“Umm, I have a meetings in the Gramercy area and uptown. And I should probably get on Facebook to do some damage control after the comment from last night,” I said with a sheepish grin.

“Uh-oh. Facebook fights. My wife gets into those,” Lou said by the door. Drew laughed.

“Yeah, she was defending my honor last night. It got a little heated,” he said, squeezing my knee. When he turned to me, the slightest frown pinched his brows. “That reminds me.”

“What?” I whispered.

“I still need to spank your ass over that couch,” Drew smirked, dropping my jaw just as Lou called out.

“Alright! Let’s boogie!”

“Coming,” Drew said before turning back to me and catching my chin to give me a peck on the lips. “See you tonight, baby?”

“Yeah. See you,” I managed when he pulled away, leaving me breathless, dizzy, and already analyzing the possible difference between the use of the words “babe” and “baby.”

Great, Evie. I shook my head at myself, still perched on that counter for a good five minutes after Drew left.

Just great.

19

EVIE

Even after a busy day of meetings all over the city, followed by cooking myself dinner, followed by dealing with the aftermath on Facebook, which included a long, private message from Mike that included the line “I won’t stoop to public immaturity and hope you’ll join me in acting like an adult the next time we see each other” – ugh, retch – I was still very much focused on one thing, and one thing only.

And that, of course, was Drew.

I found myself actually tuning into the Empires game while eating dinner, even though Drew wasn’t starting, and I didn’t know what was happening anyway. I was just waiting for the occasional shots of Drew leaning against the dugout railing with Ty, his green eyes looking so deliciously intense as he scrutinized the game from under the bill of his cap.

Just a two-second flash of him on the big screen made my heart thump.

That, Evie, I kept telling myself. That beautiful hunk of man was in your bed last night. Putting his mouth in places where a mouth hadn’t been in years. That man – that insanely hot man in that ridiculously sexy uniform – blew your fucking mind last night.

It was hard to process.

At one point, when the commentators mentioned Drew’s name, I had to do my best not to squeal.

What the fuck? Easy, woman. He’s not really yours, I scolded myself, though I almost did it again when the screen flashed a graphic of the league’s ERA leaders, and I saw Drew’s name at number two.

Crap.

I could feel it. I was getting a little crazy. And ahead of myself. I was slowly starting to sip the Drew Maddox Kool-Aid despite the fact that, just a few weeks ago, I was convinced he was typical athlete playboy who would never in his life care about anything but himself.

So before I knew it, I was grabbing my laptop and Googling him to help myself pump the brakes on the butterflies.

I went straight to searching “Drew Maddox womanizer,” and while I did get tons of pictures of Drew stumbling out of clubs with insanely leggy, short-skirted women, I didn’t see anything that scandalous. There was a story about one of his flings storming the field during Spring Training because he gave her a fake number, but that was more funny than anything.

“Okay,” I said aloud, opting next for the keywords “Drew Maddox infamy.” Alright, I nodded at the tons of results for that search, clicking through as many as I could.

There was a story about him trying to sue his own team when he played in Los Angeles. There were stories about him butting heads with teammates. Cursing off reporters. Smashing a paparazzo’s camera. There were multiple articles about bench-clearing brawls that broke out during games because of him.

There was also, for some reason, a video in the results labeled “THE INFAMOUS INTERVIEW.”

I clicked on it immediately, prepared to see another video of a shirtless Drew in the clubhouse, looking insanely hot while sounding deeply uninterested in all the post-game interview questions he was being hit with.

But instead, it was an actual sit-down interview from seven years ago.

“Oh my God,” I murmured, biting the slow grin that drifted onto my lips, because the Drew I was watching was happy, bright-eyed and only twenty-three years old. His dark blond hair was cropped short and his face was completely clean-shaven. He was still beautiful as ever, but his look was far less rugged, and both his voice and his smile were boyish in a way that I had never thought possible.

Tags: Stella Rhys Irresistible Romance
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