Mess Me Up
Page 26

Joe frowned, and I felt my shoulders shaking as I tried to keep the laughter quiet.
She was working him like a pro.
I smothered a grin with my hand.
“Okay.” He paused, looking around. His eyes stopping on an unsuspecting woman who was handing out water bottles. “Hey, Water Girl! Do you have any of your cookies?”
Jolene, or the Water Girl, as she was always referred to but who was actually the sports nutritionist for the team, frowned. “Joe Blow, I’m going to kick your ass if you keep calling me Water Girl.”
Joe held up his hands, and he started to fall backward off of the railing.
Both Izzy and Jolene started to gasp, but Joe caught himself before he could fall more than an inch or two.
“I’m sorry, WG. I’ll stop…for now,” he offered. “But tomorrow, I’ll likely forget, and you’ll have to remind me again just like you did today.”
Joe had a steel trap for a mind. He knew every freakin’ play he’d ever ran and didn’t have a single problem remembering anything. Yet he and Jolene had danced around each other like two dogs scrapping for the last piece of chicken.
Joe and Jolene had always been the two people that everyone on the team wondered why they weren’t together. I never understood why they didn’t just hook up and get whatever it was between them over with—or started.
I looked over at Izzy to see her giving me wide eyes.
I sent her a wink. “Hold my stuff.”
She held out her hand, and I started emptying my pockets. Handing her first my wallet, then my phone and keys, followed shortly by my watch.
“What have you been doing on your phone over the last hour?” I asked. “You seemed pretty intent on whatever it was you were doing.”
She shrugged. “Reading something online.”
My brows rose.
I’d tried to catch her attention quite a few times, but her eyes had been avidly focused on whatever it was she was looking at, which inevitably made me curious.
“Show me,” I demanded.
She rolled her eyes, then turned her phone around.
All I saw was writing on a page, but one word caught my eye. “Cock?”
She shrugged. “I was reading a good book, so sue me. Y’all are boring just standing around.”
My lips twitched. “That we are. If I get tackled and break myself, don’t laugh at me later, okay?”
Her eyes went serious. “I’d never laugh if you were hurt, Rome.”
I swallowed at the look in her eyes, which cleared just as quickly as they flared.
“Good,” I said softly. “Do you need anything? I think I have a bag of peanuts and a protein bar in my truck.”
She rolled her eyes. “I was just messing with ol’ Joe Blow. He gave me this sob story, so I had to lay it on just as thick.”
I winked at her. “Atta girl.”
Something changed in her eyes then. “Don’t get hurt, Rome. I have plans for your body later.”
The smirk that lit my face at her statement was nothing less than lecherous. “Good. I have plans for yours, too. Getting hurt in any way will fuck with that, and seeing you in those shorts since this morning is making me less than yielding.”
With that, I turned on my heels and barely caught the cleats that were tossed at my face in time. “You remember how to put these on, don’t you?”
I flipped Linc off. “Fuck you.”
“Don’t hurt him, Lincoln,” Izzy ordered.
Lincoln held up his hand in the Boy Scout’s sign and said, “Scout’s honor.”
Izzy looked at him. “Were you a Boy Scout, Lincoln?”
Linc’s lips twitched. “I was for about a week and a half until they figured out that I was walking two miles to the meetings by myself because my dad worked swing shift and couldn’t take me. When they found out, they tried to pick me up, and I didn’t like the sad looks they were giving me.”
Izzy’s gaze was intense on Linc as she saw something else working there behind his usual easy-going nature.
I’d noticed it myself a time or two.
Though Linc was quite outgoing and funny as well as approachable, he was also a lot older than his years. He didn’t act like any mid-twenties man that I knew.
“You’re trouble, Lincoln,” Izzy said softly. “You’ll come to dinner with us after the game?”
Linc looked a little startled. “Uhh, yeah.” He paused. “I guess.”
My mouth turned up in a smile. “You’re screwed. Just say yes.”
Linc shrugged. “Yes.”
Izzy’s smile was brilliant. “You don’t get hurt, either.”
With that, Linc’s easy grin was back. “My body is worth millions. If I break it, I don’t play. Trust me when I say it’s never my intention to get hurt. Plus, we’re just playing flag football, so no touching at all.”
Izzy narrowed her eyes. “I know boys, Linc. Trust me when I say that it’ll get out of hand.”
“Never,” Linc disagreed.
Let’s just say, she didn’t hesitate to say “I told you so” when it did, in fact, get out of hand.
***
I was laying on the ground, my balls screaming for me to do something, but there was nothing I could do.
I felt someone nudge my side, and I opened my clenched-shut eyes to see Izzy standing over me.
Her eyes were heated, and she was running that gaze of hers up and down the length of my shirtless body.
“You okay?” she asked.
I had one hand on my balls, and the other one clenched into a fist at my side.
I couldn’t manage anything but a short, jerky nod.
She looked over at Joe, then at Linc, who were watching sheepishly.
“You know,” she said softly to them both. “I had plans for those tonight.”
Joe snickered as Linc’s eyes widened. “He’ll be okay.”
“Maybe.” She tilted her head and leveled them both with an angry look. “But I told you not to let him get hurt, didn’t I?”
Linc winced. “It was an accident.”
“It most assuredly was not an accident,” she countered. “He gave you the slip, and you retaliated by diving at him. Your big, fat head hit his junk. It wasn’t nice.”
Linc look chagrined. “If he hadn’t said what he said, I would’ve left him alone.”
She turned her eyes back down to me. “What’d you say?”
I didn’t dare open my mouth, not when she looked so pissed.
It was kind of cute, actually.
“He said that Linc had his head in his vagina,” Joe offered. “And that if he needed help pulling it out, he knew a girl in Alabama that would gladly get it out for him.”
Izzy looked down at me. “Who’s the girl?”
“Conleigh,” I supplied just as Linc said, “No one.”
Joe started to laugh. “Linc has a girl who isn’t really his girl because he won’t let her be his girl.”
“That’s very convoluted, and I don’t know what it says about me that I actually understood what you said,” Izzy teased.
I sat up, my balls aching at an eight on the pain scale instead of the ten they had been a few moments before and looked around at the other men.
I’d held my own, because the other eleven men that had played with us were just as tired, sweaty, and worn out looking as I was.
“I’m not sure why you quit,” Joe said. “You were making moves out there that you weren’t making before you retired.”
“He’s lost some weight,” Izzy said. “And he’s rehabbed hard. He’s a very studious pupil who makes sure he gets all his work done.”
Joe snickered. “Oh, I’ll bet you help him get his work done…after you work him over yourself.”
Izzy flipped him off.
“Now, I’m really hungry,” she said. “You forgot to get me that cookie.”
“Oh, shit.” Joe turned to look around the field. “Hey, Water g—WG!”
I winced, expecting Jolene to turn around and kill him.
She didn’t, but you could tell that she wanted to.