Free Game On (A Bad Boy Sports Romance) by Olivia Lancaster Page B

made my way out of the office, feeling confident. I was not a legal-minded person, but if there was one type of people I knew how to talk to, it was sportspeople. As I stepped down the stairs of the offices and headed towards my car, I hit the ‘call’ button for the first team manager on my list and put the ear to my phone.
     
                  If Paul and Janet wanted a fight, I was going to bring the best ammo that I had.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER 7 - DANIELLE
 
                  I was already halfway through a box of stale crackers, curled up in bed with a face mask on, wearing a thrift store terry cloth robe and watching game show reruns. As usual, I hadn’t had the time to go proper grocery shopping, so I was just nibbling on whatever I happened to have in the house. This time it was crackers and some peanut butter hidden toward the back of the cabinet. Last night with Kieran had been my first proper meal in quite awhile. It was a wonder I managed to survive on scraps stolen now and then, scooping up handfuls of dry cereal and granola on the go. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about what I ate-- it was just that I cared a whole lot more about my career than anything else. I was too busy to eat right. Too busy to take care of myself. That’s the way I built my life, everything balanced on top of the towering, precarious structure of my ambitions.
     
                  But last night, Kieran had taken me to a real restaurant for the first time in ages. Normally, even when I met up with subjects for interviews at restaurants, they were pretty low-key, cheap establishments. Just a place to get chips and salsa while I hammer some guy about his inner strength and favorite childhood memories. I generally spent much more time asking questions and scribbling down answers than I did eating. Priorities. But when Kieran texted me the instructions for our totally professional and definitely not personal date last night, my jaw had dropped. He’d gotten us reservations at a swanky Italian place near the strip somehow, at the last minute.
     
                  Part of me wondered if he’d actually made the reservation a week ago, just planning quietly to rope me into going last night. Either way, I was begrudgingly impressed. He was doing a lot to keep me interested, which was bizarre to think about considering the fact that Kieran was a superstar football player who could literally have just about any woman he wanted. But for some reason, he chose to spend his time with me. I told myself he probably had a bunch of other girls he hung out with, too-- that I wasn’t special. And the truth of the matter was, we were still just professional acquaintances. Just because I had exclusive rights to his interviews didn’t mean I had exclusive rights to his heart.
     
                  Not that I wanted that or anything. It would be foolish to want something like that. No matter how much attention he gave me now, I told myself it was probably just the way he was-- cocky and borderline rude in the public eye and overly affable and generous in closed quarters. Maybe he was just buttering me up as a sort of bribe to make me cast him in a more positive light, since my status as his interviewer set me up to control how people perceived him. So perhaps his kindness toward me was just a ploy to keep his image clean and pretty. Just a business move.
     
    I couldn’t even really blame him if that were the case. I’d had subjects try to bribe me before in more subtle ways. And sometimes less subtle, too. One time an ad rep for a Utah team tried to pay me twenty bucks to gloss over some shady stuff he let slip during an interview. He’d gotten a little drunk and said more than he should have. But since the shady information was still pretty damn boring, I kept his dirty laundry out of the article anyway. Without accepting his pitiful bribe.
     
    Kieran, though, was a different