Touch Back: An Enemies to Lovers Sports Romance (Playing for Keeps Book One) Read online

  TOUCH BACK

  An Enemies to Lovers Sports Romance

  PLAYING for KEEPS Book One

  Copyright © 2020 by Zoey Shores

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  COVER by Mayhem Cover Creations

  NOTICE: This work is entirely fictional. None of the characters bear any resemblance to any real persons, living or deceased. All acts depicted are consensual. All characters are above the age of 18.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE: EMMA

  CHAPTER TWO: COLE

  CHAPTER THREE: EMMA

  CHAPTER FOUR: EMMA

  CHAPTER FIVE: EMMA

  CHAPTER SIX: COLE

  CHAPTER SEVEN: EMMA

  CHAPTER EIGHT: COLE

  CHAPTER NINE: EMMA

  CHAPTER TEN: COLE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: EMMA

  CHAPTER TWELVE: COLE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: EMMA

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: EMMA

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: COLE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: EMMA

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: COLE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: EMMA

  CHAPTER NINTEEN: COLE

  CHAPTER TWENTY: EMMA

  CHAPTER TWENTYONE: COLE

  CHAPTER TWENTYTWO: EMMA

  CHAPTER TWENTYTHREE: COLE

  CHAPTER TWENTYFOUR: EMMA

  CHAPTER TWENTYFIVE: EMMA

  CHAPTER TWENTYSIX: COLE

  CHAPTER TWENTYSEVEN: EMMA

  CHAPTER TWENTYEIGHT: COLE

  CHAPTER TWENTYNINE: EMMA

  CHAPTER THIRTY: COLE

  CHAPTER THIRTYONE: EMMA

  EPILOGUE

  KEEP IN TOUCH WITH ZOEY

  CHAPTER ONE: EMMA

  What do you need when you wake up and walk in on your roommate and her fiancé doing it doggy style in the kitchen first thing in the morning? More coffee than usual.

  “What’ll it be, E?” Daphne asks me as I walk up to the counter.

  “A double mocha,” I order, in extra need of a generous injection of caffeine: to wake myself up for my 8:00am class, and to help my mind recover from what I woke up to. I lean over the counter as Danielle punches in my order on her point-of-sale screen and whisper, “Guess what I walked in on this morning?”

  Daphne’s eyes widen and a look of incredulous amusement lights up her face. “Again?” she whisper-shouts back.

  Aside from being the best barista in at least a fifty-mile radius, Daphne is one of my best friends and my main outlet for venting about Lilly and Glenn’s newfound sexual adventurousness.

  I purse my lips and nod, casting a glance behind my back to make sure no new customers have walked up behind me and are in earshot. “In the kitchen this time,” I hiss towards her as she walks over to the espresso machine to prepare my drink.

  Daphne laughs as she fills my cup. “I can only imagine what they have in mind for when you’re out of the apartment today.”

  My roommate, Lilly, has been my best friend since freshman year. Starting junior year, we’ve been renting a two-bedroom apartment together off-campus. Although Lilly has her own, err, let’s say, idiosyncrasies – being a bona-fide hippy chick who keeps an indoor compost and tries to outdo herself every time it’s her turn to make dinner with a smellier, more-outlandish vegan dish than the last – it’s been the time of our lives living together.

  Lilly’s fiancé, Glenn, moved in with us two weeks ago. He was renting the second floor of a house off-campus with a friend of his, but the owner got foreclosed on, leaving them without a place to live. Of course, I didn’t have any problem with Glenn moving into Lilly’s room.

  I love the both of them to death, but it didn’t take long for them to get used to dropping their pants at the drop of a dime, whenever the mood struck them. Just another manifestation of Lilly’s free-spiritedness.

  Lilly getting it on in any room at any hour doesn’t surprise me, but I’d never have suspected it out of Glenn.

  Talk about opposites attract, Glenn is a strait-laced accounting major who blushes at suggestive jokes and is impervious to sarcasm. Just about the last guy I’d have expected Lilly, who knows more about how many species of ants in endangered in Peru than the balance of her own bank account, to end up with.

  But hey, that’s life sometimes, I guess.

  I walked out of my bedroom door this morning still rubbing my sleepy eyes, and when I removed my balled fists from my eyelids and the blurry shapes focused into view, I was met with the image of Lilly bent over our kitchen counter and Glenn bumping away right behind her.

  When they noticed me standing there, Glenn balked and ducked down under the counter to hide, while Lilly just smiled at me nonplussed and said, “Oh, I thought your first class was at ten. We didn’t expect you up for at least another hour.”

  Danielle puts the lid on my cup and slides it to me on the counter. I fish a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and hand it to her.

  “I hoped that I could at least count on Glenn’s natural shyness to make sure they keep their clothes on outside of her bedroom. That was before last week when I opened the broom closet to find –” I sneak another look behind me. Looking through the glass doors I notice someone approaching, so I finish my thought in a hushed voice, leaning over to whisper it to Danielle, “to find Lily on her knees with a mouth full of Glenn.”

  “I still don’t understand how you end up in a broom closet for a BJ,” Danielle softens those last two letters to a hushed whisper as the next customer lines up behind me. She puts my five-dollar bill in the cash register and hands me my change, which I drop into the glass tip jar on the counter.

  “Oh, Lilly has an explanation for that one. Ask her next time you see her.”

  Lilly claims that every room in the apartment has its own resonance, and that only by making love in every room of the house will her and Glenn’s double-chakra become fully in-sync, which, of course, is vital if they’re going to get married.

  She even asked if they could do it in my room – she promised they’d keep it to the floor and off my bed – for completion’s sake.

  Needless to say, I turned them down on that one.

  “Have a good first day,” Daphne says. “You have that crazy, graduate-level Advanced English Poetry class today, right?”

  “Mhm,” I nod, picking up my cup and affixing the reusable bamboo straw that Lilly absolutely insisted I buy through the lid and taking my first, much needed, sip.

  “So, look on the bring side, maybe you’ll be assigned such a hard, twenty-page essay that your brain doesn’t have enough room and those images of Lilly and Glenn drop right out of your head.”

  “Always looking for the silver lining,” I reply, not quite sharing her optimism. I’m pretty sure the images of Glenn – who before I got back from my internship I’ve hardly even seen without his top shirt button buttoned, he’s such a straight-lace – with his manhood stuffed in Lilly’s mouth in the broom closet, or the intense determination I saw on his face as he pounded her from behind in our kitchen this morning are the kind of things that get seared in the brain for life.

  The guy behind me coughs loudly, a real caustic tone to the last noise, to make sure we know that he’s tired of being held up by our conversation. I’d better high tail it to class anyway, since the English building is all the way across campus.

  “See you, Danielle,” I say, turning around and heading toward the exit.

  Once outside, I just about inhale m
y drink. Caffeine is just what I need right now. I whip out my cell phone to see if I’ve gotten a response from Nick yet.

  Nope.

  Nick is my boyfriend – or, now, my ex-boyfriend.

  Wow, I guess this is really the first time I admitted that to myself. Two days ago I finally sent him a text, and left him a voicemail message, that if we don’t sit down and have a serious talk about our relationship soon, that we should just break up.

  Well, if our relationship isn’t important enough to him to even respond to me, clearly it is over. We’re broken up. I’m single.

  Now that it’s over, I can accept how overdue this was. Nick was my first boyfriend. He seemed so nice at first. Funny, pretty smart, cute enough. The way he pursued me made me feel wanted, special. The first couple months of our relationship was great.

  But as time went on, he became more and more distant. He made spending time with me less of a priority. He cared less and less about what was going on with my life. He’d feel tuned-out whenever we were together. His head would always be buried in his phone rather than paying attention to me. He would break plans just to hang out with his friends for no special occasion.

  Daphne and Lilly have been telling me for months that I needed to kick him to the curb. I know now they were right. If I’m being honest with myself, I always knew they were right. It was just hard for me to accept.

  The idea of ending my first relationship just seemed like such a big deal. I couldn’t help but think that maybe it was my fault, that I was doing something wrong. And that if I changed somehow, our relationship would go back to how it was in the beginning – back to the good times.

  Now I know that’s silly.

  I’m mulling through all my thoughts and feelings in my mind, so much so that I’m hardly paying attention to what’s in front of me as I walk down the main pathway through the central Quad on campus. Then, suddenly—

  BUMP

  I feel like I just walked blindly into a brick wall.

  I shake my head to throw off the discombobulation and look up to see what the hell I could have run into that was so hard and sturdy. Did a giant oak tree spring up in the middle of this path overnight or something?

  When my eyes rest on what I just ran into … Oh. My. God.

  If running into him discombobulated me, seeing him absolutely floors me.

  Him? You ask?

  Him. As hard as it is to believe, that object I ran into that felt like a giant slab of solid concrete was a man.

  A big, hulking mass of corded muscle of a man. My head only reaches up to his chest, the muscles of which bulge out, straining against his tight grey shirt. My eyes wander inches down to see the outline of his abs against his shirt fabric – is that even possible? How the hell can anyone’s abs be so big and powerful that you can see them through a shirt?

  There’s no question if it’s possible or not when it’s staring me right in the face, though. But really, I’m the one doing all the staring. I lift my head up to his face. His masculine, jagged, sharp-featured face. He looks like an ancient statue turned human and walked right out of an Italian museum. That rock-hard, solid, square jaw looks like it could only be carved out of granite by a master artist. Something like this face shouldn’t just happen naturally.

  My gaze settles on his bright, light blue eyes and I perceive his right eyebrow raising amusedly. His full, soft lips – oh, God, what a mouth – perk up into a cocky smirk. A bemused grunt, dripping in conceited confidence, escapes his throat.

  “You ever try looking where you’re going?”

  His deep, smooth baritone reverberates in my ears and sends a tingle down my spine.

  “Huh?” I manage to peep out, stupidly.

  I notice two girls on either side of him. Bleach blonde hair so bright it looks almost neon in the morning sun, caked on makeup, tight shirts and shorts riding up their asses. Both giggle rudely looking at me, reminding me of catty cheerleader types from high school.

  He rolls his eyes and I notice now that it’s Cole Hampton, the football team’s star running back.

  I’ve seen his face in advertisements around campus before and even though I’m not exactly the type of girl to go gaga for ball-catchers or movie stars, it would be impossible for any woman not to stop and spend at least a couple seconds (or minutes) admiring his features when passing by a picture of him on a poster, flyer or magazine.

  But seeing it in person in a whole different ball game.

  “I said, why don’t you watch where you’re going?” he intones, more brashly this time. “You made me drop my phone.”

  He kneels down – even on one knee he’s taller than me – to scoop up his phone. While straightening back up he says to one of the barbies hanging off his arms, as if I’m the butt of a joke, “Can you believe this girl?” Their mocking giggles clatter in response.

  Who the hell does this guy think he is? Just because he could be the product of the Greek God of Sex (whoever that is) mating with a female woman doesn’t give him – or anyone else – the right to be a dick.

  Besides: look where I’m going? He’s the one taking up the whole sidewalk with his pieces of arm candy hanging off either side of him.

  “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” I shoot back, surprised at the harshness of my tone when the words leave my mouth.

  He cocks his right eyebrow up again; his expression is one of surprise at first but morphs into one of condescending amusement.

  “You’re the one taking up the whole sidewalk with your two,” I motion my right hand dismissively at the two girls – let’s call them Stacy and Becky for now – by his side. “Your two friends,” I finish, euphemistically.

  Stacy and Becky balk at my response. Smatterings of high-pitched up-talk indignation escape from their mouths.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you need to lighten up, honey?” he responds, his words still dripping with conceitedness.

  “Honey?” I’m almost seeing red now. These damn jocks act like they own the school just because they can catch a stupid ball or run fast. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a class with one of them and they acted like middle schoolers, giggling on their phones, blowing off all the work, and getting automatic C’s because the professors were under pressure to keep them academically eligible to play their stupid games by any means necessary.

  “I’m nobody’s honey, certainly not yours, and—” he raises his open palm up to stop me. Some man giving me the talk-to-the-hand sign usually isn’t going to shut me up when I’m giving them a much-deserved chewing out, but I’m momentarily lost for words taking note of how long and thick his fingers are, and how his palm looks like it could crush a full-grown watermelon like a ripe grape.

  “Yeah, yeah, I think you’ve taken enough of my precious. See ya around – or not,” he pronounces dismissively, turning and walking off with Stacy and Becky hot on his heels.

  I stand there looking at him walking away. I’m so peeved at this jerk that I almost succeed in keeping my eyes from falling on his solid, sculpted ass as he walks away in his tight, dark jeans.

  I bend down and pick up my phone.

  Freaking jerk. Big meat-head walking around campus like he owns the place, bumping into people because he takes up half the sidewalk and blaming them, sleezy sorority girls hanging off of him all day long. He probably asks one of his classmates – one of the real students at this school, actually here to learn – to do his homework for him, if he even bothers that much.

  He probably falls asleep fifteen minutes into the lecture. He probably snores and the professors treat him like too much of a primadonna to even kick him out. He probably treats women like pieces of meat and has a new one every night without as much as learning their names. He probably …

  Oh, shit, what time is it anyway?

  Advanced English Poetry is one class I do not want to be late to. Professor DuBois is a total hardass.

  Hell, seeing Lilly and her fiancé fucking stark naked
in the kitchen, about two feet away from where I keep my cereal, isn’t how I wanted to start the week, so being late for my first class would only be a big, rotten cherry on top of a stinking shit sundae.

  I lift my phone to check the time. I click the side button to display the clock.

  Good news: the clock tells me I still have five minutes to spare.

  Bad news: The phone’s background image is a shirtless picture of none other than stuck-up jock-jerk Cole Hampton.

  I picked up the wrong phone.

  CHAPTER TWO: COLE

  Well, that was an interesting experience.

  It’s been a while since I’ve met a girl who didn’t immediately fawn over me, just about dropping down to her knees and worshipping me at first sight.

  I’ve actually had to fight off girls with a stick – literally.

  But a girl actually calling me out, arguing with me? I can’t even remember the last time.

  Tell you the truth, it was kind of exciting. A girl who can stand on her own two feet and give as good as she gets? Yeah, she was a lot different from the desperate jersey chasers that hang around me and the whole team like flies, that’s for sure.

  “Oh-em-gee, can you believe her?” one of those desperate girls I’m referring to chimes in next to me.

  “Eh, whatever,” I shrug it off.

  Gotta admit, she was pretty cute, too. Very different look from the girls I usually go for; or, I should say, the girls who go for me. Ever since I came to this school and made my name as the top running back in college football, I haven’t even had to “get” girls. They come to me, and they’re pretty much a dime a dozen, so whoever’s lucky enough to end up under my arm first whenever I’m out at the bar or at a party is generally the one I’m bringing home.

  It’s easier that way, and I’m not looking to get attached. The more casual and meaningless, the better. Growing up in the home, and in the family, that I did has permanently soured me on the idea of a relationship.

  I just need a willing body to satisfy my needs, and as long as all of the many, very-willing bodies throw themselves at me know that it’s a no-strings-attached, one-time thing – and I make sure they all do – nobody can get hurt.