Dare To Love Series: Dreaming Up a Dare (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read Free Page A

teammates, and those guys weren’t anything to sneeze over, on a physical front. At this Miami Thunder party he’d brought me to, the men were all the same size as Jackson’s teammates. Actually, a lot of them were bigger. Football players tended to have a lot more bulk than hockey players. Pound for pound, I was as strong as they were, but they all had a lot more pounds on them than I did.
    Right now, I felt like I was about as big as an ant. Any one of these men coming over to shake my hand and tell me how he could help me find a job if I were interested in doing X, Y, or Z could easily squash me under his toes if he wanted.
    Like the guy talking to me now, while Jackson was getting us more cocktails from the bar. Alex Dare, the man who’d invited us tonight, was towering over me. Yeah, he was smiling and seemed friendly and all, and he even had this adorable dimple in his cheek that kept coming out when he grinned, but I couldn’t help but wish Jackson would hurry up and come back. He was my lifeline in social situations. We were polar opposites in just about every way. Man versus woman; massive versus itty-bitty; dark-haired versus blonde; extrovert versus introvert. I supposed you could say we complemented each other well, or maybe that opposites attracted.
    He’d definitely attracted me. Not that I had a chance with him, but still. He was nice to look at, and at least we were the best of friends. It wasn’t like he was completely oblivious to me. He just wasn’t interested in me the way I was interested in him. In fact, my infatuation had been going on for so long it could make me sick to my stomach if I dwelled on it.
    Add in the fact that he was available now and hadn’t bothered to fill me in on the reasons for it until I’d arrived on his doorstep, and I was a mess. And then he wanted to drag me to a party. Yippee. What a great way to spend my first full evening in Miami with him.
    I tried to take another sip from my cosmo, but I’d already finished it off, apparently. Damn it.
    “So Mad Dog tells me you’re looking for work,” Alex said.
    I poked my head around, scanning the room to see if Jackson was on his way back yet, but he was nowhere to be seen. Damn him for deserting me right now. I nodded, returning my attention to the man in front of me. “Something other than waiting tables at the rinky-dink diner at home, which was all I could find there. That’s how it goes when you grow up in a tiny town and only focus on gymnastics. Once the gymnastics is gone…” I felt like my whole life was over and done with, or at least I had in the early days after breaking my back. And now, months later, I felt as if I were floundering. Mom had suggested I look into coaching gymnastics, but I couldn’t do that. At least not yet. It was too soon. I couldn’t be around that world unless I could really be part of it right now. It would just break my heart right alongside my back.
    “Once that’s gone, everything’s gone,” Alex finished for me, giving me a commiserating look. “Been there, done that. Same thing with football. You got a degree, though?”
    “A bachelor’s in liberal arts. The most generic, useless degree known to man.”
    He chuckled. “You just wanted to get through, huh?”
    “You could say that.”
    “Any thoughts on what you want to do?”
    The only thing I’d ever wanted to do was win a gold medal, and now that wasn’t a possibility. I shrugged, glancing over my shoulder to find Jackson caught up in conversation with the gorgeous blonde I vaguely recalled being married to Alex Dare. What was her name again? Melissa? Melody? Madison? Something like that. Apparently Jackson wouldn’t be returning to rescue me from this forced socialization too soon. She might be married to Alex Dare, but she was totally Jackson’s type.
    “I don’t have a clue what I can do, to be honest,” I said, forcing my attention away from the jealousy that had cropped up finding Jackson with that