Page 98 of Her Player

Goddamn, that woman.

I tracked her without making it obvious. Three years of practice.

I made the rest of the room while I was at it. Three Senators near the silent auction. A pair of pharma executives at the bar laughing too loudly. A cluster of PHL franchise owners bluffing at each other while pretending not to be. The mayor was somewhere. I'd seen him earlier. The new GM from the Phoenix franchise was here too, which I noticed because he was deliberately not making eye contact with our GM.

Coach and Brynn were dancing.

That stopped me for a second.

I'd never seen Coach dance. Not once. Not at any team event, not at any bar, not even the time Jett got the whole locker room doing the Macarena after a shutout. But there he was, in a tux that fit him too damn well, which meant it was his and not a rental, which meant he owned a tuxedo, which meant he came from money in a way none of us had ever talked about. He had his hand at the small of Brynn's back and he was holding her carefully, and she was looking up at him with that face that she only made when she'd forgotten anyone else was in the room.

They were going to get married, those two. I'd known it the first night at The Hideout. They didn't know it yet, which was the only reason it wasn't already announced.

I'd know. I'd made the same damn decision about a different woman in a different part of this building.

I made myself stop watching them.

That was when I spotted him.

Gerald Hargrove was standing in a small cluster of money men near one of the silent auction tables. Late sixties. Expensive tuxedo that fit better than mine, because of course it goddamn did. The cluster around him was the kind that formed around old money, three or four guys laughing a little too loud at things that hadn't been funny. Hargrove himself wasn't laughing. He was scanning the room with the expression of a man calculating which conversations were going to be useful and which were a waste of his evening.

I knew his face.

I'd done my homework two weeks ago when Coach mentioned, like he was mentioning the damn weather, that the Hargrove group was sniffing around the Vipers' investor table. He'd said it the way Coach said most things, which was without inflection and without asking for help, and then he'd changed the subject before I could ask what he meant. So I'd gone home and started reading.

What I'd found took me about an hour.

Lydia Hargrove. The whole Titans story. The phone calls before nine in the morning. The reason Coach Mercer was in Las Vegas at all. A man had ended my Coach's career on the East Coast over a relationship he'd had every damn right to have, and that man was now standing across a ballroom from me in a five-thousand-dollar tuxedo, looking around a room my Coach was dancing in like he was considering buying the dance floor.

I hadn't told anyone I'd read about it.

I hadn't known what I was going to do.

I'd just known I was going to do something. I'd been waiting for the right goddamn moment.

The right moment was now.

I set the untouched champagne flute on a passing tray. I rolled my shoulders back once, the way I did before I stepped onto the ice. And I walked across the ballroom toward Hargrove's cluster with the easy unhurried gait of a man who belonged exactly where he was. Walk like you mean it.

The cluster noticed me one by one. I watched it happen. The youngest guy first, then the one next to him, then the one across from Hargrove, then Hargrove himself. Recognition flickered through them in sequence. The captain of the team they were all here to pretend they cared about. The guy from the Pirates brawl footage. The guy on the SportsCenter highlight reel from last week.

Room got made for me.

Hargrove extended his hand. “Calloway. Hell of a season.”

I shook it. “Mr. Hargrove.”

Firm grip. Practiced. The kind of grip that had closed deals.

“I was just telling these gentlemen,” Hargrove said, gesturing at his cluster, “that what your team has put together this year is, frankly, one of the more impressive turnarounds I've watched from a distance. Three years from a minor league roster to championship-bound. Quite a thing.”

“It's been a hell of a ride,” I said.

“And the credit,” Hargrove said, with the particular grace of a man complimenting a thing he had not been part of, “goes to your ownership and your coaching staff. Especially the coaching staff. Hard hire, Mercer. Inspired choice.”

He said it without a single ripple in his face.

You piece of work.