Wells did, in fact, eagle the first hole.
She couldn’t even look him in the eye as she collected his driver.
What had she been thinking?
What were they both thinking?
Was she actually going to send him a half-naked picture?
Since the moment they’d torn down the third wall between player and fan, they’d spent 90 percent of their acquaintance arguing. And 90 percent of those arguments were about pulling his head out of his ass. Was she attracted to him? Yes. No sense in denying it after the indecent thoughts she’d been having more and more lately, which were inexcusably heavy on butt biting.
Wells was level ten hot.
That wasn’t in question.
But he was also her boss. And she was all he had. His mentor and manager had deserted him. Blurring the line of professionalism would be a terrible idea. Like, awful.
“I was thinking, Josephine,” Wells said, coming up beside her, just outside the tee box on the second hole. “I shouldn’t be the only one benefitting from a bet today. This calls for a fair trade off.”
“We need to be talking about yardage,” she blurted.
Did his lips twitch? “I wouldn’t feel right if you didn’t get something out of the deal.”
“I have everything I need.”
Very briefly, his attention dropped to her thighs. “Do you?”
A bead of sweat trickled down her spine. “Good thing you’re not mic’d up right now.”
He hummed in his throat. “What do you want in exchange for me taking par on this hole? The suggestion has to come from you.”
“For decorum’s sake? I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.”
Wells let a beat pass. “I think I like flirting with you. I think you want to flirt back.” His expression was serious when he looked down at her. “And as long as you know your job is safe and I would literally cut off my own legs before wielding my power over you, maybe we need to just fucking flirt, belle.”
How did he manage to make the word “flirt” sound like an epithet? “That isn’t what you said on Wednesday night.”
“Now I’m qualifying what I said. As long as you’re the one initiating . . .”
“The flirting?”
“And you know there’s no pressure at all—”
“I do. I know that.”
“Then we fucking flirt.” He squinted out at the fairway. “Name the terms of your bet.”
What was happening here? They were in the middle of a golf tournament laying down ground rules for flirting? How could she be having so much fun while being completely and totally caught off guard? Truthfully, though, she believed Wells when he said there was no pressure, because she felt none. He would never use his position to do anything that made her uncomfortable. Was her intuition enough of an excuse to take a tiny step forward? Safe enough to pose the mother of all bets?
His eyes challenged her to do just that, but there was reassurance there, too.
Josephine filled her lungs for courage. “If you par this hole . . .” She craned her neck to give his booty the tiniest peek, but couldn’t bring herself to say the words. “Um.”
Slowly, Wells’s mouth edged up into a grin. “You want a picture of me dropping trou?”
And to think, she’d woken up this morning believing she led a mostly normal life. “I’m not sure there is any point in denying that I like your butt after you overheard my phone call last night.”
“Juicy.” He winked at her. “You called it juicy.”
Josephine closed her eyes and released a withering sound. “Just play the shot, you clown.”
Wells laughed.
He laughed.
Josephine’s legs almost gave out. Her eyes shot open, hoping to catch the tail end of his laughing face, but he was already back to concentrating on the shot he was about to take, stepping right to left and examining the angle, feeling the wind.
His swing followed through, without the hesitancy he’d developed over the last two years, and the ball dropped down on the left side of the fairway. A smattering of applause rippled through the crowd assembled behind them.
Wells handed her the driver. “Good call, belle.”
Josephine might have spent the rest of the morning driven to distraction by the fact that she’d just won a bet that guaranteed her a personal snapshot of Wells’s rear end, but she was too transfixed by the glimpse she was getting of the old Wells. He consulted with her before every shot, both of them poring over yardage books and hunkering down side by side to compare notes on the angle of the green. He almost seemed to be having . . . fun.
But all that progress came to a screeching halt on the eighth hole.
Josephine and Wells were shoulder to shoulder, waiting for Tagaloa to take his putt, when Buck Lee appeared on the sidelines. He was just one face among the crowd, but his arrival was like a bucket of cold water tossed on Wells. His expression slowly grew shuttered, his movements less natural.
In no time, he’d dropped two spots on the leaderboard.
“Hey. It was a tricky slope. Shake it off.”
When he didn’t bother to respond, Josephine’s stomach sank.
The next hole went worse.
Buck Lee left, as casually as he’d arrived.
And that’s when her glimpse of the old, astonishing Wells Whitaker winked out completely.
At this rate, their chances of making the cut and continuing in the tournament tomorrow were slim to none. Not unless he managed to get through the rest of the afternoon without bogeying a single hole and that seemed about as likely as TSwift performing in her bathroom later tonight.
Keep trying. Don’t quit on him. “The wind is picking up—”
“I don’t give a shit about the wind, Josephine. I’m pissing into it at this point.”
Her shoulders wanted to slump, but she wouldn’t let them. “You’re burning it all down.”
“Sounds about right,” he responded, tight-lipped, while examining the head of his club.
“Don’t. Step back, recognize what you’re doing, and balance yourself out.”
His snort drew the attention of several spectators. “Oh Jesus, stop shovel feeding me your Zen nonsense, belle.”
“Nonsense is allowing that passive-aggressive, condescending has-been to get in your head and letting him rearrange it. Letting him win. I thought you were more badass than that.”
Wells’s head turned slowly, pinning her with an incredulous look. “You met him for all of thirty seconds and you got all of that?”
“Yup!”
He really, truly looked like he was trying to claw his way out of the mental hole he’d dug for himself, but he just couldn’t do it. The grimace of regret, the remaining light fading from his eyes, told her that much. “Let me take my drive, Josephine.”
“Go for it. I’ll be on the sidelines.”
“What?” he shouted.
“I said, I’ll be . . .” She fluttered her fingers at the roped-off spectator section. “Over there.”
Panic slowly snuck into his expression. “What happened to never quitting?”
“I said I would never quit as long as you didn’t quit on yourself. That’s what you’re doing.” She whirled around, took a few steps, and ducked under the rope, a few feet to the right of the gallery—
And immediately her foot was run over by a golf cart.
Pain shot from her toes to her ankle, snatching the breath clean out of her lungs. It was such a shock, happened so quickly, she didn’t even have a chance to make a sound. Her backside planted in the grass before she knew she was falling, her only necessity to get the pressure off her foot. Surely it was broken?
A roar of denial from Wells nearly deafened her. “Josephine.”
He was in front of her, his image momentarily blurred by the blood rushing to her head, but after a few seconds of taking stock, the shock wore off and the pain started to dull. Just surprised. You were just surprised. “I’m fine.”
“What the fucking fuck,” he exploded, dropping to his knees in front of her. “You got run over.”
“Just my foot.”
“You ran over my caddie,” he barked at the cart, which was carrying two officials. “I’m going to f—”
“Wells.”
He made a sharp sound of frustration. “Where is the medic on this course?” Before she knew his intentions, Wells had picked her up off the ground to cradle her in his arms. “Where?”
The official stood up. “I’ve radioed them. The medical cart is on the way.”
“Oh good,” he responded. “Another cart. Maybe if we’re lucky, it’ll finish her off!”
“Watch yourself, Whitaker,” the official shot back, jabbing the air with his finger. “We were headed over here to give you a warning about the profanity. Again.”
“Wells, it barely hurts anymore,” Josephine said, trying to work herself free of the steel banded hold keeping her in place. “I was just caught off guard.”
“Is this the wrong time to point out that this wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed with me, where you belong?”
“Yes, it’s the dead wrong time to point that out.” Her neck lost power, dangling back over the crook of his elbow. “Please God, don’t let my parents see this.”
“Here comes the medical cart,” Wells said, still sounding far more anxious than the situation warranted. Three long strides and she was being settled onto a leather bench. The medic didn’t even have a chance to climb out of the driver’s seat before Wells knelt down again in front of Josephine. “I can’t remember. Are you supposed to leave the shoe on when it’s a sprain, so it doesn’t swell? Or am I wrong?”
“It’s not a sprain!” Josephine shouted.
“Sir, I can take over from here,” said the medic patiently.
“Just a second. I’m going to check the damage.”
Wells eased off Josephine’s shoe and that’s when everything started to move in slow motion. She thought back to the evening when she’d painted her toenails and denial swung inside her like a pendulum. “Not the sock. Leave my sock on.”
“How am I supposed to see anything with your sock on?”
“There’s nothing to see—”
Off came the sock.
There they were. Five freshly polished blue toes. With yellow letters on them. Spelling out W-E-L-L-S’. He went very still. Three seconds passed. Four. And then, ignoring her sputtering protests, Wells yanked off the other shoe and sock, revealing the word B-E-L-L-E.
He said nothing.
No movement.
He’d become a statue.
Josephine held her breath as he stood up, braced a hand on the top of the golf cart, and looked at her, long and hard, wheels turning behind his eyes.
His voice vibrated when he said, “We’re making the cut.”
Josephine jumped when he slapped a hand down on the roof of the cart.
“We’re making the fucking cut, Josephine.”
“Okay,” she whispered, her embarrassment turning into something else. Pure hope. Hope and . . . connection. To this man.
For better or worse.
