Match Me if You Can (28 page)

Heath gently pried her fingers loose. “Relax. Lover Boy can take care of himself.”

“All I wanted was to be a matchmaker. Is that so hard to understand? A simple matchmaker.” She slumped back on her heels. “My life is crap.”

Leandro frowned. “Annabelle, you’re starting to get on my nerves.”

Three long strides brought Robillard to her side. He gave Heath a long look, then looped his arm around Annabelle and kissed her hard on the lips. Fury exploded behind Heath’s eyelids. His right hand curled into a fist, but this was Annabelle’s house, and she’d never forgive him if he did what he wanted to.

“Annabelle’s my woman,” Dean announced as he broke the kiss and gazed into her eyes. “Anybody gives her trouble has to deal with me…and my offensive line.”

Annabelle looked annoyed, which made Heath feel a hell of a lot better. “I can take care of myself. What I can’t deal with is a house full of drunken morons.”

“That is so harsh,” Eddie said, looking injured.

Dean stroked her shoulder. “You guys know how irrational pregnant women can get.”

Way too many heads started nodding.

“Did you take that test like I told you, baby doll?” Dean slipped his arm around her again. “Do you know yet if you’re carryin’ my love child?”

Apparently that was too much for Annabelle, because she started to laugh. “I need a beer.” She grabbed Tremaine’s bottle and drained what was left.

“You shouldn’t drink if you’re pregnant,” Eddie Skinner said with a frown.

Leandro swatted him in the head.

Heath realized he was having the best time he’d had in weeks.

Which reminded him of Delaney.

Annabelle had been too preoccupied to spot her through the crowd, and Delaney hadn’t moved from her place inside the front door. She stood with her back to the wall and that ever-pleasant smile frozen on her face, but her eyes were glazed and just a little wild. Delaney Lightfield, horsewoman, champion trapshooter, golfer, and expert skier, had just glimpsed her future, and she didn’t like what she saw.

“Don’t anybody let me eat more than one egg roll.” Annabelle set her empty bottle on a stack of magazines. “I can hardly zip my jeans now.” She rolled her eyes at Eddie, who was frowning at her. “And I’m
not
pregnant.”

Robillard still wanted to make trouble. “Only because I haven’t been trying hard enough. We’ll take care of that tonight, baby doll.”

Annabelle rolled her eyes and looked around for a place to sit, but every chair was occupied, so she ended up in Sean’s lap. She sat there primly, but comfortably. “And I can only have one slice of pizza.”

Heath needed to do something about Delaney, and he made his way over to her. “Sorry about this.”

“I should mix,” Delaney said determinedly.

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“It’s just…It’s a little overwhelming. The house is so small. And there are so many of them.”

“Let’s go outside.”

“Yes, that’s probably the best idea.”

Heath drew her onto the front porch. For a few moments, they didn’t speak. Delaney gazed at the house across the street, wrapping her arms around herself. He rested his shoulder against a post, the ring box heavy against his hip. “I can’t leave her,” he said.

“Oh, no, no. I wouldn’t expect you to.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I guess you needed to see my life for what it is. This is a pretty good sample.”

“Yes. It was silly of me. I didn’t…” She gave a tight, self-deprecating laugh. “I like the skybox better.”

He understood, and he smiled. “The skybox does keep reality at a distance.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I imagined it differently.”

“I know you did.”

Somebody turned the music up again. She slipped her thumbs under the collar of her jacket and gazed around. “It’s only a matter of time before the neighbors call the police.”

The cops tended to look the other way when the city’s top athletes misbehaved, but he doubted that would reassure her.

Her fingers crept to her pearls. “I don’t understand how Annabelle can be so comfortable with all that chaos.”

He settled on the simplest explanation. “She has brothers.”

“So do I.”

“Annabelle is one of those people who gets bored easily. I guess you could say she creates her own excitement.” Just like him.

She shook her head. “But it’s so…disruptive.”

Which was exactly why Annabelle got herself into this sort of thing.

“My life’s pretty disruptive,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, I see that now.”

A few moments of silence ticked by. “Would you like me to call you a cab?” he asked quietly.

She hesitated, then nodded. “That might be for the best.”

While they waited, they apologized to each other, both of them saying pretty much the same thing, that they’d thought it would work out, but it was better they’d found out now that it wouldn’t. The ten minutes it took for the cab to arrive lasted forever. Heath gave the driver a fifty and helped Delaney in. She smiled up at him, more thoughtful than sad. She was a terrific person, and he experienced a fleeting moment of regret that he wasn’t the kind of man who could be satisfied with beauty, brains, intelligence, and athletic ability. No, it took the Tinker Bell factor to suck him in. As the cab drove away, he felt himself relax for the first time since the night they’d met.

The food had arrived while they’d waited outside, but when he reentered the house, nobody was eating. Instead, they were all jammed into the living room, the music turned down, their attention focused on an upturned NASCAR cap sitting in the general vicinity of Annabelle’s feet. As he moved closer, he saw an assortment of diamond studs shining in the bottom.

Annabelle spotted him and grinned. “I’m supposed to close my eyes, pick a stud, and sleep with whoever it belongs to. A stud for a stud. How fun is that?”

Dean raised his head from across the room. “Just so you know, Heathcliff, both of mine are still in my ears.”

“That’s because you cheap, bitch.” Dewitt Gilbert, Dean’s favorite wide receiver, slapped him on the back.

Annabelle smiled at Heath. “They’re just goofing around. They know I won’t do it.”

“You might,” Gary Sweeney said. “There’s a good fifteen carats in that hat.”

“Damn. I’ve always wanted to sleep with a natural redhead.” Reggie O’Shea whipped the jewel-encrusted crucifix from around his neck and dropped it in the hat.

The men gazed down at it.

“That’s just wrong,” Leandro said.

There were enough mutters of agreement that Reggie retrieved his necklace.

Annabelle sighed, and Heath heard honest-to-God regret in her voice. “This has been fun, but the food’s getting cold. Sean, that is a gorgeous set of studs, but your mother would kill me.”

Not to mention what Heath would do.

S
ometime around two in the morning, the beer supply a couple of the guys had been secretly replenishing finally ran out, and the crowd began to thin. Annabelle put Heath in charge of conducting field sobriety tests. He called cabs and shoved drunks into the few cars with sober drives. Just one fight had erupted all evening, and it wasn’t over car keys. Dean took exception to his teammate Dewitt’s statement that the only reason a guy would buy a Porsche instead of a kick-ass car like an Escalade was to match the color of his lace panties. Two Bears players had to pull them apart.

“So tell me the truth,” Annabelle had said to Heath at the time. “Did they really go to college?”

“Yeah, but not necessarily to their classes.”

By two-thirty, Annabelle had fallen asleep at one end of the couch with Leandro on the other, while Heath and Dean cleaned up the worst of the mess in the kitchen. Heath tossed Dean a plastic trash bag. “Hide those empty whiskey bottles.”

“Since nobody got killed, she probably won’t care.”

“No sense in taking chances. She was pretty riled up tonight.”

They shoved the worst of the food mess into trash bags and carried them out to the alley. Dean gazed at Sherman in disgust. “She actually tried to talk me into trading cars with her. She said driving that heap for a couple of days would help me stay in touch with the real world.”

“Not to mention giving her a shot at your Porsche.”

“I do believe I pointed that out.” They headed toward the house. “So how’s come you haven’t tried to shove a contract under my nose tonight?”

“Losing interest.” Heath held the back door open for him. “I’m used to guys who are more decisive.”

“I’m decisive as hell. I’ll have you know the only reason I haven’t signed with anybody yet is because I’m having too much fun being courted. You wouldn’t believe the shit agents’ll send you, and I’m not just talking about front-row concert tickets. The Zagorskis bought me a Segway.”

“Yeah, well, while you’re enjoying yourself, remember that Nike’s forgetting all the reasons they need your candy-ass face smiling down on the homeless from their billboards.”

“Speaking of presents…” Dean leaned against the counter, his expression cagey. “I’ve been admiring that new Rolex Submariner watch I’ve seen in the stores. Those folks sure do know how to make a great timepiece.”

“How about I send you a flower arrangement that matches your pretty blue eyes instead?”

“That’s cold, man.” He dredged his keys from Annabelle’s Hello Kitty cookie jar along with an Oreo. “It’s hard to see how you got to be such a hotshot agent with that kind of attitude.”

Heath smiled. “It looks like you’ll never find out. Your loss.”

Robillard snapped the Oreo in two with his teeth, gave him a cocky grin, and sauntered from the kitchen. “Later, Heathcliff.”

Heath sent Leandro off in a cab. He couldn’t stop grinning. There wasn’t one thing between Dean and Annabelle except mischief. Annabelle didn’t love him. She treated him exactly the same way she treated the other players, like they were overgrown kids. All that crap she’d fed Heath was totally bogus. And if Dean had been in love with her, he sure as hell wouldn’t have left her alone with another man tonight.

She lay on her side, little puffs of air stirring the lock of hair that had fallen over her mouth. He fetched a blanket, and she didn’t stir as he covered her with it. He found himself wondering how bad it would be to reach under that blanket and slip off her jeans so she could sleep more comfortably?

Bad.

Try as he might, he could only come up with one reason Annabelle had set up her charade with Dean. Because she was in love with Heath, and she wanted to save her pride. Funny, feisty, glorious Annabelle Granger loved him. His grin grew broader, and he felt lighthearted for the first time in months. Amazing what clarity could do for a man’s peace of mind.

T
he phone awakened him. He reached across the nightstand for it and muttered into the mouthpiece. “Champion.”

There was a long silence. He turned his face deeper into the pillow and drifted.

“Heath?”

He rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Yeah?”

“Heath?”

“Phoebe?”

He heard an angry, in-drawn breath and then the crack of a broken connection. His eyes shot open. Another few seconds passed before he confirmed what he feared. This wasn’t his bedroom, the phone he’d answered didn’t belong to him, and it was—he gazed at the clock—not quite eight in the morning.

Great. Now Phoebe knew he’d spent the night at Annabelle’s. He was screwed. Double screwed, once Phoebe heard that he’d broken up with Delaney.

Wide awake, he climbed out of Annabelle’s bed, which unfortunately didn’t contain Annabelle. Despite the career implications of what had just happened, his good mood from last night wouldn’t go away. He headed downstairs from the attic to shower, then shaved with Annabelle’s Gillette Daisy. He didn’t have a change of clothes, which meant he could either pull on yesterday’s boxers or go commando. He opted for the latter, then slipped into last night’s dress shirt, badly wrinkled from Annabelle’s fists.

When he got downstairs, he found her still curled into a ball on the couch, the blanket pulled up to her chin, one bare foot sticking out. He’d never had a foot fetish, but there was something about that sweet little arch that made him want to do all kinds of semiobscene things with it. But then most parts of Annabelle’s body seemed to have that effect on him, which should have been a big clue. He pulled his eyes away from her toes and headed for the kitchen.

He and Dean hadn’t done the best job of cleaning, and the morning light revealed remnants of Chinese food stuck to the counters. While the coffee brewed, he grabbed some paper towels and got up the worst of it. By the time he looked into the other room again, Annabelle had made it into a sitting position. Her hair draped most of her face except for the tip of her nose and one cheekbone.

“Where are my jeans?” she muttered. “Never mind. We’ll talk about it later.” She pulled the blanket around her and staggered toward the stairs.

He went back into the kitchen and poured himself coffee. As he was about to take the first sip, he noticed that a big pot of African violets had been shoved under the table. He didn’t know much about plants, but the foliage on this one looked a lot the worse for wear. He couldn’t actually prove anybody had peed in it, but why take the chance? He took it outside and hid it under the back steps.

He’d just finished reading the motivational messages on Annabelle’s refrigerator when he heard a rustling noise. He turned to enjoy the sight of Annabelle shuffling into the kitchen. She hadn’t made it as far as the shower, but she’d twisted her hair up and washed her face, leaving her eyelashes spiky and her cheeks flushed. A pair of plaid cotton sleeping boxers stuck out from beneath an oversize purple sweatshirt. He followed the line of her bare legs down to her feet, which were tucked into ratty chartreuse running shoes. All in all, she looked sleepy, rumpled, and sexy.

He handed her a mug of coffee. She waited until she’d had her first sip before she acknowledged him, a little gravel still in her voice. “Do I want to know who took off my jeans?”