How had she found out? The only people who knew were Coach, a handful of the guys, and…
God damn it. How the hell had he not seen that coming? He’d been so wrapped up in making sure Mollie didn’t tell Madison about them that he’d never once considered that Madison would tell Mollie about the job.
Jackson closed his eyes. “You talked to your sister.”
“Yeah, she’s in town,” Mollie said, dropping her purse to the floor with a careless thud. “Which I’m surprised you didn’t know, what with her being your confidante and all.”
Jackson fought down the surge of panic. “Mollie, look, I know how this must seem, but—”
“No, I don’t think you can possibly know how it seems, Jackson. I’ve been in absolute hell, trying to figure out how to tell my sister about this thing between us. And just when I finally manage to break it to her, I learn that the joke’s on me. That I’m the clueless idiot, not her.”
And there was the second blow: finding out that Madison knew about him and Mollie.
Jackson waited to feel something: guilt, relief, confusion. But his brain didn’t even seem to want to bother with that little fact. And his heart definitely didn’t. His heart was too busy sounding a red alert over the devastation on Mollie’s face.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, her voice breaking.
God. He stepped forward, but she took a pace back.
“No, actually, you don’t have to answer that. I can guess why you didn’t tell me. Maybe you were putting it off, trying to figure out how to let me down easy. But Madison? Was all this talk about how she was dead to you a lie?”
“No. Of course not.” He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “But I didn’t know she’d even gotten involved until Coach told me.”
Mollie stilled. “So she did this without your involvement? Went behind your back to get you the job?”
His throat hurt at the sudden hope he saw on her face. For a horrible moment he wanted to lie to her—to make this all go away by telling her that the coaching job had been all Madison’s manipulation.
But when he opened his mouth to tell the fib, he found he couldn’t. He cared about her too damn much. She deserved the truth. And she deserved a man who was a hell of a lot better than he was. A man who would stand by her—one whose future didn’t involve a football field in Texas.
He couldn’t be that man. He wasn’t cut out for the life she wanted, with the parties and the Central Park walks and the suits. What place did a rough-around-the-edges cowboy have with a woman poised to pursue her Ph.D.?
He forced himself to meet her eyes. “I told her. That day she came into my office, I told her that I’d been talking to Coach. That I wanted the job.”
She bit her bottom lip so hard it turned white. “How long? How long were you trying to get back to Texas?” He said nothing, and she took another step back. “The whole time? This whole freaking time? Why did you even come to New York in the first place?”
“Coach didn’t want me,” he said gruffly. “No one did. Every last contact said that with my rep, I’d bring a bad name to the team, that the guys wouldn’t listen to me. That the media would be focusing on me instead of the players. I was NFL kryptonite.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “And Madison was able to fix that for you. One phone call confessing her sins to Jerry, and you had your dream job.”
“Not my dream job,” he said before he could think better of it. “Never my dream job.”
She snorted. “Right. There is no dream job other than being a star quarterback, right, Jackson? That’s the only life worth living?”
“Don’t,” he commanded, angry now. “Don’t belittle my entire life.”
“Your entire past life. You had to have known it couldn’t last forever.”
“Of course I knew!” he shouted. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell when it was taken too early.”
“Fine,” she said, holding up her hands. “You wanted your football life to last a little bit longer. I can respect that, even if I don’t get it. But why not just tell me? All those late nights we spent talking?”
He held out his hands, feeling helpless. “I was trying to avoid this. I didn’t want to see that hurt in your eyes.”
Mollie lifted her chin. “Why? Why didn’t you want to hurt me?”
Jackson clenched his teeth. He wanted to snap that he wasn’t an animal—that he didn’t want to hurt anyone if he could help it. But he knew that wasn’t what she was asking. What she wanted him to say.
She was asking why he didn’t want to hurt her in particular.
He could tell her that he cared about her, and it would be the truth. But it wouldn’t be enough. Not for Mollie.