RHINO: A Bad Boy Sports Romance (With FREE Bonus Novel OFFSIDE!) Read online

  One dummied running play and a simple conversion later, and they’re only three points off our lead.

  For a team that hasn’t given away more than three touchdowns in one game before, and less than two minutes played in the third quarter, I’m not exactly happy when I take to the field. Before we line up I bang helmets and make sure everyone knows that there’s a lot of football still to play in this game.

  The rest of the quarter is brutal. We get another injury to our mountain of a tight end, who has to be carried off the field with a suspected twisted knee, and for a lot of the time we’re on the back foot. I’m off the field more than I’d like, and when I’m on it, nothing I seem to do has any effect. It’s frustrating, and I have to struggle hard to keep myself calm and composed, a feat I find much easier every time I look at Lucy and she smiles her loving smile down at me.

  We are outplayed in the third quarter in every area. I can’t get a pass to connect, my arm feels heavy and I’m a half a yard behind the pace much more often than I’d like. I get sacked too. With our tight end replaced with a rookie, we get opened up and I get knocked to the ground with so much force I feel my head spinning. It’s not good. They’ve come out of nowhere and turned the tables on us and it means we go into the final quarter 27-28 down.

  They’ve scored four touchdowns to our three and I can’t have that. They are winning by a single point, and I can’t have that either. We’ve thrown away a decent lead and I refuse to let that quarter dominate this game. We are the better team, even with the injuries we have sustained. I am the better quarterback, and I’m going to prove it if it kills me.

  When we take to the field for the final quarter, I take a quick moment to go over to see Lucy. I can’t get all that close to her, and I haven’t got that much time anyway, but I just want to look into her eyes and have her look back into mine.

  “I love you”, she shouts down through the roaring crowd, and even though it’s way too loud to be able to hear her properly, I do. I hear every syllable like the ringing of a bell, every word like an explosion.

  “I love you”, I call back, and the smile she gives me tells me I know she’s heard me too.

  27-28. I’ve been in worse situations before and come through them. I’ve overturned a twenty-eight point deficit in one game, throwing four touchdown passes and setting up a field game by playing out of my skin. I’m better now than I was then too. I’m more focused, more balanced, a complete all rounder. I’m a family man for fucks sake, and a family man can’t let down his family, can he?

  Tear them into nothing and throw that nothing into the void so it never comes back.

  We line up, we kick and we go head first and teeth bared, into the most important battle of my life.

  I haven’t become the most valuable player four times in my career for nothing. I haven’t led this team to three Superbowl wins and four finals because I’m a journeyman quarterback. I haven’t broken every single record there is and rewritten new ones because I’m pretty good at this game. I was born to play this game and I’m not going home until I’m satisfied I’ve done just that.

  I used to tell myself to do it for Luke. This time, I’m doing it for me.

  We push, we fight, we take the battle to them and still they refuse to yield. Their defensive wall looks like a fortress, and every time we try and penetrate it, we get smashed back and broken away. I throw missile balls that hit their targets, but somehow we don’t move out of the middle of the field. Like two armed forces battling trench warfare, we sit in and advance very little.

  They match us blow for blow, helmet to helmet, down to down. They soak up everything we give them and give it back just as hard, but we stand strong like an army defending its land to the death, and they are unable to get through and increase their advantage.

  Men fall from fatigue and others from injuries that see them carried off the field never to return. I feel exhausted from the effort, my whole body heavy and covered in bruises. I’m favoring a leg because of a knock to the right ankle I think could be twisted and my head is foggy from the lights and the noise around us. I’ve given everything and more and we’re still a point behind, the clock ticking down much faster than it usually does.

  With only a few minutes left, and not a single point scored by either team in this quarter, coach calls our last timeout.

  This feels like a world war one battle. It feels like if I get through this alive I’ll look at life with a renewed sense of importance. If we win, it’ll be the best moment of my career, and if we lose, I’ll have given everything I have and I’ll have failed at the ultimate test.

  That might not matter to anyone else and it shouldn’t matter to me, especially because of what I’ve achieved already in this game, but I know it’ll torment me until the day I die.

  Coach takes me to the side for a moment. He looks at my ankle with a sigh and then he pulls down on the grill of my helmet so we are practically face to face.

  “If you’re really a rhino, show me your fucking balls.”

  I can’t help but laugh. The Rhino. That dumbass fucking nickname they came up with for me. When I throw that winning touchdown they’ll see that I’m not just a big dick with a small brain, I can actually play ball too.

  “Get your victory lap boots on”, I say. “I’m bringing this fucking home.”

  We are in possession of the ball just inside their half, where we’ve both been camped out so much during this quarter of the game you can barely see the yard line markers on the grass for the churned up mud. There are less than two minutes left on the clock, less than a hundred and twenty seconds for me to turn this around and win it.

  The line of Bengals players in front of us look like the Appalachian mountain range, and the end zone a distant fantasy a million miles away, but I’m not giving up. No matter how unlikely it looks I’m not letting this slip away. We haven’t scored a touchdown in this half yet, but it’s not too late to start.

  With my heart beating wildly in my chest, my head thick and swimming with confusion and pain I put my head down and concentrate on two things. One, I’m going to win this fucking game, and two, I’m going to make sure Lucy sees it. This is where history is made, and if you want to write it yourself, you’ve got to be a winner.

  I grit my teeth, take a deep breath and prepare myself. Let’s go to war.

  Snap. The ball comes towards me at a hundred miles an hour, a charging force just after it twice as fast and I see it and everything around me in slow motion. I know what I need to do to win this game and much like the Jets win earlier in the season, I know there is nothing that can happen that will stop me. I pluck the ball out of the air like a falling feather, take a split second to compose myself, ignore the screaming pain from my ankle and step out into a patch of open grass, my arm already moving into position like a cannon ready to be fired.

  I have less than half a second to react before the full force of the approaching Bengal army is upon me, which is happily more than ninety-nine percent of what I need. I make milliseconds like look an eternity as I cock my arm, aim, and fire.

  The ball spins through the air like a bullet, and before I hit the ground with a heavy thud, I see it hit its mark like poetry, and stick comfortably into the hands of my wide receiver, who handles it like a newborn baby, travelling eight more beautiful yards before he’s brought down on their thirty yard line to finally gain us a first down in field goal territory.

  It is the first time in the whole quarter than we’ve managed to advance more than five yards in a play, and it’s the breakthrough we desperately needed I know is going to lead to the victory that was always supposed to be ours in the first place.

  Our fans go wild, our team celebrates and coach runs up a down the line as though we’ve won the thing already. There are a hundred seconds left on the clock, and if we want to make sure, we need to run them down a little bit more.

  First down and thirty, my whole body screaming for this to be over, I thrust a snapped ball har
d against the chest of my running back who skips two tackles before running into a pack of Tigers and disappearing mercilessly under a heap of them. When we pull him out, all of us unsure whether he’ll still be breathing, he’s smiling hard with the ball still clutched in his hands.

  We only gain six yards, but the clock has kept on ticking. It’s risky, especially a point down, but I’m so sure we’ll be able to score from here, even if it has to be a field goal, I’m not letting it get to me.

  One more running play, one more first down, and then we go for the win.

  Second down and four yards with just over a minute on the clock. I never thought it would be this tight, but then the tighter it is, the more important the win.

  We have to push it right to the limit and force their hand. The Bengals have done everything they can to try and win this and now it’s entirely up to us. Our heads go down, the crowd goes silent and the ball is snapped back towards me.

  I fake a dummy to the running back, skip into open space and with a pack of Bengals screaming to pull me down I rush towards the first down line, an audible gasp of shock coming from the entire crowd that surrounds us. No one expects this. I’m not a running quarterback although I have made this play before. I catch coach’s eye and he’s looking at me in disbelief. The clock is ticking and I’m well aware of it. Fifty-five seconds, fifty-four, I skip a tackle, feel another one around my waist and somehow manage to force myself away from it.

  When the earth finally powers towards me like a wall of solid green concrete, the clock reads forty-six seconds, and I know I’m close. I’m so close they have to get out the tape and measure it.

  Coach is fuming. The crowd is silent. The other players don’t know what to think. We have a first down, forty six seconds on the clock and nineteen yards between us and victory.

  I call the play and I do it quickly. I do it before the Bengals have a chance to really come to terms with what’s about to happen. I do it before we run out of time, and I do it to show the world who I really am. The best fucking quarterback to grace this sport since the fucking thing was invented.

  It’s an act of perfection. It is sport elevated to art and then reevaluated and reclassified as religion. It is God-like. No, wait, it’s even better than that. It’s a play that would make the Gods themselves jealous. It is flawless in its perfection and so simple in its execution in leaves mouths wide open and a whole world stunned. In fact, it is so simple, and so easy to defend against, the Bengals can’t believe I’m playing it at all, misinterpreting my double bluff and lining up to defend something more complex they have every right to believe is coming.

  It’s a sleight of hand, a classic draw and distraction and the Bengals fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

  I have more time to make the play that I expect, a bunch more tricks up my sleeve if it doesn’t come off. The whole thing goes like clockwork, though, from snap to draw to the moment I make Wesley Cadon a lifelong star. The boy earns it for the way he’s played this season, but I doubt many moments in his oncoming career will match the moment the ball comes to him like a golden egg, finding him unmarked deep in the corner of the end zone, to gather up a perfect ball that anyone’s grandmother could easily have held on to.

  For a moment, Cadon can’t believe it either. No one can believe what’s happened. And then, as soon as it dawns on us, as soon as the realization hits us like a fucking hammer, the place erupts. Not only have we won the match, not only have we scored the kind of touchdown fourteen-year-olds practice in the park, we’ve won the fucking Superbowl.

  We’ve beaten the Bengals in a game that for much of the second half we looked like losing. Arguably, we haven’t been the better team either, but here we are, about to lift the trophy for a second time running. We convert, but the game is already over. When the buzzer finally goes, and the field gets overrun by supporters, players, band members and everyone else in between, I drop to my knees, suddenly overwhelmed by emotion.

  I can hardly believe it. I never doubted myself, but what we’ve done here is frankly extraordinary. We were dead and buried right up until the last minute and the way we won it just shows the tenacity and belief we have.

  My ankle is swollen and when I stand back up I realize just how bad the injury is. Adrenaline and cortisone shots have kept the pain from reaching me, but right now, with the game finally over, it feels for all the world like the thing is broken.

  I’m swept up in a wave of players who lift me up onto their shoulders to carry me around the field on a victory lap. I congratulate my team, apologize to the coach for almost giving him a heart attack and go around to the Bengals players and console each and every one of them.

  When I’m done, I sit on the fifty-yard line, exhausted but overjoyed and watch Lucy walk slowly towards me from a distance, like an angel parting her way through a battling crowd.

  That was one of the most incredible moments of my life, but as good as it was, it doesn’t compare to what I have with this girl.

  “Not bad”, she says, all swaying sass and smiles.

  “You think?”

  “I’ve seen better.”

  “I’ll have to practice more.”

  “There’s always next year.”

  “We might have other distractions.”

  Lucy puts her hand on her belly despite there not being a bump there yet.

  “Imagine if it were twins”, she says.

  “You know it does run in the family.”

  “Mom would be over the moon with four grandsons.”

  “I think she’s over the moon anyway.”

  Lucy stretches out her hand to me. “Come on. There are people that want to interview you. I can’t keep you all to myself.”

  I take her hand in mine and let her lift me to my feet. “I think I broke my foot”, I say.

  “Then it’s a good thing the season’s over, you can rest it when we head back to the island.”

  I wrap my arm around Lucy’s neck and let her support me as we hobble towards the technical area.

  “I can take you out on the boat again.”

  She narrows her eyes at me. “If you make sure you check the gasoline levels before we go.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a wave of TV reporters rushing towards us. “Anyway, we might have other plans”, I say.

  “Other plans how?”

  The reporters are here before I have a chance to answer, microphones thrust towards us both, and a gabble of questions that sound like a wall of noise.

  “What a game.”

  “Talk us through it.”

  “What else do you have left to achieve?”

  “Did you ever think you were going to lose that?”

  “How’s the foot? Is it broken?”

  “Was that the hardest thing you have ever done?”

  I pause for a while before I answer, every single one of them waiting with baited breath, until I see Lucy and I up on the big screen around us.

  “Can you get sound on that?” I say pointing up to it. “I’ve got something I want to announce.”

  “Oh my God are you retiring?”

  I don’t answer that question. I wait until I’m told there is sound now coming from the image above us, and when I begin to talk, the stadium suddenly goes silent around us to listen.

  “I’ve got something to say”, I begin. “It’s something I’ve been wanting to say for a long time.”

  I turn to Lucy momentarily, and I can tell immediately she has absolutely no idea what I’m about to do. We’ve not talked about it before, not even hinted it’s something we should be thinking about.

  “I’ve known Lucy Parker for the best part of a decade. For the first nine or so of those years, we didn’t share a single word with each other, even though, secretly, we were both thinking the same thing.”

  There is hushed conversation around us, people guessing what’s about to come.

  “Lucy is, without doubt, the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
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br />   I turn to her, drop down to one knee and from the sock that surrounds my bust up ankle I take out the ring I’ve had concealed there for the whole game.

  The crowd gasp. They might have thought I was going to give a breakdown of the game - the first time in every year I’ve won it - but no, they have to wait for something else first.

  Lucy has her hand over her mouth. She can’t believe what’s about to come. I can hardly believe it either. Six months ago we were practically strangers, and right now, with my baby inside her, I want to make her my wife.

  I hold the ring out to her, and with the whole world watching, I say the words that have been going around my head in one form or another since I first laid eyes on her.

  “Lucy, will you marry me?”

  Lucy bites her lip. She looks away and back again. She lets the question hang just because she can, long enough that even I begin to doubt myself, and then finally, all smiles, and as cool as a cucumber, says the words I’ve longed for a lifetime to hear.

  “Yes. Fuck, yes, of course I will.”

  Winning the Superbowl, getting MVP, even if they put me into the sporting hall of fame, none of it would compare to what I feel right now. With the crowd going wild around us, and Lucy up in my arms like the best trophy anyone could ever hope to win, tears of happiness streaming down my face, and a little baby on the way, I feel like I’ve finally won.

  Nothing gets better than this. Bad boy Rhino to expectant Dad, Alex Vann Haden has made the world his own, and he couldn’t have done it without Lucy Parker by his side. The book nerd and the jock, the intellectual and the sports star, the college sweethearts who never had the balls to tell each other how they felt.

  We got there in the end, and there is no better feeling in this world than having to make up for lost time.

  Hand in hand, we walk the length of the field together swarmed by a swelling crowd, and swallowed by a legion of fans desperate to pass on their congratulations, shaking with excitement, buzzing with the promise of what’s to come.

  At the edge of the tunnel, the cameras find us again, and up on the big screen, while the thunderous noise of support surrounds us, I pull Lucy towards me and press my trembling lips to hers.