Page 5 of Violent Little Thing

“Baby, no.” I shook off the potatoes that she forced onto my plate.

“Please?” Lauri, my beautiful wife, begged.

She was six months pregnant with our daughter, and she was craving all sorts of carbs that I normally didn’t allow myself to eat, ever.

You didn’t become a professional soccer player by not working for it.

I hadn’t had copious amounts of carbs since I was a kid and a whole lot less disciplined.

I’d given up the bad shit so I could fuel my body, and my wife was currently trying to derail that for me.

“Please?” she begged.

I sighed.

“Baby, you’re not going to get me to eat…”

She started to cry, and I inwardly sighed.

“Okay,” I said.

She looked up at me with watery eyes. “You will?”

She “didn’t want to get fat alone.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she would have to, that I had a contract and I couldn’t “get fat with her.”

But tonight…tonight I would eat with her.

Like I did any time that I ate carbs in large amounts, I felt like utter shit by the time that dinner was through. Then she ordered chocolate cake and I wanted to stab myself in the eye.

I hadn’t had that many carbs since I was an adolescent, and my body wasn’t reacting well to it at all.

We were at a six-star restaurant in New York, having flown down here for a photoshoot that my wife said was going to be “perfect for me.”

Since she was my publicist, and had been since we’d met, I’d acquiesced, even though I wanted nothing more than to continue to stay out of the limelight.

But, like she always put it, I wasn’t going to be a professional soccer player forever.

And even though I made really good money right now—about eighteen million a year since I was twenty-four—I wouldn’t be able to play forever. I needed to have money in the bank so I could support my wife’s lavish lifestyle.

It really was lavish, too.

She had a certain level of living that she expected, having been born to one of the biggest hedge fund families in the country, and I wanted to make sure she could maintain that lifestyle.

Hence why I was in New York instead of Texas, at a six-star restaurant that I didn’t want to be at, smiling and networking when I wanted to be anywhere else.

I’d never even heard of a six-star restaurant before. I’d thought there was only five stars at the top.

But I learned something new every day from my Lauri.

“Bite.”

I reluctantly took a bite of the chocolate cake, even though my stomach was literally roiling.

I felt drunk.

For the last hour, I’d done nothing but gorge myself on food that I’d never allow myself to eat any other time, all because my pregnant wife had begged me to.