Briggs (Carolina Reapers 7)

“Yep.” The muscle in my jaw ticked as I finished putting my gear into the locker.

“Didn’t you fuck his wife or something?” Maxim asked, then raised his eyebrows when I glared. “What? I’m pretty sure that was the rumor. You fucked his wife at some team party, and he traded your ass.”

“True, that’s what I heard too,” Caspian nodded.

“I need a shower.” I grabbed a towel, finished stripping, and knotted it around my waist.

“So what does his sister have to do with it then?” Sterling asked Maxim.

“Fuck if I know,” Maxim answered with a shrug.

“For fuck’s sake!” Brogan shouted. “Put it together, you morons. Briggs didn’t touch Crossland’s wife, because fact-check, Crossland McLaren isn’t married. It was obviously his sister. Now can we please go back to when you all hated each other, and no one dumped their drama on the locker room floor?”

Every mouth closed, and the room fell silent for a few seconds as everyone stared at Brogan. Even me.

“Or, you could just tell us what happened with Bristol,” Sterling sang in a sing-song voice at my back.

I gritted my teeth. Sterling was a dog with a fucking bone when he was curious, and hell, it was going to come out eventually anyway. Gripping my towel in one hand, I turned back toward the group, thankful that half the team had already hit the showers.

“Fine. Here it is.” I swallowed. Hard. “I met a gorgeous woman at a party at Crossland McClaren’s house. We hit it off.” We’d had the kind of connection that I thought only existed in movies and shit, but I wasn’t about to say that. “We ended up drinking a little, then wound up alone, playing pool, and I asked her when she was graduating. She said she was a senior. I kissed her.”

And it wasn’t just a kiss—it had been powerful enough to embed itself in my memory. Even four years later, I could still taste the strawberry margarita on her lips, feel her hands in my hair. But maybe it had been the trauma of what happened next that had cemented the details.

Sterling’s forehead puckered. “And that got you traded?”

“Yeah, well, her brother walked in, and it turned out she wasn’t a senior in college. She was a senior in high school. She was seventeen, and I had just turned twenty-two. There. Happy now?” I stared each of them down, daring them to say every negative name I’d called myself when I found out.

“Damn,” Maxim muttered.

“I suddenly feel much better about Sterling dating London,” Caspian said.

“Hey, I never gave a shit, so don’t look at me like that.” Brogan turned toward his locker, dismissing the entire conversation.

I looked at Sterling.

“And she signed you to an endorsement deal with her new company?” he asked, cutting right through the other bullshit.

“Yeah, well, Bristol’s used to getting what she wants, and legally…she has me for the next six months.” As soon as that date was up, I was getting as far away from her as humanly possible.

“Must have been some kiss,” Maxim said with a laugh.

“Oh, fuck off.” I flipped them the bird and then headed to the shower. For two million dollars, I could put up with her bullshit for six months. It wasn’t like we’d be working that closely, anyways. Right?

Damn, the woman had flown out her entire team. There were easily twelve people in here, and every single one of them was staring at me. Awkward.

“Try the green,” Bristol ordered, pointing toward one of the thousand shirts that hung on racks around the hotel penthouse she’d turned into a temporary office.

The seamstress—Angela—nodded, taking the silver one I’d just had on and leaving me bare-chested on a podium in front of one of those three-way mirrors.

Bristol met Angela at the rack and started pulling additional shirts, then matched them with vests, giving me a second to give in and stare like I’d wanted to for the past half-hour.

Gone was the couture evening gown she’d worn to the gala, and she’d ditched the jacket to the pantsuit she’d donned like armor to meet me at the hotel door, leaving her in a pair of black pants that cupped her ass like a wet dream and a sleeveless, blue silk blouse that dipped low enough to make me drool. It reminded me of water, cascading down in ripples across breasts that I had zero business thinking about.

Seriously, stop thinking about them.

“Here you go,” Angela said, offering me the first shirt.

I slipped it over my shoulders, then began buttoning it up, catching Bristol’s heated glance in the mirror. She was looking at the tattoos that stretched across my chest.

“See something you like over there, Duchess?” I asked, sliding the last button home. Putting clothes on around her was definitely safer than taking them off.

Her eyes narrowed as they snapped up to meet mine. “Stop. Calling. Me. That.”