His to Win (The Alpha Soccer Saga #1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

two and half days in the family’s old van almost did him in, but he willed his way to the match.
    Patrick embraced his mother, and reached down to shake his father’s withered hand. With perhaps his final burst of strength, Ben Sievert pulled his son down for a hug, one of the few Patrick could remember ever receiving from his dad. With one knee on the grass, Patrick began to thank his dad for coming, to ask how he’d managed, to say one hundred things at once.
    Benjamin Sievert quieted his son with a wave of his hand, summoned his own raspy voice, and looked Patrick in the eyes. “Big time, son. Now this ,” a bony finger jabbed at the USMNT crest on Patrick’s jersey, “is big time.”
    Tears filled both men’s eyes, as well as Shelton’s, as he watched from beside Patrick’s weeping mother.
    Benjamin Sievert, age fifty-five, went to sleep that night in a Chicago hotel room and woke up in heaven.

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    On his team’s dime, flights and accommodations were nearly always top shelf, the players pampered like royalty. To beg off, even out of respect to his late father, would be disrespectful to the team. On his own time, however, Patrick left the Ferraris and private jets to others and lived a life with more in common with the blue collar folk he grew up with than the ostentatious playboy he could have been.
    Patrick watched the luggage cart drivers dodging raindrops outside and spent a few moments longer recalling his career in the game, a career marked by compliments on his unflappable stoicism and discipline on the field, traits he’d carried with him into the relationships with women he hadn’t allowed himself to enjoy.
    All of which made the effect the chance encounter with Ellie Peavey had on him all the more inexplicable.
    “Fate.” He said quietly, raising his bottle of water in a toast. “Good on ya, fate.”

CHAPTER SIX
    Ellie waited and waited at the gate, but there was no sign of the dashing Patrick Sievert. Stupid, Ellie. He probably jumped on the next flight returning to Atlanta, just so he wouldn’t have to share the same continent with you. So stupid. Ugh!!! , Ellie thought to herself, trying not to let the devastation of the obvious, and predictable, betrayal show as she approached the gate attendant who’d just sent out the call for final boarding.
    Scanning her ticket, the stern-looking redhead looked up in surprise, “Oh, it’s you. Sorry, there’s been a change in your seat, let me have that boarding pass. OK, ah, here it is, yes, OK here’s your new pass. Sorry, I was expecting somebody, well, somebody else.” The ticketing agent looked Ellie up and down and did nothing to hide her disapproving frown. “Enjoy your flight to Glasgow. Hurry now, they’re ready to shut the doors.” The attendant handed Ellie a new slip of paper and the confused American girl made her way down the jet bridge and onto the waiting jet.
    “What’s kept you, love? I feared I’d lost you!” It was the unmistakable voice of Patrick, welcoming her to the flight, welcoming her to the window seat next to him, welcoming him, in her hopes and dreams, into his life. Forever.
    Modifying it to fit the circumstance, Ellie paraphrased her side of a conversation she’d been rehearsing for the past thirty minutes while waiting at the gate, “Well, Patrick, I’ve got bad news. It turns out the team in Scotland doesn’t want you after all. But teams all over the southeastern United States are falling all over themselves to sign you. So your agent and I were going over your suitors and coming up with an appropriate plan of action.”
    Ellie prayed she hadn’t been too forward, hadn’t overplayed her hand, but Patrick’s easy smile allayed her fears. “Is that so, Ellie? That’s very interesting. Did any of those teams happen to be in Atlanta?”
    “Sadly, no. Not Atlanta. But there was tremendous interest from a little town, east of Atlanta, called Conyers. I don’t know much about this Conyers place