Page 97 of The Triple Play

“You’re lucky they didn’t go to the press immediately with this,” Whitney said. “I need promises that this won’t happen again. Whatever is going on with her and you three needs to be quiet and private, but if you can give me at leastsomeinformation, I can figure out a way to spin it so it doesn’t look as bad if this source decides to sell what they saw.”

My stomach twisted, bile rising up my throat. We had to lie.

“She’s just a roomie,” I swallowed. “She needed a place to stay. She was getting out of a toxic relationship, so we let her crash with us for a bit. We were drunk and it was stupid. It’s nothing serious.”

Xavi shifted next to me, glancing at me sideways, clearly not thrilled with the lie either. Colton was uncharacteristically silent, but I could tell he didn’t like the idea of my lie. None of us did.

But I didn’t know what else we could do. Didn’t know if there was anything elsetodo.

Chapter35

Colton

Iwasn’t normally one to wake up early. Sleep usually took ahold of me and kept me down until the late hours of the morning, and I wasn’t necessarily known for being a morning person in the slightest — I’d apparently punched Xavi square in the jaw once for waking me up for a flight I’d forgotten to set an alarm for, but I didn’t remember it.

But it was different this morning.

The stress that weighed on me from the conversation with Coach had made it difficult to sleep, even with Annie in my arms half the night when she wasn’t naturally shifting between the three of us. So when the dark behind the curtain had slowly begun to lift, I’d kissed Annie on the forehead and slipped out of the bed, changed into my workout gear, and went out through the garage as quietly as I could. No point trying to use the home gym and inevitably waking them up since it was so close to the spare bedroom.

Jogging wasn’t myfavoriteexercise, but it was something, and it was enough to drown out some of the chaos in my head.

The heavy fall of my sneakers on the asphalt, the occasional car with its headlights on in the lowlight of the sunrise, and my heavy breathing made up the majority of the noise in my ears, and I almost wished I’d brought my headphones with me so I hadsomethingto listen to besides myself. Even the birds hadn’t started their morning songs yet, at least not fully.

But my feet sounded weird the longer I focused on it. Like they weren’t perfectly in sync, my foot would fall onto the tarmac, and half a second later, I’d hear it, or an echo of it.

My brows furrowed.

Weird.

But then a breath I wassurewasn’t mine caught up to my ears, too, and I glanced over my shoulder. Another man, about twenty feet back on the opposite side of the road, hood up and dressed in cheap basketball shorts and shoes I didn’t recognize as any particular athletic brand. Weirder. This neighborhood was full of wealthier-than-average people, and although I knew there were definitely frugal rich snobs in here, I’d never seen someone out running here in shit you could buy at Walmart.

I cut down one of the smaller side roads, and he turned down it ten seconds later.

My heart pounded a little harder, but there was a chance he just lived on this road, or maybe he was visiting someone andtheylived on this road. My stress must have just been causing me to get a little paranoid.

I turned right into the neighborhood park, the man-made lake with a fountain at its center on my left and a fence to my right.

He followed.

I slipped my phone from my pocket, keeping my pace steady, and shot a text to Cole that I wasn’t even sure he’d see if he was still sleeping, but he was bound to wake up before Xav.

Me: Think I’m being followed.

I sent through my location, too, just to make sure. It wasn’t like I was afraid they’d attack me — I was positive I’d win against the scrawny frame behind me. But I wasn’t above worrying that they had something I couldn’t defend against with muscle alone.

My phone buzzed in my hand.

Cole: What?

Cole: Are you serious? I’ll bring the car around.

A flash went off behind me, followed by a hissedshit, and I nearly rolled my eyes.

I cut a corner, the fence blocking line of sight for a second, and stopped.

A couple of seconds later, the body rounded the corner. I reached out, grabbing a fistful of the guy’s hoodie, and slammed him up against the fence, the wood rocking slightly from the force of it, keeping him pinned with my arm across his collarbones.

“Do you really have nothing better to do than photograph?—”

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