by Lexi Blake
Amber sniffled and seemed to pull it together. “Portia was helping me put together a charity luncheon for the Humane Society. I was helping her put together some of the media for a party she was going to throw when Trey turns fifty.”
“Portia wanted to put together a short film about Trey’s career. I opened the Guardian’s vaults for her,” Carey explained. “We keep films of the games and all the media we get.”
She knew the vault well. It was like a library and it contained thirty years’ worth of films of everything from training camps to the Super Bowls they’d participated in, to commercials the players made. And all the media. The vault was huge and not the most organized of libraries. Portia had wanted to hire an actual librarian for the vault, but Carey had left it to the publicity department.
“Didn’t you do a reality show for a couple of years?” David asked.
Isla had ducked the cameras anytime she could while everyone else in the office tried to get their fifteen minutes of fame. “Holding the Line. For three years we had a film crew follow everything from what went on in the front office, to training camp, all the way to the Super Bowl in our final year. It got great ratings, but Carey nixed a fourth season.”
“It was too much,” Carey said. “And don’t look at me like that. You hated the idea. You nearly threw up every time you had to be on camera.”
Because she was not that girl. “I was born to be behind the scenes.”
Amber wiped her tears and gave her a watery smile. “That’s not true. If I’d been around back then, I would have styled you and you would have been a big star. Think about it. You might have had your own show now. The Real Lawyers of Manhattan.”
The mere thought made her shiver. Amber liked a lot of cleavage and used more glitter than a craft fair. Besides, she was fairly certain people would get bored with that particular show since nothing exciting ever happened . . . well, most of the time. “I think I’m happier with my current job. Speaking of, did you get the contracts I sent you?”
She still took care of Carey’s personal business. He always had something going on behind the scenes. Though she no longer dealt with the massive legal tangles that came with a professional sports team, she was happy she could still help out in some small way.
“I did and sent them in to be filed.” He winked at her. “Thank you for catching that mistake. Would have cost me a pretty penny. Now tell me what’s going on with Trey. How can I help?”
She gave him the general rundown and David explained that he’d gotten an emergency motion for an evaluation. While his friends had been in the apartment, they got a call from the doctor telling them Trey hadn’t been conscious enough to answer questions when he went by. They were still hoping for news today, but it would very likely be Monday before they knew anything.
After a while, David stepped back. “I’m going to head home for a bit, Isla. I’ll be back in a couple of hours and we can take it from there. I’ll call and see if we can get into the hospital this afternoon. Why don’t you set up a time to talk with Miranda and Oscar?”
She nodded, weirdly at ease with the idea that they would spend another day together. “I will do that. And thank you again.”
“Mr. Cormack?” Amber stepped up. “I need to know when I can get into the penthouse. I called over there and the police were being entirely unreasonable about letting me in.”
One brow rose over David’s eyes. “Why would you need to do that?”
“Because I’m in charge of the media presentation at Portia’s funeral. Excuse me, at her memorial service.” She flushed but carried on. “I talked to Miranda and volunteered to do it, but I need access to family photos and their personal videos.”
Isla sighed inwardly. She could practically hear how that conversation would have gone. Miranda was in mourning and Amber—while trying to be helpful—was being entirely too pushy. “It’s a crime scene. We don’t know when the police will let the family back in, much less anyone who doesn’t actually live there.”
Her eyes widened. “But the funeral will be soon. I need time to make this movie. I’ve already contacted a couple of country music singers about a memorial song. I want it to be a new ‘Candle in the Wind,’ except way more meaningful. I’m going to have a Hollywood director help me put it all together, but I need material.”
David grabbed his briefcase and his suit coat, the same one that had kept her warm much of the day before. “The good news is they were very public figures. You should be able to find plenty of material because I don’t think they’ll let anyone who’s not working the case in there soon.”
He said goodbye and left, and she stared at the door for a moment.
“I can’t use all the old stuff people have already seen. I can’t,” Amber huffed. “Well, I have to start making some calls. I have to get that material. I can’t fail Portia with a subpar memorial film. I’ll be right back.” She took out her bejeweled cell phone and started dialing. “Jay, I need you to get the whole team together.”
She walked toward the kitchen, leaving Isla alone with Carey.
“She has a team?” Isla asked, forcing herself to turn.
Carey stood looking down at a picture on her end table. It was one of her and Austin at his high school graduation. She wore a yellow sundress, and he looked young and healthy in his cap and gown. “She’s been working with a publicist. She says she needs to revamp her image. I don’t see what’s wrong with her image, but she wants people to like her and I don’t care. Anyway, this publicist person is supposedly teaching her how to better fit into high society. You have no idea how much that is costing me. I know she can be pushy, but she cares about this family.”
The fact that he still called it this family and not my meant the world to her. Her heart ached because their family was smaller today. “Are you okay?”
He picked up the picture and held it to his heart. “No, I am not. I want to go back here, to right here. I want to be in this damn picture before I realized how fragile it all is. I want to go back to when I thought I could handle anything with willpower and money. I was invulnerable when I took this picture. Now I’m an old man who longs for the past.”
She moved over to him. This man had been like a father to her. Even after his son died, he’d taken care of her when he should have been in mourning for himself. “I still think you’re invincible.”
He leaned into her when she put an arm around him. “No. No, I am not. I’ve made mistakes, done things merely to feed my ego. You would be shocked if you knew some of the things I’ve done. But my sins are my own. God, I pushed him. I pushed Austin hard.”
“He loved you.” She’d always been in awe of how well father and son worked together, but then they’d survived the death of Austin’s mother. She’d died of a heart attack when Austin was in high school, and as a result, his teenage years had been more thoughtful than most. It was how she’d bonded with him. They’d met at a grief counseling session. Their respective boarding schools had joined together so they would have a group. Two sessions in and one long talk at the café just off campus, and she’d been in teen love.
She often wondered if that love would have survived the harsh adult world.
“I wanted him to be the best,” Carey was saying. “I knew what it was like to come out of poverty. Until we found the oil on our land, we were worth nothing but dirt. It’s a hard life. I never wanted him to know that feeling.”
“He didn’t,” she replied. “Even at the end, he was smiling and happy for the life he’d had. You gave him that life.”
“And you gave him love. He got to experience that,” Carey said, placing the picture back down. “But I have to wonder.”
She took his hand and led him to the couch. Despite his bluster and bravado, he was getting up there in years. He would be more comfortable sitting down. “Wonder about what?”
Carey sank down, stre
tching his legs out. “I wonder if I would have done to him what I did to Trey.”
She straightened her spine, leaning in. She’d talked to him since they’d gotten the diagnosis, but she hadn’t heard the guilt in his voice until now. “You didn’t give Trey CTE.”
“Didn’t I?” He stared straight ahead, as though seeing something else, someplace else in his head. “Didn’t we all? The owners I mean. We ignored that research for years because we didn’t want to believe it. The players got bigger and the hits got harder, and all we cared about were ratings and cash. How many concussions had Austin gotten before he even finished high school?”
Not that it mattered. “I only remember one.”
“And how many did we miss? I think even if the cancer hadn’t come, I would have lost him. I would have lost him to this game the way we’ve lost Trey. I can’t believe this happened. I know what I said to David, and I’ll say it to every single person who asks. I’ll stand beside Trey through everything, but god, Isla. How could this have happened?”
A chill went down her spine. “Trey didn’t kill Portia.”
“He didn’t mean to kill Portia. I understand that, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time. Sometimes he thinks he’s back on the football field. He nearly killed me two weeks ago because he thought I’d made an interception and was running for the end zone. My knee is still in a brace from that tackle.” Carey turned toward her. “I love that man like he was my son, and you know what I mean by that.”
Austin had been his only child, his precious son. “I do, but I saw Trey that night. He held her after she was gone. He was devastated. I’ll never forget the sound he made.”
“Ask yourself if that was the sound of a man who’d lost. Or of a man who’d made the worst mistake of his life. I know you want to see the bright side of everything, and that’s one of the reasons I adore you, darling girl, but there’s a darkness inside every man. There’s something primitive and vile inside us, and how we handle that wicked piece of our souls, well, that’s the measure of a man. Trey can’t push it down. The disease robbed him of that control. I’m sure he regrets what he did. If he can even remember it.”
She couldn’t bring herself to believe it. “But why? I can’t wrap my head around it. And why destroy her room?”
“He could have thought anything. He’s delusional.” Carey frowned. “And there are some things going on that you don’t know about. Things no one would tell you.”
“Like what?”
He paused for a moment and Isla waited, her hands in fists in her lap. He finally leaned in, his voice going low. “Like Portia was meeting with a man. Regularly.”
“Who?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s the rumor. I do know I ran into her a couple months back. I had a meeting with a friend of mine who was staying at the Algonquin. She was in the elevator coming down when I was going up, and she was rattled to see me there.”
“What did she say?”
“Not much,” he replied. “She muttered something about the fact that she was seeing a friend, but I think she was lying. She looked almost scared to see me. I didn’t understand it. We were friends and she practically ran. I watched her as the doors closed and when she turned back, there were tears rolling down her cheeks. I think she thought I would tell someone, but I never would have. I didn’t even tell you. But I did ask the person who worked the desk if they’d seen her before. I was told she’d been coming in every Thursday for a few weeks at that point, but I couldn’t get them to give me the name of the person she was meeting. Since the room wasn’t in her name and she hadn’t stopped to ask for a number, all they knew was she went to the seventh floor.”
Portia? She couldn’t have been cheating on Trey. It wasn’t in her. “She had to have been there for some other reason.”
“Then why look guilty? Why not stop and talk to me? She practically ran out of the place,” Carey pointed out with sympathy in his voice. “And honestly, do you blame her? The last couple of years have been hell on her. After Oscar practically ran away, she was alone in that huge place with Trey, and no one knows how bad it got.”
“Oscar didn’t run away. He’s a grown man. He needed some space.” And he and Trey had butted heads often, and after Trey started getting worse, so did their fights.
Because Trey wasn’t able to control himself anymore. Because he had problems with his violent impulses.
“Oscar should have stayed home and taken care of his mother,” Carey replied with some fire. “He knew what was at stake and he wasn’t man enough to handle it.”
“There’s more reason there and you know it. He and Trey had trouble before. Teenage stuff. Portia encouraged him to get his own space. She rented the place for him.”
“He took the coward’s way out and now his momma is dead, and I wonder if he knows he could have changed that.”
Isla couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You can’t blame Oscar. Miranda left, too.”
“Miranda went to college,” Carey argued. “That’s completely different. Miranda was off making her parents proud and securing herself a future. What the hell was Oscar doing except milking his parents for cash?”
Oscar was an artist. He was twenty-two and while he hadn’t sold anything yet, he certainly had the artistic temperament down. Oscar could be unpredictable, to say the least, but he wasn’t responsible for his mother’s death. Carey had very old-school thoughts about family. They stuck together no matter what, and even when the son and father fought constantly, in Carey’s mind, the son should defer. In Carey’s world, Oscar should have listened to everything Trey said and been a dutiful, if miserable, son.
Thank god Austin had loved football or he would have spent his childhood in the same misery as Oscar had by not conforming.
Still, she felt the need to defend him, even if she found him difficult to deal with. Portia would have wanted someone to defend her son. “I know he loves his parents.”
“And you loved them, too. Hell, Isla, I didn’t come here to argue with you. I came here to see if there’s anything I can do to help you. I wanted to see if you would come out to Connecticut for a couple of days. Maybe by then the press will have calmed down a bit.”
“I’m a material witness.” She didn’t mention the fact that the DA was gunning for her to be more. “I don’t think I should leave the city right now, but I thank you for the offer.”
He frowned slightly. “Are you sure? Because I hate the thought of you staying here alone. If you’re alone.”
Embarrassment made her flush, and she told herself that she was a grown woman and didn’t need to explain anything, but he was a lot like her dad. “David stayed last night because he was worried about me. Nothing happened.”
Nothing except warmth and kindness and the intimacy of her head resting on his chest, her ear hearing the steady sound of his heartbeat. Nothing but his hand smoothing down her hair and the way he’d cuddled her close when he was sleeping.
She loved the fact that she’d caught him staring at her a couple of times over breakfast and that his friends kept whispering and smiling. This morning she’d felt like she was part of a team for the first time in a long time. Not merely the helpful outsider.
“I was afraid of that,” Carey said. “His clothes were far too wrinkled for a man of his class to be seen in unless he was doing a walk of shame.”
The idea of big, strong David Cormack doing a walk of shame nearly made her giggle. “They were wrinkled because he slept in them. Like I said, he was worried I wouldn’t sleep if I was alone. He’s a good man.”
“And he’s a damn good lawyer. Sometimes that has to take precedence over what kind of man he is,” Carey said quietly. “Don’t get me wrong. I sent you to him because I believe he’s the one who can deal with this and help Trey, but I don’t want you involved with him. Honey, if you’re ready to sta
rt dating again, let me set you up. I know some of the nicest, best men in the business.”
“David is nice.”
“David is a shark. He might be a very nice shark, but you can’t ever forget that he’s a predator at heart. He’ll do anything to win, and if that means manipulating you, he’ll do it. If he thinks you’ll be easier to deal with by romancing you, he’ll do it. Like I said, there’s a reason I wanted him brought in, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to date him. And I definitely wouldn’t want my daughter to come between him and work. That man is all about work.”
That wasn’t the David she’d met. The David she’d met was startlingly compassionate, kind. He’d been quite tender as he held her the night before, and the chemistry between the two of them had been off the charts. That wasn’t something a guy could fake. She’d been alive long enough to know that kind of chemistry didn’t come around often, and she would be stupid to let it go without at least exploring what it could mean.
“I’ll be careful.” She wasn’t going to sit here and argue with him. She wouldn’t win. He was trying to look out for her and she doubted anyone would be good enough for her in Carey’s mind.
“No, you won’t,” he said with a long, disappointed sigh, but his hand came out and covered hers in a gesture of paternal affection. “Let me tell you one story I’ve heard about him. You know he was married, right?”
“He didn’t mention it.” But it didn’t surprise her. He was in his midthirties. A lot of people she knew were already divorced and looking again at that age. They hadn’t spent a ton of time talking about personal things. Well, he’d spent a lot of time listening to her, not talking about himself.
“He married his wife a week after the draft. He went late, sometime at the end of the seventh round. He barely missed taking on the Mr. Irrelevant. That’s what we call the guy who’s drafted in the two hundred and twenty-fourth position. Now, there were a lot of scouts who thought he looked fragile, but he performed well that last season at Harvard. His stats were good enough to get him into a higher round, but it was his history of injuries that made me hold off. But Seattle was having coaching problems and David was known as a leader. I honestly think they brought him in for his brains. Anyway, he got a decent deal. He played backup but had to take over in the second half of his fourth season and he was on fire. He was definitely one of the reasons they made it deep in the playoffs. There was talk about moving him into a starting position and renegotiating his contract.”
