Page 34 of Under My Skin

“Noted,” I deadpanned. “But I’m not paying you to like it. I’m paying you to wrangle the media. So if you don’t want to do thepress conference, just leak some information to them that she’s a friend of a friend and we’re getting to know each other and seeing where it leads. I’ve gotta go.”

I hung up before she could say anything else, then went to check my email, figuring she’d probably sent me links to some of the articles from the tabloid sites. And sure enough, there was a message with links to half a dozen articles, all speculating about who the mystery girl I’d been kissing outside La Terrasse was.

Braden Hicks wines and dines his latest conquest.

Is the Casanova of football finally settling down? Braden Hicks caught in a liplock outside La Terrasse in Orlando on Friday night.

Real or a sham? What to know about Braden Hicks’s date last night.

As I scanned the articles, I just laughed at how hard these so-called journalists had worked to meet their minimum word count requirement. Mostly, they just talked about my football stats, my arrest, and my reputation for never being seen with the same woman twice. Then they’d thrown in a couple of pictures of me and Dani and said how we’d declined to answer any questions. Some of them had speculated that maybe it was all for show, while others had said “sources close to Hicks” claimed it was the real deal. Who these so-called sources were, I would have loved to know.

Shaking my head and rolling my eyes, I started to back out of my inbox…just as another email landed in it. From yet another throwaway email address. This time the subject line made me sit straight up in bed as the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and my heart started beating just a little faster.

To:Braden Hicks [[email protected]]

From:Unknown [[email protected]]

Subject:HOW COULD YOU???

You’re MINE, Braden! ONLY mine. If you don’t get rid of that little whore, I won’t be responsible for what happens. I don’t share what’s mine, baby.

*tabloid picture of kiss outside the restaurant with a huge red X over Dani’s face*

Xoxo,

Me

Damn it. What the hell was I supposed to do about this?

On one hand, this was a serious escalation. It wasn’t just a harmless fangirl with too much time on her hands anymore. This was an actual threat. But on the other hand, the communication was still limited to email. I had no reason to believe this woman had any of my personal information, like my address or phone number.

Going into my deleted emails, I grabbed as many of the messages as I could and saved them to a different folder so I’d have them as evidence if I ended up needing them. I wasn’t ready to hire a PI quite yet, but if this got any worse, I wanted to have as much information as possible to help figure out who was behind this and stop them for good.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

DANIELA

“Hey,you want to go grab a coffee before you head home?” Morgan asked as we walked out of our last class of the day. “You still need to give me the dirt on your date with Braden.”

“It wasn’t a date,” I deflected, rolling my eyes.

And how was I supposed to tell her anything at all when my feelings about it were still a jumbled mess? It wasn’t like I could tell her whyI felt like I didn’t know which way was up anymore. Why I’d spent more than one sleepless night just staring at the ceiling trying to make sense of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – er, the enigma that was Braden Hicks. Why I was questioning everything I thought I knew about myself because of one stupid peck on the lips.

“Um, excuse you?” she chuckled. “You dressed up. He picked you up from your apartment and took you to the most expensive restaurant in the city – which, for your information, Mal hasn’t even been able to get a reservation at, so I have no clue how Braden managed to. And then youkissedhim outside said restaurant in front of God and everybody. Whatwouldyou call that, Miss Ma’am?”

“A contractual obligation,” I reminded her.

“Riiiiight. That’s all it is.” She threw a playful elbow into my side.

“Thatisall it is. He’s doing something for me, and I’m doing something for him. It’s a business arrangement.”

“And that’s totally why you let him lay one on you in front of the cameras the first time he took you out.You,who need a connection to even be attracted to someone.”

“No, I let him do that because the stupid paparazzi were trying to crawl up his ass about his arrest and asking if he was going to get benched. EvenIwas getting annoyed with that, and I wasn’t the one they were harassing. He wanted to give them something else to talk about. And it was going to have to happen sooner or later.”

“Sure, keep telling yourself that,” she said with a schoolgirl-like giggle. “It’s okay to admit you like him, you know. It’s okay to let yourself have fun. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want this to be a chore for you.”

But that was just it. Itwasn’tokay. Icouldn’tlike him. I couldn’t let myself keep feeling this way about someone who had ripped my sister away from me by getting her pregnant.

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