“No,” he replied.

“And there it is again!” I declared instantly.

“What?” he clipped, his arms giving me a mini-shake.

“I get that you’re an alpha male, Captain, but bossing me around, making me do stuff I don’t want to do? Not… liking… that.”

His face dipped close. “All right, Ace, get it all out. What else?”

I’d had enough, more than enough, so I got up on my toes and got close to his face too. “Okay, Captain, here goes,” I started. “Neeta, Wood, Neeta, Wood and maybe a little bit more of Neeta and Wood!”

“You wanna expand on that?” he growled.

“Not me not expanding, Tate,” I snapped.

Tate head twitched then, immediately, he started his story.

“Knew her for as long as I can remember. Hooked up with her in high school. Partly ‘cause she was gorgeous, mostly ‘cause she put out. I was seventeen, she was fifteen and I wasn’t her first.”

I gasped at the knowledge that Neeta put out (and he wasn’t her first) at the age of fifteen. I lost my virginity at the age of twenty-one to my college sweetheart after his pre-graduation fraternity dance. We’d been going together for two years and he’d taken me to a posh hotel and bought me roses and told me he’d love me until the day he died after we did it. We were still friends and he called me on my birthday every year and each time he did we laughed together about the good old days for at least an hour.

It was doubtful at fifteen Neeta held out for posh hotels and roses and equally doubtful her first still remembered her birthday, if he ever knew it at all.

Tate continued. “She was wild but I knew that about her and it was a f**kin’ blast, always. She could have fun, Neeta. Always smilin’, laughin’, dancin’. She’d get up from watchin’ TV and dance into the f**kin’ kitchen to get a drink. The world was a dance for her. A party all in her head. But when I hooked up with her, spent that much time with her, something struck me, somethin’ not right about it. It wasn’t until later I realized she wasn’t wild. She was desperate. For what, I still don’t f**kin’ know, spent years tryin’ to figure it out same time I spent those years tryin’ to give it to her. All I know is, back then, I was too young and too addicted to her mouth wrapped around my c**k to think of much else.”

This was way too much information.

“I –” I broke in but he shook his head.

“You wanted to know, babe, here it is,” he told me. “I think you get I was a good football player. And I was good. So good, I had scouts comin’ to games my junior year. Senior year I had six offers before I took the seventh and two came in the day after that. Neeta, she liked that, bein’ with me, lookin’ into our future, plannin’ it all out. It wasn’t about me, what I could do, what I earned. It was about what Neeta could get outta it.”

I bit my lip, Tate held my eyes and kept speaking.

“But Neeta, she’s not like you. She isn’t smart. She doesn’t work hard. She thinks of the future with her head in the clouds. And she doesn’t work for shit. Always, even when she was a little kid, expected everything to be handed to her on a silver platter. So she wants to party, have fun and she wants me with her. And I’m with her because I’ll get laid or get a blowjob but also because I’m not, there’s no f**kin’ tellin’ what she’ll get herself into. And, f**k me, I love her. Not just her mouth or her cunt, but her. The way she is, the way she dances through life.”

“Tate –”

“So I gotta look after her. Problem with that is, she gets bored, she wants somethin’ new, new faces, new adventures, new ways to have fun. And there I am, at her side one night when she finds that shit and the party we’re at gets busted. I know in my bones it ain’t where we’re supposed to be, these people are older than us, rough, no good. But she wouldn’t go, she was havin’ fun. I could go, she told me, but she was stayin’ and I knew no way I could leave her there on her own. And I was right, they were no good. So Neeta and I are there and we get busted along with them. Drugs, not pot, not coke, not a little bit of it, they had crack and they had lots of it because they dealt it. When I made the papers, local football star busted at a party hangin’ with drug dealers, Ace, let’s just say the football program at Penn State, they didn’t like that much.”

“My God,” I whispered, horrified at what he was telling me.

“They almost pulled the scholarship. Dad and Pop didn’t talk to them, explain things, they would have. They were puttin’ their money down on a future All-American. Not some ass**le who gets his shit in the papers.”

“Tate –”

He cut me off with a dare. “That’s the first time she f**ked up my life, you wanna hear more?”

“But you went to Penn State,” I reminded him quietly.

“Yeah, thanks to Dad and Pop,” he returned. “I quit Neeta and went to school.”

“So, um… later you took her back?” I asked cautiously.

“More times than you got fingers, Ace. Each time, she f**ked up my life.” His arms gave me a powerful squeeze that made my breath catch and his voice got so low, I could feel it vibrating in my chest. “So I find this woman, see. High-class, great f**kin’ hair, legs that go forever but I see her when I’m pissed. I’m pissed at Bubba and I’m pissed at Krystal but most of all, I’m pissed at Neeta ‘cause I let the bitch play me again. Next day after Neeta plays me, the next f**kin’ day, that’s when I find this woman. She’s workin’ in my goddamned bar,” he growled and my heart stopped. “And I do not need that shit. Had years of that shit. I need that woman and the trouble that’s written all over her in my bar like I need a hole in my head. So I get pissed, say shit I don’t mean and what happens? I walk out after sayin’ that shit and she looks at me and I know she heard. Part of me, gotta tell you Laurie, is glad. Part of me can’t take it. Which part wins?”

“Tate –”

I got another squeeze. “Which part?” he demanded to know.

“I don’t –”

“You’re right here, Ace.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“What’s that say about me?”