“No.”
“You had a duty to this franchise to warn us about something of this nature. You’re on probation till the start of the season. But tell me why. Why didn’t you consider how this would affect your future?”
“I did it for my future. You and Dad cut me off the summer I wanted to stay on campus for a fitness program. You didn’t believe I’d find my own money to pay for it, but I did. I took the dare.”
Veronica crossed her arms. “God, Waverly, you can’t take dares like that. Porn? Really?”
“It’s not dirty, the way you make it sound.”
“Strangers fucked you on tape so anonymous people would get off on it. Please say there was some STD screening protocol.”
“Veronica, can’t you see she’s upset enough?” Aly said. “Waverly, the publicity department is trying to minimize the damage. We’ll need to prep your statement and release that. There’s going to be some debate, you can count on that. After the Beckham issue, people are sort of supersensitive to your mistakes. They’re second-guessing you as a role model for young girls interested in male-dominated sports.”
“It was never about becoming a role model,” Waverly said. “Not for me. I’m sorry if that makes me look selfish, but it’s always been about sports. The game. The role-model thing is something that this family capitalized on. Can we all be honest enough to admit it?”
“Damn it, Waverly.” The boom of J.T.’s voice seemed powerful enough to fell an entire forest. “This should humble you!”
“You mean subdue me?” Waverly handed the tablet to her mother. “It hasn’t. Like Aly said, it’s upset me. I don’t know who could’ve leaked this.”
“Sam Pratt called me this morning,” Joan said. “A woman he said is acquainted with you contacted him for information. She said you’d mentioned to her that you hit a rough patch in college. He didn’t know what her angle was until now.”
Waverly hadn’t mentioned her college blunder to anyone…except Jeremiah. “The woman. What’s her name?”
“Izzie Phillips. She’s engaged to Luca Tarantino.”
The weight of the truth hit her hard, knocked the breath out of her even as she stood totally still with the eyes of her family centered on her. What she’d told Jeremiah ended up in the hands of his father’s fiancée and then on blast. Coincidental or deliberate?
Coincidental, my ass. Waverly started to rush out of the suite, but her mother’s grip on her arm tugged her back.
“Waverly, do you have no care about your image or your family?”
More like my family’s image. “Mom, I’m sorry that what I do and who I am hurts you. But you, and everyone else, need to consider that this photo isn’t much more provocative than what the mainstream media puts in front of society every day. You’re a product of the beauty-pageant circuit. Tell us how many times you were judged on how sexy you were.” At that her mother let her go and Waverly kept walking. “I regret that tapes shot years ago can start up a firestorm, but I’m also glad that I finally saw this. I never watched myself. I should’ve. The woman on that screen is okay with herself. Unafraid. Powerful. I miss her.”
Waverly marched out of the suite with Aly in close pursuit.
“Wait!” Aly flung her arms around Waverly, squeezing even as her Waverly’s arms remained loose at her sides. “What are you going to do?”
“Go back to camp. There are things that need to be done.” And people who need to be set straight.
◆◆◆
Waverly made it back to Desert Luck as the coaching staff was dispersing from a meeting and the players were gearing up for the second two-a-day. Glances. Frowns. Stares. Chuckles. They were all directed at her as she strode through the facility to the staff lounge. It was as if she’d shown up naked.
In a way she had. There were more tablets, phones, and computers in this place than an electronics store. In the age of internet and social media, all it took was one person to forward a link or repost. It was too bad that pornography taped long ago could throw her plans, career, image into a vortex.
What was worse? She didn’t hate that she’d had sex with strangers on camera. The experiences had been challenging, frightening, and liberating all at once. What she did hate was that she’d tried to sweep it under the rug rather than own it. She hated that she’d given Izzie Phillips—and Jeremiah Tarantino—the power to use her secret against her in some sort of revenge play.
Jeremiah. There he was, in a talk with Finn and Whittaker near the lounge’s kitchenette. As she went to her locker, she heard their quarterback’s name and exhaled in relief. It was refreshing that not everyone was distracted to stupidity about sex tape stills.
“Waverly, a word?”
Turning, she saw Finn advancing toward her and cast a narrowed-eyed glance beyond his shoulder at Jeremiah. “Coach.” Finn proffered a cold bottle of water, which she accepted with a nod of thanks. It didn’t matter if you were thirsty or not. If your coach offered you a water, you took it. “What’s the update on Brock’s shoulder?”
“Rehab therapy’s going good. Backup QB’s set for the rest of preseason. Then Brock will play game one. He wants to play. I trust him to know his body.” A beat later he said, “Word of the day is Waverly.”
“Considering it could be porn, I’m okay with that.” The sarcasm was met with a look of concern. “It won’t stop me from doing my job. Does it bother you?”
Finn’s face split into an uncomfortable half grimace, half laugh. “It’s sports. A woman’s physique shouldn’t matter so much, but our players are focusing more on your acting career than they’re focusing on handling the damn football.”
“Sounds more like a conversation you should have with them, Coach.”
Finn took a moment to consider. “I trust you to know yourself and what you can handle.” He clapped a hand to her shoulder, then eyed his watch. “Need you on the sidelines in fifteen.”
Grabbing a cotton tee and shorts from her duffel gave her comfort. What if she was no longer a part of this team, no longer welcome into this lounge and the lives of the young men whose overall well-being was as important to her as her own? She was supposed to be better than perfect. For her parents, she’d already fallen short. Training camp was meant to weed out the weak.
So would she be among those cut when the team finalized its roster?
The click of the door’s lock engaging had her turning to see that she was now alone in the lounge with Jeremiah.
“Really, Jeremiah? It’s fine to spill my secrets to Izzie Phillips, but let’s keep the door locked on yours?” When he made no move to open the door, she shrugged and yanked off the street clothes she’d worn to the stadium.
Heat flared in his eyes and she stiffened. What part of him…their relationship…had been a lie? Was the lust tumbling through her, even as she cursed the moment she agreed to join Meg for drinks at VooDoo, authentic?
“The general public has seen everything you’ve seen,” she gritted out, stepping into her mesh athletic shorts.
“Not everything, Waverly. They haven’t seen the look you get when I bury my cock inside you.”
Even then you were lying to me. “Guess that makes you special, huh?” She faced her locker and finished dressing, feeling his attention on her all the while.
“We have to talk about this, Waverly.”
“Gloat or apologize—it’s all the same. Either way we’re through.”
“Does the front office know about us?”
“No, Jeremiah. Sabotage is your thing. It actually didn’t occur to me to retaliate.” Don’t shake. Don’t show him that you fooled yourself and fell in love with him. “Targeting me. Was this to avenge some wrongdoing you think my father committed against yours? Or was this about me?”
“Both, at first. It killed to know your family stole this team from mine, that your parents could fire me on a whim. I was going out of my mind trying to make things right.”
“Why go after me? What did I do?” Waverly st
opped. “Wait…I was your weapon. You wanted to get to my family through me. But you don’t get it, even now. I’m not the Greers’ Achilles’ heel. When you hurt me, I’m the only one who’s hurt.”
“Izzie didn’t tell me what she was planning.”
“Weren’t you plotting with her?”
“Yes—at first. After a while I was done with it.”
“Why?”
“It got out of hand. I wasn’t supposed to love—” Jeremiah swore, kneaded his forehead with his fingertips. “The porn? I had no idea it existed until I got here today and found some of the guys passing around a phone.”
Waverly shifted her weight to keep from falling into her nervous habit. “I heard what you didn’t say, Jeremiah. And I hope this got so out of hand that you ended up hurting yourself. It wouldn’t have worked out for us anyway. Great sex can’t change who we are.” She shut her locker. “Coach is expecting us. You go first.”
She waited ten minutes—long enough to dab away the tears that had caught her by surprise the moment Jeremiah left the room—before putting on her sunglasses and marching out.
“Waverly, wait.” Royce Davis, the wide-receivers coach, sprinted the short distance to where she stood outside the staff lounge.
“Royce.” Drained from her conversation with Jeremiah, she was anxious to get outside and start sweating out the heartache. Work was the salve she needed. It could distract her, tire her out, consume her. The only thing it wouldn’t do was make her forget. “Can we walk and talk? I need to be out there.”
“After you.”
With him trailing her she waited several beats for him to get to it, but at his continued silence she threw a glance over his shoulder to see his gaze attached to her ass. “What do you want, Royce?”
“Waverly,” he said on a low chuckle, “I can answer that with words or with action.”
To illustrate, he gave her a punishing squeeze and shoved his hand into her shorts. Protesting the assault of his fingers, she shrieked. He struck her face and she saw bursts of light.
“Shut the fuck up,” he warned.
“No.” She ripped his hand away and pinned it to his chest. “Touch me again and you’ll answer to Coach, with words, why I broke your wrist.”
Royce yanked free. “Not worth it, bitch.”
Waverly went onto the sunny field, straight to Finn, and rose up to whisper into his ear, “Royce Davis cornered me in the building and tried to take it further. I talked him out of it. It happened in the hall, so pull the security tape for proof. If you can handle this without involving administration, I’d appreciate not being called into a meeting with my parents again anytime soon.”
Flabbergasted at her cool, matter-of-fact demeanor, he asked, “What do you want to do now?”
“Do you really have to ask?” She was already jogging backward to the sidelines. “Work.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The last place Waverly thought she’d wind up after camp the next evening was on Main Street inside a utilitarian interview room at Las Vegas’s Office of Diversion Control.
Chilled, she blew into her hands, rubbed them together for warmth. The air-conditioning was overcompensating for the heat and humidity that hung to the pitch-black night. She’d never seen so many cold, impassive faces.
And here she thought she worked with a complicated group.
At the late hour Meg managed to look fresh and alert in her snug pantsuit and startlingly blue T-strap shoes. She was working her first controlled-pharmaceuticals case, which was the biggest assignment she’d sunk her teeth into since her transfer to Las Vegas. It called for late hours, long days, and total focus. Which meant personal ties took a backseat. In light of this, Meg’s inviting Waverly to this location at this time of night was two kinds of weird.
When she entered the interview room carrying two cups of hot brew in one hand—both for herself, as Waverly was still nursing the foam cup of lukewarm water-cooler H2O another agent had offered—she took the chair beside Waverly and set her cane across her lap.
The gesture took off some of the interrogation edge, but not much. Meg rested her arms on the table, steepled her manicured fingers. “Use evidence for maximum results. It’s a cardinal rule, for me at least.”
“Evidence?”
“Jeremiah Tarantino. Let’s say I took a professional look at him.” At the admission, Meg toyed with the ID badge clipped to her lapel. “Called in a favor to D.C., kept it need-to-know.”
Waverly held up a hand. “What the hell? I asked you not to do that.”
“I had to make a judgment.” Pushing back her hair, Meg took a swallow of coffee. “When I found out you were sleeping with Jeremiah.”
“And that was a problem? What are you, a sex narc?”
“Can’t you recognize when someone’s watching your back?” Meg yanked her badge from her jacket and slapped it onto the table between them. “I’m putting my ass on the line telling you what I found out, warning you about who you’re getting all tangled up with. Jeremiah’s another guy with an ulterior motive. Like Alex.”
“Jeremiah’s not just another Alex. I didn’t love Alex.”
“And there it is.” Meg waited long enough for Waverly to understand the magnitude of her own words. “You invest too much of yourself into relationships.”
“Maybe. But it’s better than holding back. I know part of the reason you took this pharmaceuticals case is to distance yourself from Parker. You’re afraid he’ll screw you over, like that black-ops guy did. Well, Meg, Jeremiah isn’t Parker and I’m not you. I trust and I love, and I get my heart broken. It’s not your duty to save me from your mistakes.”
“Fine.” But it wasn’t. A nerve had been hit. “I took a look, had D.C. check my homework. Jeremiah is clean. It’s his father who’s in deep—a gambling network living and breathing in Grimaldi’s casino. We’ve only scratched the surface, but this is what I can tell you. Before he sold the team, Tarantino was using a proxy to bet on Villains games. He manipulated the outcomes of those games.”
“How?”
“A bounty. Incentives. Bonuses. Under-the-table payments to his coaching staff. A few still work for the team—assistant offensive-line coach, wide-receivers coach. All it took was the right players to cooperate, particularly his offensive men. Luca Tarantino took a huge financial loss, and the next Sunday his son got the living hell knocked out of him in a game against—”
Waverly knew her eyes were wide as saucers. It was unbelievable and yet made perfect sense. “The Villains.”
Meg nodded. “That week Tarantino needed his team to win to try to dig himself out. Milo’s strength as a player made him a threat, so he had to be stopped. The erratic wins and losses, the tackle that killed his son’s career, the sale of a relatively lucrative franchise, lying about J.T. intimidating him? The man was covering his ass.” She nudged Waverly gently with an elbow. “What will you do with this information?”
“Jeremiah and I had an agreement—no cheap shots.” Her friend gave her a meaningful look that said, Wouldn’t leaking porn be considered a cheap shot? She stood to leave. “Maximum results, right?”
Another nod. “You know what I’d do. But you’re not me. Just know that I can’t unknow what I found out. Corruption like this can’t be ignored. A man lost his career…could’ve lost his life.” Meg stood with her cane, pulled Waverly into a hug. “Dios. We’ve both got issues, you know that, right?”
“Must be why we’re such good friends.”
* * *
Revenge was a dance. A tango of attack and retaliate. Waverly wasn’t much of a dancer, though. When she found her escort behind the velvet rope leading to the front entrance of Grimaldi Royal Casino, where an Italian opera sensation would be performing for the city’s elite, she didn’t have revenge in mind.
What she did have was backup in the form of a jaded quarterback who had the looks and scandalous reputation of a Hollywood prince and nothing to lose. Simon Smith had harbored suspicions al
l along, but no one—including Waverly—had been willing to listen. What he’d claimed was a team conspiracy and a corporate screw-over, the public had perceived as his attempt to escape responsibility for his own underperformance and shitty leadership. His release from the Villains upon the change of ownership hadn’t been unexpected—more like anticipated. Now, with no contract and no credibility, Simon was fired up enough to talk to anyone who might clear his name.
Waverly found Simon among the stream of well-dressed guests bleeding into the casino. He greeted her with a short nod. A pair of aviator sunglasses shielded his eyes. “If Jeremiah has us thrown out—”
“I don’t think he will.” Jeremiah may have quit trying to plead his case and draw her into conversation at camp, but when she’d suggested they talk tonight, in person, he’d named the time and place without hesitation. What he didn’t know was that she’d be walking into the casino with Simon. “But if he does, then I’ll try again. I’ll keep trying until I get through to him. We’re giving him the chance to get ahead of the avalanche before the league comes down on his father.”
With no time or inclination to plot, Waverly had chosen to bring her evidence to Jeremiah first. She’d toyed with the idea of saying nothing until the commissioner’s office made a move against Luca. But Jeremiah needed to know the truth before the media captured it, shaped it, exploited it.
Waverly’s skin prickled with awareness as her gaze settled on Jeremiah, who sat at a table in the Mahogany Lounge, his features serious.
As the mezzo-soprano’s haunting aria drifted from the casino ballroom, Waverly approached Jeremiah, with her companion following close. “Simon,” she said, turning to him, “give me a minute?”
“I can give you as long as it takes me to finish a beer. After that, I start talking. And if Tarantino won’t listen, then I’ll find someone who will.” The man shrugged in a take-it-or-leave-it gesture and cut a path toward the far end of the bar.
Jeremiah’s gaze cruised her boldly, intimately, as she closed the distance between them. “For days I’ve been trying to get time with you, Waverly, and when I finally do, you bring him.” He jerked his head in the direction Simon had gone. “Didn’t know you and Smith were a packaged deal.”
The Penalty Page 17
