Dirty Tackle: A Football Romance
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Authors: King,Imani
Dirty Tackle
Bad Boy Ballers
By Imani King
© 2016 Imani King
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.
Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.
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Eight Years and Nine Months Ago
Maddy Thompson was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, in Rosewood or anywhere else for that matter. Besides that, she was the smartest girl I’d ever talked to, and she liked football. All in all, she was damn perfect.
And I’ve regretted not telling her that, right then and there, for every day since then.
Instead of letting her know that night at the bar exactly how beautiful I thought she was, and how much I liked talking to her about the football team and everything else, I said, “Yeah, no strings attached. I’m not that type of guy.”
It was dark in the bar, and her eyes flashed in my direction over and over that night. She’d come up to me and told me she needed a ride home, and she was hoping I was up to the task. I’d had one—maybe two beers—and she didn’t have a car there with her. And we’d just gotten to Brooks University all the way from Virginia. I was the only person she knew. And someone told me she’d had eyes for me forever, though I didn’t quite believe them.
Because it felt like forever that I’d been watching her, wanting her.
I stared at her when she came up to me like she was a ghost that had appeared out of nowhere.
“Well are you going to take me back to my dorm, or what, Shane Wright? You’re the only guy I know in this whole town, so I thought I’d ask you first since I’m pretty sure you’re not a serial killer.” Her voice was melodic and soft, but I could hear every word, even in the noisy atmosphere of the bar. It’s like I’d been waiting to talk to her all night.
Even though the boys on the team called me “Dirty Tackle” because of the way I played—and the way the Brooks University freshman girls followed me around—Maddy Thompson made me shut right up in confusion whenever she talked to me. I was a bad boy by reputation, all right, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a soul. And Maddy touched that piece of me, even back then.
“No, I guess I’m not. And I guess I can,” I said after a pause that didn’t make me look like a
dirty
bad boy, or an offensive tackle, either one.
“Then get me out of here.”
We were quiet on the ride back to her place. She had one of those single dorm rooms that I was jealous of, even though I lived in the best dorm on campus. It would be worth it to live a farther walk from everything if I didn’t have to have a roommate.
I nodded to her when we pulled up outside of her dorm. “Have a good night,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to walk me in?”
I gulped. At that point, I was familiar with how women looked at me when they wanted a certain thing, Usually, I was ready to oblige, right out of the gate. But Maddy wasn’t the type of girl I usually walked in. “I could do that.”
I turned off the car, and she offered me her arm as we walked up the steps to her brick dorm building. “Listen, Shane. I’m going back to Rosewood tomorrow. And I’ve liked you for a long time. I know you like me too.”
“We’re friends—I do like you, of course—” I internally kicked myself for being so stupid. I knew what this woman was saying, and I should have been jumping at the chance to be with her.
“You do like me. And you know you do. We’ve been skating around this thing since forever. And I’m going home tomorrow to finish college there. For the sake of my parents and my family. All that.” She reached up to my face and pulled me in. “You should kiss me and take me inside. And then we should—do what you have a reputation for.”
I thought about protesting, but even a nervous man has his limits. “And what do I have a reputation for?”
“For keeping the freshman girls up all night long. Or so I’ve heard. And if we’re just friends, then there are no strings attached when I go back to Rosewood—”
“Yeah, no strings attached. I’m not that type of guy.” I winked at her then and took her inside.
Instead of talking, we kissed, my lips strong and hot against hers, her tongue glancing against mine. We fell into her room like a couple of kids in high school, clothes coming off and landing in piles on the floor. I didn’t ask her exactly why she was going home or what it had to do with her family—I just kissed her. Her deep red top came off, and my mouth found her breasts, bra flying to the floor in a mad rush. She moaned, and gentle whimpers escaped her lips. When I took my shirt off, the core of me grew tight, and I realized that there was nothing more in the world than this woman. I needed her, like a man needs to breath air. She unzipped my jeans, and it was all over.
Everything happened fast after that. Blood rushed to my cock, and I grew hard as steel. She knelt before me and tasted me until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I picked her up and threw her back on the bed, entering her as a loud, satisfied groan escaped her lips.
“It feels so good,” she gasped, “to have you deep inside of me.” I almost exploded at that very moment, but I held off, making sure to touch the base of my cock to her clit with each thrust, bringing her closer and closer to the edge. Her sex tightened around me after what felt like forever, and I felt her legs shake against the small of my back, the whole of her body wrapped tight around me. She begged me to come inside of her, told me she was on the pill, that she was clean and knew I was too. I’d told her that once in one of our many conversations.
I didn’t tell her, though, that I’d never entered a woman bare. That I’d always fantasized about her, nothing between us, filling her and taking her to her limits.
When she came, she begged me again. “Fill me up, Shane. Please.” I came deep inside this time, my mind tipping over into oblivion.
We fell asleep like that, limbs intertwined.
In the morning when we woke, I spread her legs and tasted her before I pulled her on top of me and watched her ride my cock, deep red flushing over her brown skin as she came hard, riding me.
After that, I took her to breakfast and drove her to the airport.
No strings attached.
And just like that, she was gone.
I’ve thought of that woman every day since then, even with all the women I’ve taken home in between.
And I never thought I’d see her again.
Present Day
My eyes had gotten blurry from staring at all of the stacks of paperwork with numbers in front of me. “I’m a doctor, not an accountant, but from what I can tell, this looks bad.” I hadn’t wanted to verbalize that obvious truth, even though I knew my parents, sitting across the table from me, already knew this. “Why didn’t you tell me how bad this was before? I moved back here once to fix these problems. I love you guys but—wow. What is going on here?”
“We didn’t want to worry you,” my father said. “Especially with your new job and everything else you’ve been worried about.”
“I have a little bit of money put away, and I’m going to be making almost twice as much with this new job. I’m sure I can funnel some of that back to you.” Even as I said these words, I felt a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. The money I had been squirreling away ever since my first job out of residency was meant to be put toward a down payment on a house. That was my dream. A beautiful little house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a set of monkey bars in the back yard for Scarlet.
“We can’t take any money from you,” my mother said quietly. “Had we known what Darrell was doing, obviously, we would’ve fired him years ago.”
My heart felt heavy for them. My parents had been in business for fifteen years. They had built their small service business cleaning commercial properties from the ground up. Their very first full-time employee was a man named Darrell Brown. He was their bookkeeper. It turned out that Darrell started embezzling from the business about five years ago. My parents found out six months ago when my father got a call from the bank requesting authorization for an abnormally large withdrawal, but by then it had been too late. The damage had already been done. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been siphoned out of the business, and they’d be lucky to recover a fraction of it. Even then, it wouldn’t come back to them anytime soon.