Challenging the Center (Santa Fe Bobcats #6)(45)

Instead, she found herself terrified by the thought of him getting hurt. Which was insane because he was just a guy who was supposed to be keeping an eye on her. Mentoring. Babysitting.

After splashing water on her face in the bathroom and a quick mental pep talk to suck it up, she walked back out toward the seating. And stopped at the entrance. She wasn’t quite ready to go back down yet and be down there with all the women and families who apparently knew the drill and thought nothing of watching their loved ones get knocked around like bowling pins.

But she needed a minute to get her mind off the fact that she was watching someone she probably shouldn’t care about—but did—being pummeled on the regular.

As she stood at the mouth of the aisle, she watched both teams come back to the benches for the end of the first… quarter. Music began to blare, and she watched as the Bobcat cheerleaders ran out onto the field to do some little jiggle-dance number.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned around to apologize for being in the way. Then she smiled a little. Hello, distraction…



Michael took his helmet off and grabbed a bottle of water as the tray was passed by. The helmet was a sauna, and he winced as sweat rolled into his eyes. His butt perched on the edge of the bench with a few other guys from his line. Every one of them was leaning forward, in anticipation, in aggression. They were up by only three, and now was definitely not the time to get comfortable, even on a break.

Then one of the guys beside him laughed and elbowed him. “Check out Benny.”

Why the hell would he give two shits about where Benny the Bobcat mascot was during a game? Michael shrugged it off and squirted more water into his mouth, then over his face to cool him down.

“Lambert, check it out.”

Oh, for God’s sake. “What?” he growled, looking up as his teammate pointed to the jumbo screen above the end zone.

And found Kat, doing a booty-shaking salsa with Benny the Bobcat at the top of the aisle to Metro Station’s “Shake It.” She laughed and kicked her leg out as he spun her around and dipped her old-Hollywood style. Then he let her go, and she shook her ass and whipped her hair around in abandon, as if she had no clue she was being filmed at all and thousands of people were watching.

Several guys looked up from the sidelines, smiling and nodding along. A few imitated her moves with each other, causing uproarious laughter from not just the other guys on the team but the crowd nearby.

Something flashed on the bottom of the screen, and suddenly her name popped up, alongside “Pro tennis player” and what he assumed was her current ranking.

“How do they do that?” he hissed. The guys on the team—or some of them—knew who Kat was. Kristen, Caleb, a few others in the front office. But how would the guys in the control booth know…

Did she tip someone off? Was this all a setup?

“Dude, your face could scare small kids.” Josh Leeman, the Bobcats’ backup quarterback, sat beside him. “I’m not sure what’s going on with all that,” he added, gesturing to his own face and then pointing at Michael’s, “but you better clean it up before a camera finds you and suddenly the story is you and I are in a major fight over a girl.”

“We aren’t fighting over a girl. You found yours.”

“I did.” Looking like a smug * about it, Josh settled back on the bench, his preferred spot. “And it only took me twenty-seven years to figure it out.”

“Why don’t you go annoy Trey on the quarterback bench?” Michael suggested icily, watching as the camera panned to other spectators doing a similar booty-shaking dance. At least they weren’t focusing on Kat’s ass anymore.

“Trey’s in his own world again, like normal.” It wasn’t said maliciously or even in an annoyed tone. Everyone on the team just knew that if Trey was playing, he had his nose in the playbook and was reviewing options. Trey was one of the most social guys Michael knew, but on game day, he was all business.

The screen cut back once more to a shot of the back of Benny Bobcat and Kat, both of whom were shaking their, er, tails.

“God damn it,” Michael muttered to nobody, then tore his eyes away from the screen. When they got home later, Kat would know exactly what he thought of her midgame ass shake.





Chapter 13





Kat’s cell phone rang even as she hit the button for the elevator of the apartment building. Michael wouldn’t be home yet, not for another hour or two by Aileen’s estimation. But she hadn’t wanted to wait around. Her stomach was still in knots from the game, and she needed to get out before she did something ridiculous like go around the stadium to find one of the Seahawks’ defense, push one of those three-hundred-and-fifty-pound linemen on the shoulder, and yell, “Stop hitting him!”

Sanity would need to return before she would be ready to see Michael’s face again.

But even as she toed off her shoes, she felt the vibration of her phone in her pocket. She dug it out and sighed at seeing her old coach’s number on the screen. “Hello, Peter.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” her coach demanded in his thickly accented broken English. “Do you think we sent you out there to middle of nowhere to get samba lessons from a saber-toothed tiger?”

“Okay, Peter, first off… it was a bobcat.” She held the phone away from her ear as she listened to her coach go off in Russian. You’d think, after over four years with the man, she’d have learned more than just a few Russian curses… but no dice. When he seemed to finally calm down, she tried again. “And secondly, I didn’t know the cameras were filming the crowd. Why would I know that?”