Dread drove every footstep he took away from his new wife.
* * *
"Congrats, buddy." A hard slap sounded across his shoulders from yet another teammate. Only Ty and Dominic had kept silent, the two newly married guys who just shook their heads as they looked at him.
He'd never been happier to hear the whistle blow. After the past twenty-four hours, he needed these three hours playing a game that was so natural to him. It was as close as he was going to get to decompressing. He wouldn't give up a second he'd spent with Anna, but her family, the press, and all of the crap swirling around them was another matter entirely.
Football. That's all he was going to think about.
But even as he took his spot in the defensive lineup, he found his attention wasn't entirely on the game. He'd never paid much attention to who was up in the VIP box watching him. But today, Anna was there. What was she thinking? Feeling?
And was she okay without him there to protect her?
* * *
"Hi there. Are you Anna?" Anna looked up to see two very pretty women standing in front of her. Getting to her feet, she hoped her legs weren't nearly as shaky from Cole's kiss as they had been a minute ago.
She smiled nervously. "Yes, that's me."
She was surprised when the slim blonde hugged her. "Wonderful. It's so nice to meet you.
And such a surprise, too. Such a good surprise."
Completely off balance from the warm greeting, she was glad when the curvy woman with the curly hair simply held out her hand. "I'm Melissa, Cole's agent. And this is Julie. She does PR for the Outlaws. We're also both good friends of Cole's."
"Or at least we thought we were." Julie smiled as she sat down next to Anna, more put together and polished than Anna could ever dream of being.
Melissa grabbed a seat on her other side, her business suit not nearly stark enough to hide her soft, sexy curves. "And then he goes and gets married to a woman we've never heard word one about."
Feeling neither as put together nor as sexy as either of Cole's female friends, Anna was trying to figure out how to respond when Julie said, "Honestly, getting hitched in Vegas is something I would have expected my husband to do." At Anna's shocked expression, Julie added, "Before we got serious, Ty used to be a bit of a player."
Melissa laughed at that, her initial businesslike demeanor quickly giving way to friendliness. She leaned over to Anna as if she were sharing a secret. "Actually, the truth is that the team had to hire Julie as Ty's personal PR rep."
Julie shrugged. "He's a bad boy. But he's my bad boy. Besides, you should know that Melissa met her husband, Dominic, when he hired her to be his agent." She waggled her eyebrows. "I've never seen an agent that interested in her client."
Anna had to bite her lip so she wouldn't laugh at the way the two women were ribbing each other. At the same time, she'd noticed they both seemed to have a glow about them, especially when they were talking about their husbands. A little pang of envy caught her in the chest, similar to the way she sometimes felt when she watched her sisters with their husbands.
"So." With unsettling abruptness, Julie and Melissa stopped teasing each other and turned their laser focus on Anna. "Tell us about yourself. What do you do for a living? How did you meet Cole? When did you know he was your forever?"
Oh God, what was with people and the word forever?
"I teach first grade." She paused, readying herself to lie to these two nice women. Just one more lie to add to the heaping pile. But she couldn't quite do it, not when they'd been so nice to her. "We met in Las Vegas. One of my sisters was getting married and he was visiting his grandmother."
She would have stopped there, but she already knew neither of these women was going to let her get away with leaving the "forever" question unanswered.
Dropping her voice, she lowered her gaze to her lap. "I knew it was forever the first time he looked at me."
Julie's soft gasp echoed Anna's own private reaction to what she'd just said.
To what she'd just admitted...to herself.
Oh God, had everything she was starting to feel for him already been there in that first glance, when he'd looked into her eyes and told her they were beautiful?
"It's clearly mutual."
Julie's surprising statement was quite possibly the only thing that could have pulled Anna out of her shocked self-examination.
"Cole is usually pretty even-keeled, but he almost bit my head off in the hall before we came in here."
Anna didn't understand. "Why? What happened?"
"I told him I wanted to give the press our version of your story, rather than whatever random misinformation they'll splash onto the Internet and the newspapers. I thought he was going to tackle me when he told me that your relationship is private. And that there wasn't any story."
Melissa agreed. "I've never seen Cole act like that about any other woman. I honestly never thought he'd find anyone he really, truly could care about. Not until you."
Anna couldn't believe how wrong these women were about Cole. He'd bit off Julie's head because he was trying to keep their lies from being revealed, not because he cared about his new wife.
"I still can't believe he managed to keep you a secret," Julie said. "When did you say the two of you met?"
Anna knew she wasn't a good liar. Not only did she preach to her first graders day in and day out about the value of honesty, but she simply didn't like the way lying made her feel, like gears were grinding together in her gut, pulling and tugging at her insides.
Thankfully, before she could answer, the game began and everyone's attention turned to the field. She peered out at the men in their uniforms. She wanted to ask which one was Cole, but it would be way too suspicious if she did. Fortunately, he wasn't hard to pick out. Not when she already knew how he moved, the broad set of his shoulders, his tight hips. He looked up at the VIP box between plays and she couldn't stop her body from reacting. From wanting.
Needing.
As she watched the players move on the field, she was glad to find herself quickly picking up on the rules. Time passed and she had almost started to feel comfortable, when suddenly Cole thundered into a player from the other team, knocking the huge man to the ground without even breaking stride.