Imperfectly Beautiful (Jordan Knight Fanfic, Liadan #3)

Cheerleaders and Christmas Trees

-TONY-

'Holloway, get your head out the clouds and back on this field or your ass will be riding the bench for the rest of the season, you got me?'

That threat from my high school football coach had been replaying itself in the back of my head for the past seven years—not because it was a particularly memorable line or because the words had some significant impact on me. In fact, I'd hardly heard the words at all—unlike some players who might've had a coronary after hearing such a threat, I hadn't batted an eye because I'd known Couch was just spouting bullshit and the tone of us his voice had told me that he knew it too.

All four years of high school, I'd been Barrett High's star quarterback with an arm like a cannon and a father with a checkbook big enough to fund an entire economy. From the time I'd first picked up a football as a little tyke, I'd never spent a second on the bench and I never would.

Thus, absolutely nothing about the threat was memorable. It was just one of many empty threats that Coach had roared and I'd long forgotten. Instead, it was the moment that those words had echoed in my ear that made them stay with me.

That moment was the first time I'd ever laid my eyes on her.

At barely 5 foot 3 inches with shiny, long brownish-black curly hair tucked into a giant bow, chocolate drop eyes that sparkled from a mile away, and cheeks with adorably cute dimples that were so deep they looked like they were being pinched by teeny tiny invisible fingers, she wasn't my type.

Not even close to it.

I'd had my share of girls—sexy, leggy, booby blondes and redheads who were far from anywhere close to being described as adorable or cute by any stretch of the imagination. They were the kind of girls who had no problem with my blow and go arrangements, were screwing my teammates and me and who displayed their assets without inhibition.

In direct contrast, just one minute of watching her cheer and move around told me she had no clue what her body could do. No one had ever told her that the way she absentmindedly swayed her hips underneath her uniform could make a man go weak in the knees. And nobody had ever alluded that the kind of flexibility it took to kick her legs so high in the air was a carnal turn on.

No.

She wasn't my kind of girl.

She was the kind of girl that I stayed clear of.

The kind who was innocent and sweet and probably had her wedding planned when she was five. The kind who still believed in love like the movies just enough to make the hardest heart believe it too.

She was the kind of girl that grown men cried over in sappy songs on the radio—she was danger wrapped in a pint-sized package and I knew it from experience.

The one time that I'd broken ranks from my neatly cultivated group of girls for a girl like her had been the one time that I'd let myself get hurt.

Against all my sensibilities, I'd met a girl with pretty brown eyes and long brown hair at a party and allowed her to flash me a smile as big as Texas and smooth talk me right into a whirlwind romance. Her name had been Delilah and she was two years older than me—eighteen and an absolute dream.

In a matter of weeks, she'd taken everything that I thought I knew about love (and how it was pointless) and flipped it upside down until I'd sworn she was the one. I didn't tell my father about much, but she was the kind of girl that I thought deserved to get the royal treatment and I'd even gone so far as to bring her home to meet my former nanny and my dad and make it all "official".