Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (184 page)

Just the two of them, falling into bed.
 
They made love all night, over and over,
resting in between climaxes, holding each other, talking about everything and
anything.

Jay told her about Marti, about how he’d wanted her to marry him,
and how she’d turned him down.
 
Alyssa
told him about Joel, how she’d always felt like she was in his shadow.

“I can’t imagine you ever being in anyone’s shadow,” Jay said, and
kissed her deeply and passionately.

Finally, the night had to end, and the sun began to rise over
Brooklyn.
 
Alyssa lay there, thinking
about how good this felt, letting herself believe for just a second that maybe
this could work out.
 
Crazier things
had happened, right?
 
Look at Prince
Charles and Princess Diana.
 
Of
course, he’d ended up cheating on her, so it wasn’t the best example, but --

The phone rang, breaking the spell.

“God,” Jay said.
 
“Doesn’t your editor ever sleep?”

Alyssa laughed, then reached over and picked up the receiver.
 
“I’m almost done with the column,
Isobel,” she said.

“Forget the column!” Isobel screeched.
 
“You better get down to Lerner Field
asap!”

“What?”
 
Alyssa was
confused.
 
“Why do I have to get
down to the field asap?”

“Because,” Isobel said. “Jay Havens is about to be arrested.”

***

This was a nightmare.
 
Some kind of brawl had apparently taken place last night at a bar
between Brooklyn Heat fans, and the fans of their rivals, the New York
Storm.
 
Things had gotten out of
hand.

And now, someone was saying that Jay had been there.

“Do you even understand what this is going to do?” Steve hissed
through the phone. “They’re going to kick you off the team now for sure.”

“I wasn’t there,” Jay said calmly.

“Well, there are two witnesses who say you were.
 
Do you have any kind of alibi?”

“No,” Jay said.
 
He
glanced at Alyssa, sitting on the bed next to him.
 
“I was at home, alone.”

 
“If I were you,” Steve
said,
 
“I’d get a lawyer.”

Jay sighed and hung up.

Alyssa looked nervous.
 
“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Jay said.
 
He
rolled his eyes.
 
“Just some
assholes, saying I assaulted them last night.”

“But you were here.”

“I know.”
 
He
shrugged.
 
“But it’s my word against
theirs.”

“And you can’t tell them you were here,” Alyssa said slowly.
 
“Because of me.”
 
She looked upset, and her eyes filled
with tears.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Jay said.
 
He reached over and rubbed her back.
 
“Don’t worry.
 
It’ll blow over.
 
It always does.
 
This is one of those things that just
comes with the territory, you know?”
 
He kissed her lips softly.
 
“I’ll call you later, okay?
 
I’m going to go meet with Steve.”

Alyssa watched as he walked out of the room.
 
She thought about what Isobel had said,
about how she should get down to the field as soon as possible.
 
Instead, Alyssa took her time.
 
She got into the shower, letting the hot
water beat over her body.
 
She dried
her hair, then dressed in jeans and a Brooklyn Heat hoodie.

She looked around her hotel room and thought about how Jay hadn’t
told his agent they’d been together, even though it would have been easy for
him.
 
She thought about how he’d
been so understanding about her not wanting to be seen with him.
 
She thought about their talk last night,
about how amazing he was.

She thought about Joel, how he’d always pressured her to stay in
his shadow, how he’d demeaned her job, acted like it didn’t matter.
  
She thought about how Jay hadn’t
done that, how he’d never made her feel like his job was more important than
hers, how he was willing to get arrested because he knew her job was that important
to her.

She thought about how afraid she’d been, about how she hadn’t been
able to really give herself over to love.
 
She thought about taking chances.

And then she sat down.

And wrote a column.

A column about how she’d fallen in love with Jay.
 
How the two of them had spent the night
together.
 
That he couldn’t have
been nicer.
 
That he’d been willing
to get arrested for her.
 
That
everyone had him all wrong.

And then, before she could change her mind, she sent it to
Isobel.
 
And then she went to find
Jay.

~Epilogue~

Four
Months Later

At Lerner Field, the crowd was going wild.
 
The Brooklyn Heat had just beat the New
York Streak to clinch the pennant, and they were headed to the World Series.

Alyssa sat right behind the dugout, her pen and paper out in front
of her.
 
After she’d sent her column
to Isobel about her and Jay, things had taken a turn for the better.
 
It turned out that Isobel had loved
it.
 
And so had the site visitors.

Jay and Alyssa had become America’s favorite couple.
 
And Alyssa had gone on the road with the
Heat, writing about her adventures, and what it was like dating America’s
favorite reformed bad boy.

Ticket sales were up.
 
And now with the trip to the World Series, things would be even
better.
 
Alyssa watched the field as
Chad and Jay hugged.
 
Chad had had
his own scandals after her column had run, which had taken the heat off Jay.

Apparently Jessa had made a hidden sex tape of the two of them, and
when Chad had refused to see her again, she’d threatened to release it.
 
But that had blown over, and the tape
had never materialized.
 
Alyssa
suspected Chad had given Jessa some kind of settlement, but she couldn’t be
sure.

Alyssa watched as the players celebrated, and then a microphone was
brought out and shoved in front of Dax’s face.
 
As the captain, he gave a few words of
congratulations to the team.
 
And
then he handed it off to Jay, giving him a hug.
 
The two had mended their fences once Dax
had realized that Jay and Alyssa were the real thing.
 
Dax had even apologized for the comments
he’d made.

“Hello, Brooklyn,” Jay said, and the crowd went wild.
 
“I just want to say thank you so much to
the fans who have supported me since the beginning of my career.
 
I know we had some rough times.”
 
The crowd laughed, and then hollered
their appreciation.

“I couldn’t have done this without my teammates, without my agent,
Steve, without Cliff Billingsley.
 
But the one person who’s most responsible for everything I do, is my
girlfriend, Alyssa Cotler.”

Everyone turned to look at her, and then Jay was walking across the
field toward her.
 
“She’s been my
inspiration, my light, my life.
 
She’s changed everything about what I think and how I feel.
 
I wouldn’t be anywhere if it weren’t for
her.”

The crowd cheered.

Jay was at the bottom of the stands now, and he jumped onto the top
of the dugout and took Alyssa’s hand.

“Alyssa,” he said,
 
“I
love you more than anything in the world.”

“I love you, too,” she said.
 
Her heart was beating almost out of her chest.

Jay got down on one knee.
 
And the crowd went even crazier.
 
“Alyssa,” he said, and pulled a ring out of the pocket of his
uniform.
 
“Will you marry me?”

“Yes!” she screamed.
 
“Yes, yes, yes!”
 
He slid the
ring onto her finger, and then grabbed her in a hug.

“I love you,” he whispered into her ear.

“I love you, too,” she said.
 

“Forever?”

“Forever.”

He kissed her, and Alyssa closed her eyes and remembered the
moment.

THE END OF CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT

HEAT OF THE MOMENT

(Brooklyn Heat, #2)

by Locklyn Marx

Copyright
2011 Locklyn Marx, all rights reserved

Chapter
One

Kenley Mitchell sat at the bar drinking a pina
colada and thinking about how horrible her life was.
 
Well.
 
That was being a little dramatic.
 
Her life wasn’t
totally
horrible.
 
She
knew there were people with far bigger problems in the world, people who were
homeless or had incurable diseases or had just lost a family member.
 
Kenley’s problems were a lot more
run-of-the-mill.

“Would you like another drink, ma’am?” the
bartender asked.
 
He was a young
guy, probably about twenty-two, with a tattoo of a snake on his wrist and a tight
gray T-shirt that showed off his bulging muscles.
 
Kenley had taken an instant dislike to
him, and she was still trying to figure out if it was because of his perfect
body or the fact that he kept calling her ma’am.

“How old are you?” Kenley asked and then took
another sip of her drink.

“Twenty-one,” the guy answered.
 
He sounded wary, like maybe he was
afraid she was going to proposition him for sex.
 

“Yeah, well, I’m twenty-nine.”
 
She was going to be thirty in two
months, but whatever.
 
For right now,
she was twenty-nine and she intended to hold on to every last second of
it.
 
“Which means I’m only eight
years older than you.”

The bartender frowned, like he thought eight
years was actually a lot.
 
“Okaaaay,” he said, and shrugged.
 
“Would you like another drink?”
 
He was probably used to crazy people getting drunk and spouting off at
him.
 
Not that Kenley was
drunk.
 
She was riding the line
between warm and buzzed, and had been for the three hours that she’d been
sitting there.
 

“Whatever,” Kenley said, frustrated that he
wasn’t getting her point.
 
The point
being that he shouldn’t be calling her ma’am.
 
“Yes, I’d like another drink.”

She sat back in her seat and looked around the
bar.
 
It was poolside at her hotel,
the St. Pierre Siesta Key.
 
Palm trees
swayed gently in the evening breeze and the warm night air brushed against her
skin.
 
How could she be depressed
when she was out here in the beautiful Florida weather, away from Connecticut
and the cold, gray winter?
 

She really needed to snap out of her funk.
 
She picked up one of the cocktail
napkins that was sitting on the bar and rummaged around in her straw beach bag
for a pen.
 
What she needed was some
kind of plan.
 
She would write down
everything that was wrong in her life, and then come up with a solution for
each item.
 
How hard could it
be?
 
People changed their lives
every day like it was nothing.
 
All
you had to do was turn on the OWN network and you could see millions of
examples.

Number
one,
she wrote,
lost my job.
 
She tapped her pen against the bar.
 
The solution to this one was
obvious.
 
Find another job.
 
But with the economy the way it was, it
was easier said than done.
 
Especially since Kenley’s field, real estate, was one of the hardest hit
by the recession.
 
She’d been a
mortgage broker at a local bank for the past five years, until last week, when
her boss called her into his office and fired her.
 
“Let go” is how they put it.