and he’s seen as charming and down-to-earth. I do it and people act like I’m, well…”
“Naked, rolling in Jell-O?” he asked mildly, referring back to his conversation with Sawyer.
“Yeah, about that.” She smiled slightly, then dragged her spoon through the chili. “Thanks for standing up for me with Sawyer. I think he struggles with this whole concept. You know, a female not sitting down and shutting up when he gives them a dirty look or two. I’m off script, and it scares him.”
“Maybe if it scares Sawyer, it should scare you too,” he said quietly.
Kat absorbed that for a moment while she tasted the chili for the first time. He watched as her eyes closed after the first warm sip, and she relaxed. It was physically evident in every inch of her body. Her shoulders dropped, her eyelids lowered, her mouth lost the tight, aggravated, pinched look. Everything in her made the slide from tethered anger to simple relaxation.
“It’s good,” she said after a minute. “Good chili.”
She likes my chili. Michael smiled into his bowl and took another bite.
Chapter 7
The next morning, Kat debated asking Michael to take her to work out again but decided to make use of the equipment downstairs in the main fitness area. It was definitely more comprehensive than some apartment workout rooms she’d seen in the past, but not nearly enough for her. But for a day between harder workouts, it would do. What she really needed was a court. Her rackets in her hand, a full cart of balls at the ready, and an entire hour to serve at cones or just to hit the shit out of the ball and watch the fuzz fly.