Quarterback's Secret Baby(78)

"Homely little girls from back in Bumfuck with no media training? Sorry, it doesn't work ninety-nine percent of the time, my man. You've got to get yourself a woman of the world, a woman who understand what it means to be a pro sportsman, you know?"

I laughed. "And by that, you mean a woman willing to put up with multiple pieces on the side, right?"

"Damn right. And she better have an ass you can bounce a quarter off, too."

I couldn't be bothered arguing with Barry. There was no point, he wasn't interested in women, not beyond what they could do for him at any given moment, anyway. Tasha would have thought him ridiculous and she would have been right - he was. He was also pretty harmless as long as you didn't take any of his proclamations about life seriously.

I accepted it a few weeks later when a famous sports magazine called me up with an interview and photo shoot request. I had to take it - promoting the team was part of the job, especially in the off-season - but I didn't mind. It was going to be a longer piece, not just the same old boring questions I get all the time. The photo shoot, though, ended up involving a world-renowned Dutch supermodel. They sent us out into the desert in swimwear to be photographed in ridiculous, yoga-like poses. It was hilarious. The photographer kept telling me to flex - and kept telling the model to arch her back or stick out her tits. Which she did gamely and with the patience of someone who is a)used to sticking out her tits and b)paid highly for doing so.

The interview itself was with a guy not much older than me who, right from the start, gave off a patronizing air that he didn't even bother to try and conceal. He thought I was a dumb jock. Maybe I was. It was my job not to get my back up, though. And, truthfully, he was probably just jealous. A foot shorter than me, chubby-faced and round-shouldered, he was one of those guys who needed to be smarter than the other guys in the room - the jocks - because he knew he couldn't compete physically.

He ended up asking me about how being drafted by the NFL and moving to Dallas had affected my 'relationships' - and we both knew that he didn't mean my relationships with family members.

"Most guys go crazy when they first get drafted," he told me somberly. "That doesn't seem to have affected you. Any reason why, Kaden?"

I shrugged, not willing to talk about my deep personal feelings with some random jackass. "Nah. I'm just concentrating on training, getting better, being the strongest I can be for my team. I know it's not the answer you want but it's the truth."

Afterward, when he was packing up to leave and we were off-the-record he turned to me as he fumbled his iPad into his backpack.

"You're probably killing it with the ladies, though, huh? I understand you don't want to talk about it - got that shiny new Keerok endorsement after all - but c'mon. You must be loving it."

I fixed him with a hard stare. "Actually, I meant what I said when I answered that question the first time - I'm just concentrating on my fitness and my game right now."

"Huh," he replied, getting ready to leave. "That's not what I hear."

"What?" I asked, after a couple of seconds had passed, long enough for his comment to sink in.

"I said that's not what I hear." He repeated.

"What have you heard?"

I wasn't worried. I was perfectly aware of the fact that I didn't get up to any of the shady shit with football groupies that my teammates did, but the reporter's smug tone bothered me. He threw me a coy little smile before walking out the door and turning back towards me to say one more thing before closing it behind him:

"I hear you don't know how to wrap it up, Barlow. Rookie mistake."

And then he was gone. I stood there in the cavernous foyer of my house for a few moments, wondering what the hell he was talking about. Not that it mattered. I knew exactly how many groupies I'd stuck it in without wrapping it up: zero.

Tasha didn't even occur to me. Not because she was the only one I'd ever been with without protection, but because she was miles away - not just physically but mentally, too. She inhabited a different universe. A universe in which jumped-up little pricks like that reporter didn't exist.

A few minutes later I got a text about a change in the off-season training schedule and forgot the interviewer's remarks. The post-season, after the glare of the media spotlight dulled a little, gave me time to start sorting out my life in Dallas. A couple of my teammates invited me to their houses to hang out, I played - and was hilariously bad at - my first game of golf and I hired a real estate agent to start showing me houses that were more to my taste. There was also the matter of my parents moving to Dallas, an idea they were still pondering. I added smaller, easily maintained, handicap-access houses to the list of properties I wanted to see, just in case.