The music stopped once she and Stephen reached the gazebo.
“Definitely a princess,” Will said softly.
Julianne’s knees nearly buckled at the heat of his stare. It was ironic, she thought; around the league it was believed that Will had ice running through his veins. One look into his eyes and Julianne saw only hot passion there.
“Your very own crazy princess,” she whispered back.
The minister cleared his throat.
“Who gives this woman to be wed?” he asked in a booming voice.
There was a speculative pause as Stephen looked from the minister to Julianne. She held her breath, wondering what her brother was up to now.
“No one,” Stephen stated, deviating from what they’d rehearsed the night before. “This woman comes of her own free will out of love for this man. And with the support and love of her family.”
A tear rolled down Julianne’s cheek. Stephen wiped it away before kissing her forehead and taking his seat beside his wife in the front row.
Owen chortled in delight as Julianne and Will said their vows for real this time, signifying their love for one another with matching wedding bands and sealing their promise with a kiss.
Turn the page for a preview of Tracy Solheim’s next novel
RISKY GAME
Coming in May 2014 from Berkley Sensation!
Prologue
From the blog:
THE GIRLFRIEND’S GUIDE TO THE NFL
It’s that time again, girlfriends! Kickoff weekend in the NFL. Men in tight pants fighting over a ball. Yum. And while those macho talking heads on cable are breaking down the plays, we’ll be giving you all the stats you really want to know: the inside scoop on your fantasy players. Ladies, forget about the games, because we all know the real scoring takes place off the field. So let’s get right to it.
Rumor has it Miami running back Al Stephens and his estranged wife are reuniting—in court that is. According to sources, Stephens will spend his day off next Tuesday in a Dade County courtroom answering to his wife’s claims of infidelity. Prepare yourselves, ladies, because it’s about to get nastier than an episode of The Real Housewives. My spies tell me Stephens’s wife, Jackie, will be naming the girlfriend of one of his Miami teammates as the other woman. Wouldn’t you just looove to be in that locker room next week?
Speaking of other women, a little bear told me that Chicago head coach Ray Clooney has not one, but two new ladies in his life—besides his wife, of course. Clooney is apparently the secret father of a daughter with a certain Chicago-area restaurant hostess. No word on Clooney’s wife’s reaction, but I think it’s a safe bet he’ll be dining out for the foreseeable future.
Finally, the return of the pigskin brings back the fine tight end of Baltimore’s Brody Janik, every girlfriend’s favorite fantasy player. Brody and his sexy baby-blues have been laying low this off-season. Apparently, he’s lost interest in a certain flavor of Candi. One has to wonder how—and with whom—he’s been spending his free time.
Got some football fantasies to share? Maybe a photo of our favorite guys of the gridiron doing something naughty? Send it to us at TGFGTNFL@TWITTER.
One
Shannon “Shay” Everett had been in some compromising positions in her life. Many of them even of her own doing. Growing up in a small town in Texas as the daughter of a down-and-out rodeo rider and a beauty salon owner, the rebellious tomboy had gotten into more embarrassing scrapes than she could reckon. That being said, she never envisioned herself stuffed into a cubby inside an NFL locker room late at night. A locker room that was supposed to be empty. Only it wasn’t.
Hell’s bells.
Shay would have kicked her own butt for this little escapade if it wouldn’t call attention to her presence. The guilt she felt over her task had already swayed her to abort the whole thing the minute she’d entered the players’ domain. Not to mention that she was risking her internship with the team and her scholarship along with it. She’d just have to keep riding her bike to work and the bus downtown to campus because the money to replace her car’s muffler wouldn’t be coming from some mystery Internet blogger who paid handsomely for personal information on professional football players. Shay was ashamed for even attempting it, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
Now she just needed to quickly extricate herself from her perch in a dark corner of the Baltimore Blaze’s state-of-the-art locker room. Unfortunately, her punishment was to endure painful pins and needles in her legs and feet as she waited out the room’s other two occupants, both of whom seemingly had all the time in the world. Not that any woman would complain, given the view. Standing twenty feet in front of Shay was Blaze tight end and all-American heartthrob Brody Janik.
A deliciously naked Brody Janik.
Shay willed her stomach not to growl at the sight before her, but Brody was a spectacular example of Grade-A Prime athlete in all his physical glory. Her mouth watered as she took in six-foot-three inches, two-hundred-ten pounds of perfectly sculpted muscle standing beneath a single shaft of light, the scene reminiscent of a statue of a Greek god on display in a museum somewhere. All that was missing was the pedestal for him to stand on.
Not that she hadn’t seen nearly this much of his perfect body before. The whole world had. As the spokesman for an international designer’s line of men’s underwear, pictures of Brody wearing nothing but his sparkling blue eyes and his skivvies had been plastered all over billboards and buses for months now. Except tonight, those skivvies were noticeably absent.
She licked her lips as he scrubbed his neatly trimmed brown hair with a towel, the muscles in his broad back rippling. Her eyes drifted lower to the two fine dimples on his backside—a backside that saw a lot of sun based on the lack of a discernible tan line. She slammed her eyelids shut as he turned to reach for something out of his locker. Surely this was an invasion of his privacy and she ought not to be looking. Except when would she get another chance like this one?
She blinked one eye open. Dang! He’d already pulled on a pair of skin-tight gray boxers, a noticeably abundant bulge hidden beneath the Egyptian cotton.
“It’s going to be hard to keep this under wraps,” a heavily accented male voice said from the shadows, a few lockers over.
Ain’t that the truth, Shay thought. She mentally shook herself in an effort to refocus her attention from the sexy scene in front of her and tried to make sense of the conversation. The other voice in the room wasn’t hard to recognize; the distinct accent belonged to Mr. pomegranate-smoothie-with-extra-flax-seed, Brody’s personal trainer whose last name was something Scandinavian and unpronounceable. Shay only knew him by what he ordered in the Blaze commissary each time he visited.
“It won’t be that hard, Erik.” Brody tugged on a pair of jeans over his well-defined, long legs as Shay stifled a sigh. He sat down on the folding chair in front of his locker and pulled on his socks and sneakers. “The Piss Man only checks for banned substances. He’s not checking my blood sugar.”