Sidelined (Game On 3)

Chapter 1 - Rodeo Drive, Make-Up Tips and Zumba

“Stop calling me!”

“Bree, I just-”

“I don’t want to hear it, Taylor. Leave me alone!”

I flung my cell onto the bed and threw myself backwards against my soft, fluffy pillows. So over having the same conversation. I should have stopped answering the phone to her but Taylor’s calls didn’t always come from the same number, and what if it was someone important? I hated missing calls from friends – any excuse for a good chat, right?

Taylor was no longer a friend. Not since she broke Jesse Shaw’s heart, broke my trust, and called me a gold-digging tramp. Who needs that kind of negativity in their life? Not me for sure. I’d run out of patience with her endless calls. She’d tried to apologise for the things she said and the crappy things she did, but she hurt so many of my friends. She hurt me.

“Bree, honey?”

My husband, Jude, appeared in the doorway looking all soccer-player-sexy in his Westberg Warriors training gear. Okay, blue wasn’t really his colour but he still looked hot as he stood in the entrance to our bedroom. His sandy blond hair needed a trim, even though the way it swept across his forehead, slightly covering his brown eyes was sorta cute.

Mmm.

“Bree?”

“Huh?” I said, shaking my head. You’d think after three years together I wouldn’t have been quite so mesmerised by him. Thankfully, Jude adored my ditziness.

He smiled fondly. “I gotta go to work now. You’re going out soon, right?”

I hopped up from the bed to give him a goodbye kiss and bounced up and down on the balls of my feet, grinning. “Yes! I’m going to Jesse’s first then I’ll meet Freya and Leah for lunch!”

There was no point in trying to hide my excitement. Leah moved back to L.A from England a few days before to finally be with Radleigh McCoy. That was a drama. I always knew their love/hate thing swayed more towards love than hate. Well, sometimes. Whatever, Leah had been gone for several months while they worked things out and I’d missed her like crazy. I couldn’t wait for shopping and girly lunches, and spa treatments and talking for hours.

“Right.” Jude gave a slightly forced laugh. “Well, have a good time.”

Leah wasn’t Jude’s favourite person in the world since she cheated on his best friend a year ago and he hadn’t gotten over the incident as quickly as Miguel had. Jude had this weird idea me being friends with her would mean I’d be influenced by her actions and start screwing one of his team mates. That wasn’t me and Jude knew it, yet he still battled with my closeness to her. I hated that he’d gotten such a bad impression of her. She’d made a horrible mistake but who lives their life without stuffing things up now and again?

“We will have fun,” I told him. “It’ll be so good for us to all be back together! I mean, except for Jesse. I’m still totally bummed out he can’t leave the house for a while.”

“Not as bummed out as we are that he’s gonna be out of action this season. Poor kid.”

Jesse hated being called a kid and I knew because I hated when people thought of me that way, too. Since I’d turned twenty-one the label started to come unstuck, but for the whole time I’d been with Jude some of his friends treated me like a greedy child looking for a sugar daddy to take care of me. Pfft. I’d dealt with more crap in the first eighteen years of my life than most people deal with in a lifetime; I didn’t need to be taken care of.

“He’ll be okay, though, right?” I asked. “His knee operation will make him better?”

“No way to tell yet. Let’s hope so.” Jude pressed his lips to mine again. “Gotta go, beautiful. I love you.”

I smiled up at him. “I love you too.”