4th & Girl (Mavericks Tackle Love) Read online

  4th & Girl

  A Mavericks Tackle Love Novel

  Published by Max Monroe LLC © 2018, Max Monroe

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9780998943077

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Editing by Silently Correcting Your Grammar

  Formatting by Champagne Book Design

  Cover Design by Peter Alderweireld

  Photo Credit: Wander Aguiar

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Intro

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  To Wes Lancaster and the New York Mavericks: Not gonna lie, sometimes, you guys were a pain in the ass. The whole lot of you are cocky and demanding, and you almost never do what we tell you.

  But despite all of that, we love you guys.

  Thank you for making 2018 such a fun year.

  To Sia: We might have retired the wigs, but you and those black-and-blond mops will always hold a special place in our hearts.

  To Kim Holden and Gemma Hitchen: We kind of sort of stole your names, mashed them together, and put them in this book. But, if anything, that should show you how much we adore you.

  You’re our favorite real-life angels.

  In my opinion, in football, there isn’t a more badass position than shutdown cornerback.

  What makes my position so badass? Well, I have to be agile and quick and have a natural instinct for the game. My footwork has to be on point, and my speed has to be unmatched. I have to cover, read, adjust, and break on the ball. This position, my position, is one of the biggest anchors of pass defense plays.

  What does all of that football lingo mean?

  It means I’m vital.

  It means I’m the guy who will stop a quarterback’s touchdown pass.

  I’m the man who won’t let the best wide receivers in the league get their greedy hands on the ball.

  Last year, my college record was nearly unheard of. I held opposing QBs to a 47.9 rating when they tried to throw the ball to the man I was covering.

  Basically, I was the badass in one of the toughest positions in the league.

  And now, as one of the newest first-round draft picks for the New York Mavericks, I’m the guy with everything to prove.

  I can either be the big hero, or I can be the guy who loses the fucking game.

  My reputation is on the line, my nearly flawless career in college taunting me in the background to live up to it, and if there’s one thing I need to do, it’s focus.

  But life’s got other plans.

  I should have my mind on my money—and my money on my mind—but the only thing I can seem to think of these days is the mystery girl I met at one of the team’s very first group activities.

  Blond hair.

  Long lashes.

  Criminally blue eyes.

  She’s petite and awkward, and she’s completely fucking up the plan.

  But it’s too late to second-guess.

  And it’s sure as fuck too late to go back.

  Once my mind is fixated on something, there’s no stopping me.

  I have my eye on the bombshell prize, and I won’t settle for anything less than victory.

  Good thing I’m at my best when the pressure’s on.

  My dad would shit himself if he knew I was hanging out with the Mavericks today, I thought to myself as I took in the large logo painted across a wall inside the New York Mavericks’ stadium’s brand-spanking-new medical facility and lab.

  Except, gah. He probably wouldn’t.

  Yes, Lon Holden—otherwise known as my dear old dad—was one of the Mavericks’ biggest fanboys, but he probably wouldn’t have been too thrilled to find out his daughter’s job of the day included collecting urine from his favorite football players.

  Not only was that not every father’s big dream for his little girl, but my father’s dream for me was pretty much the opposite of this.

  Truthfully, it was the opposite of everything I did these days.

  He wanted me to follow in his footsteps and his father’s footsteps and his grandfather’s footsteps and become an engineer just like the rest of the Holden clan.

  The big plan? To eventually take over our family’s engineering consulting firm.

  I’d been on board. I’d been dutiful. I’d been everything he wanted me to be until about a year ago.

  And then I’d dropped out of college one year away from getting my degree and shot it all up in flames.

  One month into my senior year, while I sat inside Advanced Engineering and Professor Serbin prattled on and on about thermodynamics and the ways they were vital to my future profession, I had an epiphany.

  An “I can’t fucking do this anymore” kind of lightbulb moment.

  It wasn’t out of rebellion, laziness, or modern Hollywood-style dreams of becoming “Insta-famous.” I just couldn’t continue to strive for a degree that bored me senseless, and I couldn’t pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

  Twenty-four hours later and I’d officially dropped all of my classes and taken a leave of absence from NYU’s engineering program.

  The aftermath wasn’t pretty.

  My dad had a meltdown.

  My mom calmly tried to talk me out of it, and then, when that didn’t work, had a crying jag in the bathroom with a glass of whiskey and the cigarettes she thought no one knew she hid in there.

  And Grandpa Joe had questioned whether or not I’d fallen ill with a mental breakdown.

  Fallen ill with a mental breakdown, his words exactly.

  Like a mental breakdown was the equivalent of catching the flu.

  Not likely, Grandpa Joe.

  But I couldn’t be mad at my grandfather’s reaction or his words. It had been the exact kind of response you’d expect to get from a man who had been raised in the “pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get the fuck over it” generation.

  I, on the other h
and, was a millennial. The generation Grandpa Joe’s generation pretty much despised and predicted would be the end of civilization as we knew it.

  I called bullshit to his dramatic take on an entire generation, but even if Judgment Day was near, I refused to spend the rest of my time between now and then dying the slow death of pursuing a career I hated.

  Of course, now, here I was. Twenty-three with no future prospects for a longstanding career to speak of. Completely uncertain of what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. Instead of climbing the corporate ladder or padding my 401K, I was working for Star Temps—a temp agency that sent me to all kinds of odds and ends jobs—and paying the necessary bills.

  Dog walking. Housecleaning. Secretarial work. You name it, and I’d done it.

  And the current task of the day? Collecting professional football players’ urine for drug testing.

  Apparently, this was an annual formality at the start of every Mavericks season.

  I watched quietly as Lisa, my coworker of the day, stacked up fresh urine cups on the laboratory counter. With careful fingers, she piled them into some sort of neurotic tower.

  Honestly, they appeared just fine to me in the cardboard box they’d been delivered in, but I kept my questions to myself.

  With her perfect yet severe brown bun on the top of her head and her pristine white scrubs, Lisa appeared to be a woman on a medical mission, and far be it for me to put a damper on her pee-cup parade.

  “How long have you been a medical assistant?” she asked, and I swallowed against the nerves doing a gyrating dance on their way up from my belly.

  Technically, I wasn’t really supposed to be doing this temp job. But, Mable, the old lady who ran Star Temps, was short on medical assistants and figured what the Mavericks didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  Completely illegal, I was sure, but I wasn’t exactly in the financial position to be declining a paycheck. And, if I was being honest, the Mavericks compensated greatly for being in charge of their football players’ piss.

  Lisa glanced at me over her shoulder, and I cleared my throat.

  “Um…not long,” I finally answered, strategically sugarcoating the fact that I had zero medical background. Hell, the only time I’d ever stepped foot inside a hospital was back in high school when I’d thought being a candy striper would look good on my college resume.

  It’d only taken two hours into my shift to realize medical shit was not for me.

  Watching an old guy puke up green Jell-O I had to clean up, and then promptly ask for another serving, hadn’t been my idea of a fun extracurricular activity.

  Not that I didn’t like helping people, I just preferred to do it with a little less bodily fluid involved.

  Funny, given today’s activities, how that’d worked out for me.

  “Do you have a full-time job somewhere?” Lisa questioned as she continued to stack. One cup, two cups, she paid careful attention to detail, going so far as to make sure all of the seams lined up perfectly. My messy personality nearly had a seizure watching it.

  Playing Twenty Questions when you almost positively didn’t know any of the answers was a little like high-stakes gambling with no experience, but not answering wasn’t a normal human behavior and pretty much went against all social skills. My only option was to play nice with my coworker and hope to Jesus it didn’t end up getting me fired.

  “No, not really,” I answered semi-honestly. “I’m more of a fly by the seat of my pants kind of gal.”

  “Oh,” she said and glanced at me over her shoulder again. “What doctor’s office did you do your medical assisting clinicals at?”

  Medical assisting clinicals? Were those a thing? Was this a test? There should have been some sort of warning if there were going to be trick questions! Fucking hell, Detective Lisa was hot on my heels. I could only assume she wasn’t making up crap like I was.

  “Uh…Doctor…Shepherd’s.”

  I didn’t personally know a Dr. Shepherd, but I knew Derek Shepherd from Grey’s Anatomy real flipping well. I mean, eleven years’ worth of Thursdays pretty much made me a Derek Shepherd expert, if you asked me.

  May he rest in peace.

  “Dr. Shepherd?” she asked. “I don’t know a Dr. Shepherd. What kind of practice does he run?”

  The key to a lie was to stick as close to the truth as possible. Or so I’d been told. So, that’s what I did. I stuck to the truth. Or, in this case, the plot of a TV show.

  “He’s a neurosurgeon.”

  “A neurosurgeon?” Lisa’s eyes perked up like a stoner who’d just been told weed was legal. “Wow. That’s so interesting.”

  Not that I know anything about being a stoner or smoking weed.

  Well, besides that one year in college, but doesn’t everyone experiment their freshman year?

  Just me? Okay, yeah, forget I said anything…

  “Yep,” I agreed. And seriously, it was interesting. Who hadn’t loved watching Dr. Shepherd perform brain surgery? Before his shocking death—which I’m still pissed about—he’d been the best damn neurosurgeon Seattle Grace, hell, even the country, had ever seen.

  “Wow,” she said again. “Did you get to see any surgeries?”

  “Oh yeah.” I waved a nonchalant hand in the air. “All the time.”

  If her eyes had gotten any brighter, I could’ve turned the lights out and saved the Mavericks on electricity.

  In my humble and maybe a tad bit judgmental opinion, this chick needed to get out a little more. I mean, dollar beer nights at Frankie’s in Brooklyn would’ve really given her medical-assistant-focused-mind a run for its money.

  You didn’t even need to drink the cheap beer to have a good time.

  The last time I was there, I watched two guys fistfight over which Jersey Shore character was hotter—I’m a JWoww fan myself—and a girl who could’ve been Courtney Love’s doppelgänger flashed her boobs so some guy with a goatee would play Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA on the jukebox.

  “Did you get to do a lot of blood draws?” Lisa asked, and I silently wondered if this was what the next two weeks of working with her would be like. Of course, her eyes did that thing again where they lit up like someone just handed her a winning lotto ticket.

  I started to fear if I gave her any more excitement, she’d channel Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally—only this time, it wouldn’t be fake.

  I’ll have what she’s having? No thank you, Lisa.

  But to deny her more medical pleasure felt like a sin, so I just rolled with it.

  “Oh yeah,” I answered. “Blood, brains, you name it, and I collected it.”

  Her eyes popped big and wide. “You collected brains?”

  Whoops. In the name of Lisa’s medical O, I’d officially taken it too far.

  “I’m kidding,” I backpedaled, and the look of relief in her eyes was evident. “Just a little neuro humor.”

  “You scared me for a minute there,” she said with a hand to her chest. “I thought maybe this Dr. Shepherd was running an unethical practice.”

  Derek Shepherd unethical? That’s blasphemy! The man had lived his life for his career!

  I felt outraged for all of Seattle Grace and Shonda Rhimes.

  “Dr. Shepherd was the very best man I’ve ever known,” I said, and my voice turned soft. “Well, until he died, that is. May he rest in peace.”

  Lisa’s eyes turned gentle. “He died?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and I swear to God, the trauma of Season 11, Episode 21 hit me straight in all the feels. “Terrible accident,” I whispered and had to blink back the tears. “No one, and I mean, no one, saw it coming.”

  Damn you, Shonda Rhimes!

  “That’s horrible,” Lisa said, and I nodded, just solemn little tilt forward of my head.

  “Tell me about it. Thursday nights haven’t been the same since.”

  “Thursday nights?” Lisa, the goddamn supersleuth, asked, and I kind of felt like smacking her.

  But I didn’t
.

  Instead, I backpedaled…again.

  “Uh…we used to, uh…fish on his land every Thursday.”

  “Wow. Sounds like you two were close.”

  I nodded again. “You have no idea, Lisa. No idea.”

  Obviously, I really needed to derail this crazy-train conversation before Ms. Medical Assistant caught onto my lying game.

  “So, uh, Lisa,” I redirected. “Mind giving me the rundown on how you usually handle these drug tests?”

  Quick as a flash, there were her happy, I-love-my-job eyes again, and it didn’t take long for my medicine-loving coworker to dive headfirst into a conversation that revolved around her favorite things—medical assisting, urine collection, and the potential for blood draws.

  By the end of her instructional ramble, I knew two things.

  Lisa was one hundred percent type A.

  And two, she loved the prospect of medically allowed violence.

  Her enthusiasm terrified me a little, and that was why it didn’t take long for me to make the executive decision to be the girl who told the players what to do and to collect their urine, and to leave the rest of the technical stuff to Lisa. She could test, she could log, she could do all the shit I wasn’t qualified to do anyway. I’d stick to handing out and collecting cups.

  The hallway noise got noticeably louder as I crammed information from the instruction manual on how to collect a proper piss sample as quickly as I could, and my nerves kicked into overdrive.

  Sure, Lisa had just instructed me on all this shit, but hells bells, that didn’t mean I retained it. If anything, I was more focused on the way her tight bun didn’t budge an inch whenever her head moved.

  “Looks like we have our first customer of the day,” Lisa said less than a minute later, and I looked up to find the most gorgeous set of baby-blue eyes I’d ever seen in my life. With the rest of the team yucking it up and making more noise than I knew was humanly possible in the hallway, the first player had apparently found his way inside.

  And I thought I had nice blue eyes? Sweet baby Jesus in a manger, this guy’s eyes were locked and loaded and prepared to take down any female in their vicinity.