Game On (A Bad Boy Sports Romance) by Olivia Lancaster Read Free Book Online Page A

wouldn’t fight anymore, so he moved on to teaching people like me.
     
                  And that was something I didn’t mind at all. Football was my lawful wife, but martial arts were my mistress. It had been a dream of mine since I was a kid to be able to master martial arts. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take the skills into the ring, but I knew I wanted to have them. And Jamal was just the man to make that happen.
     
                  Today was weight training day, though. I approached the bench and saw Andrei standing there, checking something on his phone. He looked up at me and gave me a nod as I approached. That mountain of Russian wasn’t much of a talker, but I knew he meant well under all that bulk and surliness.
     
                  “Kieran,” he said in his light accent, “well done landing that interview. The article was good.”
     
                  “Our man just got back from Interview #2, in fact,” Jamal said with a smile, “and it sounds like he’s a little more interested in the what the reporter has to say than what she has to write,” he added with a meaningful look to Andrei, who glanced to me with a hint of a smile.
     
                  “Dating the press is dangerous,” he warned, and I nodded as I sat down on the bench, rolling my shoulders in preparation for the mountain of iron he’d be putting on me in a few minutes.
     
                  “I know,” I said, “but it’s...kind of a complicated situation. I think I was a little too forward in that first interview. In a lot of ways.”
     
                  “Kieran Michaels, the guy who paraded around the whole endzone in his last game’s winning touchdown, too forward?” Jamal teased, crossing his arms with a grin. “Can’t imagine.”
     
                  I rolled my eyes. “Alright, alright, don’t sound too much like my Mom. Anyway, let’s just say she knows I’m interested. I still can’t believe she managed to put together a good article after the first time I talked with her. She was pretty much in her rights to smear me in public, but she didn’t.”
     
                  “Surprising, for the press,” Andrei said, and I nodded.
     
                  “Took a little advice from home and made today’s interview a little different, though,” I said. “And she seemed to appreciate it. Like, genuinely. I don’t know, but I didn’t imagine she’d be willing to even speak to me again after the first time so I figure...maybe there’s something there, you know? Anyway, I gave her my number, so I guess I’ll see how it works out. I’m thinking-”
     
                  “You’re thinking of wowing her with all that football money and taking out on the most extravagant night of her life, complete with a club and a good time in the back of a sports car, aren’t you?” Jamal cut me off, and that knowing look he gave me drove me crazy, but shit, he knew me better than me after all these years.
     
                  “Well, I don’t know about all that, but…” I smiled, trailing off, but Jamal laughed and shook his head.
     
                  “Your heart’s in the right place, Kieran, I can see that. You just wanna give this girl the kind of time you wish you could have had before all this fame and fortune happened, right?”
     
                  “Well, what’s the point of it all unless you can give it to someone else?” I responded, genuinely perplexed.
     
                  “No, you’ve got the right idea,” Jamal said with a smile. Jamal was one of the very few people in my professional life who actually knew that I didn’t have as much money at the end of each month as even some of my less well-paid teammates. A ton of my money went to supporting my mom, so when I spent big, it meant something to me. “But you can’t lay on all