and offered the realtor a smile she couldn’t manage to keep subtle. “I’ll take it.”
“Heaven,” she repeated to herself as she came through the door, stomach full from the casual po-boy dinner with her father, immediately stripping off the smell of grass and sweat with her practice clothes. “And I’ve just been to hell.”
It wasn’t that much of an exaggeration to call that pathetic encounter with Ryder and the fans torture. Even her father hadn’t been able to keep her mind from it, though she hadn’t offered him any real reason why she was in such a funk.
“Reesie, you knew it would be hard,” he’d told her, sitting across the old wood table near the back of the crowded restaurant. “But you can do it.”
“Yeah, Papa,” she’d told him. “I know I can.”
In the morning, Neil Noble would know that his daughter and his former player had yelled at each other in front of media and fans and their team. Reese expected a long, biting message when he heard the rumors.
She expected that reaction anytime she’d done something so stupid her father’s only response was a grunt of annoyance. Like the day he saw her in the bikini she planned to wear to the university party on Lake Wheeler.
“Papa, it’s a bikini. I won’t be naked.”
That had earned Reese the low, gasping grunt that made her father frown, turn, and leave her in the kitchen, towel draped over her shoulder.
Then, there was the scowling, low grunt that warned he was losing his patience, like when he caught her staring wide-eyed and wanting at Ryder the Easter Sunday he’d spilled sweet tea all over his dress-up shirt and had to strip off in the laundry room while Reese brought him one of her brother’s too small Duke tees.
She’d stood there like an idiot, mindlessly gawking at Ryder as he twisted and stretched and slid his large chest into Nathan’s medium-sized t-shirt. The scowling grunt greeted Reese over her shoulder and she blinked, cheeks flaming as Ryder grinned at her and her father grunted like he had something stuck in his throat.
But none of her father’s non-verbal reactions were as bad as the guttural, angry raging grunt that sounded like a tiger mid-pounce. That one came to Reese the night Ryder snuck into her bedroom at two a.m. to do things that would make her father’s admonishing grunts go lethal and nuclear, mainly because Ryder fell asleep, naked, draped across Reese’s equally naked body. The ragey-lion grunt her father emitted was preceded by the slam of her door against the wall and the loud refrain of “son of a whore!” before Ryder jerked awake, shielding Reese from her father’s impossibly wide eyes with his wider chest and pair of boxers across his lap.
“Coach! Oh, shit…I mean, sorry…oh, God!”
Reese had never seen her father move that fast, chasing Ryder out of her room or grunt so viciously that it didn’t sound like a grunt at all. It took weeks for him to even look at Reese and longer than that for him to stop referring to Ryder as “that knucklehead” or giving his young quarterback miles of extra laps to run.
He never quite accepted their relationship, but he did start knocking at her door before he opened it after that.
Now, though? Reese groaned about the grunting admonishment she knew her father would give her after today’s practice and her little tiff with Ryder.
Shit, she thought, shoulders sagging.
Hell. That’s what practice had felt like. Reese had taken the quarterback’s insult in stride, managing not to show much emotion as he told her to fuck off and left her amid their laughing players and irritated fans.
She’d lifted her chin, muttered a low “Tu eres un pendejo, Ryder Glenn,” straightened her shoulders, then left the field, catching a few loud insults as she left.
“Guess he told her.” She’d heard from some jackass in the stands, but Reese hadn’t stuck around to even throw a glare his way.
“Guess he did.” That got repeated by one of the players—she guessed Hanson—but again Reese didn’t do more than shake her head as she went back toward that long hallway decorated with a mural of the city and all the players that clearly didn’t want her on their team. Ryder Glenn, especially.
Reese tried brushing off the cold, disgusted look he’d worn when she snapped at him. She’d only seen it once before from him, and that had to have been on the worst day of both their lives. There was