Protecting The Quarterback. Kristina Knight

As if the model cared.

      The makeup artist swiped more powder over Jonas’s forehead and then leaned back to observe her handiwork. The lights flashed.

      “You’re ready,” she said, and Jonas stood while another presenter slid into the now empty chair.

      He straightened his bow tie and smoothed his hand over his close-cropped hair. It still felt a little weird to have basically no hair on his head. He’d kept his dark hair long nearly as long as he’d been playing football.

      Mandi linked her arm with his, pulling him to a darkened corner of the stage. Jonas winced and withdrew from the contact. Mandi didn’t know the extent of his injury. Very few people did. He intended to keep it that way. By the time the next season started he would be back on the field. Back in control.

      “I thought we could hit one of the clubs downtown,” she was saying. “A little dancing, have some fun. I can’t remember the last time you were in town.”

      Jonas could. It was last November, when his team played the Gladiators. They’d lost by twenty points, his star running back had gone out with a pulled hamstring, and Jonas had missed the team flight back to Louisville in favor of spending a night wrapped up in Mandi’s sheets.

      Instead of spending the night in her bed, though, he’d spent it in lockup while she scavenged for cash after instigating a fight between him and a tattooed giant wearing a dog collar. By the time he finally made it back to Kentucky, all the newspapers and sports talk shows were talking about how out of control Jonas Nash was, and what a blemish he was to the sport of football.

      And he hadn’t cared. He’d gone back to his condo, taken a few of the other players out to a favorite club and thrown for two hundred yards—and a win—the following week.

      “So what do you say? Dinner and dancing and we’ll see what happens next?”

      A pretty blonde across the room caught Jonas’s attention. She was a sportscaster, he thought, and she hadn’t looked his way all night. He’d been watching her, though, from the moment she walked out of the dressing room in those screw-me heels.

      He didn’t want to go out with Mandi tonight. Hadn’t wanted to go out with women like her for almost a year. What he did want was a little peace and quiet. To get back on the football field with his teammates and not worry about whether or not his shoulder would hold up.

      But there was an awards show to put on, so Jonas pushed the bleak thoughts away and refocused his attention on Mandi.

      “Dinner and dancing, huh?”

      She smiled and ran her hand up his arm. A year ago that move would have turned every hormone in his body on. Tonight, he felt nothing.

      “And whatever else might come up,” she said.

      Jonas sighed. He didn’t feel a damn thing.

      The stage manager motioned him over, and the pretty blonde from the makeup tables caught his eye again. A spark of something hit his belly.

      Weird.

      “You’ll present with Miss Smith, entrance here at stage right. After the presentation, you’ll exit stage left together,” the man was saying.

      Mandi tugged on his tuxedo jacket and he glanced her way. She made some kind of motion with her hand, but he didn’t quite catch it because the pretty blonde stood and smoothed her hands over the tight dress.

      Navy and sparkles shimmered before his eyes, and his mouth went dry. She ran her hand over her hair and something hot began to crawl around his stomach. There. There was something normal. A normal reaction of man to woman.

      Something he hadn’t felt in...too long for mental math.

      Not that it mattered. He didn’t go chasing after every woman he met anymore. Mandi made another gesture from the side of the stage. He didn’t even chase after women he knew wanted to be chased. That was part of his past. Part of the Jonas he didn’t want to be any longer.

      Still, it was nice to know all the equipment still worked.

      He watched the blonde for another long moment. Definitely nice to know the equipment still worked.

      * * *

      THE LIGHTS FLASHED, signaling two minutes to go. Two minutes until she could return to her hotel to get out of this ridiculous dress. Brooks Smith tottered on four-inch heels toward the stage manager, who held a gilded envelope. She’d accepted the hosting gig at the International Sports Awards before she knew she had also been nominated in a completely new category: Hottest Female Sportscaster. Had she known about that award, she would never have agreed. And to have won it... God, another reason for the boy’s club of professional sports broadcasting not to take her seriously.

      “No peeking,” the balding man said, and she could practically hear the “tsk tsk” in his voice. “Either of you.” He looked pointedly from Brooks to her presentation partner, Jonas Nash, star of the Louisville Kentuckians, one of the worst professional teams in the North American Football Federation. Which made it odd that he was up for not only Athletic Performance of the Year, but also Player of the Year.

      Just went to show what a good PR team could do, she supposed. That and the fact the man looked like Hollywood’s version of a football player, from the reckless gleam in his chocolate-brown gaze to the muscles clearly outlined under the smoothly tailored lines of his Hugo Boss suit.

      Brooks plucked the envelope from the manager’s hand. “You might want me to carry it, then.” She shot a pointed look to the man beside her. Six feet five inches of muscle and bad-boy reputation. Six feet five inches of charisma.

      Six feet five inches of ball hog.

      Which partially explained the Performance of the Year nomination.

      “I don’t peek.” Jonas held a hand to his chest and his full lips spread into a wicked smile. “Much.”

      The bleach blonde standing beside him near the entrance to the stage offered a finger wave and an air kiss. “See you in the limo,” she practically purred before turning on her heel and disappearing in the hubbub of the backstage area.

      “I can make this presentation without you if there is somewhere more important you need to be,” Brooks said.

      “No place I’d rather be,” Jonas said, as if the bottle blonde hadn’t just offered herself as his backseat entertainment for the evening.

      Why the thought of Jonas with the woman bothered her Brooks couldn’t say. It wasn’t as if she really knew the man. It also was no secret that he’d left a bevy of blondes, brunettes and redheads in his wake for most of his football career. But it did bother her. Brooks pushed the image of the woman from her mind. She needed to focus on the presentation.

      The manager ushered them onto the stage as the host for the International Sports Awards introduced them as “Kentucky Football Royalty,” whatever the heck that meant. Brooks rolled her shoulders and pasted a bright smile on her face as they walked into the spotlights. Jonas took the stage with his palm against her lower back, seeming to burn a hole through the silk and sequins of her navy dress.

      “Slow down there, Slugger, we stop at the podium, not the next curtain.”

      As if.

      She didn’t run. Well, except when she ate her weight in salted caramel ice cream.

      “I know how to work a stage,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, making sure she kept her smile in place. The problem was being center stage wearing sky-high heels and with nothing to do with her hands. Standing before a single camera in her ballet flats and with a microphone in her hands was so much...simpler.

      Jonas waved to the crowd, a big grin splitting his handsome face. “Then try actually smiling for the cameras and waving to the crowd.”

      “I am smiling—”

      And then her feet betrayed her. Brooks’s left foot slid on the