title: The Player
author: Allen, Rida
description: Escape.
   All Brage Connell wants to do is escape his hovering friends, who think they're doing the right thing by keeping him under constant surveillance. A neighborhood dive bar with few staff and even fewer patrons looks like the perfect hiding spot from everything and everyone...including fans of Lexical Diffusion, the band he plays bass guitar for. So when Brage meets Jo-elle, a spunky, curvaceous barmaid who has absolutely no interest in his infamous rock star life, he is both amused and aroused.
   His proposition: One night of incredible passion between two people otherwise uninterested in any kind of commitment. But Brage didn't count on being drawn to the one woman who wanted him as a man and not a musician.
  
  Loneliness.
   Joel "Jo-elle" Malone doesn't realize just how lonely she is until the man she secretly desires strides into her bar. Player or not, she can't pass up the offer of one hot night between the sheets with the only man who makes her pulse race. But in the cold light of day, she is reminded that he is a player through and through.
   Her plan: Get Brage out of her head--if not her heart--and find a man who will make her his one and only. But when the player's interest suddenly seems to change to include a future with her, can Joel trust him to change his player ways?