Nice Girls Finish Last. Natalie Anderson

      For Miss S, aka Rachel, aka Life-Saver—

      thanks so much for helping me out!

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘COMING through!’ Lena clapped one hand over her eyes and pushed the changing room door open. She always sang out the warning, giving them time to cover up if they wanted. Some did, most no longer bothered. Eighteen months in the job and they were so used to her being around she might as well be wallpaper. But today she was in and out more than usual, and they were in and out of clothes more than usual, too.

      She peeked through her fingers and registered that they were out of their clothes at the moment—but that they’d towels round their waists. Short towels. Dropping her hand from her face, she lifted the heavy bag off her shoulder and started pulling out the contents. ‘I’ve got the next lot—you want them now?’

      ‘Not yet, it’s the shower shot,’ Ty, the team captain, answered for everyone.

      ‘Oh, okay.’ She dropped the handful of shorts and looked up to find a place to leave the bag. And froze. Silently she swivelled her eyeballs left to right and back again and refused to let her reaction show.

      Because nineteen nearly naked guys now surrounded her. Closely surrounded her.

      Lena called on all her internal discipline to keep her focus up on their mischievous faces. The temptation to ogle was always there—how could it not be? They were championship-winning athletes with the megamuscles to prove it and no red-blooded woman could be immune to the urge to admire.

      Lena was as red-blooded as any other woman. She just pretended not to be.

      She narrowed her gaze because they were all grinning at her and stepping closer still, tightening the circle. Yep, she was in the middle of the men’s changing room, in the middle of a rugby scrum. While there might be thousands of women in the world who’d beg to be in that exact position—sans the towels—she wasn’t one of them.

      ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded, affecting a long-suffering big-sister tone.

      ‘We need your help,’ Ty answered for them all again, too innocently.

      She handed him the bag in the hope he’d step back and take the others with him. ‘I’ve got to go and get the shirts. I’m just getting creases out of a couple of them.’

      Her job description included that nebulous sentence ‘other duties as required’, and this one day of the year that meant playing the part of wardrobe mistress while the Silver Knights endured the photo shoot for their annual calendar.

      ‘We need you to do something else first,’ Jimmy, the first five-eighth, spoke up.

      ‘Really? What?’

      ‘The photographer says we have to glisten.’

      Lena closed her mouth and took a microsecond to keep cool. Then she asked for clarification. ‘Glisten?’

      Jimmy nodded and held up a bottle. Baby oil. ‘All over the torso.’

      ‘You can rub it on each other.’ She bit back an add-on comment about them liking grappling each other out there in the mud. She never let sassy snark out in the stadium; professionally polite was how she played it. Once she got to know the newbies she was friendly in a sisterly way, but, until then, pretty frigid.

      ‘We’ve got ball shots coming up straight after.’ They glanced at each other and smirked. ‘We’d lose our grip if we get that oil on our hands. Too slippery.’

      Slippery, huh? With balls. Oh, they were appalling today.

      Lena might not be interested but she was human and being surrounded by nineteen nearly naked, extremely buff sports stars would make any woman break into a sweat. Lena point-blank refused to sweat but, even so, her temperature slid up a notch. ‘Just wash your hands,’ she slowly stated the obvious solution.

      ‘It doesn’t work.’ Ty rubbed the tips of his fingers in her face as if to show how slippery they still were.

      ‘You have to help us,’ Max, one of the props, pleaded with puppy-style eyes. ‘I mean, we could get the photographer to do it but …’ He trailed off.

      She knew these ultra-competitive jocks liked to tease. She had their respect. They always listened to her work requests and refrained