Players to Lovers
Series Collection
Ketley Allison
Copyright © Ketley Allison LLC, 2019
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Cover Designs © 2018-2019 Mayhem Cover Creations
Editing by Mitzi Carroll, Mitzi Carroll Editing Services
Proofreading by Madison Seidler
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This collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Visit Ketley Allison’s official website at www.ketleyallison.com for the latest news, book details, and other information.
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Contents
Trusting You
1. Carter
2. Locke
3. Carter
4. Locke
5. Carter
6. Locke
7. Carter
8. Locke
9. Carter
10. Locke
11. Carter
12. Locke
13. Carter
14. Locke
15. Carter
16. Locke
17. Carter
18. Locke
19. Carter
20. Locke
21. Carter
22. Locke
23. Carter
24. Locke
25. Carter
26. Locke
27. Carter
28. Locke
29. Carter
30. Carter
31. Locke
32. Carter
33. Locke
34. Carter
35. Carter
36. Locke
37. Carter
38. Locke
39. Carter
40. Locke
Epilogue
Daring You
1. Ben
2. Astor
3. Ben
4. Astor
5. Ben
6. Astor
7. Ben
8. Astor
9. Ben
10. Astor
11. Ben
12. Astor
13. Ben
14. Astor
15. Ben
16. Astor
17. Ben
18. Astor
19. Ben
20. Astor
21. Ben
22. Astor
23. Ben
24. Astor
25. Ben
26. Astor
27. Ben
28. Astor
29. Ben
30. Astor
31. Ben
32. Astor
33. Epilogue
Craving You
Part I
1. Sophie
2. Ash
3. Sophie
4. Ash
5. Sophie
6. Ash
7. Sophie
8. Ash
9. Sophie
10. Ash
11. Sophie
12. Ash
13. Sophie
14. Ash
15. Sophie
16. Ash
Part II
17. Sophie
18. Ash
19. Sophie
20. Ash
21. Sophie
22. Ash
23. Sophie
24. Ash
25. Sophie
26. Ash
27. Sophie
28. Ash
29. Sophie
30. Sophie
Playing You
Easton
1. Easton
2. Taryn
3. Easton
4. Taryn
5. Easton
6. Taryn
7. Easton
8. Taryn
9. Easton
10. Easton
11. Taryn
12. Easton
13. Taryn
14. Easton
15. Taryn
16. Easton
17. Taryn
18. Easton
19. Taryn
20. Taryn
21. Easton
22. Taryn
23. Easton
24. Taryn
25. Easton
26. Taryn
27. Easton
28. Taryn
29. Easton
30. Taryn
31. Easton
32. Taryn
33. Easton
34. Taryn
35. Easton
36. Easton
37. Taryn
38. Easton
Sneak Peek of Sing to Me
Also by Ketley Allison
About the Author
1
Carter
The night my best friend died, I’d been thinking about Skittles.
She holds my hand, the pale of hers almost translucent compared to my tan, her blue veins swelling in ways they hadn’t nine months before.
Before.
That’s the classification I’m cursed with. Before, when Paige was healthy. After, when she is dying.
“Do you remember?” she asks now, a weak smile on her lips.
Her voice is hoarse as if a breathing tube were inserted and removed, although that hasn’t happened, thankfully. And never will.
“Remember what?” I ask, leaning forward so I can hear better. The beeps and blips of the hospital machines echo her every breath.
“At the end of freshman year, how we met by fighting each other for green Skittles?”
It’s such a rare moment of clarity. Paige’s grass-green eyes are usually glazed over in a chemical-induced fugue. She’d stopped eating days ago. Stopped drinking the day before yesterday.
I bark out a laugh at the memory.
“God,” I say, squeezing her hand. “I can’t believe that’s what you’re thinking about.”
“You took the last one,” she says, then chuckles hoarsely.
“As I said then and will now, you took the last one and blamed me.”
“Who likes only the green ones anyway?” She smiles. It’s a brief glimpse of visceral health until the muscles fall and she goes back to ghostly sick. “Everyone knows the red ones are the best.”
“Not according to us.” I make my voice stronger than the utter cave-in my insides are suffering through, the crumbling and cavernous twists that began their avalanche ten minutes ago.
I’d been getting coffee from a beaten-up vending machine down the hall when a nurse gently tapped me on the shoulder.
“It’s getting close to time,” she’d said, somehow managing to be grim, but kind. She held my stare, understanding the process it took to go from looking for the cream button to saying good-bye to your best friend forever.
The walk back to Paige’s room was like taking the Green Mile; the execution of my heart, of Paige’s soul, imminent. Yet I lift my feet, for her. I’m by her side, for her. Nobody wants to watch the person they love most die before their eyes. It takes a certain form of bravery to wait for death, to hold it in your hands and watch it pass through the body of your soul mate, a wonderful woman, who did not deserve to be the next one chosen. And whom, if you could, beg whatever force was taking her to take you instead.
It was a nightmare to go to bed e
ach night, thinking Paige might not be breathing the next day. Yet, the lead-up was somehow worse than the actual moment. Beside her now, I feel a strange sort of calm, an ability to help her through these last hours, maybe because the last thing I want her to see is me hysterical beside her, my twisted, devastated expression her last image on this earth.
“It’s time for me to go, isn’t it?” she asks me now. Somehow, despite her pain and opioids, she can read me as well as ever.
“You’ve been out of it a few days.” I clear my throat of the rest of the clogs. Her last sounds can’t be of me keening and howling beside her.
“So, that’s a yes.”
I stroke her hair, once a cascading blonde, from her face. It’s short now, growing in uneven, frizzy chunks, since they’d stopped her chemo a few months ago in favor of hormone therapy, managing to extend her life a little bit more. That’s what it comes down to—a few more options for a few more months. Then a few days. Until they can only extend hours. Until it becomes minutes.
“Lily?” she asks.
“She’s fine.” I top off the reassurance by kissing Paige’s cold, damp forehead. “She’s at the daycare downstairs. I’m picking her up after…” My voice catches.
This time, Paige squeezes my hand. “I don’t think I’m gonna pass over to the other side by the time daycare closes at five.”
I tremble out a surprised laugh. “Then our neighbor will come get her. I’m not leaving you, Paige.”
“And her? Lily?” Paige is blinking slowly but becomes wildly alert. “You’ll never…”
“Not for a second,” I say, and mean it. “She will be taken care of. Adored. Will know everything there is to know about you. Including your love for green Skittles.”
Paige smiles, but it’s not even half the glimmer she used to give off. “I should tell you…”
“Save your strength,” I say, then try for a joke. “All this chitchat is exhausting me.”
“What am I saving my strength for? Dying?”
I pause with my mouth open. She has me there.
“I need to tell you…” She exhales, then her chest rises with a big breath. “I want Lily to know her father. That’s what I’ve been waiting to tell you. What I’ve been planning for. She needs to go to her father. I have a letter I wrote, in the side-table here, saying I want her to be raised by him. I looked it up. It can be a Last Will and Testament, as long as I get two witnesses to sign it, as well as myself. My favorite nurse already agreed, and will come in when I’m ready. I’d like you to be the second witness.”
I swallow, buying myself time in a moment where there are so few seconds left. “We’ve never talked about that.”
“I know. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. But it’s time. When Lily grows up, when she understands she doesn’t have a mother… I’m not leaving her as an orphan.”
“I’ll be here,” I say to her firmly. “Lily will never understand what it’s like not to have parents.”
“I know, honey, but…” Paige’s breathing slows, labors. Her eyes drift to a spot on the other side of her hospital gurney, filming over as the morphine pump blips its administration. “I know she has you. And I know it’s enough. But Lily needs more. She’d want more.”
“Yes, I…” I rub my lips together. “You’re right. It’s just, you said he was a one-night stand. I don’t know if showing up at his door with a baby would…”
“Because this is the last thing he’d want, I’m aware, but without me, without a mother…” Paige chokes up, and I brace myself forward, holding her hands tight.
“She will know you. Okay?” My attempt at being strong fails miserably. “She will know her mother.”
Paige nods, her shaking lips parting. And she murmurs his name.
“Oh,” I say, thoughts shifting to a little over a year ago, where we were, where he was. Who he is. My brows furrow.
“I know it’s hard to understand,” she says. “But promise me. Promise me you’ll be the one to tell him. Not lawyers.”
As my lips waver, they feel wet. I taste salt. I don’t like this, not at all, but I can’t dismiss a dying wish. “On all the green Skittles on this Earth, I swear to you.”
Paige gives me a long look. She says quietly, “If I had the energy, I’d cry with you. I’m going to call the nurse in to sign with us, okay?”
I break under her soft, wise gaze. “Don’t go. Please. Don’t go.”
Paige shakes her head, a gentle side-to-side. “Not my choice anymore.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Carter. So much.”
The nurse comes in, and we all flourish our signatures, Paige’s being the shakiest. When we’re done and the nurse leaves, my head bows, and, when the weight becomes too much, rests on Paige’s stomach. Her arms come around, stroking kindly, weakly. We stay that way for a while, mostly because I can’t summon the energy to rise, to look up and see my friend’s slow seeping of spirit. I’d rather feel her warmth and movement through her breath and strokes. It means she’s here for the moment. She’s staying.
The slow up-and-down of her chest, the candor of the machines around her, almost forcibly lull both of us to sleep.
And when I wake up, she doesn’t.
Paige remains alive—physically—for another twelve hours, her body ever so slowly succumbing to the end. It’s an education I wish I’d never received: what a death rattle sounds like, how the body reacts to the deprivation of food and water. But this is what Paige chose—do not resuscitate. And I’d go through it again. Whether or not Paige is aware of my presence, when she went into the unknown, she isn’t alone.
I hold vigil, look upon her face, until the official proclamation that she is gone. The nurse has to quietly but firmly remove my hand from Paige’s, whispering kind assurances with an all-too-knowing calm. And while reality is a brutal, terrible beast, my last words to Paige are about us. About Lily. Letting her know that her daughter will be okay.
But as I take these steps out of Paige’s hospital room, I have something important to hold me down. An essential person who continues to tie Paige to this lifetime. A whole-hearted presence bearing Paige’s namesake and sweetness. Lily James Tobias.
While she doesn’t understand it yet, Lily lost her mother today.
And now I must find her a father.
2
Locke
The morning after is so fuckin’ awkward.
It’s why I don’t have any. Until an accidental now.
I’m pretty sure I got so hammered last night I forgot to chivalrously escort a lady to a car.
I risk a glance to my right.
Fuck. Definitely sure.
Couldn’t she be nudged out by text? Something like Nice to take shots with you, even better to fuck you, but can you get out of my bed?
Actually, not so bad an idea. If only I could… No.
Way too much chance of waking her up.
Instead, I’m stuck beside a woman whose hair is tangled in my pillow, not to mention my face, those red-brown strands that were so sexy a few hours ago sticking to my stubble like we’d used honey instead of lube last night.
Only one set of sheets lives in this apartment. And I only know to say “set” because my sister drilled it into me when she threw the plastic package at my chest after storming out the other day. Something tells me I’ll be picking curly hairs out of this set long after I send it out to be washed.
And I hate sending my stuff out to be washed. Takes days. Usually, I sleep ass-up on the mattress, but after the sex and now the shedding, not to mention my sister’s annoying, You need to grow the hell up, Locke—
“Mmf.”
The woman whose name is… Candace? Candy? Tara? …rolls over, taking her hair with her, but making my nose itch like the red in those highlights contain fire ants.
“God…fuck.” I rub at my nose with my palm, sitting up and flicking the rest of her tangles off me. I take it as my opening.