Page 63 of Good Girl's Guide to Love
She laughs. “It’s a long story for another day. But that was my way of saying that if shenanigans are happening, I’m all about them. I just need them to stay on the right side of the law.”
“Wait, does your family break the law?”
She shakes her head as she takes another bite of a ranch-dipped tender. “A few arrests, but no convictions. My sister Stella, though, was once picked up by the FBI for questioning.”
I drop the tender I was about to put in my mouth. “The FBI? As in the Feds?”
“Yup,” Ainsley says, like that isn’t a bombshell. “But it all went away after we got her ex to admit to a dominatrix that he set her up.”
I stare at her, jaw dropped, because no way those words just left her mouth. “You’re lying.”
“Cross my heart.”
We both pause for a second after she says it. I don’t think she meant to, but the second it came out of her lips, she realizes what she said.
Kind of like me last night when I scored that touchdown. I didn’t even realize what I was doing until I did it. But in that moment, the first person I thought of was Ainsley.
Because my mind was clear. During that entire play, it was like every other worry or possibility left my head. All I saw was an open field and six points.
I know rationally that Ainsley didn’t magically fly into the stadium and wave a magic wand to clear my mind from the noise. But she also did. Which is why when I found the end zone and my teammates started flooding me in celebration, it was just her blonde hair and blue eyes I could think of.
I’d wondered if she saw it. Knowing Ainsley the little I do, I doubted she was going to bring it up. But between how her breath stopped just now, and the flush in her cheeks, she did. And that’s good enough for me.
“So you’re saying that I, the man who has also never been convicted, but was damn close a few times, picked the right sister to date?”
Ainsley gives me a genuine smile with a coy shoulder shrug. “Stick with me, Kincaid. I’ll have you volunteering and not swearing in no time.”
I don’t know what draws my attention from Ainsley to out the window, but I do. Which is when I see a not-so-sly passerby not passing by. And aiming a camera right through the window.
“I think we’ve been found,” I say. “Want to keep them on the move?”
Ainsley looks out the window, then back to me. “Can ice cream be involved?”
“Can it be involved?” I stand from my seat, holding my hand out for her to help her up. “Not only can it be involved, I think it’s required.”
“So if you weren’t playing football, what would you be doing?”
“Oh yes! The twenty-questions part of the first date!” My sarcastic comment earns me a side-eye as we walk with our ice cream cones along the Cumberland River. “I’m kidding. But yes. It was football player or bust.”
“But you went to college? What did you major in?”
“Communications, which in athlete terms, meant I was majoring in football,” I say. “And if your next question is ‘Linc, what would you do with that if football didn’t work?’ The answer is play football. I needed a major, and it required the least amount of science and math classes.”
“Unlike my major, which was all math and science,” she says before taking a lick of her sugar cone filled with strawberry ice cream. I opted to go with a waffle cone of cookies and cream. “That was the only thing that almost stopped me from becoming a nurse.”
“And let me guess, you were a straight-A student, even while taking stupid hard math and science classes?”
She bashfully shrugs. “Yes. But I had to work for them. I think organic chemistry almost killed me.”
“We had a very different college experience,” I say. “The only thing that tried to kill me were summer workouts.”
“But you didn’t start at Mississippi State, right? You transferred?”
“Did someone do their homework on me?”
Again with that shy shrug. It’s fucking adorable. “Yes. But in my defense, Mia also told me your entire bio, and my sister Stella is an unofficial FBI member. So I had help.”
I take the final bite of my ice cream cone and thank the heavens Ainsley remembered to grab napkins, as we find an empty bench looking at the river. In the skyline is the Fury stadium, and right now, at night, with the reflection of the water in front of it, I don’t know if there’s a more beautiful sight.
