Free Blitzed by the Brit: A Secret Baby Sports Romance by Jessica Ashe Page A

seven o’clock in the morning.
    How the hell is anyone supposed to study this early in the morning? When I’d been in school, I’d only really been efficient between the hours of eleven and two. Anything before eleven is too early, and anything after two is in the middle of the afternoon lull. Seven in the morning is just impossible, or at least it is for me. When I arrive at the library Becky is already hard at work.
    “Morning,” I growl.
    Becky looks up at me, but the smile quickly fades from her face. She still looks gorgeous. She must always get up early, because there isn’t a hint of tiredness in her eyes. “Did you get any sleep?”
    “Some,” I reply. “Not as much as I’d like. Didn’t get in until one o’clock.”
    “Party?” I can already hear the disapproval in her voice.
    “Yeah, last party before the season starts. I had to go. Team spirit and all that.”
    “You won’t even be playing this season if you don’t get good grades.”
    “I know, I know.”
    “Do you? If you did, you wouldn’t be going to parties and staying up till the early hours of the morning doing God knows what.”
    “I was just drinking,” I reply. “There was nothing sordid. You don’t need to be jealous.”
    “I’m most certainly not jealous. I just want you to take this seriously.”
    “I am. I can assure you, if I wasn’t taking this seriously, I wouldn’t be here at this time in the morning.”
    “Good. I want to go through this week’s assigned reading with you today.”
    “Yes, ma’am.” I dig through my bag and find the right book. It’s mercifully thin, although when I look inside I realize that’s largely because of the small print. I’m not complaining. The longer it takes to get through this book, the more time I have to be with Becky. I need to get her to stop thinking of me as just a student, but that’s not going to be easy. She has feelings for me—I’m almost positive about that—but she won’t admit to them. I have my work cut out for me.
    “Before I forget, I have a surprise for you.”
    Becky digs into her bag and comes out with a handful of pens and different colored sticky labels.
    “You bought me highlighters,” I say excitedly. I’m not excited to have highlighters, but I’m excited that she cares enough to buy them for me. When I buy things for women it’s because I want to get them into bed. This is probably the same thing, right?
    “You have to actually use them.”
    “What do I do? Just highlight important sentences?”
    “Yes,” she says slowly, clearly wanting to say ‘no, you idiot.’ “But you can’t just go highlighting things left and right. You need a system.”
    “A system?”
    Becky takes the pens out of the plastic pocket and holds up a yellow highlighter. “I use this color for lines that really jump out to me as being particularly poetic or inspirational. Ones I might want to quote in an essay.” She puts the yellow highlighter down and picks up a green one. “I use this color for lines that add something to the character’s personality. For example, if a character casually gives money to a beggar then I would highlight that action because the author is clearly trying to communicate something about the character. You should use a similar system.”
    “What about all the other colors?”
    “You might not need to use them.”
    “But you do?”
    She nods. “I have a system, but it’s probably overkill to be honest.”
    “What about the sticky labels?”
    Becky didn’t just buy standard yellow stickies. There were lots of small stickies of different colors and shapes. She even had those labels that lawyers used to indicate where you needed to sign.
    “How you use the stickies depends on what you’re reading. I don’t really have a strict system for that.”
    “Wow, how rebellious of you.”
    “Yeah, yeah. I know, but it’s got me where I am today.”
    “Sitting in a small room with a footballer you want to fuck?”
    She purses her