Night Games

by Lisa Marie Perry

  Danica crossed her arms. “God, Lottie, you can’t take dares like that.”

  “Danni, can’t you see she’s upset enough?” Martha said. “Lottie, 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 on ESPN, you can count on that. After the Dibbs 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,” Charlotte 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 y’all were capitalizing on. Can we all be honest enough to admit it?”

  “Damn it, Charlotte. This should humble you!” The boom of Marshall’s voice seemed powerful enough to fell an entire forest.

  “You mean subdue me?” Charlotte handed the tablet to her mother. “It hasn’t. Like Martha said, it’s upset me. I don’t know who could’ve leaked this.”

  “Chaz Lakan called me this morning,” Tem 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.”

  Charlotte hadn’t mentioned her college blunder to anyone…except Nate. “The woman. What’s her name?”

  “Bindi Paxton. She’s engaged to Alessandro Franco.”

  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 Nate had ended up in the hands of his father’s fiancée and had then ended up in cyberspace. Coincidental or deliberate?

  Coincidental, my ass. Charlotte started to rush out of the suite, but her mother’s grip on her arm tugged her back.

  “Lottie, do you have no care about your image or your family?”

  More like my family’s image. “Ma, I’m sorry that what I do and who I am hurts you. But you, and everyone else, need to consider that this photo is just as provocative as what shows up in magazines like GQ and Sports Illustrated. You’re a product of the beauty-pageant circuit. Tell us how many times you were judged on how attractive you were in a bathing suit.” At that her mother let her go and Charlotte kept walking. “I regret that a photo taken twelve years ago can start up a firestorm, but I’m also glad that I finally saw it. The woman in that photo is okay with herself. Fierce. Unafraid. I miss her.”

  Charlotte marched out of the suite with Martha in close pursuit.

  “Wait, Lottie!” Martha flung her arms around Charlotte, squeezing even as Charlotte’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.

  *

  Charlotte 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, Facebook and Twitter, all it took was one person to forward a link. It was too bad that a single long-ago impulsive photo shoot could throw her plans, career, image into a vortex.

  What was worse? She didn’t entirely hate that she’d stripped down in front of a camera. The experience 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 embrace and own it. She hated that she’d given Bindi Paxton—and Nate Franco—the power to use her secret against her in some sort of revenge play.

  Nate. There he was, in a talk with Kip 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 an old-as-dirt naked photo.

  “Charlotte, a word?”

  Turning, she saw Kip advancing toward her and cast a narrowed-eyed glance beyond his shoulder at Nate. “Coach.” Kip proffered a cold bottle of Evian, 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 Charlotte.”

  “Considering it could be boobies, 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?”

  Kip’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 picture than they’re focusing on handling the damn football.”

  “Sounds more like a conversation you should have with them, Coach.”

  Kip 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. In the eyes of 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 Nate.

  “Really, Nate? It’s fine to spill my secrets to Bindi Paxton, 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 attraction tumbling through her, even as she cursed the moment she agreed to join Joey 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, Charlotte. They haven’t seen where I touched you to make you break apart in my arms.”

  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, Charlotte.”

  “Gloat or apologize—it’s all the same. Either way we’re through.”

  “Does the front office know about us?”

  “No, Nate. 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 folks 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?” Charlotte stopped. “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 Blues’ Achilles’ heel. When you hurt me, I’m the only one who’s hurt.”

  “Bindi 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—” Nate swore, kneaded his forehead with his fingertips. “The magazine photo? I had no idea it existed until I got here today and found some o
f the boys passing around a phone.”

  Charlotte shifted her weight to keep from falling into her nervous habit. “I heard what you didn’t say, Nate. 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 Nate left the room—before putting on her sunglasses and marching out.

  “Charlotte, hold up.” Royce Davis, the wide-receivers coach, sprinted the short distance to where she stood outside the staff lounge.

  “Royce.” Drained from her conversation with Nate, 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 backside. “What do you want?”

  “Charlotte,” he said on a low chuckle, “I can answer that with words or with action.”

  To illustrate, he gave her butt a punishing squeeze and went for the waistband of her shorts. She promptly ripped his hand away and pinned it to his chest. “Try this again and you’ll answer to Coach, with words, why I broke your wrist.”

  Royce shoved away, spitting a derogatory word.

  Charlotte went onto the sunny field, straight to Kip, and rose up to say into his ear, “Royce Davis grabbed my ass in the building, 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 folks again anytime soon.”

  Flabbergasted at her cool, matter-of-fact demeanor, he asked, “What do you want to do now?”

  “D’you have to ask?” She was already jogging backward to the sidelines. “Work.”

  Chapter 13

  The last place Charlotte 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. On top of that, she’d never seen so many cold, impassive faces.

  And here she thought she worked with a complicated group.

  At the late hour Joey managed to look fresh and alert in her snug pantsuit and startlingly blue T-strap Saint Laurent 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, Joey’s inviting Charlotte to this location at this time of night was two kinds of strange.

  When she entered the interview room carrying two cups of hot brew in one hand—both for herself, as Charlotte was still nursing the foam cup of lukewarm water-cooler H2O another agent had offered—she took the chair beside Charlotte and set her cane across her lap.

  The gesture took off some of the interrogation edge, but not much. Joey 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?”

  “Nate Franco. Let’s say I took a professional look at him.” At the admission, Joey toyed with the ID badge clipped to her lapel. “Called in a favor to D.C., kept it need-to-know.”

  Charlotte held up a hand. “What the hell? I asked you not to do that.”

  “I had to make a judgment.” Pushing back her curly brown hair, Joey took a swallow of coffee. “When I found out you were sleeping with Nate.”

  “And that was a problem? What are you, a sex narc?”

  “Can’t you recognize when someone’s watching your back?” Joey 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. Nate’s another guy with an ulterior motive. Like Wade.”

  “Nate’s not just another Wade. I didn’t love Wade.”

  “And there it is.” Joey waited long enough for Charlotte 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 mess you over, like that black-ops guy did. Well, Jo, Nate 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. Nate is clean. It’s his father who’s in deep—a gambling network living and breathing in the DiGorgio. We’ve only scratched the surface, but this is what I can tell you. Before he sold the team, Franco was using a proxy to bet on Slayers 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. Alessandro Franco took a huge financial loss, and the next Sunday his son got the living hell knocked out of him in a game against—”

  Charlotte knew her eyes were wide as saucers. It was unbelievable and yet made perfect sense. “The Slayers.”

  Joey nodded. “That week Franco needed his team to win to try to dig himself out. Santino was so good of a player that he was 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 Marshall intimidating him? The man was covering his ass.” She nudged Charlotte gently with an elbow. “What will you do with this information?”

  “Nate and I had an agreement—no cheap shots.” Her friend gave her a meaningful look that said, Wouldn’t leaking a nudie pic of you be considered a cheap shot? She stood to leave. “Maximum results, huh?”

  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.” Joey stood with her cane, pulled Charlotte 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. Charlotte wasn’t much of a dancer, though. When she found her escort behind the velvet rope leading to the front entrance of DiGorgio 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. Dex Harper had harbored suspicions all along, but no one—including Charlotte—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 Slayers upon the change of ownership hadn’t been unexpected—more like anticipated. Now, with no contract and no credibility, Dex was fired up enough to talk to anyone who might hold the clout to clear his name.

  Charlotte found Dex 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 Nate has us thrown out—”

  “I don’t think he will.” Nate 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 Dex. “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, Charlotte had chosen to bring her evidence to Nate first. She’d toyed with the idea of saying nothing until the commissioner’s office made a move against Al. But Nate needed to know the truth before the media captured it, shaped it, exploited it.

  Charlotte’s skin prickled with awareness as her gaze settled on Nate, who sat at a table in the Mahogany Lounge, his features serious.

  As the mezzo-soprano’s haunting aria drifted from the casino ballroom, Charlotte approached Nate, with her companion following close. “Dex,” 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 Franco 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.

  Nate’s gaze cruised her boldly, intimately, as she closed the distance between them. “For days I’ve been trying to get time with you, Charlotte, and when I finally do, you bring him.” He jerked his head in the direction Dex had gone. “Didn’t know you and Harper were a packaged deal.”

  “Probably because we’re not.” Charlotte didn’t want more walls between them, more obstacles to get in the way of her shedding light on the truth. “Nate, he was telling the truth. The team—your father—set him up to fail.”

  “Thought sabotage wasn’t your thing. You’re a Blue and you’re above that, right? So how are you gonna turn around and come at me with this?”

  “I’m coming at you with what the FBI considers the truth,” she whispered. “Dex was set up, and it was all under your father’s orders. Al offered a bounty. He paid his boys to injure opponents and to piss on their quarterback’s plays.”