She hadn’t stopped him and asked him to come back.
She hadn’t called or brought him into her office.
She’d barely smiled at him during the game or at any of their time meetings.
Kai had a lot of tension to work off. Part of him hoped Murry would start shit. Shit starting might be good for working out the knots that had settled into his body the moment he met Gia Jilani.
The door opened, but the music did not pound with it. The guard stuck his head out, nodding once before he waved the men inside, ushering them in with his hand against the knob.
“He’s in here,” he said, walking through the small entry and down into a dropped living room. “Mr. Murry?”
There was a wide screen T.V., likely seventy inches or more across the back wall and two half-naked girls in front of it, a game console in each of their hands who didn’t bother to stop playing when the guard cleared his throat. Lennox sat watching them, his grin approving, head nodding, but then Kai squinted, looking away as he spotted the woman lying in his lap, her hands splayed out over his stomach.
“Mr. Murry?” the guard said again, and the fighter flared his nostrils, tapping the woman in the shoulder to stop her.
“Laters, yeah, love?” He tipped her chin when she pouted then nodded toward the back of his room and the woman stood, yelping as Murry slapped her bare ass and hurried through a door. He stretched, glancing at the two game players still invested in Star Wars: Battlefront and rolled his eyes, reaching for a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table in front of him. “Mate, I don’t know what you want,” he started, tossing his lighter on the table after he lit the cigarette, “but whatever it is, make it quick. That one,” he pointed to the door behind him and the girl he’d dismissed, “gets bored quick like, yeah?”
Glenn walked toward him, his jaw clenched, his attention on Murry’s face, not the room around them or the mess the fighter seemed to revel in. “Reese Noble.”
“You serious?” Murry said, laughing. He leaned his head back, scrubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes before he stood, wincing a bit before he moved to the bar to the left of where Glenn and his teammates stood. “Bloody hell, mate.” Murry seemed to speak to himself, leaning down behind the bar to pull a Heineken from a small fridge there. He waved it at his uninvited guests, head shaking when none of them accepted. “I’ve got a cracked rib and busted lip.” He popped the top off the beer and took a drag from his cigarette, flicking ash into the sink inset behind the bar. “If I’m honest, I’ve fucked myself out of an endorsement deal with Nike because, as it turns out, I shagged the VP’s niece last month and I was too fucking blootered to know she recorded the whole of it.” He downed the beer, leaving less than half before he stood staring at the cigarette, watching the ash crinkle and burn before he inhaled the last of it and flicked it into the sink. “But please, mate, give me all the grief you can about the pretty bird who only agreed to a night out with me because her people thought she’d look good ’round the likes of me.” He shrugged. “It seems I’m good for boosting the PR, as it were.”
“PR?” Glenn said, laughing. “You?”
“Piss off, mate.” Murry frowned, flaring his nostrils again, something Kai guessed he did when he was annoyed before he polished off the beer and grabbed two more. “It ever cross your dandy wee head that the shite that’s gone ‘round about her in the media might make your fans see her as someone they maybe couldn’t support? And where are any of us if we don’t have our fans? Those wankers made her look like a tosser in the papers a few weeks back, no? Putting her in a fucking sexy dress, getting her with some caveman bloke like me, that’s gonna make her look very un-tosser like. That just might make her look like a fucking lady.”
Glenn’s jaw didn’t unclench, and Kai noticed he balled his fist at his side, but he wasn’t sure the QB was the one who needed to be angry. Reese had been put up to this by Gia. They’d schemed and plotted