Striker. Michelle Betham
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She wished he wasn’t, and she’d spent the past day or so trying to deny it and pretend he was so far from the truth it was laughable, but she’d only been kidding herself. There was something about Ryan Fisher that was gradually knocking down all her well-built defences, and there was nothing she could do about it. But he really didn’t need to know that. Despite everything she’d told herself, she was finding his arrogance and bare-faced cheek one hell of a turn-on. ‘I’ll ask you again – what are you doing here?’ But she still had to keep up the cold-bitch act. For now.
‘I came to see you,’ Ryan said, fixing her with a stare that may just have ever-so-slightly dented her steely exterior. ‘You busy tonight?’
Amber sat down on the edge of her desk, looking briefly out of the window at the view of the city centre, the traffic down below streaming past the building, letting her know that rush-hour was almost upon them. ‘I’ve got work to do,’ Amber lied. She had absolutely nothing to do; she was finished for the day but, once again, he didn’t need to know that.
He sat forward, clasping his hands between his open knees, his eyes still boring into hers. ‘Can we cut the crap, Amber?’
She stared back at him, those deep-blue eyes of his making her feel quite dizzy. ‘I… What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. Don’t you?’
She swallowed hard, a tingling in her thighs that she should not be feeling at 4:15 in the afternoon sending warning signals to her brain that she really shouldn’t be thinking about doing what she was doubtless going to end up doing, but what the hell. Ronnie was right on another score – maybe she did need to let her hair down more often. So, yeah, she knew what he meant. And even though it went against everything she’d ever stood for, broke every self-enforced rule she’d ever set herself, she wanted to see what was going to happen next. If she let it. Because she could still stop it, if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to. That was the problem.
Ryan smiled, a smile that sent a shiver right through Amber’s body, that tingle in her thighs only increasing with every second his eyes were on hers. ‘I’m giving you the chance to welcome me back to the North East in a way nobody else could ever do.’
‘You’re giving me the chance?’ Amber asked, half laughing at his never-ending arrogance. ‘You’ll be telling me it’s a one-time-only offer next.’
Ryan sat back, shrugging, and Amber laughed again, throwing her head back, yet knowing full well that she was going to grab this chance with both hands in an act of total recklessness that was so beyond anything she’d ever done before – well, maybe not in a long time, anyway.
‘There are two reasons why I shouldn’t go anywhere near you,’ she said, sliding down from the desk, leaning over to write something down on a post-it note. As she wrote, she deliberately stuck out her bum, arching her back downwards, completely aware that she was flirting outrageously now, but not because Kevin had told her to. It was because she wanted to. Probably just to see if she still could.
Standing up straight, she smiled at Ryan, quite flattered by the flustered look he sported, even though it was obvious he was trying to look cool. Okay. So she could still do it. ‘Reason number one – you’re a lot younger than me, and two – you’re a footballer.’ She handed him the piece of paper, his fingers quickly brushing against hers as he took it from her, an action which sent a wave of something almost electric shooting right through her. ‘Anytime after seven-thirty. Now get out of my chair. I’ve got work to do.’
Ryan felt like he’d just scored the winning goal in a cup final. Sticking the yellow post-it note to the dashboard of his black Jaguar XK coupé, he entered the postcode into his satnav, waiting a few seconds until it finally plotted the route to what he hoped was going to be a very successful night. He knew he should really be taking it easy; he should be leaving the fun until after Saturday’s match, that would be the sensible thing to do. But Amber Sullivan was something else. She was also the kind of woman that was almost guaranteed to change her mind if you left her hanging on for too long, so he wasn’t going to play games. She wasn’t one of those ten-a-penny pretty girls; she was different, a distraction he hadn’t banked on, but one he couldn’t ignore.
Switching the radio to a rock station, he turned up the volume and headed out onto the motorway, barely able to keep the smile off his face. Was he going to be the one that made this ice-cold sports reporter break her own rules? That in itself was enough to turn him on, but the thought of what lay beneath the surface of a woman who was quite fascinating, to say the least, made everything just that little bit more exciting. And the one thing Ryan Fisher couldn’t live without was excitement. It was something that had got him into a lot of trouble in the past, and maybe he should be listening to the warning shots that were ringing out now, telling him to back off and lay low, play it cool, settle down. But he couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t do it. That would be like rolling over and admitting defeat, and anyway, who’s to say that what had happened in London would happen here? He knew the pitfalls now. He’d promised Max he’d left all that behind, and he had. But that didn’t mean to say he had to stop having fun altogether. Jesus, he was only human.
Shaking those thoughts from his head, he knocked the radio’s volume up another notch and began tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as The Killers’ Somebody Told Me blasted out. Max had assured him that moving back home had been the right thing to do, and Ryan believed him. It was time for a fresh start, a new beginning, but none of that meant he had to start living like a monk. He just had to be careful, that was all. He was still hot property in the football world, and nobody could take that away from him. Nobody.
Amber wondered if she’d done the right thing. Or had she just made the biggest mistake of her life, inviting Ryan Fisher into her home? Had she just taken the first step towards losing her so-carefully-kept-intact dignity just because she’d developed some silly little crush on a handsome footballer? Had she really allowed her head to be turned by Ryan Fisher and his hardworking charm offensive? After all, how many good-looking footballers had she been around in all her years as a sports reporter? Loads of them. And yet, she’d never allowed herself to feel this way about any of them, despite a fair few of them trying to gain her attention, without much success. And surely, after what had happened all those years ago, she should know better.
She shook thoughts of the past out of her head and let her hand hover over the phone as she contemplated ringing Ronnie. Maybe he could talk her out of what she was about to do. Jesus! She was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake! She didn’t need somebody else to tell her whether what she was doing was right or wrong.
Pulling her hand away from the phone, she went over to the cupboard and pulled out a large wineglass, filling it with the last of the bottle of Rioja that was sitting next to the microwave and taking a long drink. It went to her head almost immediately, which was what she’d hoped it would do. Just a small dose of Dutch courage.
Checking the large clock on her kitchen wall, she watched the second hand tick round, as if it was in slow motion. She needed some music or something, anything to take away the silence and her mind off what she’d done. Not that she’d done anything yet. She could just be asking him round for a drink, couldn’t she? A harmless drink, that was all. Oh, bollocks, Amber, she thought as she walked into the living room. She could try and convince herself otherwise, but it would be a complete waste of time. Ryan Fisher was coming here for one reason and one reason only, but it was still up to her how far she let things go. She had to remember that.
Scrolling down the playlists on her iPod, she settled on a classic Janet Jackson album before walking over to the living room window, peering through the wooden blinds and watching the street outside as everything and everybody carried on with their usual daily routine. And then she saw it – the flash Jaguar sports coupé that certainly didn’t belong to anyone on her street, that was for sure. So it could only belong to one other