Bigger Than Beckham

by V. K. Sykes

  Kavanagh brightened a little. “Well, yeah, Clark’s a damn good man. Jesus, you must be going to give him a hell of a pile of money to get him to sign on to that kind of shit deal.”

  Actually, Owen Clark owed his career to Tony and would do whatever Tony asked of him. “He knows he’ll be assistant manager in name only. And he’ll only have to wait one season.”

  Kavanagh stroked his stubbled chin, his gaze going canny. “And you’ll put a leash on McLeod, too? He interferes more than he should. Plus, if he’s still here, he’ll never want to re-sign me at the end of my contract.”

  Kavanagh was proving again to be a totally self-centered bastard. “Rex has agreed to spend a good deal of time over here,” Tony explained. “And I intend to be hands-on, too. Between the two of us, McLeod will have someone looking over his shoulder on all major decisions. And, trust me, I’ll make sure he lets Owen control what happens on the pitch.”

  Kavanagh’s gaze popped back and forth between Rex and Tony. “I still don’t like it, but at least I understand it now.”

  Tony moved in for the kill. “Hell, I can’t do it without you, Derek.” Unfortunately, sod it. “I really need you to help me turn this team around. You know you’re the man to do it.”

  When Kavanagh started to preen, Tony knew he had him hooked. He stood and extended his hand. “We’ve got a deal, then?”

  Kavanagh got up and accepted the handshake “Yeah, Tony, we’ve got a deal.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Minutes later, after a bit more haggling with Rex over the details of their plan, Tony hustled him out of the suite. He needed to reach Martha with no more delay, because God only knew what Steam Train had up their bloody sleeves. While she’d agreed to give him at least a few more hours, Tony had been in enough eleventh hour negotiations to know that such promises could easily go out the window. He trusted Martha to keep her word, but had to believe that if Steam Train were to cave on her demands, the pressure on her to finalize the deal would become unsupportable. The brewery no doubt already had a letter of intent prepared and ready for her signature.

  He’d just reached for the phone when someone began pounding hard on the suite’s door.

  “Branch, are you in there? Open up, you limey wanker!”

  For a second, Tony stood rooted to the spot. What the hell?

  Then he remembered the voice and what Martha had told him a few hours ago. “Carter, is that you bellowing?” he shouted as he strode to the door.

  “Hell, yeah. How many other people call you a limey wanker?”

  Tony threw the door open. Nate Carter leaned his lanky, six-five frame against the jamb, a cheeky grin on his mug.

  “Nobody else would dare, you yank bastard,” Tony said. “Get your sorry ass in here.”

  As Nate stepped into the room, Tony enveloped him in a bear hug. “Damn good to see you, mate. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? London, early February?”

  Nate clapped him on the back. “Yep. At the Evelina fundraiser. You took me to the Lions match against Wigan the next day. Your guys kicked their asses.”

  “I remember it well.” Tony broke the brief man-clench. “Martha told me you were in town today. Normally, I would have tried to meet up with you right away, but I’m afraid she’s been keeping me busy.”

  “So I heard over dinner. She gave me your room number earlier, so I figured I’d just mosey on over and surprise you.”

  When Nate flopped down into an armchair without waiting for an invitation, Tony wondered if he might soon have to kick Nate out so he could call Martha. He’d give it a few minutes, but not long, even at the risk of being rude. “Bourbon or Scotch?” he said.

  “Whatever you’re drinking is fine.”

  Tony poured two short glasses of bourbon. “Did Martha manage to get through dinner…undisturbed?” Tony asked. No subtlety there, but it was worth a shot.

  “Nice try, buddy,” Nate said, taking the glass Tony extended. “Don’t worry. I’m not here on some spy mission for her, either.”

  “Wouldn’t have dreamt it for a minute,” Tony said smoothly. Naturally, the thought had crossed his mind as soon as he heard Nate’s voice.

  Nate fixed him with a genial gaze that looked serious underneath. “But I do want to talk to you about her situation, man. About this possible sale.”

  “Possible sale? I think it’s more than possible, Nate. Martha’s all out of options, so it’s just a matter now of whether it’s going to be me or the brewery. I was just about to call her when you knocked.”

  Nate nodded. “Good, then I won’t keep you more than a few more minutes.”

  Tony smiled his gratitude. “I expect this isn’t entirely a social call, is it?”

  “Not entirely. Martha doesn’t know I’m here, though, man. When I dropped her off at home, I told her I was heading out to my condo so I could get a good night’s sleep before flying back to Philly in the morning.”

  “Okay.” Tony sipped his bourbon. If Nate said he wasn’t on a mission for Martha, that was good enough for him.

  “You know the woman’s totally crazy about you, right?” Nate said.

  Tony felt his jaw go slack. Of all the things he’d thought Nate might say, that hadn’t been one of them. “Bollocks. She didn’t tell you that, did she?” he asked with a hefty dose of incredulity.

  Nate shrugged. “Not in so many words, but she didn’t have to. I know her too well. Anyway, it’s so obvious I’d have to be in a coma to miss it.”

  Tony wondered if that meant Nate was accusing him of being in a coma. Martha crazy about him? He’d known there’d been something very special going on between them, all right—different from anything he’d ever felt or experienced. But he hadn’t a clue what Martha truly thought about him. About them. She’d run hot and cold for so much of the time that he was never sure if he was about to be scalded or chilled to the bone.

  Then again, maybe that was his problem, not Martha’s. Sometimes the only things he read well were opposing teams’ strategies. When it came to reading women, especially extraordinary women like Martha Winston, he had to admit he was something of a second stringer.

  “Well?” Nate said, interrupting Tony’s brief reverie.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, aren’t you going to say something? Like ‘I’m crazy about her, too?’ Or are you too macho to admit something like that to a bro?”

  Tony eyed his friend, uncertain of the terrain. Why the hell was Nate challenging him like this? He was just trying to find a way to buy a sodding football team, not analyze his bloody feelings to death.

  “Macho? Screw that,” he finally said. “You ought to know me better than that, Carter.”

  Nate gave him an easy grin. “Man, don’t get all huffy and bent. Just give me a straight answer to the question, my friend. It’s not that hard, is it?”

  Exasperated, Tony blew out a heavy breath. This discussion was turning bizarre, and would get them nowhere.

  Nate prodded. “Look, I love Martha Winston—like a sister, obviously. I’ll love her till the day I die. And as far as I’m concerned, you, Tony Branch, are a certified nut job if you aren’t crazy about her, too.” He paused for a few beats. “And I sure as hell don’t mean like a sister.”

  Tony hated talking about emotional crap, but he got where Nate was coming from. After all, his relationship with Ginny had some parallels with Martha’s and Nate’s history. He had to admit it might was time for him to sort out his feelings for Martha—feelings that had so far been hopelessly intertwined with a whole other agenda.

  He’d always figured their combustible attraction to each other would serve his quest to buy her team. But he’d never expected Martha to mean even more to him than his own plans and dreams. He’d never thought any woman would.

  Until now.

  Tony grimaced and finally admitted the truth. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t want to blow my chance with her. I know that much at least. It kills me to see how ripped apart she i
s about this sale. The brewery and the bank have fucked her royally, and I’m knocking myself out trying to find a way to make it a little easier for her to part with the Thunder.” He blew out a heavy breath. “I’m not optimistic she’s going to buy my idea, though.”

  “Okay. So, tell me,” Nate said.

  So Tony did, even including the handshake deal he’d just made with Derek Kavanagh. “The damn thing is that I can’t match Steam Train’s money,” he said in conclusion. “And it would be bloody impossible for her to leave a million and a half on the table. Not with her jackass uncle breathing down her neck.”

  Nate’s mouth twisted as he nodded. “I don’t want to tell tales out of school, but over dinner I think Martha came to the conclusion that she’s got no real choice but to sell to Steam Train. For exactly the reason you just said.”

  Shit.

  Nate’s confirmation hit Tony like a mule kick to the gut. Now, even his last-ditch gambit with Kavanagh wasn’t going to rescue him. Disappointment blanketed him like cold, driving snow. Though he couldn’t blame Martha, somehow deep down he’d always thought he’d be able to pull out a victory in the end, because he almost always had. Tonight his prospects looked worse than bleak and God only knew how this would impact their relationship.

  He stayed silent, unable to utter anything worth saying.

  “But it’s not quite a done deal yet,” Nate continued quickly. “Martha’s still waiting to hear from you one last time.”

  Tony took little comfort from those words. Yes, he’d thought Martha would wait, but he got the impression that it was more of a courtesy than anything else. He narrowed his eyes. “I thought I might convince her by giving her the guarantee of jobs that she wanted. But it seems that was just wishful thinking.”

  “Probably, but I’ve got another idea, man.” Nate got up suddenly and ambled over to the window, drink in hand, gazing out into the night. “It’s a little wild, but sometimes you gotta think outside the box, right?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Tony responded cautiously. He watched Nate study the glittering view of Jacksonville at night, then his impatience broke free. “If you’ve got some kind of bloody lifeline, you better throw it to me quick. I figure I’ll be going under for the third time as soon as I talk to her.”

  Nate turned around to face him, but leaned back against the big window. “Let me ask you something first.”

  Tony gave him a grim nod by way of reply.

  “Do you know why Martha’s been so determined to keep running the team? You know it’s not about money, Tony. The team’s been a financial disaster, and Martha was doing great with her sports writing career, anyway.”

  Nate’s question seemed a bit out of left field, but Tony was going to humor him. “Martha hates to fail at anything. That’s obvious as hell. And she’s as driven as anyone I’ve ever met. Hell, she might be as driven as me,” he finished with a snort.

  Nate shook his head but didn’t say anything.

  Tony frowned. “She wants to hold on because people in the sport don’t take her seriously, and she’s bloody well determined to prove them wrong. I admire her for that.”

  Nate shook his head again. “All that may be true, but it’s not the whole answer. Not even the main answer. Nope.” He ambled back from the window and sat down again. “I asked Martha today if she’d ever told you the real story, and she admitted she hadn’t. She said she wanted to, but couldn’t seem to ever manage it. She thought you’d think it was….I believe her exact words were, ‘sentimental and stupid’.”

  Tony was about ready to strangle Nate if he didn’t finally get to his point. How could Martha have ever thought he could find her stupid? And he’d never regarded her as particularly sentimental. In fact, the words that immediately came to his mind in describing her would have been ones like ‘tough’ and ‘resilient’.

  “Bloody hell, just tell me, you wanker,” he growled.

  “Keep your shirt on, I’m getting to it,” Nate said, making the stop signal with his hand. “I knew her dad, Will Winston, pretty well. The guy was a good man and a good father, if you ask me. But he was…eccentric. Weird, even, in some ways. The guy was totally nuts about soccer, and he had this dream about someday buying and running his own team. When he made a bit of a fortune with his paper business, he took the plunge and bought the Thunder franchise. And because he insisted on becoming the full-time CEO of the team, he needed to turn over operational control of his company to somebody.” Nate raised his arms out to his sides like a preacher. “And guess which somebody he picked?”

  Tony immediately thought of Winston’s brother, Geoffrey. But was that likely, given what an idiot Geoffrey obviously was?

  “Martha.” Tony didn’t have to make it a question.

  “Give the man a prize,” Nate drawled. “Yep, Will picked his sportswriter daughter. A daughter who had zero experience with the company other than menial summer jobs in one of his plants. For all his fine qualities, the guy was eccentric to the point of lunacy sometimes.”

  Tony shrugged. “I can understand that a man might want to keep the business in the family. And Martha was his only child.”

  “True enough. But Martha obviously had other ideas. She was already a pretty big star in her corner of the world, and she got even bigger as the years went on. Heading back to small town Georgia to run some paper plants was not on her agenda.”

  “So, she said no to her father.”

  Nate nodded. “It practically killed her to have to do it, even though she knew it was a hare-brained idea. And her refusal absolutely devastated Will. To make a long story short, he wound up selling the business because he knew he couldn’t run both it and the team. At least not in the way he was used to running things. He was a real hands-on guy, and he sure wasn’t going to leave his idiot brother in charge.”

  Tony was getting the picture. “I suppose her father couldn’t forgive her for letting him down,” he said with an impending sense of doom.

  “Well, things were pretty rocky between Will and Martha after that, but eventually they forgave each other. In fact, they grew really close again in his last couple of years. It totally wrecked Martha when he told her he had terminal cancer.”

  Tony thought he could imagine Martha’s shock and grief. He’d gone through something like that years ago when his brother Cliff committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.

  “Her father should never have asked that of her. Martha did nothing wrong by saying no,” he snapped, outraged on her behalf.

  “No argument from me on that, man. But fathers aren’t always perfect, right?”

  Nate’s revelations put a different spin on Martha’s behavior, at least regarding the team. He and Martha had shared relatively little about their personal lives. Tony certainly hadn’t wanted to open up about his life growing up, even though she’d tried to pry it out of him once or twice. Someday, maybe, he’d tell her what it was like to be raised in an abusive home, with a mercurial father that regularly beat the hell out of his wife and every single one of his five children. A home in which each child’s accomplishments—whether in school or on the sports fields—could never measure up to his father’s drink-fueled, overblown expectations.

  “No argument on that score, mate,” was all he could finally manage as he yanked his mind back from Middlesbrough.

  “Not long before Will died, he begged Martha to move here and take control of the team. And, man, then it was like a goddamn delayed replay of the fight they’d had four years ago. Martha was a mess about it, but this time she couldn’t bring herself to refuse him. Turning him down once had practically eaten her from the inside out, and she just couldn’t do it to him again no matter what the cost. So, she said yes, even though taking over the Thunder was the last thing she wanted to do.”

  “Ah, hell,” Tony swore, disgusted with himself. “I had no idea.”

  Nate tossed back the rest of his bourbon before continuing. “It gets worse. Will split the shares of the team between Martha a
nd Geoffrey—but you obviously already know that.”

  “Martha has eighty percent, Geoffrey twenty.”

  “That’s right. But then he threw the kicker at her. He made her swear that no matter what happened, she’d make sure control of the team stayed in the Winston family.” Nate gave a little snort. “He even told Martha that he dreamed her children would one day run it, and he pleaded with her to do everything she could to make that dream come true. He literally extracted a fucking deathbed promise out of her.”

  The puzzle that was Martha Winston finally locked into place, and Tony felt his chest grow tight. “It was obvious to me from the start that she was putting a ton of pressure on herself, and I couldn’t understand why. But she might have told me that story herself, mate. It sure would have helped.”

  “I get why you’d say that, but look at it this way. Yeah, you two got chummy in London, but you never stopped trying to maneuver the team out from under her, did you? On that front, you guys have been adversaries from day one, and you still are. So, why would you expect her to blab something so personal to you? She hates being exposed like that, anyway.”

  Tony shrugged, not wanting to admit his buddy spoke the truth.

  “Besides,” Nate continued in a dry voice, “on some level I think she’s embarrassed as hell about the whole thing. She doesn’t want to have to explain her relationship with her father to anybody. She thinks people wouldn’t understand.”

  Not just “people” in general—Tony in particular. The implication was pretty clear to him.

  The vise that gripped his chest in its jaws tightened with Nate’s every word. Tony knew better than anyone how screwed-up the relationships between fathers and kids could be. Bitter secrets in his own family were to be forever hidden from outsiders, and some promises—spoken and unspoken—were to be kept close to the heart. Sometimes it was the only way to survive.