Page 11 of Bluffed By the Offense

“Grrr.” I growl out loud just as a mother and her preschooler pass me.

The child gives me an odd look and the mom rushes him along with a little pat to the back.

Great. Now I’m growling in public and scaring small children.

Off to the side of the pathway, another Thunder player is doing the same type of shoot Marcus and I just did. I squint to see who it is. Keller. Why couldn’t I have been paired with him? Or Treyvon Harris? He seems fun.

I get to my car and blast the AC. Not only did I have to pretend to flirt and be romantic with Marcus, but I had to sit on his lap. The man is like a space heater.

And he looked at me with those ice-blue eyes, shards of silver in them like a mosaic of glass. I shake my head, picking up my cell to call my sister.

She answers right away. “Hey! How’d it go?”

“Welllll … I got matched with Marcus Delaney.”

“For the stranger photo shoot?”

“Yep. And we had to act all romantic.”

“Cass! Were you nice?”

“Was I nice? Why don’t you ask if he was?”

“Okay. Was he?”

“No. Not at all. Right off the bat, when he turned around and saw it was me, he said Not you! And then he dropped the bouquet of flowers he was holding onto the ground.”

“He brought you flowers?”

“He brought a stranger flowers. When he saw it was me, he dropped them.”

“He actually said Not you?”

“Well, I said it too.” I have to be honest. “But he said it louder.”

“Cass.”

“What? It was so awkward. And yes, he was nice when we were faking for the camera. But he wasn’t nice. He was Marcus. Bottom line? We made it through. And it was for a good cause.”

“I wish the two of you would get along. Marcus really isn’t a bad guy. You just got off on the wrong foot.”

“I love how you see him. And I’ve tried, haven’t I?”

“You have …” her voice trails off.

I hope that means she’s giving up the ghost.

“Oh!” I exclaim, remembering the most mortifying moment of the shoot. Or maybe it was only one of the ten most mortifying. “Guess what else happened?”

“What?”

“We were posing for the camera, and his nose was near my head. Out of the blue, he started laughing.”

“Maybe he was nervous … or he thought of something funny.”

“That’s what I assumed. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. Really. I was. And then I asked him what was so funny. Do you know what he said?”

“What?”