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CHAPTER FOUR

ASHLEY

Throwing the cup hadn’t been my best idea, and trying to find all the pieces of it now was impossible. Every time I walked through the kitchen another piece would turn up even though I’d vacuumed it twice already.

Picking up the most recent shard which was at least an inch long and had somehow escaped the vacuum cleaner, I got as far as taking one step in the direction of the garbage when a sharp pain shot up through the sole of my right foot.

With a squeal, I dropped the piece in my hand and lifted my foot up to see where the pain was coming from. Unfortunately, that involved me hopping onto my good foot, and right onto the just dropped piece of porcelain, which promptly went into the bottom of that foot.

Dropping to my butt on the tile floor, I tried to figure out what to do.

First, I should probably see how bad it was.

I’d never been flexible. Even as a kid, it was like torture doing gymnastics in gym class, and with the way I was currently sitting, pulling both feet up to look at the bottoms of them, I looked like a turtle that was stuck on its back.

From the quick glimpse I got, though, I could clearly see a smaller chunk of mug in the bottom of my right foot, and the large dropped one in the bottom of my left.

“Oh, holy mother of pearl.”

Here was the other problem, I was the biggest wussy ever. Heck, I hadn’t even gotten my ears pierced until four years ago when I was twenty, and I don’t think I’d changed them out of the ones they’d pierced them with since.

Lunging, I tried to pull the smaller piece out of my right foot but missed by a mile.

Chewing on my lip, I looked around for where I’d put my cell when I’d come in, groaning when I saw it on top of the counter furthest away from me. Of course that’s where it’d be.

Then a sound that filled me with hope came from behind me—someone was typing in the code on the keypad to the kitchen door. Only a handful of people had that code: me, Hayden, Mom, the cleaner and he who shall not be named.

Looking hopefully over my shoulder, I almost cried when I saw it was the latter of the list.

And the shithead was laughing.

Taking in my position, his brows shot up. “You okay down there? I mean, not that it hasn’t been hilarious watching you try to do whatever it is you’re doing, but still.”

Unwilling to say it out loud—seeing as how he’d know immediately where the new ceramic piercing in my body had come from—I scooted around on my butt and held both feet up for him to see. His chuckling stopped immediately.

“Oh, what the fuck?” he groaned, crouching down and wincing when he saw it up close. “Didn’t you clean it up?”

Breaking my silence is golden policy, I ground out, “Yes, I did. I vacuumed twice and I’m still finding pieces of it.”

“So are your feet,” he pointed out unhelpfully.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

Rolling his eyes, he leaned in closer to my right foot, and before I could blink or tell him not to, he was holding the piece from it between his fingers. “Here’s that little bugger.”

The shard was freaking tiny. “It felt bigger.”

“That’s what she said,” he murmured distractedly, his focus now on my left foot. “I think you’re gonna need a doctor to get that piece out.”

The news almost made me cry. The insurance from my new job hadn’t come through yet, so this was going to drain me dry. Oh, and let’s not forget the huge amount I was going to have to pay the charity for my stupid bid last night that I didn’t even have.

Sighing, he picked me up like I weighed nothing, and then started walking toward the door that led up to my apartment, avoiding Able who was excitedly wagging his tail at the newcomer.

I knew what I was saying was a lie, but I said it anyway. “I can walk, you know?”

“No, you can’t,” he murmured. “Your right foot’s bleeding, and if you put pressure on the other one, you’ll push that iceberg deeper in.”

He had a point, but one thing stuck out. “I’m bleeding,” I squealed, jerking my foot up to see and almost making him drop me.

Sure enough, there was a trail of blood down my foot.

It wasn’t like I was gushing, but it was bad enough for a wussy like me to faint. Which was exactly what I did.

“Thanks, man. I’ll make sure she stays off it,” Kip assured the doctor that he’d brought me to see, who incidentally was one of his friends.

“I know he’s irritating as hell, but try not to throw anything breakable at him again,” Josh advised me. “Go for heavy and un breakable.”

Seeing as how I was still being carried around by the big oaf, I had to concede that his advice was smart.

“Thank you for patching me up.”

Here’s some irony for you. The shard that was in my right foot had come from the mug I’d thrown. The shard in my left one, though, was from a color changing mug that went from plain black to a picture of a naked woman.

Ask me how I know.

Because, as Josh had pulled it out, he’d found that the bit that’d been inside my foot had turned into a nipple.

A photo of it was texted to Hayden, and he’d shared that it’d been a gag gift from one of his team, and he’d laughed so hard when he’d seen what it changed into that he’d dropped it. Apparently, though, that’d happened five weeks ago, so it was just bad luck that I’d found the piece that’d escaped five weeks of cleaning. Oh, and that it was the boobie part. That nipple had resulted in five stitches in my foot that wouldn’t come out for a week. My other foot needed two days of no weight on it, and then I could just hobble.

Basically, I was screwed.

Thinking about how shitty my luck was, I wasn’t listening to what Kip was saying until he said, “He can’t install it until next Tuesday, though, so you’ll stay at mine. It’ll make it easier to help you out with your feet.”

“Wait, back up. A, what’s being installed next Tuesday? B, why would I need to stay at yours?” The last word came out squeaky due to the fact that his arm around my back had shifted to hold a lot more of my butt, and his knee lifted to rest under the other part of my booty while he looked for something in his pocket.

I figured out it was the keys to his SUV when I heard the locks click on the vehicle beside us. What can I say, blood loss made me stupid.

“Hayden doesn’t have a security system in his house, and the guy who does the best work according to him is away until then. For your safety, and so you don’t hurt your feet even more, you’ll stay at my house.”

“Why does Hayden need security?”

It might sound like a dumb question, but if he hadn’t had it installed before now, maybe there was a good reason? Like the area being safe.

“Because he’s a well-known figure, and you’re staying there on your own.” He refrained from adding a ‘duh,’ but his tone didn’t.

Then, he carefully placed me on the passenger seat and put my belt on me—even though I had zero injuries to my hands—and then walked around the front of the vehicle to get in behind the wheel. If I’d gotten in on my own, I’d have had to boost myself into the seat, but he made it look easy and did it almost elegantly.

Stupid smug footballer.

Yes, I was being unreasonable, but I was in the midst of a moral dilemma here. I avoided unnecessary interaction with sports players at all costs with good reason—some childhood memories left deep scars. And here he was being all nice and genuine and I couldn’t get away from it. I also owed a lot of money to a charity for him that I was certain I’d have to ask my brother for and then pay him back with my firstborn.

And I couldn’t freaking just run away from him because I couldn’t even walk.

I stayed silent, focused on the view out of my window, as he reversed out of the parking space and then drove us home. It wasn’t a pissed off silence, more a frustrated one.

“You being this quiet is making me nervous,” he muttered as he navigated us toward our homes.

“I’m thinking.”

“I’m more used to verbal rants and anger,” he admitted, shocking me into looking at him. “My ex used to do that if I did something to piss her off. Come to think of it, she used to do it for everything.” The last bit was said quietly, almost like he was saying it to himself.

For some reason, him letting down that wall made me drop my ‘bitch’ defenses, and I offered up something I never spoke about—my ex.

“Mine was the same, but he also liked to push me around while he did it.”

Taking his eyes off the road for a moment, he asked incredulously, “Your ex hit you?”

“Not hit, per se. Just pushed when he wasn’t getting his own way.”

“Does Hayden know?”

“No,” I snorted. “He’d lose it and beat the shit out of him. I wouldn’t give Cam the satisfaction of Hayden losing his Sounders contract. It was bad enough when he found out he’d cheated on me and then followed me here.”

There was a tense silence, then he asked, “Did they ever get along?”

“Nope, which was why Cam would be ecstatic to get the chance to mess his career up.”

We were just pulling up in front of his gates when he stopped altogether. “Wait, are we talking about Cam LaValle? The guy who tried to sue the Sounders for not signing him?”

“One and the same,” I sighed. “That was after we’d broken up, obviously. I wasn’t meant to find out he’d cheated on me, and when I did and moved here, he followed and set his sights on the Sounders. He thought being linked to Hayden would give him an automatic in, but when that didn’t happen, he got his lawyer to sue them for discrimination.”

“Didn’t he try to sue his ex for ruining his career?”

Yes, yes, he had.

“Neither legal cases lasted long. Basically, his lawyer sent the letters to us, and then told him he didn’t stand a chance and to give up or ruin his career forever, so he gave up.”

“Douche,” he muttered as he resumed driving through his gates, pressing the button on the black box attached to his visor to close them behind us.

When we got to the garage, he came around to pick me up and carried me inside. “Make a list of what you need from your place, and I’ll go get it.”

To an outsider, it might look like he’d dropped the subject of my ex, but the tense set of his jaw and gleam in his eye as he tapped on the screen of his phone made me suspicious. Still, when he saw that I wasn’t making the damn list, he raised his brows and nodded at me to get on with it.

I’d still blame the shock from my injury and the fact I’d needed needles inserted into my body to fix the damage for the fact that I didn’t argue with him about going through my stuff to get what I needed. The truth was, I was still recovering from being in his arms and how kind he was being.

Shit, I totally liked the footballer.