The Right Player: A Sports Romance Read online

  Copyright (C) 2020 Kandi Steiner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without prior written consent of the author except where permitted by law.

  The characters and events depicted in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Kandi Steiner

  Edited by Elaine York/Allusion Publishing

  Cover Photography by Perrywinkle Photography

  Cover Design by Kandi Steiner

  Formatting by Elaine York/Allusion Publishing

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A Note to the Reader

  On the Rocks - Chapter One

  On the Rocks - Chapter Two

  More From Kandi Steiner

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Belle

  His face looked like a potato.

  I never noticed before. Maybe it was because I wasn’t used to seeing him in the morning light. Maybe it was because, under normal circumstances, he would pat my ass and kiss my cheek on his way out the door, and I’d roll over in bed and sleep for another thirty minutes before dragging myself out of the sheets that smelled like him. Maybe it was because normally when I kissed that dumb potato face, I was so distracted by his lips that I didn’t care.

  Maybe it was because for the last year and a half, Doctor Jordan and I had an understanding, and that was all that mattered.

  He had a busy schedule as a pediatrician and wasn’t looking for anything serious. I had sworn off anything resembling a relationship long, long ago. What we both did want was steady, reliable, mind-blowing sex.

  And for those reasons, we were a match made in heaven.

  I had a firm three-date rule — meaning, no guy made it past three dates with me. That was just enough time to have some fun without catching any serious feelings. But with Jordan, we’d had an understanding. We didn’t date. We didn’t have deep, long conversations. What we had was casual sex without anything more demanded of us.

  Jordan was tall and lean, athletic, built like a golf pro. He always dressed like a doctor. You know what I mean — khakis, polos, long sleeves under a sweater vest, his golden hair always gelled and swooped to one side. He had what I liked to refer to as a news broadcaster smile, wide and bright with too many teeth, but I much preferred what that mouth did under my sheets. And he even wore these wire-framed glasses from time to time, mostly when he was reading something, that just topped off the whole look.

  When it came to me and Jordan, I didn’t need much.

  I didn’t need flowers. I didn’t need Valentine’s dinner dates. I didn’t need to meet his family. I didn’t need his time, or attention, or anything other than a great lay on a consistent basis.

  And he never asked anything of me, either.

  When we were together, we talked briefly, maybe ate a late-night dinner or had a bottle of wine while we joked around, ended our short time together with a romp in the sack, and then we went about our day to day without having to answer to anyone else.

  It was perfect.

  And now, the potato-headed motherfucker had a girlfriend.

  He was ruining everything.

  “I really am sorry,” he said for the fortieth time that morning. It wasn’t even seven yet and the jerk was dressed and ready for work, teeth brushed and breath minty-fresh, his white coat laying over the arm of my sofa and waiting to transform him from average good-looking guy to smokin’ hot doctor.

  I, on the other hand, still hadn’t cleared the sleep from my eyes.

  Jordan folded his hands between his knees, leaning closer to where I sat across from him. “I didn’t expect it to get serious with Ella. I mean, neither of us did. We met at the conference, and we both thought it would just be a little fun, but… I like her, Belle,” he said, looking at me like the dog he was about to kick out of the house. “I really do. And she wants to take it to the next level.”

  “The next level,” I deadpanned. “Meaning, the level where I get booted.”

  He grimaced. “Don’t think of it like that.”

  “How else am I supposed to think?” I huffed, tossing my hands up in the air.

  “I don’t even know why you’re upset,” he said. “We’ve never been exclusive. We’ve never even gone on a proper date. Surely, you didn’t think this would last forever.”

  I ground my teeth, but to his credit, he didn’t say it with even a slight hint of annoyance or pity or arrogance. It was a genuine, accurate statement, as if he was reminding me that the shirt I was wearing was blue.

  The fact of the matter was that had this been the version of me that existed even a few months ago, I wouldn’t have batted an eye at him calling off our little arrangement. If anything, I’d known it was coming — eventually. He told me about Ella when he met her, and they’d been hanging out just as consistently as we had. It didn’t bother me, and again, had this been a few months ago, I would have wished him luck with his new girlfriend, biting my tongue against telling him that he was likely going to end up with his heart broken, and then I would have saluted him on the way out the door and made a silent bet with myself as to when he’d walk back through it after he and his precious Ella broke up.

  But the me who existed now had been slowly waking up over the past few months and realizing that everything around me was changing.

  Except for me.

  My best friend was getting married. My party friends were all settling down into relationships. The few single buddies I still had were dispersing, either moving to different cities or slipping into varying levels of alcoholism that I did not find cute or appealing. All my previous friends with benefits were locking themselves down, losing my number, politely asking me to take them off my for a good time call list.

  And then, there was me.

  Belle Monroe.

  President of the Single Forever Club, and newly removed from my position of Hot Doctor Jordan’s Favorite Fuck Buddy.

  “I guess you just couldn’t help yourself,” I commented after a moment, meeting his gaze. “Had to get in one last round before you locked yourself down, huh?”

  Jordan’s neck turned red, and he cleared his throat, looking away from me ashamed. The motherfucker had called me at almost midnight last night. And normally, I wouldn’t care.

  But normally, he wouldn’t be dumping me the very next morning before I even had the chance to make a cup of espresso.

  I made a mental note, jotting this down as just another prime example of why the three-date rule is essential.

  Jordan stood, grabbing his white coat off the arm of the couch. “I am sorry, Belle. You know I care about you.”

  I held up a hand, cutting him off before he could say another word. “Don’t.”

  “Why does it make you so uncomfortable to hear that? We’ve been
…” He paused, waving a hand between us. “Doing whatever this is for over a year now.”

  “This was a fun arrangement, one that mutually benefitted both parties.”

  Jordan heaved a sigh at that, looking out my floor-to-ceiling windows at the Chicago skyline being dusted with the morning sun. “Well, I guess it shouldn’t hurt too bad to lose me, then.”

  My cold heart defrosted a bit at his words, and I met his disappointed gaze like a dog with her tail between her legs.

  But I didn’t have anything to say.

  I’d shut out the possibility of anything resembling love a long, long time ago. Love, I’d learned, was a trap. It was a glitter-covered black hole that would swallow you up and spit you out and leave you shipwrecked and alone time and time again. The only way to avoid that kind of heartache was to not participate at all, to cut all strings before emotions had the chance to form.

  That was how you kept yourself safe.

  And no one could change my mind about that — not even hot, sensitive, caring Doctor Jordan.

  Jordan watched me for a long moment, waiting, like he wondered if his words had struck some chord with me. He watched me like maybe this was the day I would confess all my feelings.

  But I just sat silent.

  Resignation found his features, and he nodded, something of a smirk on his lips as he leaned down long enough to press them to my forehead. “Goodbye, Belle,” he whispered.

  And when he was gone, I threw a pillow — a throw pillow, funny enough — at the door he’d walked through.

  A growl ripped from my throat, and I ran my hands back through my long, strawberry blonde locks, tucking them behind my ears and grasping the back of my neck. I let my eyes close and attempted the stupid breathing technique Gemma had taught me for work-related stress situations, but after about sixty seconds, my annoyance grew to an unavoidable boiling point.

  I jumped up from the couch, not even bothering to get dressed before I was in the elevator and on the way down to Gemma’s.

  Gemma was my best friend in the world, my life-keeper both at work and outside of it, too. Our mutual hate for algebra had brought us together in high school, and the mountains of shit we’d had to climb over together had bonded us for life. We’d been through more hell together than most married couples, including the death of her asshole cheating husband, and the metaphorical death of the man I always thought would be my husband — but that’s a story for another time.

  If anyone in this world was my soul mate — it was that girl.

  She only lived a few floors below me in a skyrise downtown, a blessing I had been grateful for after her husband passed away. At first, I worried she’d move even farther out of town or, worse, stay in the three-bedroom suburbia hellhole of a house she’d lived in with Carlo.

  But thankfully, she’d loved my idea of living in the same building. It’ll be just like college, I’d told her, and that’s exactly how it had been.

  Having her just a few floors down meant I could bombard her every morning before work, or on any given evening when I wanted someone to watch trashy TV with or to go out on the town with. I was always there for her, and she was always there for me — only a few dings of an elevator separated us.

  Of course, now, when I barged into my best friend’s place, she wasn’t the only one there.

  Zach looked up from his tablet with a smirk when I blew through the front door of Gemma’s condo, one that looked similar to mine, though hers was smaller, had less windows, and was peppered with little specks of proof that a man lived here with her, too. She’d let me decorate her new space when she moved in, which you would think would have been a given, since I was an interior designer, her best friend, and her boss. But Gemma was a list-making, highlighting, organizing, clean-until-the-knuckles-bleed kind of gal, and it was both a feat and a high honor getting her to give up control to me.

  “Ah, good morning, Belle,” Zach said when the door shut behind me, looking back to his tablet. “Coffee’s hot.”

  “Where’s Gemma?”

  “Shower,” he said, lifting a brow when I didn’t immediately move for the coffee pot like usual. “Everything okay?”

  “No,” I said on a huff, flopping down at the kitchen island in the bar stool next to his.

  I liked Zach. I had since the moment I met him. He was sexy in the ex-football player, self-made entrepreneur, boy-next-door kind of way. But right now, I was irritated with every man in the world.

  I grabbed his tablet and tossed it across the room and onto the couch.

  “Hey,” he said, but it was on a chuckle and with his smile still in place.

  “Jordan just dumped me.”

  Zach’s brow rose again. “I didn’t realize you were dating.”

  “We weren’t.”

  “Oh.”

  I blinked.

  Zach smiled uncomfortably.

  And then I sighed, dragging a hand over my face. “You don’t get it.”

  “Afraid not,” he agreed on a laugh.

  “What good are you, Zach?”

  “Oh, he’s completely useless,” Gemma said, joining us from the bedroom. Her long, brunette hair was still wet from the shower, dripping water over her petite shoulders as she bent to press a kiss on Zach’s cheek. “But I keep him around because he’s kind of cute.”

  “Kind of?” Zach said, pinching her side. Gemma giggled and pretended like she wanted to get away, but in the end, she wound up wrapped up in his arms and leaning her hip against his thigh. She was a tiny little thing in his arms, and they might as well have had heart-eye emojis for faces in that moment with the way they looked at each other all gooey-ooey like.

  I wanted to gag as much as I wanted to swoon. Those two were so cute together it made me nauseous.

  Gemma had been through enough shit to last her a lifetime, and I truly believed Zach was her reward for never calling her ex out on his transgressions. The motherfucker cheated on her and then told her he had terminal cancer. She never even got to call him out on it. Or rather, she chose not to, deciding instead to stand by his side as he lived out the last months of his life.

  The other woman showed up to the funeral, and Gemma didn’t kill her.

  File this under reasons Gemma is better than me.

  It took a while for her to heal, but a couple years ago, I convinced her to get on a dating app. The premise was that she would take a new, different guy to each Chicago Bears home game. Gemma was a season pass holder, and to be honest, I hated sports so much that this was partly to get her out and dating again, and partly to make sure it wasn’t me who’d have to fill the seat next to her.

  Zach was the lucky bartender who overheard me getting Gemma in the dating app scene, and he volunteered to be her practice round… but let’s just say he wasn’t satisfied with just one game.

  And the rest was history.

  Now, the lovebirds were just months away from their wedding, and as much as I missed my best friend having nothing but time for me, I loved Zach so much that I couldn’t even be mad.

  They were meant for each other.

  “Why don’t you have coffee in your hand?” Gemma asked me.

  “Because I had a different wake-up call this morning. One in the form of Jordan dumping me.”

  Gemma frowned. “Wait, you guys were dating?”

  I slapped my forehead. “Come on, bestie. You know more than anyone that I don’t date.”

  “Right… so…” Gemma might as well have had smoke coming out of her ears as she tried to figure out my dilemma, and she and Zach shared confused looks.

  I sighed. “We’ve just had an arrangement, that’s all. For the last year and a half, we’ve been banging on a consistent basis. Do you know how hard it is to find an insanely hot guy who is also educated, professional, and single? And then, to find that kind of guy and him not be anxious to tie you down? He was perfect.” I pouted, flopping back in my seat. “And then he went and got himself a girlfriend.”

  I mum
bled under my breath, and Gemma quirked a brow. “What did you just say?”

  “I said stupid potato-headed motherfucker,” I repeated.

  Zach barked out a laugh. “Do all your exes get adorable pet names like that?”

  “He’s not my ex,” I defended, crossing my arms. “And I didn’t realize his head looked like a potato until he was breaking up with me.”

  “Convenient timing,” Zach commented.

  I flicked him off.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Gemma said sincerely, leaving Zach’s arms to wrap hers around me, instead. She rested her chin on my head as I leaned into her. “Did you tell him you didn’t want to split up?”

  “No. What would the point be? He wants something serious.”

  “And you don’t?” she asked. “Even after more than a year of being with him?”

  “You already know the answer to that.”

  Gemma sighed softly, patting my arm. Not many people in my life knew the real reasons why I blew off any kind of relationship, but Gemma was one of them. The poor girl had known me and my college ex well. We’d always hung out with her and Carlo, a little foursome, double dating all the time and being all sorts of adorable.

  Gemma and Carlo got engaged right after college, and I just knew that the ring from Nathan would come next.

  Instead, he dumped me.

  You’re a good time, Belle, but you’re not exactly the girl you take home to Mom, if you know what I mean…

  And I did. I knew exactly what he meant.

  I was good for sex, for fun, for spring break and frat parties and wearing his jersey number while I screamed like a little fan girl in the stands at every single game he played. And that’s where the road ended for me.

  It was a moment in my life that could have destroyed me. And, though I’d deny this to anyone who ever asked, other than Gemma — it did break me. For months, I wallowed and felt sorry for myself and tortured myself replaying every minute of my and Nathan’s relationship. I was searching for clues, for the errors I made, for what I did that was so bad that he had filed me into a category where a ring and a wedding and a little house full of babies was off the table.

  But then, I had an epiphany.