Free Pinned Down: A Triple Threat Sports Romance by Lexi Cross Page A

I hadn’t found any true love potion yet, but I had found that there were lots of foods that would kick down doors and walls to let me in.
     
    “I just figured you’d have someone cooking for you,” she said with a shrug.
     
    “Yeah, I guess that would make sense, but I’d be just as likely to cook for my house staff as I would be to have them cook for me,” I explained.
     
    She nodded. “Well, you can cook dinner for me any time you want. Just no funny business.” She leveled her eyes on me and pointed her fork at me.
     
    “Fine, no funny business,” I played along, raising my hands.
     
    She smiled, and I knew that no matter what else she said about trying to keep our relationship purely professional, I was back in, and I would be able to work my way into her heart and into her pants if I just kept doing what I was doing. I was well on my way to winning her over and making her mine.
     

Chapter Nine
 
    Kendra

 
     
    I had encountered Lucky’s kind before. He was just out for the conquest. When I had turned him down after the kiss the other night, he’d really gone and turned up the heat on me. He started texting me every day, a couple times a day. He’d brought me lunch a couple of times. He left it at the front desk and disappeared both times before they called me down for it. I was pretty sure that was by design. He’d sent me flowers for my office—one bouquet and a couple of brightly colored arrangements.
     
    I came out to his place for dinner to give him another chance to redeem himself. I wanted to see if he could behave after taking the opportunity to kiss me like he did last time. And I supposed part of me really wanted to see if he would try it again. I didn’t know if I would have been able to stop him a second time.
     
    As much as I didn’t want to get involved with Lucky, I wanted him. He had the kind of charm and charisma that turned me on. Hell, his smile alone was enough to make me wet and make my knees weak. It would have been so inappropriate, though. It was bad enough I was letting him use me as his girlfriend for show. To actually give in and let it happen would have undone all the work I had done so far.
     
    I asked him at dinner, “To what end?” He was talking about putting time and effort into us , but us was just a charade. It wasn’t real.
     
    He didn’t answer me, even though he kept flirting with me off and on all night. He was going to continue to lay it on thick until he could get me in bed with him. Once he got me to sleep with him, it would all be over. The constant attention would be gone. The special treatment, gone.
     
    I would just be another girl at that point, and all the sweet talk would have meant nothing at all. I wasn’t even sure we would go back to just being a professional couple. I couldn’t predict what Lucky was going to do. So far, he’d seemed to be the exact opposite of his reputation, but guys like him usually did come across that way. That was how they got away with what they did.
     
    “If you know that’s what he wants, though,” I argued with myself on the way home from his place, slapping my hands against the wheel. I was trying to convince myself to go ahead and give in, to let sex be part of our arrangement.
     
    “It makes more sense to sleep with him than to go through all the trouble to sneak someone else into bed,” I told myself, and I was right. To keep them from being noticed by the press, I would have had to sneak any partners other than Lucky into my bed. It made perfect sense to go ahead and sleep with Lucky instead, since we were already seeing each other anyway.
     
    I just had to convince myself that sex was all it was. I couldn’t afford to let myself get hurt like I had before by fooling myself into thinking it was anything more than what it really was. I had fallen for a guy just like Lucky once before, and he’d left me high and dry.
     
    I had been ready to give myself to him completely. I was moving in