Bad Boy Brit (A British Bad Boy Romance) Read Online Free Page B

impression had been, at least partly, erroneous. Lauren did sail through life, relying on her good looks and allowing men to do everything for her without the slightest idea that this was unusual, but she was also fiercely intelligent and good at her job.
    She was arrogant at times, but I knew she had the goods to back it up. She could talk sport with the best of them, she argued with respected coaches over tactics, she explained to players why they were in a slump, and she’d once denied a sports psychologist an extremely lucrative new client when she suggested that he didn’t need therapy as much as he needed a slightly different grip on his upswing. I’d almost peed my pants laughing when I heard about that.
    To many people, Lauren could seem like one of the most irritating women in the world, not because of anything that she said or did, but because she made almost everyone feel inadequate. She was beautiful, smart and generally pleasant to be around, aside from the aforementioned arrogance. It was probably easy to be pleasant when you were both beautiful and smart (why on earth would you be anything else since the world had already done you so many favors?) and yet I’d found that so many women who were beautiful and smart were also the definition of ‘mean girls’. Sometimes I wished that Lauren fell into that category—she would’ve been easier to be around if she was a bitch. Instead, she wasn’t, and it often made me feel slightly inferior, because she was so damn perfect.
    That was my own silly insecurities talking, though—she hadn’t done anything bad to me, and I doubted she ever would.
    “I didn’t know you were in England!” she said as she reached the spot where I was standing. She was beaming a smile that would’ve made Reese Witherspoon green with envy.
    “I just got in yesterday,” I replied. “You?”
    “Oh, I live here now,” said Lauren, waving off the question with as much modesty as someone like her could manage. “You know how it goes: BBC scout sees one of your demo reels, six figure offer, blah, blah, blah.”
    “Sure,” I replied. I actually had no idea how that might ‘go’, but I was keen to find out.
    “I take it you’re here for…” Her voice trailed off. There was no need to say the actual name.
    I nodded. “Yeah. Him.”
    It was hard not to notice the number of tall, blonde and willowy—which was the nice way of saying ‘stick-thin’—sports journalists in the press lounge today, though none were taller, blonder or willowier than Lauren. With my curvy frame and mess of dark curls, I was starting to feel decidedly out-gunned.
    Lauren leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially. “Apparently Brian has already picked a shortlist,” she said.
    I arched an eyebrow. “Really? Who told you that?”
    Brian Thomas was Liam Croft’s manager, and to have his ear was to have Liam’s time. There were stories about media outlets sending their best-looking reporters to try and seduce Brian, but unlike his client, Brian Thomas was not swayed by a pretty face—only money talked.
    “I keep my ear to the ground,” Lauren said with a devious smile.
    I grinned back at her. “Well, may the best journalist win.”
    Lauren nodded. “Sure. Anyway, I need to grab some water. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “By the way, let’s have a drink when all this is over. Seeing as I live here now, I can show you some of the best little watering holes.”
    “Yeah, that sounds really nice.”
    She headed towards the bar, and I turned my attention back to one of the big screens.
    “Kick-off’s in fifteen minutes, ladies and gentlemen!” A harsh voice cut above the chatter of competitive reporters pretending to like each other, and all eyes turned to the squat man by the door from who it had issued.
    It was Brian Thomas, Liam Croft’s aforementioned manager.
    There was a running joke around the world of football that Brian carried around a piece of paper on which he’d