Page 2 of Tides Of Your Love (Riviera Shores #3)

Owen

“FUCKING CUNT!” I brEATHED out when my goddamn knee buckled despite the ugly sleeve brace tightened around it. I gripped the back of the seat I was passing by on my way from the aircraft bathroom.

The man whose seat I clutched turned, lifting his sleep mask just enough to glare at whoever dared intrude on his First-Class cubicle.

His groggy annoyance shifted to shock when I hissed a pained, “Fucking shit,” at my knee—suddenly remembering that cunt as a legitimate curse word wasn’t quite as prevalent in the U.S. as it was in England.

“Mr. Wheaton, if you can please return to your seat, we’re preparing for landing,” a flight attendant approached me with a professional smile.

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” I huffed, pain slurring my voice.

“May I?” she gripped my elbow and helped me limp to my seat.

The sliding door of the cubicle across the aisle from mine was open. A rarity in First-Class where people pay good money for maximum privacy. The woman in the gray dress suit occupying it smiled at me as she had ever since we boarded in Heathrow.

“This looks painful,” she had said eleven hours ago, noticing the knee brace that protruded below my designer’s calf-length capri pants when we found ourselves next to each other, exiting the A-list airport lounge.

“It’s not usually, but it is today.” I had limped that day after being on the mend for at least a week, and it pissed me off. I preferred pissed off rather than worried. Hope of returning to do what I did best—playing football—was my only reason to get out of bed before noon.

“Must be all that rain.” It was a typical London drizzle outside, but she had an American accent.

“Good thing I’m headed to California then,” I managed to say when a group of people raced toward me, surrounding and separating me from her, clamoring for my signature and a selfie.

I wore my best smile and acquiesced. It wasn’t just talent that got me to the top.

It was giving people—the media, fans—what they expected of me: always smiling and bantering, never scowling, even after bitter losses.

And now, with my career on its deathbed, if to believe the grim predictions some doctors made, I had more than the usual urge to keep up my public image.

These fans could be the last I’d have, so I tried harder for them. For me.

This couldn’t end. Not now, not yet, not like that.

The World Cup was a year away, and I had every plan on playing it with England. I couldn’t care less if I died after . I just wanted to bow out on top .

“So ... you’re a famous soccer player! I googled you while the mob lined up for your autograph,” the suited woman whose name I had forgotten said when we made our way through the sleeve toward the aircraft.

“A top midfield attacker, been voted not just one of the top players of the English premier league, but one of the hottest in Europe’s Champions League despite losing the season.

” She gave me a thorough once-over while shaking her phone with the screen facing me as if to prove where she had gotten her intel.

A picture of me on the pitch in Wembley flashed on her screen.

“ Football . Please.” I smiled back.

“You’d better get used to it being called soccer if you’re heading to the States.” She placed a perfectly manicured and bejeweled hand on my shoulder and flashed a smile at me.

Tell me about it.

“A big star traveling alone with no one to kiss your boo-boo?”

I wasn’t surprised by the familiarity. People often treated me like public property—the result of being notoriously approachable and automatically personable—and women like her usually cut straight to the chase with me, instinctively knowing that not much else could be gained from me. It was a barter.

“Who’s kissing yours?” I flashed an automatic smile and response.

“I’m recruiting volunteers.” She raised her eyebrows suggestively.

“Maybe another time.” We had just reached the plane’s entrance and the end of my patience .

“Hey, neighbor,” she said when we discovered our seats were across the aisle from each other.

Gallantly, I placed her carry-on in the overhead compartment next to mine.

Finishing the task, I took a step back.

She didn’t hide the hungry look she had taken me with from head to toe. “Thanks. What can I do for you in return?”

I gave my white T-shirt a tug as it had hiked up and exposed my abdomen when I’d lifted her luggage. Admittedly, even after three months without my training routine I still kept in good shape.

“Be a good, quiet neighbor.” A grin spread on my lips as I took my seat.

She was actually my go-to type. The type who wouldn’t attach any strings. If I had been myself, she’d be on her beautiful knees in my cubicle helping me forget my sorrows after takeoff. But these days, I didn’t want anyone near me, not even for that.

“You sound American,” she said as the plane made its way on the runway.

“I’m an accent chameleon,” I said in my best British accent, acquired from my British mother.

She laughed and cast another look at her phone. “Google says you were born in the U.S., left at eight, returned Stateside at fifteen, then left again a few years later to shoot for stardom.”

I pressed my lips and hiked my eyebrows up in acknowledgment .

“It also says that you played in the best clubs of the English, German, Italian, and Spanish leagues. Can you do all of them?”

“I certainly tried to do all of them.” The flirty innuendo and smirk sprang out of me on their own.

Based on her kittenish chuckle and the hand she reached across the aisle and smoothed over my forearm, she understood.

Despite rejecting her, I was playing my part perfectly—the funny, flirty, fun, successful “ player on and off the field, ” as the tabloids dubbed me.

I was a chameleon, adjusting to the audience and situation.

Raised to do whatever it took to succeed, to fit in at the top. It had become my second nature.

My first.

My only.

I forgot what other nature I used to have. I didn’t know what it was like to be unsuccessful, unpopular, unwanted. To be banned from doing what I did best.

Which was probably why I had done my best to defy my doctors. When reports of my injury had taken on smaller and smaller real estate in newspapers and news sites, with nothing new to replace them because I wasn’t playing, I had lost my footing. And it wasn’t just a pun.

Staying in the limelight in some capacity had become crucial.

I hadn’t been out of it in eighteen years.

Being forgotten felt like an early death.

My rapport with sports columnists and the media had proven itself time and again—ever since I had to build a high-profile image to compensate for my late entry into the professional league.

(Thanks, Mom and Dad, for cutting me off from the youth leagues at fifteen, right when all the clubs were scouting.)

Though my agent advised against it, I knew that romancing the media and feeding it what it wanted would work. And it did. They ate it up:

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Injured On The Field, Scoring Off It: “Wonder Wheaton” caught on camera coming out of a Soho nightclub. And he wasn’t alone.

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Benched for Injury, but still Kicking in Love Life!

Hot new pictures of Owen Wheaton partying and beating doctors’ bleakage.

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EXCLUSIVE: INJURY CAN’T STOP THIS PLAYER. OWEN “WONDER” WHEATON CONTINUES SCORING. And he’ll be doing it on the pitch soon enough!

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Yeah, fucking around was another thing I was good at, and one I wasn’t banned from. Until I banned it, waking up one morning and not remembering how I’d gotten home, what painkillers I had mixed with my drinks, or who was the naked brunette in my bed.

“Your knee got worse?” the woman across the aisle now asked.

“Yeah,” I grunted, lowering myself into my seat-bed.

“Anything I can do to help?”

“No, thanks,” I repeated with a smile then closed the acrylic sliding door that sealed my cubicle from view .

I didn’t mean to be rude, but the pain was killing me, and the unwanted attention was getting on my nerves.

When we deplaned in San Francisco, I was the last to leave, limping my way out and refusing help from her and the attendants.

Only the pre-booked chauffeur waited for me outside.

No fans, no paparazzi. That was the whole point of coming here, “to heal and come back big time,” as my agent suggested, probably so he could focus on clients who could actually play.

But now that I was here, I felt empty. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting Walter and his criticism.

And I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Rio.

Rio Mio, whose eyes always made me look at myself from the outside, as if she reflected me to myself.

She was the only woman who had always seen me just as I was and not as she thought, expected, wanted, or hoped I’d be.

I used to like what I saw in there years ago. But I feared I’d despise the view now.

When she asked me to be the one to take what she called her “lingering virginity” at nineteen, she said she chose me partly because I’d be gone soon. No strings. No complications. Now, years later, I was supposed to live on the same floor as her—as if that night had never happened.