I'll Catch You (Kimani Romance)

by Farrah Rochon

  The bookies in Las Vegas were no doubt having a field day with all the money they were raking in. This was supposed to be the year the Sabers made it to the Super Bowl. No one had expected them to get knocked out so early. It was the nature of the playoffs. A missed tackle here, a couple of costly turnovers there and your season was over.

  Payton tried to shake off her disappointment. As an agent, she could not let her emotions about the game get the best of her. When her agency started growing, she would likely have clients who played on opposing teams. She could not allow her heart to get entrenched in a single team’s season.

  Payton turned her attention back to Percy’s contract. Convincing the rookie linebacker that he should sign with Mosely Sports Management hadn’t been as hard as Payton had once thought it would be. She’d had calls from several Sabers players, a tight end for the Giants, even a power forward with the New Jersey Nets, though she had no desire to move into the NBA arena. After all, she became an agent to stay close to the game of football.

  The flood of calls had started Tuesday, the same day she’d turned down Daniel McNamara’s offer to return to the firm for the very last time. Tuesday had also been the day it was announced that Cedric Reeves would be the face of Electronic Sports Gaming’s newest football video game. News of the eight-figure endorsement deal Payton had scored for her client had buzzed through the NFL’s grapevine at rapid speed, and had several players rethinking the girl agent.

  Too bad she couldn’t enjoy a single bit of her success.

  She and Cedric hadn’t spoken a word to each other since the press conference. He hadn’t answered his phone when she’d called to give him the news about the ES Gaming deal and Payton hadn’t bothered to call back. They’d done the communication-through-nonverbal-devices-only dance before; in fact, the steps were still fresh in her mind.

  They would have to speak face-to-face eventually. The NFL’s free-agency period would open up in a matter of weeks and she and Cedric still had to go over the list of incentive clauses and performance bonuses they would demand during contract negotiations. After the stellar season he’d had, Payton had much more ammunition than when she’d first taken him on as a client a few months ago.

  What happened after their meeting with the Sabers was still up in the air. Now was not the time to worry about that. Everything she and Cedric had accomplished this entire season would mean nothing if he walked out of that meeting without a new contract. They could work on their personal relationship later; for now it was their professional relationship that demanded her undivided attention.

  Payton pushed Percy Johnson’s contract to the side and picked up the yellow legal pad where she kept notes for Cedric’s contract negotiation. It had just occurred to her that his performance in today’s game had put him close to breaking into the NFL’s top twenty all-time rushing yardage. They could demand an extra bonus if Cedric passed that threshold next year.

  Her BlackBerry buzzed atop her coffee table. Payton’s stomach instantly tightened, as it did every time she got an email or text message these days. But the message wasn’t from Cedric, just an email from the Twitter service she’d signed up for. It alerted her any time the volume of internet chatter surrounding Cedric’s name on the social networking site passed a certain number.

  A tiny burst of excitement fluttered in Payton’s stomach as she read the tweets—the Twitter messages people were posting regarding Cedric’s stellar performance in today’s game. Despite the loss, Sabers fans were ready to nominate the team’s running back for the NFL Hall of Fame.

  As Payton came across a tweet from a columnist for one of the biggest online sports magazines, the fluttering in her stomach stopped and was replaced by a feeling of dread the size of a boulder. She scrolled through the messages the columnist had posted. He claimed the insider information came from a source deep within the Sabers organization.

  Cedric Reeves joins Hayes Entertainment Management Co.

  M. Hayes will take C. Reeves to the next level.

  Payton blinked several times, unable to digest what she was reading. She clicked on the pages of several other sportswriters who were also reporting that Cedric had signed with mega-agent Marvin Hayes.

  Cedric had fired her.

  Payton shot up from the couch, grabbed her coat and headed out the door. It wasn’t until she’d made it to Manhattan that it occurred to her that she should call to make sure Cedric was at his home, though he probably would not have answered the phone anyway. Chances were she would be stopped at the front desk of his building again but she’d cross that obstacle when she came to it.

  By some miracle, she found an open parking space on the street. Payton parked at a meter two blocks from the building. Whether it was luck, fate or some higher power, Payton didn’t know, but something was working in her favor. As she approached the entrance to the building’s parking garage, the gates opened and a black Lincoln Navigator eased out. Payton stared right into Cedric’s eyes through the driver’s side window. The overwhelming rush of hurt that crashed through her at the sight of him was enough to bring her to her knees.

  How had they ended up here?

  The window lowered. He didn’t say anything, just stared back at her.

  “When were you going to tell me I was no longer your agent?” Payton asked.

  The gate opened and another car pulled up and honked.

  Cedric motioned with his head. “Get in.”

  Payton hesitated for a second before jogging around the car and slipping into the passenger side. The interior was nice and toasty, but the atmosphere between her and Cedric was as icy as the cold New York day.

  He took a left, his hands tight on the wheel. They drove along the streets of the Upper West Side in the lighter Sunday afternoon traffic. After a solid five minutes of silence, Cedric finally spoke.

  “I was on my way to your place. I didn’t want to do this over the phone.”

  The dread that had sunk into Payton’s bones multiplied, spreading throughout her entire body.

  “Do what?” she asked, a heart-rending ache crushing her chest before he could even speak his next words.

  “I want to exercise the exit clause in our contract.”

  Payton pushed back the threat of tears that clogged her throat. She would jump out of this moving vehicle before she allowed him to see her cry. Yet the urge to do so was so overwhelming, she wasn’t sure her will was strong enough to stop the tears from flowing. Forget being a professional; this cut through the business persona, straight to the core of the woman who had fallen in love with him.

  “I’m sorry,” Cedric said. “I really am, Payton. I didn’t want it to end like this, but I’m thinking about my career. Marvin Hayes is a legend. I don’t care how much you prepare, you could never get me the kind of deal he’ll be able to negotiate. Just his name adds another twenty-five percent to my bottom line.”

  “I know the kind of clout Marvin Hayes wields, Cedric.” And she did. Hayes was the kind of agent others in the business aspired to be, and he rarely took on new clients. Cedric would be a fool not to sign with him. “It’s not that you signed a contract with him,” Payton continued. “It’s that you didn’t bother to tell me. After everything we’ve been through, you didn’t even bother to tell me you were done with me.”

  “I haven’t signed with him yet,” he said.

  “But you’re going to.”

  A pause, then, “Yes.”

  Hurt wrapped around her heart like a fist, squeezing it in a vise grip. Somehow, Payton managed to pull herself together. Emotions had no place here. How could she tout her professionalism if she became this disheartened when she lost a client? It was a part of the business.

  But Cedric wasn’t just a client. She loved him.

  And she was losing him.

  “This is strictly business, Payton. I know what you’re thinking, but it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened between us after the bar fight incident. I know I’ve been a jerk since
then, but I needed to clear my head and focus on the game. That’s why I haven’t been in touch.”

  “Well, it sounds as if there’s no reason for you to be in touch now,” she managed to say while keeping her emotions contained.

  They pulled up to the traffic light a block away from his building. In more ways than one they had come full circle, landing right back where they’d started.

  Cedric stared at her. “Is that how you want it?”

  No. Not at all. But what else was there to say?

  With a nod, Payton said, “That’s how it has to be.”

  Chapter 16

  “Can you hold one minute, Mr. Myers?” Payton switched the first phone to her other ear as she answered her other one. “Percy, I can’t talk right now, but I promise I’ll call you back in an hour.” She switched back. “Yes, Mr. Myers. I apologize for that.”

  She’d once envied agents who needed to walk around with multiple cell phones on their hips. Who knew the juggle would be such a pain in the butt?

  Payton finished up her conversation with the head of the marketing division at Pump You Up Energy Bars—the new super food that promised both energy and muscles. It was the perfect product for a hefty lineman to endorse. She would call Percy Johnson—whom she’d realized ten minutes after signing would be the kind of client who needed his hand held—and let him know the call had gone well. Later.

  Right now, she had a meeting with the Sabers starting quarterback, Mark Landon, who was rethinking his plans to retire now that the Sabers season was over.

  Payton entered the same Starbucks where she’d convinced Cedric to sign with Mosely Sports Management and greeted Mark with a smile. An hour later, she walked out without having signed the quarterback to her roster.

  As soon as she learned of the multiple concussions the Sabers had managed to keep under wraps, Payton knew Mark Landon would never play another game of professional football. He’d called her because his current agent, a man Payton knew only by reputation, refused Mark’s request to negotiate another one-year deal with the Sabers. Mark wanted a ring, but after five concussions over his eleven years in the league, the risk was just too high.

  Another agent probably would have taken him on, collected a percentage of the eight-figure salary a quarterback with Mark Landon’s experience would fetch and then hoped he didn’t take another blow to the head. But Payton refused to be just another agent. Her clients’ well-beings would always come before money.

  She reached in her purse for BlackBerry number one, intending to call Percy, but the phone rang. Payton paused as she stared at the familiar name and number that lit up the screen. At first she wasn’t sure she should answer it, but she tossed the thought out of her head. She was through running away.

  “Hello, Cedric,” she answered, walking to her car.

  “Hi,” he replied. “Congratulations on signing Percy Johnson and Luke Davenport,” he said, referring to the kicker she’d signed last week.

  “Thank you,” Payton said. Not too keen on beating around the bush, she came right out and asked, “What do you want, Cedric?”

  He was silent for a moment, uncertainty buzzing across the phone line.

  “I want my agent to meet me at the Sabers facility tomorrow to negotiate my contract,” he answered.

  Payton paused with her hand on her car door.

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “You’re still my agent,” he said. “You never signed anything dissolving our contract, did you?”

  “I…” No, she hadn’t. In the weeks that had passed since she’d learned of his talks with Marvin Hayes, she’d acquired three new clients and had been too busy to realize she had never received the papers from Cedric exercising the exit clause of their contract.

  “You’re a lawyer,” he continued. “You should know that both parties have to sign the papers agreeing to end the relationship.”

  “Of course, I know that,” Payton said. What she didn’t know is why he had never sent the papers. “Cedric, what’s going on here? Why isn’t Hayes negotiating your contract?”

  “Because he’s not my agent,” he answered. “I couldn’t do it, Payton. You took a chance on me when no one else would.”

  “But you were right. I can never get you the kind of deal Marvin Hayes will. Call him back and beg him to reconsider. You would be crazy not to.”

  “Some things are more important than money,” he answered. “Loyalty being one of them.” He paused. “Love being another.”

  Payton slumped against the side of her car, clutching the phone to her ear as if it were a lifeline. Her heart swelled until it ached.

  “I love you, too, Cedric.”

  “Then meet me tomorrow. Eleven a.m. at the Sabers’s front offices.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Cedric turned to his brother, the smile on his face uncontainable. He bounced his phone from one hand to the other, exhilaration rushing through his veins.

  “Did you…fix…what was…broken?” Derek managed to get out.

  “I did,” Cedric nodded. “I don’t know how but I think I fixed it.”

  He patted his knee and motioned for Derek, who lay prone on the floor, to lift his leg. “Up here,” Cedric directed. In subtle, incremental movements, he edged his brother’s bent knee toward his chest, then eased it back into resting position.

  “You like it here at Marshall’s Place, right?” Cedric asked.

  “Yes,” Derek answered.

  “Good, because I think you’re going to be here for a while. And the best thing is I’ll only be an hour away for a long time to come. Next week, I’m going to bring someone here for you to meet. You’ll like her.”

  “Is she…your girlfriend?”

  “Yeah,” Cedric answered. “She is.”

  “I…have a…girlfriend,” Derek proclaimed.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I’m…gonna…gonna marry her.”

  “That right?” Cedric chuckled. He leaned over and lifted his brother’s other leg up. “Guess what? I’m going to marry my girlfriend, too. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Cedric sat behind the wheel of his SUV, watching the winding driveway that led to the Sabers’s front offices the way a hawk eyed his dinner. It was ten forty-five a.m. and Payton had yet to show. Every time his brain tried to conjure the thought that she’d stood him up, he put a stop to it. She would never do that. If there was anything he’d learned about Payton over these months, it was that she was a professional. She’d agreed to negotiate his contract. She wouldn’t let him down.

  Just then Cedric spotted her sedan coming down the drive at a much higher rate of speed than the posted fifteen mph speed limit. She found an open spot three slots down from where he’d parked. Cedric met her at the rear of her car.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Someone ran into a fire hydrant right outside of my building. Traffic was a nightmare.”

  “The important thing is that you made it with—” he looked at his watch “—nine minutes to spare.”

  “Oh, God. We need to get in there.” She started walking, then stopped. Took a breath. “Okay, I need to calm down.”

  The transformation was stunning. With a few deep breaths, she went from harried to completely composed. The ultimate professional. Payton looked him in the eye, a small smile perched on her lips.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah, baby.” Cedric rubbed his hands together. “Let’s do this.”

  Over the past several months, Cedric had tried to imagine how Payton would handle the forces of nature also known as Sabers upper management. It had taken less than ten minutes of negotiation to realize his worries had been unwarranted. Milton Crawford was a rain shower compared to Typhoon Payton. She didn’t try the usual tactics, the strong-arming, the hostility and shouting Gus was prone to do.

  Payton’s method was much more effective. She’d turned the tables on Crawford and the rest of Sabers management. Instea
d of her trying to convince them that Cedric was good for the team, Crawford was listing all the reasons Cedric should stay with the Sabers.

  She sat at the conference table with her fingers crossed, those sexy shoulders squared. She was strength and power and knowledge all wrapped up in a smoking-hot business suit that Cedric couldn’t wait to peel from her body. She waited for Tom Rutledge, the team’s general manager, to finish his diatribe about where the Sabers were headed as a franchise and how Cedric was an integral part of it. Then she went in for the kill.

  “We all know what Cedric means to this team,” she said. “We also know that after the season he just had, teams around the league have been ringing my phone night and day.”

  They had?

  “However, Cedric wants to remain a Saber,” she continued. “He’s a part of this community and has embraced the fans just as much as they have embraced him. But he also wants to win a ring,” she stated.

  “We all want that,” Rutledge said.

  “But you’ve come up short for the past four years. Cedric has done his part. In fact, he went above and beyond this year. Yet, once again, the Sabers started their off-season early.”

  Payton lifted the teal coffee mug with the roaring Sabers logo and took a slow sip.

  “So, here’s what we’re willing to do,” she announced after a stretch of silence Cedric knew was deliberate. The woman was good at her job. “We’re willing to leave some money on the table, and not ask for the seventy million we’d originally planned to demand, if the Sabers are willing to bring in talent to help take this team to the next level.”

  Cedric tried to keep the surprise from showing on his face. Where had she gotten that number? The most he’d expected was forty million, tops, for the four-year extension deal the Sabers had offered.

  “Some things are more important to Cedric than money.” She glanced over at him and gave him a slight nod. “Cedric wants to give these fans the championship they deserve, and if that means a smaller contract for him, so be it.”