Ryan Hunter (6 page)

With a confident feeling in my gut, I decided that things were going to change today.
Radically
.

“Good luck, Matthews.” I gave her the sticker, which she popped on the upper curve of her left boob and rubbed it smooth.

Holy penalty kick,
she shouldn’t do this to me
.
My eyes fastened on that same spot while my mouth watered so badly I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to say anything else without drooling all over her.

Fortunately, she didn’t pay attention to my sudden lack of composure but turned around and headed back to Tony. Pulling myself together fast, I nodded a greeting at my friend then cleared my throat…several times.
“Okay, everybody. For a little warm-up, I want you to run three laps around the field then come back here,” I shouted over the murmurs.

After some protesting moans, the crowd got moving. Susan left her post to join in the warm-up, and I jogged over to run with her. “Thanks for your help,” I told her. “That’s really cool of you.”

“Yeah, sure. No problem.” She gasped for air as we ran then continued. “As long as that gives me a special status for the tryouts, we’re fine.”

She made me laugh. In fact, I was thinking about it already. Though I had no idea how she’d handle the ball, I thought it would be fun to have an up-front girl like her on the team. “Don’t you worry about that,
Miller. If you can hit a ball with your foot, we’re good.”

I left her side after the first lap and sat on the small table with Alex and Frederickson, watching how some of the girls already fought for air.

“Tony’s girl is going to collapse before she makes the three rounds,” Frederickson stated, and I automatically scanned the girls for Cloey. But she ran like a pro. Then of course, to everyone else Tony’s girl would still be Liza. I found her more crawling than jogging next to Mitchell, totally red in the face, and panting like a tank engine.

“Damn. That’s not good,” I mumbled.

“Why?” Alex wanted to know.

“Because last night, Tony asked me to take her on the team.”
And of course, I would have done so even if I had to give her a piggy ride to master just the warm-up.

“Well then, I guess you have to be gentle on her.” Alex laughed and pushed away from the table. Something told me that his joke was in fact on me.

After most of the girls had finished the three laps, I started a goal contest with them. Everybody had to score at least one. Three points if the first kick was a goal. None, if they didn’t manage to get the ball past Frederickson even on the third try. Of course, Frederickson wasn’t giving his best today. It was more like fifteen percent of what he was capable off, but we didn’t want to win a match today, we wanted to restock the team. So, fifteen percent was good.

I got a little excited as numbers forty to forty-six took their turns. Next would be Liza, and I couldn’t wait to practice goal kicking with her. But when I turned around, she was sitting on the ground and talking to Mitchell who handed her a drink in a paper cup. I had always been cool with him being her companion, best friend,
playmate, whatever. It had gotten on my nerves, but I had never said a word. However, since last night—since Tony had told me he was seriously involved with Cloey—I was more jealous than ever. At their tiniest touch, the urge to hit something hard rose within me. This was a serious problem, and I could only hope that Mitchell would come out with the truth fast. She would see him with different eyes then. With eyes that didn’t bear this romantic, dreamy
take-me-now
look any longer.

“Matthews!
Your turn!” I yelled, suppressing my jealousy, and kicked the ball toward her. She turned around and caught the ball to her chest. Good reflexes. There was definitely some potential in that.

I waited next to the goal while she placed the ball in the grass then kicked it with mild power toward Frederickson. The tall guy didn’t have to move an inch to stop the ball. In fact, it died on the way toward the goal and looked like it needed reanimation. Damn, kicking wasn’t Liza’s strength.

“Come on, Matthews!” I shouted as I picked up the ball and jogged over to them. She looked like she was going to capitulate. Sweat coated every inch of her skin and breathing still troubled her after running the three laps. But I couldn’t let her fail in this qualifying, so I tried to tickle out her ambition with a smirk. “I’ve seen you kick Mitchell’s butt harder than that.”

Since she didn’t back off, I guessed she was up to another try, so I dropped
the ball in front of her. Then I placed my hands on her shoulders and moved her several steps back. “Now take a short run and put a little more power in your thrust.”

This was the first time that I ever touched Liza Matthews. And I thanked God for the invention of tank tops. Her skin was smooth and heated, emitting the warm scent of some flower mix. I didn’t know what she used to rub on her body after a shower, but the smell of it drove me crazy and close to not giving a fuck about who might see it when I was going to kiss that girl in just another moment.

Unfortunately, she didn’t look very happy about what I did to her. She grabbed the collar of Tony’s jersey and whined, “Ah no, don’t let him make me do that. We both know I will just trip over the damn thing.”

She looked so hilariously panicky that I couldn’t stop myself from laughing while
Tony pried her fingers loose from his collar. “No, you won’t,” he told her in a confident way. Then he shot me a quick glance that looked like he was asking my permission…for whatever. I nodded, because I trusted him fully. Anyway, we both wanted the same today, which was getting Liza on the team. “Tell you what, if you hit Frederickson straight in the chest, I’ll buy you a chocolate decadence ice cream sundae,” he tempted her. “Deal?”

It wouldn’t be a goal if the ball didn’t make it
past
Frederickson, but as long as the outcome at the end of the day was the same, I didn’t care.

Liza considered the new task for a second then grinned.
“Deal.” Two steps she ran, then she kicked the ball with an amicable thrust. It dropped like a baby in Frederickson’s arms. At least she mastered it this way.

“Well done!”
I told her, wishing I would be the one to buy her ice cream later.

I returned to the table and to Susan. “Forty-seven gets three points for the goal shooting,” I told her. She’d seen what happened, and of course it earned me a quizzical look from the book lover, but I was the captain of this team, and what I said was law. It took only my arching one brow to make her understand that, and she scribbled a perfect 3 next to Liza’s name. When she grinned up at me in a nice schoolgirl manner, I smiled back. I liked how we communicated without words and understood each other so well.

I finished the goal contest with the remaining attendees then joined my buddies, Alex and Sasha, who trained running and kicking across the lawn with some of the girls. Tony did the same with Liza, and though she wasn’t a pro, she managed a few very promising passes to Mitchell. I watched them for a while deciding whether to give her the deserved two points in this task or the full five. She was really lame at the next event, which was testing their balance and skills at juggling the ball with one leg, doing kicks without dropping it. I grimaced and dragged my hands down over my face. There was no need to even start counting how many she did.

I scratched my head. If I gave her a fair rating, she’d never make it on the team. There were at least twenty other girls better than her. On the plus side, she wasn’t the worst, and having her on the team wouldn’t turn out to be a total loss.

On the way over to Susan, a sneaky attack made me drop on all fours. One of the girls hit me on the backside of my left knee with a really hard kick that Alex failed to stop. Me going down like a shot buffalo caused a round of laughter and some bantering from Alex. It took exactly two seconds, until he was on the ground underneath me, and we wrestled around like a couple of puppies.

“Hey Sash,” Frederickson yelled above us. “Help me get the kids apart. They’re always so
rollicking
when they get coffee in the morning.”

Alex and I grabbed each a leg of Frederickson, which was his downfall.

“Oh, come on, guys.” I heard Cloey’s annoyed voice. “Can you wait with the man-part until later? Some of us would like to know if we’re on the team.”

I wrestled myself free from Alex and Frederickson and gave Cloey a wry look. “You got maximum score in every event,
Summers. I guess it’s okay to say that you probably made it.”

She disappeared on a happy skip, and I could finally tell Susan the last few scores to enter into her list. I walked up behind her, braced my palms on the wooden top on either side of her, and leaned over her shoulder. Susan gave a short gasp, probably at the unexpected nearness. If I judged her right, she’d never had a boy touch her, let alone kiss one. Dating might not be spelled in caps in her books. That was a shame. She was cool and she smelled like vanilla milk. She had a pretty face, even with her glasses. The only thing missing on this one was boobs, but she was only sixteen. They might come soon.

I pointed to the bottom of the list. “Fifty-three and four get three points each for the run and kick, and they did seven and ten at the juggling. There’s no need in writing anything down for numbers fifty-six, seven, and eight. They won’t make it.”

“Okay, so we have all. Well…all but one.” She tilted her head a little and studied me from the corner of her eye. “You didn’t give me the scores for Liza Matthews.”

“Didn’t I?” It was a suggestive drawl, and it made Susan chuckle.

“Let me guess, five points for the run and kick, and at juggling she probably did imaginary…
twelve
?”

“Fifteen.”

She pointed the tip of her pen at me. “Right.” Then she wrote the numbers into the list without further discussion, but she wore a knowing smile all the time.

I leaned lower to speak into her ear. “You know, as my assistant, you’re bound to secrecy.”

“Absolutely,” she confirmed with the same sneer that I wore, and for some reason I knew I could trust her with that. When she was done writing, I took her hand and pulled her off the bench. “Okay, it’s your turn now, book lover. Let’s see what you can do with a ball.” As my unofficial secretary, she hadn’t had much time to take part in the tryouts, so I ran her personally through the events. She probably wasn’t going to be a professional soccer player, not now or ever. But she was better than Liza in most things, and even though her scores sucked, I put Susan’s name on the new members list.

Her shadow moved over the paper when she leaned forward to take a look at what I wrote. Then she straightened with that quirky grin again. “You know, some people say you’re an ass, Hunter. I can’t see why that is.”

“That’s because they don’t know me.” I winked at her, which made her flash her teeth in a wide smile. Then I headed onto the middle of the field and welcomed the new members. When Liza realized she’d made it, her sweet mouth hung open like she was trying to catch fish with it. Apparently, it took Mitchell a minute to assure her that she hadn’t heard wrong. Happy like a kitten, she hurried to the bench and fished for her backpack.

I followed her. Step one of courting my dream girl was a success. She was in my team now. Step two: come to my party.

I wanted to say hi when I stood right behind her, but at the same moment, she whirled around so fast that she bumped straight into my chest, throwing me a step back. Cupping her elbows, I prevented her from tripping. And once again, I couldn’t resist taking a deep breath of the beautiful scent that clung to her hair and body. “Congrats, Matthews,” I said. “You handled the tryouts quite well.”

She only gave me a mean growl.
“Yeah, whatever.” I was so stunned that I didn’t even hold her back when she strode past me, with a piss glare on her face. But then she stopped and spun on her heel, folding her arms defiantly over her chest. “What does Tony owe you for putting me on the team?”

Whoa. That I sure didn’t expect. Hell, what to do now? Lie to her? Give her the truth? Grab her by her neck and just haul her into me for a distracting kiss? I would so go for the latter, but it didn’t seem like something that would work to my advantage. So I did what I felt like and laughed, deciding for the almost-truth.
“You don’t want to know.”

Obviously, she did, and damn, by the look on her face she was ready to beat it right out of me if necessary. I might tell her why I decided to take her on the team…one day. For now it was better to pull my head out of the noose. I turned around and started walking away, but then I remembered the one thing that had brought me over to her in the first place. I cast
her a look over my shoulder that suggested she’d better not say no. “See you at my house, Matthews.”

She nailed me with her baffled gaze, and that was everything I needed. She’d be there tonight. And in my house it would be my rules. She didn’t know it yet, but she wouldn’t stand a chance. In the end, she’d be mine.

Smiling to myself like a lovesick fool, I grabbed my backpack and headed for my car.

I had only reversed out of the spot and turned onto the road, when I spotted Susan Miller walking on the pavement. She was the only new member on our team, who hadn’t been at my house yet, and I had totally forgotten to give her an invitation for tonight’s party. Slowing down to match her pace, I let the passenger window roll down and leaned a little forward, so I could see her face. “Hey, book lover!”