“Okay,” she said, clapping her hands and rubbing them together. “Since I can’t talk you out of the heartbreak you’re headed for, what can I do to help?”
“Just keep my nephew in for another month while we train.”
“You’ll need to go to Philly with them—”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Cain, they’re going to need you there.”
“I said I’m not leaving.” I shot her the same look I gave suspects when they took advantage of my demeanor and got mouthy. Hell, I had to keep up my skills.
“Okay, we’ll talk about that part at another time—”
“Looking forward to it,” I muttered.
“Hey, don’t make me practice my mom voice on you.”
“You don’t have a—”
A knock echoed through the room, cutting off what I was about to say. I climbed to my feet, grabbed a rag, and walked around to the straightaway, my feet rooting to the spot when I saw the familiar face standing there.
“Word around town is Beautifully Brutal is training to save Crossroads,” Tilly said from the door. “I want in.”
14
After two soul-sucking days of double shifts at The Shipwreck wrangling the families rolling into town for the impending Christmas holiday, followed by two nights spent trying to talk my team into this plan, I just wanted to lay here after my shift and bask in the Christmas lights from the two-foot tree on my end table.
I wanted to shove my face so deep in their glow I’d need sunglasses and SPF50.
Was that too damn much to ask?
I’d done so much taming of tantrums, assuaging of egos, and kissing of disgruntled ass in the past two days, I needed a therapist, a chiropractor, and an asshole bleaching kit for my mouth after all the ass I’d had to lick to bend people to my will.
Ass licking in porn—intriguing.
Ass licking in real life thus far—unpredictable, with a bit of crunch, salty as fuck, and plagued with pesky rogue hairs.
Shut up, we’ve all been there.
A man too macho to consider a bit of manscaping.
An overeager thrust of his hips jamming his man wand so deep down your throat his balls try to crawl in too.
And a ball hair or three with no manners.
Next thing you know you’ve placed a Prime order on the Zon for mega tweezers long enough to untangle short and curlies from your uvula next time because chugging drinks didn’t wash them down this time.
And really, no cocktail existed strong enough to forget they lay back there tickling your throat until they decided to have mercy on your soul and slide down.
The last short and curly I’d been forced to deal with in the past twenty-four hours was Patti’s—um, well, that didn’t sound right.
You know what I mean.
The woman spent two nights giving me side-eye for climbing on her bar despite sending her a slammin’ edible arrangement from Crum Cakes. And I sprung for the cinnamon bun as big as her seventies hair.
But it wasn’t until Mike from Dawson’s Hardware tried to be funny by suggesting Patti start paying me to perform up on the bar that she turned that side-eye on him and silently declared me in the clear.
Well, I should be in the clear. This was partly her fault. I wouldn’t have known there was another banked track around here had it not been for her.
Because Priest sure as hell wasn’t telling.
Pulling secrets—or hell, just straight-up information out of him was like trying to drag a cat into a bathtub of water and pit bulls.
Same could be said for convincing my team to agree to work with him. The exhibition had definite appeal to them. His track did too.
As for his involvement…more than half the team gave a swift no.
But my psyche had grown jagged, sharp claws and hooked into the idea of his training like a horny bitch coming out of a year-long self-imposed dry spell to dig her nails into the scrumptious ass cheeks of a sweaty rock-hard Magic Mike dancer while she wrapped her thighs around him and squeezed him so fucking tight she tried to crack his hips like walnuts.
Basically, I’d refused to take no for an answer.
At the same time, I got it. I completely understood their trepidation.
We’d put in hundreds of hours into our compliance and application to the WRDF. Time away from our families, our friends, hours of sleep lost when we were already stretched so thin.
Plus, we had money into this.
Real money.
Money we would not get back.
With this being a mostly quiet small town, scandal had a hell of a long shelf life. There were more than a few mouths around here willing to spread the word. And it had already begun.
You’d think they had better things to do with Christmas around the corner, but nope. Fueled with festive cocktails, more family around than ever to regal with tales, and embellishments these people had injected the salacious chatter with a hulking round of steroids until it flowed as smooth as rum-spiked eggnog.
But at what point did it stop? Ten years? Clearly not.
What about twenty?
Never?
Did we really need to be worried that somehow word would get to the WRDF?
And so what if word did get to them? Were they going to deny our application based on gossip? If they were, why would we even want to become a WRDF team anyway?
Sure, we wanted to grow derby in our area and up our game play, but did we really need them to do it? If left with no other choice, why couldn’t we just start our own junior leagues, recruit members, build more teams on our own?
I didn’t point that part out just yet. I decided to vent my doses of reality to my team in manageable nuggets. They were already on edge. Even the people who’d readily agreed to Priest’s involvement were fidgeting like they were fifteen again, storing contraband in the form of a half-naked varsity football player in their closet sporting 100% activated boy peen.
No
