Page 8 of Gridlocked on the Gridiron

“Too many for my liking.” She paused, then, “How was it? As horrible as you thought it’d be?”

Lucia disregarded the minor breakdown she’d just had and thought back to the large boardroom. “It’s a total testosterone-fest, but that’s what we were expecting. Colton is as infuriating and horrible as always. Though…” She trailed off, embarrassed about where her thoughts were leading her. She hadn’t expected to be as attracted to him as she had been.

“Though, what?” Isa asked suspiciously.

“Nothing.” She said it too fast, so she hurried to the real reason she’d called Isa. “He said something about my best friend sleeping with his tight end so we could win the rivalry game. I know you were seeing that Crestview tight end our junior year. Do you know what he was talking about?”

“Seeing is a very strong word, but yes, I was hooking up with Vinny for a while there. But I don’t know what that has to do with the rivalry game.” There was shuffling on the line. “All I remember is Max—I mean he-who-shall-not-be-named—being upset with me for it, me telling him off, and then the next time we spoke about it, he was very smug. I just assumed it was because we ended up winning.”

Lucia hummed. “Why didn’t I know any of that?”

“You had so much going on with your degree and the new project you were working on for the team. And you know how little I paid attention to the wants and cares of he-who-shall-not-be-named. Sorry, osita. But I’m sure it’s just Colton being Colton. Once he sees how much you improve his game, he’ll stop talking about the past.”

Lucia hoped so. She’d seen him play the last few years, and she knew he was capable of 5,000-yard seasons. He just needed a little help to get back to his game.

And she planned to be that help, even if it meant wanting to rip her hair out every time she interacted with him. Fixing his season would be her Everest, and then she’d finally get her dream job: running departments of analysts.

Chapter four

Colton

Ice baths had always been both the bane of Colton’s existence and the thing that kept him sane. Once the stinging wore off and he became numb, all thoughts would disappear. No more thinking about how poorly he’d done so far this season. No more thinking about his father’s harsh words. For the next ten to fifteen minutes, he should have been able to relax in complete silence. It had always been meditative.

Except now, that wasn’t the case. Lucia Moretti had ripped away that calm, that sanity. The thought of having to work with her for an entire season made him want to scream at the top of his lungs. She was infuriating.

The rivalry between him and Max had begun in college and had extended into the NFL, where he was sure it would continue until one of them retired. He’d only seen Lucia a handful of times during his college years, and he hadn’t had an issue with her outside of the fact that she was Max’s girlfriend. Until he’d learned about what her best friend had done. He remembered seeing the black-haired woman leaving the football apartments but hadn’t thought anything of it until Max had taunted him after Crestview lost during Colton’s senior year, laughing about how she’d learned their plays just by being around them.

It was bad enough that Lucia, her boyfriend, and her best friend had stolen his senior season with their conniving, but now she was pretending to “help him fix his game”? He didn’t buy it. It was too convenient. Even if it had been six years ago, it had lost him the chance at playoffs in his final season, and that wasn’t so easy to forgive.

He hadn’t cared so much when she was with the Vipers. Max Clark was a slimy weasel, and Colton wasn’t sure what she saw in him, but with him in a different state, he’d rarely had to pay the narcissist any heed. But now, with her so close to home, it was all coming back, and he was bitter.

How many lectures had he endured from his father after that game? How many extra reps had he forced himself to do to prove to his father that he had, in fact, cared about this sport? How many times had he been told how lucky he was that Max was the year below him, because when draft time came, he wouldn’t have to outperform the Lincoln quarterback?

He’d spent weeks perfecting everything about his game before that loss, and all of it had been ripped away from him. She was a reminder of that, and he couldn’t stand it.

He couldn’t stand her in that little skirt, those ridiculous heels, or that blazer that he was sure she’d been overheating in. He couldn’t stand that she knew so much about his game after watching a few hours of film, or that she knew so much about football in general. He couldn’t stand that little groove that had popped up between her eyebrows when she got mad at him, the look of disgust on her face clear.

Most of all, he couldn’t stand the fact that the moment she’d walked through the doorway of that boardroom, his first thought hadn’t really been, You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. It had been, She’s even more breathtaking than she was in college. And that pissed him off more than any of the other thoughts.

He groaned, pulling himself from the ice as his phone alarm went off. All of that aside, he really didn’t want to work with her. It’d been fine when he thought he was just getting some nerdy analyst to come in and give him pointers, but Lucia was, and had always been, the enemy. And he knew she would relish pointing out all of his failures. As if he didn’t have enough people in his life doing that.

Coach Turner’s words came back to him. “At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game. And she’s a numbers girl,” he’d said, like that was supposed to make him feel better.

It had not, not one bit. And now he had to go upstairs and meet with her one-on-one, and they had to try not to kill each other while getting his numbers up. Because it was a numbers game.

“Coop, I’m heading up.” Coop waved his hand, too relaxed in his adjacent ice bath to respond.

Colton had just finished toweling off when Lucia appeared, eyes widening at the towel tied loosely on his hips.

“Oh, I—” She shook her head, cheeks pinking as she looked down at her watch. “You’re really dragging your feet. You’re fifteen minutes late, and I didn’t wanna let you get away with ditching again.” She kept her gaze averted.

“Practice ran over. I’ll be up in a few. Unless you wanna watch me get dressed.” He grinned. If he was going to do this, at least he could enjoy getting under her skin a little.

“I’ll be in my office.” Her heels clacked against the polished concrete floor, but she’d opted out of wearing a blazer.

When he looked back at his best friend, Coop was smirking back knowingly. “Oh, yeah, you hate her.”

“Shut up.”

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