Page 103 of Good Girl's Guide to Love
But then, my world crashed down.
“It was my last night there, and I got a phone number from a Detroit area code. It was the hospital. My grandma…she’d been sick. I knew she was. I was planning to go visit her after I left the combine, but…it was too late.”
Ainsley moves my head from her lap, but only so she can hold me in her arms. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to. I feel every ounce of support and comfort just from her touch alone.
“I went into the hallway and lost it. I hadn’t even told my agent yet that she’d died. I just went and hid. I was a mess. I was twenty-two years old at the time, but I suddenly felt like an orphan, even more than I did when my parents died. And suddenly, the anger came back. I was angry at God for taking away the only one I had left before I could say goodbye. I was still angry for my parents' deaths. I was just so–fucking–angry.”
I close my eyes and back away from Ainsley’s hold, needing to get the rest off my chest. “I thought no one could see me. I was in a random hallway that I’d found, but two guys came walking through. And apparently they were still twelve-year-old shit heads, because instead of asking me if I was okay when they saw me crying against a wall, they started digging at me. Calling me a pussy. A crybaby. That to man up and not cry or I wasn’tgoing to get drafted. They all assumed that’s why I was crying. And…I snapped.”
I just saw rage in that moment. They had no idea what was going on in my life, and instead of telling them just to leave me the fuck alone, or walking away, I made the worst decision of my life.
“I beat the hell out of them, Ainsley. It was two-on-one but you’d never know it, the way I left them. For a second I thought I killed one. I threw him against the wall, and his head bounced. All I was seeing was red. No one ever asked me what happened. I was just sent home and I fell off of every single person’s draft board. I squandered my entire career in that one moment.”
I wouldn’t blame Ainsley in the slightest if she backed away from me now. Held me at an arm’s distance after I admitted I gave a man a concussion and that I was lucky it wasn’t much worse. But she doesn’t. Instead she comes in closer, wrapping me back up in her arms.
“When I got home, the anger didn’t stop, only I was mad at myself. Mad that I lost it. That I let down Grandma. My parents. Everyone. That was my rock bottom. And I’ve been clawing like hell to come up from it every day since.”
“That’s all you can do,” Ainsley says, her legs now wrapping around me as well. “And the man I know? The man who saved me? My boyfriend? He’s not that guy anymore. I hope you don’t think that.”
I shake my head before it falls into her shoulder. “Sometimes I do. Many times I did when I was sitting watching a football game on TV, knowing I could’ve been out there, but instead I was boxing for cash and hoping a team had a practice squad opening. Living in a delusion that one day a team would pick me up.”
“Intrusive thoughts are the worst, but that’s all they are,” she says. “You’ve made a change. You’re a good man, LincolnKincaid. You visit kids in the hospital, even when there aren’t cameras around. You stay after games and sign autographs. And I also know that you arranged for Caden, the patient you met on your official Fury visit, to go to a game this season. Bad guys don’t do things like that.”
I shrug off her praise. “But even with all of that, I feel like it doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe not to some, but to me? To your teammates? Your fans? It means the world to them. And those should be the only ones you care about.”
“Thank you,” I say. “But this is now the problem, and frankly, why I couldn’t sleep. Things are good. Too good. I don’t want to get comfortable. What if the other shoe drops? What if these articles get worse and people believe that I’m back to the angry guy who hit first and didn’t care about the consequences? Or worse—what if something happens to you? I swear to everything, Ainsley, if someone hurt you, I wouldn’t just hit someone, I’d kill them. And I wouldn’t feel bad about it.”
She shakes her head as she gives me a reassuring kiss. “I’m not going anywhere. And don’t worry about having to kill someone for me. If something like that were to happen, my brother will hire someone to do it. He knows all kind of guys. I’m sure he has someone for that.”
I appreciate her joke, but that doesn’t change anything. “This is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, Ainsley. I don’t want to mess it up.”
“You won’t,” she says. “And I was told once by someone that it was good to do scary things every once in a while.”
I can’t fight my smile. I never have with this woman. From the first time she ran into me, to the time she tried to seductively sing karaoke to me, to right now when she’s trying to break down my last wall, she’s always had a way to make everything seem easy. Happy.
Less scary.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit, linking my hands behind her back. “But I want to. I want to be the man you deserve.”
“You are,” she says as we fall back down to the bed. “And the same for you. I want to be the best person I can be for you. This is a partnership, Linc. We’re in this together. All of it. You and me.”
I kiss her forehead, feeling more relaxed now than I have in who knows how long. “We’re really doing this, aren’t we?”
“We are,” she says. “Should it feel different?”
I shake my head. “No. Let’s be real. We were the worst fake daters in the history of PR relationships.”
Her laughter fills the room. “We were pretty bad. But now there’s no more pretending.”
“No more watching what we say.”
“No more snapping rubber bands on my wrist when you did something sweet.”
Wait...what did she say? “You did what?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says as the blush takes over her face. “I realized pretty quickly that I was going to fall for you. So every time I had a thought that was wanting to make this real, I snapped my wrist to remind me it was fake.”
