Blitzed by the Brit: A Secret Baby Sports Romance

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W
ITNESS

There’s something special about Laura. Something mind-blowing. Something… familiar.

Alex

Laura Chapman made it up to my hotel room, got naked, and then bailed, leaving me with a serious case of blue balls.

There is more to Laura than just a nervous virgin, and I soon find myself coming face to face with an emotional blast from the past.

I can’t let Laura go, but the minute I’m back in her life everything goes to shit. I’m going to protect her, but who am I protecting her from?

L
aura

Alex Garland was the boy next door, and we played together as kids. Then my mom was nearly killed by a stalker, and we had to move away. New name, new address, new school, new everything. No more Alex.

That is, until I met him in a club and went back to his hotel room.

Alex is back in my life, but so is my mom’s stalker. The stalker wants to pick up where he left off and destroy everything we’ve built in the last ten years.

What is Alex’s connection to my mom’s stalker? Have I ruined everything by hooking up with the boy next door?

Y
our copy
of Blitzed by the Brit: A Secret Baby Sports Romance includes two free bonus novels. The first of these is Royally Screwed: A British Bad Boy Romance, and the second is Hard Tackle: A Bad Boy Sports Romance.

Blitzed by the Brit is a standalone novel, and therefore you do not need to read the bonus books first. They are just there as an extra if you want them!

Please note that because of these extra books,
Blitzed by the Brit will finish at about 35% on your Kindle
.

C
harles strolls
into the sauna clothed only in a small towel barely long enough to cover his ass. His thighs are impossibly muscular, already glistening with a thin layer of sweat from training and now the added heat of the sauna.

He turns around without noticing me, and closes the door behind him while checking the temperature on the wall. The muscles in his back appear to be moving of their own volition; each one is defined so perfectly his body could be used as a specimen for medical students to study.

He turns back and notices me for the first time.

“Hello?” he says curiously, looking at me like a confused child.

It’s a question, not a greeting. He has no idea why I’m here, even though he specifically requested this meeting. How do you forget something as ridiculous as an interview taking place in a sauna? I shouldn’t have expected any different. He’s not exactly the sharpest tool in the box. Charles won’t be the first footballer to earn a degree based on his on-field abilities, but he might be one of the dumbest.

And one of the best-looking. The photographers for the school newspaper are going to have a field day with him. Sally will have him leaning on the fireplace wearing a morning robe by the time she’s done with him.

I really need to stop thinking about his appearance. For the first time, I’m grateful we’re in this stupid sauna, so I can blame my red cheeks on the heat. I look horrendous when I’m sweaty, and right now I’m
really
sweaty. My hair is already sticking to my face, and it takes only minutes for patches to appear under my arms.

Yes, I know it’s stupid to be wearing a blouse and skirt in a sauna. It’s stupid to even be here, but I’m a journalist—well, student journalist—and I do what I need to do to get the story.

“Hello Mr. Lewington,” I say politely. “I’m Rebecca. From the school paper.”

I reach out a hand towards his firm, slick chest, and wonder what it would feel like to touch his muscles. They look like they’d barely move even if I dug my fingers into them.

Stop thinking about his looks, Rebecca. Try to stay professional for five minutes.

“Oh yes,” Charles replies. “You’re the one insisting I give an interview to the school paper.”

“No, I’m the one being forced to interview you for the school paper.” I don’t want him thinking I’m here because I want to be; he looks arrogant enough as it is. “If it were up to me, we’d be using column inches to discuss one of the thousands of topics more important than the school’s latest hotshot footballer.”

“You think I’m a hotshot footballer?” Charles asks, a cocky grin covering his face.

“Really? Out of all that, the one thing you pick up on is the word ‘hotshot?’ Why does that not surprise me?”

I should stick to words of no more than two syllables. This is a guy who left school at the age of sixteen and makes the average college footballer look like a future Nobel Prize winner.

I take a deep breath, the steamy air cleansing my lungs, and try to concentrate on the task at hand. This interview doesn’t need to last any longer than ten or fifteen minutes. I can get the information I need in that time, and spin it out into a full-page article once I’m back in the office.

The noise outside doesn’t help my concentration. The football team has just finished a training session, and the team is back in the locker room now, bragging about how awesome they all are and probably slapping each other on the ass with wet towels, or whatever else it is these morons do in the locker room.

I hate footballers. I
really
hate footballers. It’s an irrational hatred, but knowing that doesn’t help. It’s not even a complicated hatred. It’s pathetically simple, and I hate myself for it. A year ago, I got screwed over by a lousy ex-boyfriend who played for the college football team. So now I hate footballers. Like I said, simple, but irrational.

“I’m going to guess from your attitude that you’re not a huge football fan?” Charles says in his smooth English accent.

Why does he have to be English? That makes it so much harder to hate him. He looks and acts like a dumb jock, but sounds like he could be on Downton Abbey debating whether or not the Duke of Norfolk should be marrying off his eldest daughter to the Winstons or the Mitchells. He not only looks like the physical embodiment of sex appeal, he sounds like it too. This man probably won’t sleep in the same bed twice over the next year.

“I don’t understand the fascination with men charging into each other and occasionally throwing the ball. But for some reason it’s popular, so here we are.”

“Here we are indeed. In a sauna.”

“Don’t say it like I had anything to do with it.”

“You’ll be a little more comfortable if you take some layers off.”

“I’m fine like this, thank you,” I lie. My entire shirt is stuck to me, and the prospect of peeling it off is almost as tempting as that of touching Charles’ abs. The walk home is going to be painfully embarrassing at this rate.

“I need to turn the heat up a bit,” Charles says. “It’s part of my post training routine. My muscles will be wrecked tomorrow otherwise.”

Charles stands up, the towel shifting slightly, almost revealing the one part of his body I haven’t yet laid eyes on. He grabs the bucket of water and uses the ladle to scoop more water onto the hot coals. The rise in temperature hits me immediately, and I undo a button on my blouse while he’s not looking.

“I really don’t mind if you want to take some clothes off,” Charles says.

“I’m sure you don’t. But if it’s all the same with you, I’d rather not conduct an interview in my underwear.”

Charles shrugs, a small movement which somehow seems to involve about sixty different muscles in his upper body. “I know it seems weird to undress in front of a stranger, but you’d wear a bikini at the beach and not bat an eyelid. Why is it any different to wear your underwear in here?”

“I don’t conduct interviews at the beach,” I reply.
I also don’t wear bikinis. Forty-year-old moms who have just given birth have more body confidence than me. I’m the girl who wears a T-shirt when she goes swimming, and still feels self-conscious.
“Have you quite finished trying to undress me?”

“For the time being.”

“Is that why you suggested we do the interview in a sauna? A pathetic attempt to get me to undress?”

“First of all, if I really wanted you to undress I could make it happen. No woman can keep her clothes on around me when I really put my mind to it. Second, I thought the person interviewing me was a guy.”

“So you wanted a guy to get naked in front of you?”

“Very droll. I just figured he’d be comfortable in a sauna. Why are you here instead? Didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see me naked?”

If I want to see him naked I only have to turn on my computer and do a quick search. Five minutes of research before this interview had revealed photos of him celebrating a victory with his teammates in a large Jacuzzi. In one photo, he’d stood up completely stark naked and his modesty had only been saved by the newspaper’s strict editorial standards that required the pixelation of male genitalia. Those pixels covered more than his towel did now though.

My current view blows those online pictures out of the water. Even high res images don’t do him justice. You can’t see the muscle definition in those photos. You can’t see how firm they are, how hard they would be to touch. In those photos, he looks just like all the other meathead athletes I’d been surrounded by when I dated Brian. Now he looks more like a model than an athlete.

I make an effort to get the interview underway. The quicker we’re done, the quicker I can get out of this literal sweat box. “I’m here because for some reason the school thinks you joining is a big deal. I don’t for the life of me understand why, because this has never been a football college, but the world of college sports is a mystery to me. The college newspaper sent me and not one of the guys, because it wants a proper article, and not some hero-worshipping piece that no one would take seriously.”

Peter had originally been assigned the story, because he was the ‘sports guy.’ He writes fluff pieces about the team and its players, making them sound like heroes worthy of worship. No one ever reads them, and certainly no one outside of the college would ever give them a second glance. They read like they were written by a fan desperate to be part of the football scene despite having never stepped foot on the field.

Unfortunately for me, the guy in charge of the college newspaper, Professor Fenwick, has a plan for this story, and he insists I be a part of it. The college football team has never had a winning season before, but apparently Charles is going to change all that. With the right publicity—including lengthy articles in the college paper—the college hopes to attract the next generation of athletes, no doubt awarding them ludicrous scholarships in the process. I chose this school specifically because it
didn’t
have a decent football program, not in spite of the fact. Thank God I’ll be graduating in nine months.

“Sounds to me like you’re the ‘hotshot’ on the college newspaper,” Charles says. “I guess logically, if you’re the newspaper hotshot and I’m the football hotshot, we should both hook up. It’s basically inevitable, so we’d be saving a lot of hassle and drama if we just got on with it now instead of dragging it on for months.”

“Actually, ‘hotshot,’ you’re destined to hook up with the head cheerleader.”

Charles shakes his head and waves his finger in front of me. “No, you see, if my understanding of American colleges is correct, the head cheerleader belongs to the quarterback. I’m not a quarterback, so I have to look elsewhere. You will do nicely.”

“You’re too kind,” I reply.

A bead of sweat drips down his cheek and my eyes instinctively follow it as it drops off and lands on his lap. What is under that towel? He’ll show me if I ask, but there is no way in hell I’m going to do that. Why does he even have such a small towel? It barely covers anything. It’s the sort of towel you use to dry your hands; there’s no way it will dry all of…
that
.

“Just calling it like I see it, love.”

I remind myself that I should be grateful for this interview. Charles is the most famous guy on campus right now, single-handedly given the responsibility for reviving the football team’s fortunes which have been on a decades-long decline. Every guy wants to be near him, hoping to look better just by being in his presence.

And the women…. I think it’s safe to say that every single woman—and many of the attached ones too—would love to be sitting in a sauna with Charles right now. Not many of them would keep their clothes on like I insist on doing.

I take some satisfaction from knowing that Peter is probably upstairs sitting in the college’s newspaper office, furious in the knowledge that I’m conducting this interview and not him. That satisfaction quickly disappears when I try to cross one leg over the other, only for the top leg to slip off because they are both so sweaty.

This interview needs to be over, and quickly.

Charles must be able to read my mind, because he gets up and puts another two scoops of water on the coals.

“I won’t look,” he says. “If you want to strip off a few layers, I will answer all the questions facing the wall.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” I lie. And I don’t trust him for a second. If I strip down to my underwear, he’ll get up and open the door to let the entire football team see me half-naked. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve seen me in a highly-compromised position, and I’m not about to make the same mistake twice.

I pick up my pen and pad of paper, the pages already wrinkled in the damp heat, and try to focus on the task at hand.

“You know, phones can record conversations now,” Charles says cheekily.

“I’m well aware of that. I’m also aware that phones and water don’t mix. If you want to move this interview to somewhere sensible, then by all means I will use my phone.”

“On second thought, maybe it’s best not all my comments are recorded for posterity. I’ve gotten in trouble like that before.”

“For the first time today, I think you’ve just been completely honest with me. Miracles will never cease. Now, let’s get this stupid interview over and done with.”

“Yeah, let’s crack on. I have a party to go to tonight. Fire away, Becky.”

“It’s Rebecca.”

“Sorry, Becky, my bad.”

I take a deep breath to try and calm the anger building inside me, but the hot air filling my lungs only makes me feel worse. I clutch the pen to stop it from slipping out of my grip and remind myself how important the college paper is to me and to my future.

If this gets me a job as a journalist, it will be worth it. Besides, I’ll have to interview worse people than him. Probably. Maybe.

“Why did you transfer to this college?” I ask.

“Oh, well, it’s always been a dream of mine to study at such an illustrious institution as… what’s this place called again?”

“Hilarious. I’m just going to write down ‘it’s the only place that would take my dumb ass.’ That sound accurate?”

“No,” Charles replies pointedly. “If you must know, I came here because my dad lives in this town. He moved to the states from England when he split up with my mother. If I’m going to go to college somewhere in America, it might as well be the one closest to him.”

I scribble ‘father’ on the paper. With my sweaty hand and cheap plastic pen, each word takes more effort to write than an entire sentence, so for once I keep my notes brief.

I know all this stuff anyway, but I want to hear it from him firsthand. I need him to trust me if I’m going to get any decent answers from him later.

“Where did you go to college in England?” I ask.

“I didn’t go to university. I left school at sixteen to play rugby.”

“Sixteen? Is that even legal?”

“Yes, in England it is. Standard leaving age is sixteen, and there wasn’t much point me staying in education when I had a training contract from a big team in front of me.”

“So there’s no such thing as ‘college rugby’ in England?”

“No, thank God.”