Players to Lovers (4 Book Collection) Read online

  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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  Sign up for Ketley’s newsletter for giveaways, sneak peeks, exclusive excerpts and more!

  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.