Score (Skin in the Game Book 1)

S
ooo warm
…so snuggly.

I burrowed deeper into the mound of blankets and let out a sigh of contentment. Saturdays were the best days.

No alarm.

No classes.

No-

A low
thud
sounded at my bedroom door, followed by a muffled but concerned female voice.

“Bee? Are you sick or something?”

My roommate Flora. She usually respected my Saturday sleep-in ritual so I swallowed my irritation at this uncharacteristic breach.

“I don’t think so, why?” I rubbed at my gritty eyes with both fists before opening them to peer out the window. Light out, sure, but morning light. Couldn’t be past ten AM. Hardly late enough for her to be worried.

“Was your nine fifty canceled or something?”

I scuttled back to sit against my headboard and peered at the clock on my desk. The numbers that were usually lit in a preternatural blue were dark. Sort of like my muzzy brain.

What day was it? I thought back to the night before and what was supposed to have been a therapeutic glass of wine that had turned to four, and it hit me.

Not Saturday.

Thursday.

My alarm clock was off because we must’ve lost power at some point in the night. Which meant I was late as fuck.

“Crap!”

I leaped off the bed, squealing as the chilly air of the room hit my warm, bare legs.

“Safe to say that your nine fifty isn’t canceled then?” Flora called through the door with a wry laugh. “I’ll pop a pod in the coffee maker and put it in a to-go cup while you get dressed.”

I could hear her footsteps as she shuffled off and made a silent vow to kiss her on the mouth once I had time to brush my teeth. I’d been in a near-comatose sleep, happy and clueless as a clam when she’d woken me up. If not for her, I’d have missed my entire PT seminar and have faced the full wrath of Professor Maxwell. At least now I’d attend the tail end and only face half-mast wrath, which was a hell of a lot better.

I didn’t bother with a bra, instead yanking my favorite hoodie over my head after giving it a quick, pit-sniff test. Then I grabbed a pair of yoga pants off the top of the hamper, rationalizing as I shimmied them over my hips. I never did actual yoga in them, how dirty could they be?

“Who uses an alarm clock anymore, anyways?” Flora called from the kitchen. “I told you to set your phone alarm, but do you listen?”

“No,” I muttered under my breath. My mistrust of wireless technologies was one Flora couldn’t understand, and I had to admit, today it had definitely done me dirty.

I pawed through my closet and made a mental note to reconsider the whole cell-phone-as-an-alarm thing after class.

Why, today of all days, did this have to happen? We were going to be assigned our PT clinicals, and there was no way Maxwell was going to hold off until I graced the class with my presence. Which meant that I’d be stuck with the dregs, and that was
if
he assigned me a patient at all. I could just as easily wind up working on Don the life-sized rubber doll while everyone else got hands-on experience with living bodies.

I slammed a crocheted hat my granny had made me onto my gnarly mop of hair and swung the door open to find Flora standing there with a steaming travel mug in one hand and a fudge-slicked Pop-Tart in the other.

“Seriously,” she said, with a roll of her ebony, almond-shaped eyes. “I’m setting your phone alarm when you get home.”

I nodded absently and paused for a precious second to take a swallow of the coffee. It was tongue-scorchingly hot and tooth-achingly sweet, just how I liked it. Any irritation at her lecturing me faded in the wake of my gratitude.

“You are a goddess,” I murmured, bending low to scoop up my book bag that sat next to the door.

A smile lit her heart-shaped face. “And don’t you forget it.” She gestured to the piece of white computer paper taped to the outside of my door. “Do you want to take your news to go? The last thing you want is to walk around not in the know, Bee.”

The “news” Flora took it upon herself to tape to my bedroom door each morning was, in fact, just a brief recap of all the latest celebrity gossip she’d gathered from TMZ and Instagram that morning, along with new pics of various Kardashians or celebrities’ kids.

None of which I gave a crap about. Still, she was a good friend and she’d saved my ass today, so I tugged the sheet off the door and stuffed it into the pocket of my hoodie.

“I’ll check it out between classes.”

“Spoiler alert: North West was rocking Balenciaga at a bounce house party in Calabasas,” she said, lips curved in a cat with the canary grin. “You’re welcome.”

I widened my eyes in what I hoped was an acceptable response to her seemingly nonsensical declaration and brushed past her, calling over my shoulder,

“Wow, that’s truly…scintillating stuff. Gotta go, though. Lattes on me later. Thanks again!”

I charged down the hallway, tugging my old fashioned, over-ear headphones out of my pocket and sliding them on, keeping my head down in hopes of avoiding conversation with the rest of my housemates. As I stepped out the door into the frigid November air, I said a silent prayer of thanks to the big guy in the sky that I had braved the gauntlet without running into any of my “sisters”.

Then I promptly hit a patch of ice on the front porch and went careening down the entire flight of stairs, mouth opened in a silent scream.

The breath left me in a whoosh as I hit the sidewalk and landed flat on my back. My rattled brain scrambled wildly to catch up with this new turn of events. First thought?

Cold.

So unbearably cold.

I stared, unblinking, into the too bright sun, mouth opening and closing like a landed catfish as I struggled for air. Before I could take stock of what had happened, a dark cloud eclipsed the sun, offering immediate relief for my now tear-blurred and probably singed corneas.

“Are you okay?” a low male voice came from the dark cloud hovering above me, and I realized it wasn’t a dark cloud at all.

It was a witness to my shame.

FML.

I blinked furiously, desperate to put a face to the voice and feeling hella-vulnerable, like a beetle on its back. It was bad enough that he’d seen my Jackass routine as I’d taken a dive off the stairs, but the fact that I was now both temporarily mute and blind only made it about a kazillion times worse.

I nodded and shifted to push myself to my feet before realizing that my hands were both
occupado
. Somehow, my body was so in tune with my needs that I’d instinctively forgone any attempt at actual self-preservation in order to save my mug of steaming coffee and my Pop-Tart, both of which I was holding aloft like twin trophies earned from the world’s worst ice skating routine.

Go me.

I scuttled up on my elbows and shimmied backward until my spine was pressed up against the wooden steps. The new, upright position seemed to be just the thing and my burning lungs filled with precious oxygen.

“I’m fine,” I wheezed as the blurriness in my eyes receded, leaving behind just a few orange floaters. I gazed up and the dark form hulking over me began to take shape.

And what a shape it was.

Six feet worth of certified, grade A man beef stood before me. Even under his black fleece jacket, I could tell he was built like a Calvin Klein brief’s commercial. His dark hair was cropped super close, which only drew more attention to the fact that his eyes were the strangest mix of blue and green.

Sea-foam, if I was the type to wax poetic over a stranger.

Which I wasn’t.

But he was seriously good looking. Like, if I’d been in a desert, I might have feared a mirage. In this ten-degree weather, though, all I could think was that maybe I’d hit my head.

Then he spoke again.

“You really went flying there,” Mirage-man observed. “It was a lucky thing you didn’t break your neck.”

My cheeks burned and I nodded.

“Yeah,” I croaked, suddenly unsure of what to do with my hands. I jammed the Pop-Tart into my mouth and tore off a chunk, which was apparently a hilarious thing to do, because Mirage Man let out a crack of laughter as I chewed.

“Maybe you should stand up before you start breakfast. You’re sitting in a puddle.”

The adrenaline that had been coursing through me from the second Flora had woken me until this very moment had done its job too well because I hadn’t even realized. He was right, though. My bottom was firmly planted in two inches of slushy water. I shifted to set my cup on the porch and winced as a shaft of pain shot through my tailbone.

“Son of a—”

Before I could even finish cursing, strong hands slid under my arms and hauled me effortlessly to my feet.

“—bitch,” I finished as a shudder ran through me that had nothing to do with the ice water streaming down the back of my yoga pants.

I was mere centimeters from Mirage Man and he smelled like everything good. Leather and spice and something exotic I couldn’t name.

My throat worked as I swallowed hard and willed myself to take a step back before I drowned in those sea-foam eyes.

“Real bonehead move, you know,” he observed matter-of-factly as he picked up my book bag and plucked my hat off the ground. “Too bad no one caught it on video because that would go viral in no time.”

He plopped the wet hat back on my head and patted it like I was a child.

My hero-worship came to a screeching halt as my gaze narrowed on his suspiciously twitching, perfect lips.

“You think this is funny?”

A dimple popped out on one, lightly stubbled cheek. “Well, I mean, now that I know you’re okay, it’s pretty funny, yeah.”

Okay, so maybe if it hadn’t been me, on a day like today,
I would have found the humor in it. Hell, it
was
me, and I knew for sure Flo and I would be rolling with laughter about it later.

But right now? Today? With this guy?

It felt anything but funny.

“I gotta go. I’m late for class.”

He glanced over my shoulder at the sorority house and then back at me. “Early morning tutoring session run long or?”

My whole body went hot, chasing away the chill, and I swallowed hard. “I wasn’t tutoring anyone. I. Live. Here,” I bit out, each word a succinct statement in itself as my humiliation came to a head.

“Really?”

The surprise on his face shouldn’t have stung as much as it had. It wasn’t like I didn’t understand his confusion. Kappa Beta Chi’s had been an institution at the school for over a hundred years and the name instantly brought an image to mind. A gorgeous, 19
^th
-century church renovated and repurposed into a sorority house filled with mall-pretty co-eds named Candy and Amber who all possessed swanlike necks, narrow hips and perfect hair that other women would describe wistfully, with words like “mahogany”, “honey”, or “burnt sienna”.

Not me. My hair was brown. My eyes were brown. I had what my mom liked to call “sturdy” legs and the one horrific year I was on the cheer team, I was instantly cast as the bottom left base of every pyramid, opposite a guy cheerleader named Miguel.

In a word, I was the polar opposite of everyone else in my sorority.

I’d joined because my mother had guilted me into it a la “I was a Kappa. You don’t want to break tradition and your mother’s heart all in one go, do you?”, and I’d stayed for Flora.

Despite our differences, she’d proven over the past two years that she was a for real, ride-or-die bestie. I’d never had that before, and I could withstand the rest of the girls in the house and all the confused looks in the world if it meant we could keep rooming together.

Right now, though? I wanted the ice-slicked ground to swallow me up. So I did what I do, and threw up my defenses.

“Yeah,” I chirped. “Those girls need someone to ring that church bell for them, you know? I like to think of myself as the Quasimodo to their Esmereldas’.”

His dark brows came crashing together in a stark frown and he shook his head. “Wait, what?”

“Nothing,” I muttered under my breath, irritated at myself for letting this stranger get to me. “I was just making a joke about the bell tower.” I held out a hand and gazed up at him expectantly. “Can I have my books back now, I’m kinda running late.”

He cocked his head and studied me through ridiculously gorgeous eyes before holding the books out. “Do we have some sort of beef…what did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t say.”

I knew I was being bitchy, but I couldn’t seem to stop it. I just wanted to get out of there, crawl back into bed, and pretend this day had never happened.

“Look, I’ve gotta go. Thanks for picking up my books,” I muttered, tugging the tomes from his unresisting fingers. Then I turned tail and sloshed my way down the sidewalk. I could feel his eyes on me as I went, and my flaming face stayed at a steady ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit until I reached class, despite the sub-zero temperatures.

I’d meant to creep, ninja-like, through the back door of the classroom, but nearly got my nose taken off when the door swung out before I could even get my fingers around the handle.

I flattened my body against the wall as my entire class stampeded out. Some of them winced and shot me a pitying glance as they passed.

Oh, hell.

I’d wasted so much time yammering to Mirage Man that I’d missed the whole damned class. Heart sinking, I pushed against the tide and managed to get through with my internal organs intact. Professor Maxwell stood at the front of the room, normally impish blue eyes locked on me.

“Ms. Mitchell,” he boomed, in a voice that seemed more suited to a Broadway stage. Then he bowed in my direction. “Thank you so much for bestowing us with your presence this morning.”

I cringed. “Sorry, I was—”

He held up a hand like he didn’t want to hear it, thank God. The rest of my excuse sucked.

Sorry I was a dumbass and thought it was Saturday, and my alarm clock didn’t work because, yeah, I’m still in the last century and have no idea how to set my phone.

“I’ve been handing out our case assignments. You interested in that at all?” He cocked an eyebrow at me as I bridged the distance between us until we stood only a few feet apart.