Dating Trouble (Grover Beach Team Book 5) Read Free Page A

grin, I wanted to shout at him: I told them your name, so what? Only, I couldn’t make my mouth form coherent words because embarrassment had wired my jaw shut.
    “Hey, girls,” he greeted the others like a perfect charmer. His gaze landed on my lap. On his iPod still in my lap, to be exact. “You like my music?” He chuckled but didn't give me a chance to answer as he turned around and headed back into the game.
    “Thanks a lot!” I spat through gritted teeth at my supposed friends. A moment later, however, I was snickering along with them, because aside from all the embarrassment, the situation was funny. If I were one of them, I’d have acted equally as stupid for sure. I’d just never been at the receiving end before.
    Sam leaned back to prop herself on her elbows and stretched her legs out in front of her. She was the smallest of us, all right, but always wearing camo pants and black Doc Martens, she was also the most dangerous-looking of us five—even if her appearance was deceiving. Samantha was the nicest girl I’d ever met. Right now, she let go of a long sigh. “Take it easy, Susan. So he’s playing your position.” She shrugged it off. “It’s only for a while, and he’s cute. It’s really not a drama.”
    Yeah, she was right; it wasn’t. And Sam would know a thing or two about dramas herself. Only a week ago her cousin Chloe had almost succeeded in making her parents send Sam back to Egypt, where Sam’s parents still lived. Because her father was a general in the U.S. Army and garrisoned in Cairo for three more months, Samantha had been allowed to move ahead to Grover Beach at the beginning of November to stay with Chloe and her family, so she wouldn’t have to move later, during the school year.
    No one could have guessed that Chloe still had a crush on Tony Mitchell, the guy from my soccer team who Sam had hooked up with. It had caused a pretty nasty scene a week ago when Chloe wrecked her car and later almost drowned herself in the sea. We had quite an eventful fall.
    Admittedly, none of us had liked Chloe Summers much before. But after what happened, we all looked at her with different eyes now—even though she never looked at any of us, ever. It seemed she felt really bad and sorry about what had happened. And now, knowing all the facts, it wasn’t hard to forgive her, whether she asked for it or not.
    On the weird side, none of us had ever seen Tony as radiantly happy as he’d been since the day he and Sam became a couple. He spent every minute of his free time with her, so it didn’t surprise me when he came over to us during timeout. Stopping behind Sam, he bent down and stole a kiss. He did that every so often, and most of the time, he didn’t come alone. Hunter normally couldn’t stay away from Lisa either, but today he kept away.
    Noticing, Lisa pouted at Tony. “Why isn’t Ryan coming over?”
    “He’s scared.” Tony chuckled. “After the thing with Ethan, he’s afraid Miller will bite his head off.”
    “Ha, ha,” I said. But there was a grain of truth in that joke. I flashed a tight-lipped smile across the field at Ryan. Catching my gaze, he rubbed his neck and laughed out loud, knowing that Tony had just ratted him out.
    With only a short time left for practice, Tony headed back to score another goal against Ryan’s team. Watching the two of them out on the field was always a delight. Hard to say which of them was the better player. Since it was Ryan’s final year at Grover Beach High, I often wondered if he would nominate Tony for captain of the team when it was time for him to leave. But that was still a few months off and no one talked about it just yet.
    Practice ended at quarter to four, and my friends immediately fanned out to their guys on the field. Being seventeen and still as single as could be, I stayed put and shoved my book into my backpack. It was then that I saw Ethan walking toward me and my mouth dried out. Why? Because he’d taken off his shirt