Wrapped Up: A Triple Threat Sports Romance by Lexi Cross Page A

already. I was late getting home. I knew he would probably wonder where I was or what I was doing. He knew me well enough to assume I was just testing him, too, and that was probably the worst part of it.
     
    I went back to the wheel but still couldn’t loosen anything.
     
    I heard a car pull up behind me after trying for a few more minutes. The engine kept running as I heard the door close. I stood up with the tire iron in my hand, in case it was someone who planned on taking advantage of me.
     
    It was Jake.
     
    “How the hell did you find me?” I asked as I threw my arms around his neck.
     
    “I called your father and asked who you would be going to see out of town for work. He told me where to find you,” he said. “Looks like you have a flat tire.”
     
    “No shit, Sherlock. Can you help?”
     
    He looked at me as if to say you gotta be kidding me . “Hand me the tire iron. I’ll get you fixed up in a jiffy.”
     
    A few moments later, he was swapping out the tires and tightening the lug nuts on my spare. He tossed the tools and the blown tire into my trunk.
     
    “We need to get you a new tire as soon as we can, like tomorrow. You don’t need to drive around on that doughnut too long,” he told me.
     
    “Thanks,” I said.
     
    “See you at home?”
     
    “On my way.”
     
    “Okay, I’ll see you there,” he said with a smile. He hopped in his Mercedes and waited for me to pull away first in my Kia. Even our choices in cars showed how differently we treated our money.
     
    On the way back to his place, I saw the reasoning behind letting him know where I was. If I hadn’t told him as much as I had, he wouldn’t have been able to find me. In the future, I decided, I needed to tell him my schedule in more detail. It just seemed safer to let him know where I was and what I was doing.
     
    I hated it, but it was a necessary evil.
     
    Still, Jake had proven himself to be my hero, and it felt good to be going home with him. Those same big, strong arms that had worked on my car to replace my tire would have been perfect to wrap around me and hold me safely against his muscular body overnight.
     
    He’d tried to hold me a few times already, but I had fought off the physical attachment. I didn’t know how much longer I could continue doing that. Eventually, it seemed like our appearance as a happy, loving couple would depend on our actually being a happy, loving couple. Things certainly seemed to be heading that way already.
     

Chapter Ten
 
    Jake

 
     
    As much as we tried to keep things professional and on a strictly business level, it felt like our lives were moving us closer and closer together. Maybe it was the fact that we already had a history that made us more open to it, but there was no denying that we kept moving in that direction.
     
    Real relationships were so flawed, and they never seemed to work. One person always seemed to be more invested in it, or they wanted to move faster than the other person, and it just fell apart. Communication was harder with emotions involved. Brooke certainly would have agreed with me on that one. It was harder to voice concerns or desires with someone once love was involved.
     
    As a real relationship, our looming marriage was doomed already. As a business transaction, we stood a chance at having a rather successful marriage. We were both very successful people already, and putting that together seemed like the perfect recipe for a successful life together.
     
    But there was so much more to us than just our success. And it was all determined to come out in the open.
     
    The first game of the season was a home game. Brooke had asked to come watch, so of course, I got her in. She sat with the owners in the suite they had at the stadium. They had the best seats in the house, and could watch through the windows or on the TV screens in the walls.
     
    She got a close-up of my injury in the fourth quarter. Harley sent the ball soaring beautifully to