Ignoring the offer, she opted to switch on a floor lamp. Warily, Millie peered down at her shoes. The nappy faux hide on her Jimmy Choo ballet flats was damp but otherwise appeared none the worse for wear in spite of her stealth approach. When Ty hadn’t answered the ring of the bell, she’d had to activate plan B. Since there was no way she’d chance rolling ass over teakettle down his steeply sloped yard to get to the back door, she’d cut across the neighbor’s yard to get to his split-level McMansion.
Exhaling her frustration, she shifted straight into fixer mode. “Okay. Time to pull up your big-boy pants and make a plan.”
Without taking his eyes off her, Ty tossed the drink back with a flick of his wrist. He fixed her with an oddly defiant glare as he let the tumbler slip from his fingers and drop to the floor.
“My big-boy pants?”
Millie goggled as the heavy crystal glass rolled across the wide-planked wood without shattering. She stared after it in wonder. Had it survived the fall because his arms were so long and it hadn’t had far to go? Shaking her head, she thanked God she wouldn’t have to add cleaning up shards of glass to her to-do list for the night.
“Right.” She clapped her hands together. “Your woman has ditched you. No big deal. Happens all the time.”
“Thank you for your condolences.”
She let the sarcasm pass. He could expend his anger on her all he wanted. She was more worried about what he said to other people.
Moving past him into the still-shadowy great room, she spotted the remote control perched on the arm of the overstuffed armchair and made a beeline for it. She pointed the zapper at the screen and switched the power off, plunging them into thick, buzzing silence.
Feeling steadier, she faced Ty once more. “The real juicy part is she left you for one of your players.”
Ty planted his big, ball-handler hands on his hips. “Thanks for clarifying,” he said gruffly. “I almost missed the juice.”
Millie rolled her eyes. She didn’t care what her friend Kate said about an athlete’s innate mental toughness. There was nothing trickier than handling a bunch of superjocks and their touchy egos. “I am sorry, Ty, but you had to have seen something like this coming, right?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be making me feel better or something?”
“I’m not your mommy. I’m not here to kiss the boo-boo and make everything better.” A shiver ran down her spine even as she spoke the words. Awareness. Hot. Tingling. Happened every time they shared space. Which meant she’d had more than two years to get a handle on her attraction to him. Too bad being near him made her grip feel shaky. “No, my job is to help you put the best possible face on a situation that may reflect badly on the university.”
He inclined his head slightly but still managed to look straight down his nose at her. “You’re a real pal, Millie.”
“I’m working,” she reminded him. “I’ll try to be a better pal when I’m off the clock.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Setting her jaw, she studied him, measuring his readiness to step up to the line on this one. “First of all, we have to keep you off the phone. Then, we need to spin your marital situation: amicable split, coming for a long time, you wish her well, blah, blah, blah. When they start lobbing questions about Dante, we keep the focus on your contributions to his NBA career.”
“So you don’t think I should go on TV and tell the press I want to take a baseball bat to his shins?”
She blinked, surprised by even the hint of violence coming from this quiet giant of a man. “Do you?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Kinda.”
“Over her? Really?” The questions, three simple words tinged with seven shades of disbelief, popped out before she could stop them. “I thought you two were pretty much done before all this.”
The air between them sizzled and cracked with tension. At last, he ran a hand over his close-cropped hair and down to knead the muscles in his neck. “No. Not over her.”
“Then why?”
The corners of his mouth curled up in a rueful smile, but she didn’t see even a glimmer of happiness in his eyes. When he spoke, he enunciated each word slowly, as if he were forced to explain his reasoning to a particularly slow toddler. “Because I envy his court time. His career. His future.” He flung one long arm out. “He’s just starting out. No injuries. Nothing holding him back. He’s going to have the career I never had.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Then this could be the strangest midlife crisis ever.”
He held up both hands. “Hey, I’m not having a crisis, and this is not my fault.”
His palms looked to be about the size of salad plates. A fact Millie had long found intriguing. But this wasn’t the time or place to speculate about how great it would feel to have those big mitts all over her. She could let her fantasies loose later. When she was alone.
Besides, the defensive note in his denial told her he wasn’t quite as cool with his wife leaving him for one of his NBA-bound players as he wanted her to think. Feeling the need to do something, anything, to make him realize she was on his side, she reached out and gave his arm an awkward pat. “No. No, it’s not. And I am sorry.”
He looked down at her hand, a smirk curving his lips as she yanked her fingers away a tad too quickly. “Wow. You really suck at the sympathy thing.”
Millie had the good grace to grimace. “I’ve never been very touchy-feely.”
Ty cocked his head. “I’m surprised.”
“Are you?”
He took a half step closer. “You don’t strike me as the kind of woman to shy away from anything.”
Proved how much he knew about her. It was all she could do to hold her ground.
