Saving Hearts

by Rebecca Crowley

  Either way, he didn’t deserve this. And she was better than this.

  Time to tell Marsha she might buy a condo instead and haul ass out of here.

  The excuse was on the tip of her tongue when Marsha pushed open an antique-looking, glass-paneled door at the bottom of the stairs.

  Erin took two steps inside and froze.

  “Here’s where he hides the bachelor vibe,” Marsha explained.

  “Wow,” was the only response Erin could muster.

  He’d converted the expansive basement into an authentic English pub. A polished-wood bar ran along one end, complete with a row of taps and shelves of spirits. The floor was carpeted in muted evergreens and clarets and dotted with low, round tables and matching stools. Pennants from his former clubs in Liverpool and Valencia dotted the walls, and although a few high slit windows let in some natural light the space had a pub’s cozy fireplace smell.

  She moved further inside, then stopped.

  On the wall to the right past the bar was a whiteboard, so clinical and huge that its incongruity jarred in the otherwise dim room.

  It wasn’t the decorating choice that widened her eyes. It was the tight, neat handwriting in bold black marker—and the words didn’t advertise drinks specials.

  The handwritten grid probably wouldn’t mean anything to most people—maybe even to most gamblers. He used acronyms for leagues and teams, abbreviations or initials for players. But she knew the context, and she knew her sport. She knew exactly what she was looking at.

  Betting odds.

  “Gotcha,” she whispered.

  “This could easily be converted into a home gym.” Marsha appeared at her side. “Or a fantastic cinema room.”

  “It’s perfect exactly as it is. In fact, would you give me a minute? I’d like to soak it all in.”

  Erin could practically hear the cash register springing open in Marsha’s mind. “By all means. Take as long as you’d like. I’ll wait upstairs.”

  The agent’s high heels echoed up the stairwell. When she heard the upper door close, Erin focused on the whiteboard.

  She shouldn’t touch it. Or take a photo of it. Or acknowledge it anyway. She shouldn’t even be down here. She should’ve left five minutes ago.

  But if she wanted to march enthusiastically down that road, she shouldn’t have scheduled this viewing at all. She shouldn’t have dropped her credit card bill in his hotel room. She shouldn’t have slept with him in the first place.

  Except she had slept with him. And she couldn’t un-see this.

  What could she do with it? She tapped her finger against her lower lip. It wasn’t ironclad proof—he could just be tracking the odds without placing any bets. Not sure what the point of that would be, but nonetheless, it was possible.

  She took a step back, physically and emotionally. What did she want? And how far would she take this?

  Even if she found something that would ruin Brendan’s career, in her heart she knew she’d never use it, not the extent she probably could. She might threaten and allude, but she wouldn’t go so far as to share something with her superiors that would see him banned from the league. Not this close to the end—not when she wasn’t sure herself that he’d done anything so terribly wrong.

  She wanted to scare him. Not destroy him.

  But he didn’t need to know that.

  She picked up one of the black markers in the tray below the whiteboard. The surface was crowded with his precise handwriting and immaculate gridlines, so it took her awhile to find a spot with enough space to make an addition.

  Eventually, she found somewhere. One of the matches had been rescheduled, so instead of successive columns for the odds on a home win, an away win, a draw, and whether or not both teams would score, there was a white rectangle labeled with what she assumed was the new date the match would be played.

  She crouched in front of the board, uncapping the marker. She wrote carefully, trying to match his handwriting, confident he’d notice the addition but Marsha wouldn’t.

  Eight letters and a dash. She straightened, pleased with her handiwork.

  Hopefully, this would be enough to send him a message and scare him into compliance before things between them got any more complicated.

  She replaced the marker and bounded up the stairs, grinning an awful lot for someone about to tell a Realtor she’d decided she couldn’t afford such a beautiful house.

  * * * *

  “Didn’t she know she couldn’t afford it when she called for the viewing?” Brendan cradled his cell phone in the crook of his neck as he yanked his sports bag higher on his shoulder with one hand and opened the door from the garage into the kitchen with the other.

  Marsha sighed. “I’ll be honest with you. I think it was the pub.”

  “The pub?” he repeated incredulously, slinging his bag on the kitchen island and unzipping the top. “The pub is great. Why would anyone not buy the house because of the pub?”

  “I warned you it could be a deal-breaker.”

  “It shouldn’t be. It’s in the basement. If she doesn’t like it, she can pretend it isn’t there.” He tugged his balled-up workout clothes from the bag and threw them into the washing machine.

  “I told you that for this price people want something special. A gym, or a home theatre. Even a guest suite. This was a single lady. Corporate type. What’s she going to do with a pub?”

  “Drink in it,” he suggested, removing his empty water bottle and shoving it in the dishwasher, then moving to the fridge. “Anyway, I’m not sure single ladies are my target market, even if they are the corporate type.”

  “Really,” Marsha said dryly. “Then who is your target market?”

  “Families.” It was a perfect family home. That’s why he bought it.

  “And what’s a family going to do with a pub?”

  Good point, but not one he planned to concede. “I’m not turning it into a gym.”

  “But you have all that equipment in the spare bedroom. If you just took out the tables and moved in one or two—”

  “I’m not doing it. Find another buyer.”

  “I’ll try, Brendan, but—”

  “Talk later.” He ended the call before she could protest further and shoved the phone in his pocket.

  He opened the fridge and stared unseeingly at the shelves.

  Were people really put off buying his house because of his pride and joy in the basement? It hadn’t been on the market that long and it was something of a specialist purchase at the price, but still…

  Brendan shook his head, selecting a bottle of water and a tangerine. Then he pulled a spiral-bound notebook out of his gym bag and tucked it under his arm.

  He couldn’t think about his house sale right now, not after the bombshell he’d had at training. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about Peter’s injury, and he needed to clear his head.

  He needed to work his odds.

  He jogged down the stairs into the basement, his favorite place in the too-big house. He’d built it to look exactly like a down-market pub he used to frequent when he played in Liverpool—one of the few pubs he could enter without being swamped by soccer fans. The regulars knew exactly who he was, but no one bothered him, and it became his oasis in a city—in a country—that was soccer mad.

  His chronic, background anxiety and feverish thoughts eased every time he stepped inside his own private public house. If only he could make it smell slightly mustier and pay some grumpy old dudes to slump at the bar all day, he’d never know he was in Atlanta instead of England.

  He placed his water and tangerine on the bar and took a seat on the last stool, perfectly positioned to glance between the whiteboard and his notebook. He flipped through pages creased and indented with dense handwriting to the one he’d started that morning. He picked up a pen from beside the bar m
at and settled in to study his odds, hand poised over the paper.

  He flexed his hand, his whirring thoughts already slowing as he scanned the board. His shoulders relaxing, he mentally stepped into the methodical, long-standing routine of calculating and recalculating odds that had been better for his anxiety than anything a psychiatrist ever tried.

  “Anxiety”—that was his favorite diagnosis of the several he’d had since he was a teenager and his cyclical, ultra-focused thought patterns became so intense and intrusive that he stopped sleeping. For as long as he could remember he’d had hyper, scrolling thoughts, like an unending stock ticker running behind his eyes. He unconsciously and instantaneously evaluated every angle of a situation and calculated the probable outcomes. As a child, he knew which slice would be biggest from the slant of his mother’s arm as she cut a cake, and immediately called dibs. If he crossed an intersection he instinctively took stock of how many cars were approaching from which directions and the likelihood that any of them intended to turn without signaling, based on a snap scan of their positions in their lanes.

  Sometimes it was useful. His immense capacity for concentration meant he was an outstanding student, and his naturally heightened awareness and super-fast reaction times made him a star athlete from a young age. He first excelled as a Little League catcher but found his true love when he joined a rec soccer team. After only a handful of games his coach told his mom to find him a real club, and a week or two later he was the youngest player on a highly competitive traveling team. Assessing his height, speed, and uncanny ability to read his opponents’ intentions, his coach immediately put him in goal.

  More often, though, his unusual thought patterns meant he lived with a veering, uncontrollable brain and a constant sense of worry. Because he could predict a full range of outcomes for any given circumstances, he often had negative, fearful thoughts. In the car he braced himself for what felt like inevitable crashes. He’d anticipated fistfights around every corner at school, and he developed an irrational paranoia about failing to complete an assignment or study for a test and spectacularly flunking out.

  After turning in three weeks of math homework early—and then falling asleep in class—his teacher called his mother, who took up the cause of his suspected mental illness with the same gusto she’d used to fight for his older brother’s dyslexia diagnosis and champion his younger brother, Liam, who had Down syndrome.

  He and his mother completed a circuit of every psychologist and psychiatrist in the greater Lincoln, Nebraska, area and received verdicts ranging from adolescent hormones to obsessive-compulsive disorder. He began to resist his mother’s attention and downplayed his symptoms. Steadily she backed off, and he transitioned from hiding his problem to developing techniques to control it, to maximize the upsides and minimize the downsides.

  By the time he graduated from high school he’d become a master of mental self-regulation. For the most part, he simply matured enough to be able to talk himself out of his worst thought spirals, and when the noise in his head became too much he quieted it by working ahead in his calculus textbook, channeling his focus onto the complex equations. In college he took his first statistics class and was instantly hooked, gulping down modeling theories, filling entire notebooks with calculations while setting records on the soccer pitch.

  He finished college in May and in July he was in England, twenty-two years old, with more money than he knew how to spend and fiercer competition on the pitch than he’d ever imagined. He bought advanced statistics textbooks but still struggled to control his increasingly intrusive thoughts—until he walked past one of the storefront betting shops that were legal in the UK.

  That afternoon he sat in a pub for three hours, drinking juice, analyzing the players in the Italian league, researching their past performances and assessing their chances in that weekend’s match schedule. He filled out a betting slip and handed it into the shop with a modest wager.

  He tripled his money.

  Of course, his system didn’t have the same soothing effect now that he couldn’t place any real bets. As soon as the data leaked from SportBetNet he shut down all his accounts and hadn’t wagered a cent since. He’d thought about it, and he’d gone as far as entering his credit card details into one site or another, but always changed his mind in the end, reminding himself the day after his contract expired he could gamble every hour of every day if he wanted.

  In the meantime, he had his homemade pub, his notebooks full of calculations, and his master fixture chart on his whiteboard.

  He scanned a page as he unpeeled the tangerine, looking at the anticipated team sheets for upcoming English matches. He popped a segment into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully, opting to look at one of the London rivalries first. His thoughts settled into a calm hum as he went down the lists of players, weighing each one’s recent performances, injuries, intersection with other players, long-term records against this opponent, track record of conduct in emotionally charged pairings like this one…

  He decided it would be a draw, either 1-1 or 0-0. He glanced up at the whiteboard to see the odds bookies were offering on both scores, squinting at the chart—and dropped the tangerine on the floor.

  Gotcha—EB

  He ground his teeth as he put the pieces together.

  A young, single woman viewing his house.

  EB.

  Erin fucking Bailey.

  He snatched up his phone and redialed the Realtor, then stormed up the basement stairs as he listened to it ring.

  “Hi again, Brendan.”

  “What color hair did she have?” he demanded, stalking across the kitchen.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The viewer today. Was she a redhead?”

  “Actually, yes. Why? Do you know her?”

  He ended the call without another word and turned his phone upside down on the counter, ignoring its buzzing as Marsha called back.

  He paced a directionless circle around the kitchen, shoving his hand through his hair as his anxiety amped up from a background hum to a breath-quickening whine.

  Less than two hours ago his career had gotten its biggest boost in months when he’d been promoted to the second-choice keeper. Now it teetered on the edge of failure again, with Erin poised to push it off the cliff.

  He couldn’t believe she had the audacity to sneak into his house and spy on his personal space in some sick attempt to double down on this antagonistic game they’d fallen into.

  Scratch that—yes, he could. He should’ve known she’d retaliate. He was stupid to think this had ended in her office.

  He stopped pacing and forced himself to pull his thoughts into a coherent line. There was no defense he could use without implicating himself. He couldn’t call her boss, he couldn’t call the press. Any effort to expose what she’d done would send her straight to the league with what he guessed was photographic evidence of an ongoing gambling habit. He’d never be able to convince them he hadn’t actually placed any bets—how could he prove a negative? That would be the end of any sliver of redemption he might grab over the next couple of months.

  He had to hand it to Erin. She was smart, strategic, and knew exactly what she was doing. She’d made a brilliant move in their personal chess match. He never saw it coming.

  It would’ve been kind of sexy, actually, if it wasn’t so infuriating.

  He flattened his palms on the counter as he made a decision. He couldn’t out-connive her, nor did he especially want to. But that didn’t mean he would give up.

  He retrieved his phone, swiping to dismiss Marsha’s three unanswered calls. He scrolled to a number and tapped to call.

  “Good afternoon, Erin Bailey’s office, Suzanne speaking.”

  “Hi, Suzanne. This is Brendan Young.”

  “Mr. Young, hello. I’m afraid Erin’s in a meeting, may I take a message?”

 
He drummed his knuckles on the cool granite. “No. But you can do something else for me.”

  Chapter 5

  With the air of a warrior preparing for battle, Erin reapplied her lip gloss, then fluffed her hair. Satisfied her armor was fully in place, she snapped shut her compact mirror and shoved it in a drawer, then checked the time.

  Four minutes until her meeting with Brendan.

  She hadn’t even flinched when the meeting appeared in her diary, nor did she bother to give Suzanne a hard time when her young assistant revealed that she’d forgotten to ask what it was about. She knew exactly why Brendan was coming to her office, and she was ready for him.

  She didn’t have a plan, but she had a goal. She wanted the scales to tilt back in her favor. For him to back down, quietly go along with her concept for the annual report and slink off into oblivion.

  Surely that wasn’t too much to ask.

  The phone on her desk rang. She punched the speaker button.

  “Mr. Young is here to see you,” Suzanne announced.

  Mr. Young. Erin rolled her eyes. “Send him in.”

  She moved to her wall of windows, crossed her arms and turned her back to the door. A clichéd posture, yes, but for good reason. It exuded superiority.

  Behind her the door clicked open and shut. She didn’t bother to glance over her shoulder, knowing full well who was in the office with her.

  “Brendan,” she stated evenly.

  He laughed, and she spun at the derisive sound.

  “What is this, The Wolf of Wall Street?” he asked, arching a brow.

  Her cheeks heated but she kept her expression cool—no easy feat when she took in a full, sweeping view of the man before her.

  Damn, he’s hot.

  He’d ditched the formal attire and wore slim-fitting jeans and a thin T-shirt that hugged the contoured muscles in his arms and shoulders. His hair was slightly mussed, his eyes hard and clear as emeralds, his mouth set in a tight line.

  She ached to kiss him.