Player's Princess (A Royal Sports Romance)(3)

I shake my head. No way she'd even notice some hick football player. She's a princess; I grew up in a trailer.

Doesn't stop me from thinking about her.

I've been catching glimpses of her on campus since I started school—she started the same year, I think. She's like a beautiful phantom, something otherworldly and ethereal that brings light and color into the world in her passing.

Oh for f*ck's sake, Jason, get your head out of your ass. You've never even met her and you're not going to. Besides the fact that she is way out of my league, if I try anything her bodyguards will tear me apart.

Of course, I can't see any bodyguards now. Usually they're hovering behind her like big Viking-esque shadows, ready to pounce on anyone who so much as looks at her. It's sort of an unwritten rule on campus that you don't approach the princess.

I wonder if that's lonely. She doesn't look like she rejects the crowd around her now. In a hoodie and jeans and sitting with Dee, she could just be an ordinary, average student.

Except there's nothing ordinary or average about her. The most I've ever seen her is in class, and every time I do something tugs in my chest, urging me to try talking to her no matter what her apelike bodyguards say about it. I have this throbbing desire to at least try, and yet….

There's a place in this world for guys like me, and princesses don't fit into it.

The game comes back to me like a bomb dropping. Possession of the ball has changed hands once more, and we have a chance to score again before the third quarter ends.

Ransom is still on the field as I run out. He grins at me.

"Get ready to taste turf, Hayseed," he yells.

That f*cking name. Who calls people that? Really?

I point at him and grin. You'll get yours one day, you miserable puke.

Head in the game, Powell. Focus. Get that ball down the field.

We're down a touchdown. We need to tie it up.

I glance over and see the princess, and the thought she's watching me—even if she's just watching the game—lights a fire in my chest, and I eagerly await the snap.



Ana



I should have thought to wear sunglasses. I must get a pair of sunglasses. I have a condition called heterochromia iridium. My right eye is blue, and my left eye is green. It makes escaping notice difficult. My eyes are the first thing most people see, and when I look anyone in the face, I know I'm announcing myself. I may be the only girl on campus with this trait.

It makes me easy to pick out of a crowd, as if being myself didn't make it easy enough. Everyone on campus knows what I look like. There's less of a commotion now than there was when I first arrived as a freshman, but now the incoming students have to gawk at me when I walk from class to class or eat in the cafeteria, until they grow bored.

If only someone would talk to me instead of stare. So far, only Dee has been brave enough. She was the first person to just walk up to me and, as the Americans do, say, "Hi." Somehow my bodyguards were willing to let her sit with me in the cafeteria while I picked at lukewarm spaghetti and greasy meatballs one afternoon late last year.

I snap out of my thoughts as the game resumes. It becomes a grind, the ball going back and forth. After the Knights make an extra point, neither team scores again for the rest of the first half, and then in the second the Knights manage one field goal.

In the end, the Knights win by three points. It feels like a pyrrhic victory as they leave the field. It was a close-run thing, the Badgers nearly making it into the end zone twice. If it weren't for a mistake by one of their players who dropped the ball and another who slipped on slick grass, the Knights would have lost.

"Come on," Dee says, grabbing my arm.

I rise with her, and we toss our trash, then join the throng of students walking away from the stadium. I keep my head down but look around, scanning for anyone snapping my picture or pointing me out. Every time I leave my room like this, I feel a nervous energy. The fear of getting caught becomes excitement and folds back into fear again, swinging one way or the other, taking my stomach with it.

"That was interesting," I tell Dee.

It was. I was rather wrapped up in it by the end. Whenever one of the hulking defensive players knocked Jason Powell down, I cringed and craned forward to see if he was hurt as I wrung my hands together.

I sigh. "I should get back…."

"Oh come on, it's six o'clock," Dee says. "You can't go home yet."

"Someone might recognize me."

She sighs, having heard this before. "Okay, hold up."

Dee takes my arm, and then leads me off the sidewalk and into a little convenience store that sits along the road back to campus. Once we're inside, she grabs a pair of cheap sunglasses in a plastic sheath, buys them from the shopkeep, and sticks them on my face.

"There. Keep your hood up and keep those on and you'll be fine. It's those damn eyes of yours we have to worry about."

My eyes, and my hair. It runs in my family. I have it, my mother has it, and if I have children they will have it. Hair so blonde it's more silver than gold, almost white; Mother's hair actually turned darker when it went gray.

Add to that the fact I haven't cut it since I was twelve, and it stands out.

I jab my hands into the pockets of my borrowed hoodie and follow Dee back toward town.