What? WHAT?
It was him. The man from last night. Mr. Right Then, the guy I had spent the night with.
“Lance Parker, meet your new athletic trainer and physical therapist.”
Lance..Parker? Parker from last night was really Lance Parker? What the hell?
I tried to keep the astonishment from off my face but I knew right that second that I was doing a really terrible job doing so. Parker, well, Lance, had a shocked look on his face too.
Morris didn’t seem to notice. He turned to me and continued as if nothing was wrong.
As if I wasn’t about to start working with the man who I’d just had my first one night stand ever with.
“Charlotte Calloway, meet Lance Parker, starting quarterback for the New England Patriots. He’s your most important customer.”
Ugh. This was gonna be bad, I just knew it. On the one hand, my body immediately began aching for him all over again, seeing him there all dressed up like he just came from something almost formal.
On the other hand, though, I was gonna have to touch this man…for a living. Wait, there was a downside to this?
Oh yeah, he was a glamorous star athlete who probably had girls all over him all the time, and who probably brought home another girl every single night.
“Nice to meet you, Lance,” I said, reaching out my hand and emphasizing his real first name as heavily as I could without making it seem awkward. “I’m Charlotte, looks like we’ll be working together this season.”
Lance took my hand in his, and flashes of him pressing me against the wall as we kissed just hours earlier flitted through my head - I tried to wave them off but they kept coming. “Thanks for coming on board, uh, Charlotte, it’ll be good to work together.”
“I’m sure of it.” We were still holding hands.
Great, just great, Charlotte. Way to fall in lust with literally the worst guy in New England to fall for. Brilliant move. And just before your first day of…working with him! Or, more specifically, working ON him.
Because, you know, that’s what you do now! You work on Lance Parker’s body. For a living. Just great.
Lance and I must have both realized we were still shaking hands at the same time, because we both pulled our hands back at the same moment, both of us wearing sheepish looks.
Morris kept on like there was zero tension in the room, and zero knives with which to cut it. “I’ll let you two get acquainted. Glad to have you aboard, Miss Calloway.”
“Thanks again, Mr. Morris. I won’t let you down.”
“You wouldn’t have time to even if you wanted to.”
He smiled at us both and left the room. We were alone. As soon as the door closed I had my hands on my hips, getting up in Parker’s face.
“What’s the big idea, anyway?”
Lance just stood there like a statue, his mouth opening and closing but no words coming out. “Huh?”
“Last night, dummy. Giving me a fake name like that. Do that to every girl, eh?”
“To be clear, Miss Calloway, it was my last name I gave you.”
“Factually correct, ‘Mr. Parker,’” I countered with.
“And we both know, Charlotte,” he said, emphasizing my name in a way that would have made me swoon if I wasn’t so mad at him already, “that factually correct is the best kind of correct.”
“Be that as it may, Lance, that whole nonsense about having two last names was just a game to you?”
“Uh, yeah, wasn’t it to you too? We were flirting at a club, I didn’t think it really mattered what we said.”
I looked down, reaching up to pull an errant lock of hair back behind my ear. “OK, you have a good point there, fine. But still, you should have told me your real name.”
“I just didn’t want you to know who I was.”
“You didn’t want me to know who you were? The starting quarterback of the New England Patriots?” Now I pointed at him, hard, poking him in that perfectly chiseled chest of his, the chest I’d pressed myself against over and over while riding his cock a few hours ago. “Don’t you think I should have known that from the start?”
Lance stayed standing there, letting me poke him. “I just didn’t want you taking me home for the wrong reasons.”
“The wrong reasons?!”
“Yeah, I didn’t want to sleep with you just because you wanted to get with a pro athlete.”
“You think that’s what I wanted? To have a one night stand with a professional football player? Do you even know me?”
Lance laughed, his laugh warm and rich and sexy and gorgeous and I could not believe how much I both hated Lance Parker and wanted to jump into his arms right at that moment. “No, Charlotte, I don’t know you at all. But I had to plan for the possibility that you recognized me and that all you wanted was a night with a starting quarterback.”
“Well, that’s not what I was looking for.”
“Well, you got it, even so.” He thought about it a second. “Would that have changed anything if you had known?”
“Maybe. Yes, it would.”