Page 32 of The Linebacker

“I could do that.” He scratched the side of his neck. It was a tell. He was either uncomfortable or was about to say something she wasn’t going to like.

Probably both.

“But I don’t want to leave Patches alone. She was used to having other cats around at the shelter, and now she’s alone for long stretches at a time. I feel guilty.”

She glanced over at the cats again. They’d moved to the living room floor and were batting around one of Lazlo’s stuffed mice.

“So you want to leave Patches here?” She supposed it wasn’t a terrible idea. To be honest, she hated the idea of Lazlo being alone so much as well. When the team traveled to away games, her neighbor checked on him, made sure he was fed and the litterbox was cleaned, but the neighbor didn’t spend the night, didn’t cuddle with him on the couch for hours on end.

“I do,” Amil said solemnly.

She hesitated before agreeing. Something in his tone indicated he wasn’t done talking.

“And I want to stay too.”

Yep. She was right to hesitate.

Chapter

Eleven

As far as ideas went, asking Diana if he could stay with her wasn’t one of Amil’s worst.

It certainly wasn’t his best, either, based on the frustration on her face.

At the moment, he thought he deserved at least a tiny bit of credit for keeping his gaze on her face. She was standing before him in a pair of casual black pants and a hot pink tank top that was very thin.

And she wasn’t wearing a bra.

And while it didn’t feel cold to him, it must to Diana, because her nipples were stabbing at that thin material, demanding he lower his eyes and stare at them. Or maybe suck them through the fabric until she became a moaning, writhing mess, begging him to?—

Whoa. In these sweats he’d hurriedly tugged on when the manager had knocked on his hotel room door, it was about to become way too obvious how he felt about the state of Diana’s nipples.

Which wasn’t cool. He was supposed to be keeping his distance, not thinking about her like that. She was a one-and-done kind of girl, and it was his job to respect those boundaries.

Which meant, yeah, this was definitely one of his worst ideas.

She walked away without responding to his request, snatched an insulated cup off the coffee table in the living room and took a hefty swallow.

Something told him there was rum and Diet Coke in that cup. If not, he bet she wished there was.

She turned to face him and waved her arm in an arch. “This place is 653 square feet, Amil.”

A little bigger than he guessed the first time he was here. That meant her bedroom was probably decent sized.

“I’ll sleep on the couch. Seriously. And it won’t be for long. I’ll devote every minute that I’m not practicing or playing in a game to finding a house.”

He didn’t tell her that he didn’t even ask a single other person if he could crash with them. Or, as she’d pointed out earlier, looked into Airbnb rentals.

Hell, that would have been the easiest solution.

And yet, here he was, trying to convince her that they could cohabitate within the confines of her tiny one-bedroom condo.

The most obvious question was, why?

The answer was…he had no idea.

Okay, he had an idea; he just didn’t want to admit to it.