by Maggie Wells
“Exactly what I’ve been aiming for my entire career,” Kate muttered.
“I’d never let them exploit our Katie.” Avery’s response was automatic but a bit distracted. “How much do they pay for those things anyway?”
Millie looked over and found Avery staring intently at the scotch in her glass. She smirked. “I hear you get some decent moolah. Should we call a modeling agency?” Millie asked with exaggerated sweetness.
“I think between me and Danny, we’ll be able to cover the light bill.” Kate laughed, but an edge of sharpness undercut the effect. Wetting her lips, Kate dismissed her moodiness with a short shake of her head. “Sorry. Just a little tired of being talked about like a commodity.”
Millie grimaced an apology. Kate’s contract negotiations had taken on new dimensions when the university had tried to dismiss Danny due to their personal involvement. All of Kate’s future happiness, personal and professional, had boiled down to what essentially became a game of chicken played out in the media. As her friend, Millie couldn’t blame her for wanting to shy away from the spotlight, but professionally, she had an obligation to the university and to Kate herself to be certain she was positioned to grab all the best possible opportunities for publicity. It was a constant struggle for balance but one she was supremely adept at handling. The high-wire act was part of what Millie loved about her job, and Kate knew and understood. The dichotomy kept their friendship interesting, if not always harmonious.
Avery set her glass on the table and, with her trademark single-mindedness, followed her thoughts straight down the rabbit hole. “I bet they pay well though, and if you were to put the money toward—”
“I don’t want to be anybody’s poster girl.” Kate paused, then split a look between them. “Like everyone else, I want to be left alone to do my job.”
Millie nodded, swallowing any smart-assery she might have spewed a couple of months before as she remembered Ty expressing the same sentiment nearly word for word the night Mari’s defection became public. She gave her friend the same canned answer she spewed at him. “No one lives in a vacuum,” she said instead.
“I know,” Kate murmured, staring at the scarred tabletop.
Then she lifted her head, tossing back a fall of smooth, chestnut hair that always made Millie think of the sleek, glossy mane on a thoroughbred horse. That’s exactly what her friend was—a thoroughbred. Beautiful but skittish. Born to run like the wind but kept carefully corralled.
The increase in revenues generated by college athletic programs meant the system had become a gilded cage. Deep-pocketed alumni or enthusiastic boosters still mattered, but they weren’t where the big money came in. No, the networks supplied the grease to make the wheels turn. The public had staked a claim on intercollegiate athletics, elevating some of the programs and their players to a level many professional franchises aspired to reach. And a run of bad publicity had brought down more than one legendary program.
Coaching was the one area where the pay for performance was entirely legal. Fail to live up to potential, and the press would take great joy in helping to dismantle a career. It had happened to Danny and a good many football coaches before him.
Now, the spotlight was shining brighter on the hardwood court. The men’s programs, like Ty’s, were destined to take the heat, but high-profile women like Kate were becoming a bigger target. Avery considered this progress, from a detached, feminist point of view. But both Millie and Avery were attached to Kate, and the strongest argument for the advancement of women either of them could make was to help her bargain from a position of power. In all things.
“What’s happening, Mil?” Kate asked, her voice gentle with concern. “For a couple of weeks, you were all coy and enigmatic whenever we talked about Ty—”
“Apparently not too enigmatic,” Millie grumbled.
Avery chuckled, then reached over to pat Millie’s hand. “More the giddy kind of enigmatic. Gives you away every time.”
Kate nodded and tapped the thick handle of her mug. “For the last couple of weeks, you haven’t said anything at all, which leads us to speculate.”
“Right now, the leading theories are Mari had him killed, and someone’s making a hole in the desert,” Avery said, holding up one finger.
“Holes in the desert would be Las Vegas. Ty’s in Reno,” Millie corrected. “Besides, Mari’s getting her divorce. Why would she kill him?”
Avery shrugged. “Quicker?”
“Messy,” Kate interjected.
“I’m pretty sure he’s not dead.” Flicking up a second finger, Avery moved on. “Okay, possibility number two is Ty met one of those chorus girls, and you discovered they’re busy trying to repopulate the earth with freakishly tall children.”
“Wow. Talk about fast work,” Millie commented, raising both brows.
“Personally, I think that’s your long shot,” Kate chimed in. “I think we all know Ty prefers the vertically challenged types to those of us with loftier aspirations.”
“I may not qualify as freakishly tall, but I’m not exactly petite,” Millie reminded her.
Avery sat up taller on her stool, but the adjustment didn’t do much good. “As one of the vertically challenged, I find this line of reasoning offensive.”
“It was Kate’s reasoning,” Millie hurled back.
“And in the absence of any other information.” Avery made a circling motion with her hand, prompting her to be more forthcoming.
Millie inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, savoring the familiar and not-at-all-sexy scents of Calhoun’s—stale beer, industrial cleansers, and postadolescent pheromones run amok. God, she wanted to talk to them. She’d always thought she could tell her best friends anything, but this was hard. How did a woman admit she failed as miserably at long-distance relationships as she did the ones up close and personal?
“No one lives in a vacuum,” Kate whispered sotto voce.
Millie narrowed her eyes at Kate, annoyed her friend had the balls to throw her words back at her, but even more irked she wasn’t big enough to kick Coach Snidely-Snyder in the ass.
“Fine.” She pushed her drink to the center of the table and clasped her hands primly on the sticky surface. “You want to know what happened?”
Avery rolled her eyes so hard, she almost toppled off the stool. “We’re mildly curious.”
“And if you answer with ‘nothing,’ we’ll know you’re lying.” Kate tucked her hair behind her ear and focused her full attention on Millie. “Something happened. We’ve been trying to wait for you to come around to telling us, but you’ve lost the giddy, and now we want to know why and how badly we need to hurt Ty.”
“We had phone sex,” Millie blurted.
Avery gripped the edge of the table as she reared back. “Whoa. So not what I expected.”
Kate barked a laugh, fluttered her eyelashes in disbelief, then knocked her ear against her open palm a couple of times as if to knock some water out. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you clearly.”
“We. Had. Phone. Sex.” Arching her eyebrows, Millie eyed each of them challengingly.
Avery’s bright, inquisitive eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Has to be more than that.”
“Obviously,” Kate said, bobbing her head. “You had phone sex, and his head exploded?”
“As far as I know, Coach Tyrell Ransom was last known to be alive, well, and unexploded in Reno, Nevada.” Millie looked from one woman to the other but found only the bafflement she’d been feeling for the last two weeks written in their expressions.
Kate shook her head. “I’m still processing the leap from phone sex to no phone.”
Swallowing what was left of her pride, Millie gave up the tough-girl act and leaned in close. “Everything was going so well. He kissed me the night he spouted off to Jim Davenport on the phone,” she said in a hushed rush.
&nbs
p; “He owed you at least a kiss for shooting his mouth off,” Avery said in an officious tone.
“Before, not after,” Millie clarified.
“Either way, I’m not surprised,” Kate interjected. “You two have been throwing off more sparks than a soldering iron since the day he came here. Of course he kissed you.”
“Again when we went to New York…” She paused, not sure how to explain how conflicted she’d been about the events of that night. “We kissed, but nothing else has happened.”
“Until now,” Kate concluded.
“Nothing’s really happening now. I’m here, and he’s there,” Millie sputtered. But her friends knew her too well to buy into the spin.
Avery definitely wasn’t buying. “Other than the phone sex.”
Kate cocked her head, her face open and curious but not condemning. “Did you want something to happen? Then, I mean. Knowing he was still married.”
“Technically,” Avery interjected. When both heads swiveled in her direction, she lifted a shoulder in a defensive shrug. “I think we can all agree the marriage pretty much had a fork sticking out of it.”
“Still, he was married.” Kate’s voice was firm and uncompromising.
Millie’s cheeks burned as she recalled the ambivalence she’d felt about his marital status as they’d jolted through the New York streets in a darkened town car. She might have slept with him. She wanted to—a fact she wasn’t exactly raring to admit to her newly married friend. Millie had long ago given up any illusions she might have had about the matrimonial state. The old saw about taking two to make a relationship work was heartbreakingly true. No one person could love another enough for the both of them.
Bypassing the moral quagmire, she steered the conversation back to the facts. “We kissed. Things were said. Certain…implications were made,” she said, choosing her words as carefully as she would for a press release.
Avery ran a fingertip around the rim of her highball glass. “Dirty implications?”
Millie considered her answer carefully. “Somewhat.”
“Errrrrrgh!” Avery made the buzzer noise again, then glanced at Kate. “I’m going to need a ruling on this.”
Kate pulled back in surprise. “A ruling on what?”
“Can an implication be somewhat dirty?” Avery persisted.
Kate’s brow creased as she gave the concept consideration. “Well, yeah. I think so. I mean, an implication is by nature vague, so the connotation of an implication can be vague as well, can’t it?”
When Kate looked to Millie for backup, she held up both hands in self-defense. “I’m not the professor here.”
The two of them zeroed in on Avery, and Millie drew a calming breath as they joined forces to bounce her request for a ruling back at her. But Avery, being Avery, threw her head back and laughed, accepting the parry with grace. The younger woman could be bold to the point of aggressive, but she wasn’t the least bit cowed by being proved wrong or reluctant to admit when caught out.
“Fine. Implications, connotations, and ambiguities,” she chanted.
“Oh my!” Kate grinned, tickled by the verbal byplay. But simple amusement wasn’t enough to knock Kate Snyder off her game. The unwavering intensity Kate brought onto the court zoomed in on Millie. “Be as vague as you want, but anything you don’t tell us, we’ll fill in with our own versions.”
Resigned, Millie gave up the struggle. “We kissed. He called. Things were said,” she recapped.
“Can we get a little clarification on the ‘things’ bit?” Avery signaled the waitress for another round of drinks, then drained her own glass. “Not the dirty things, the other stuff. The general tenor, so we can better parse the subtext.”
Millie treated her friend to her own version of the impatient eye roll. “Okay. We discussed some of the finer points of the attraction between us—”
“Saw this coming from the get-go,” Kate interjected.
“From the start,” Millie conceded with a regal dip of her head. “I wasn’t alone in indulging some less-than-professional thoughts about him.”
“God, I love it when she gets all choosy with the words,” Avery murmured.
Millie paused as a perky coed in short shorts and a skintight shirt emblazoned with Greek letters delivered their drinks. To buy a little more time, she plucked the umbrella and uneaten fruit garnishes from glass number one and added them to the second before allowing the girl to take the melted dregs of her daiquiri away.
“Tell me, in any of these ‘less-than-professional thoughts,’ was Ty perhaps wearing those tight shorts like Magic Johnson used to wear?” Kate raised hopeful eyebrows. “I bet he’d look great in them.”
Avery cast a wistful sigh. “Ah, the days of guy thighs. I miss tight baseball pants too. I swear, they’re killing all the eye candy in sports. Then again, I don’t have a lot of luck with the baseball players.”
“Since when do you know anything about baseball players?” Kate demanded.
“Since the night of your wedding party,” Millie supplied, filling their friend in on what she’d missed while romping around on the beach. “Miss Avery made a play for Dominic Mann.”
“No,” Kate gasped, her gaze shooting to Avery, then back to Millie for confirmation.
“She’s been tight-lipped about it,” Millie said pointedly.
Avery shrugged. “Nothing to tell. I struck out.” She blinked beguilingly at her friends. “See what I did there? I sports-talked.”
“Very good,” Kate commended warmly.
“I’m into soccer now,” Avery added. “Did you know soccer guys wear knee-highs?”
Millie blinked in surprise. “You think those are sexy?”
“I’ve found a way to twist it into some variation of the Catholic-school-girl thing.”
“You are twisted,” Millie declared.
“Sauce for the gander.” Avery toasted her with the scotch, took a sip, then shuddered as she gulped the alcohol down. “But back to the thighs at hand. I mean, the guy we’re talking about,” she corrected with a smirk. “Tyrell Ransom, Coach Handsome, the fella about to be divorced and man voted most likely to tear up Ms. Millie Jensen’s sheets.” She planted an elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm. “Tell us about the phone sex. You can go word for word with that. Maybe we can help figure out where you went off the rails.”
Tiring of interrogation cloaked in conversation, Millie decided to charge right into the fray. “One night he called, the conversation went to a…more intimate place, and we backed our words up with deeds. But then Ty told me he didn’t want to do it again. He babbled something about saving things until he got back, and then the phone calls became a little too tense, so I backed off on talking to him, then…nothing.”
“Bupkus,” Avery added with a sad wag of her head.
Kate sighed. “Shut down.”
“Yeah,” Millie and Avery said on the same breathy sigh.
“So sad, to have the sex shut off like a spigot,” Avery said morosely.
Touched and more than a little suspicious of the depth of her friend’s empathy, Millie eyed Avery closely before stating the obvious. “You’re drunk.”
Avery’s unpainted lips ticked up in a wry smile. “A little.” She swirled the whiskey in her glass. “This stuff is strong.”
Kate removed the glass from Avery’s clutches and set the highball on the far side of the table. “Now you know why the big boys all call it firewater.”
As if to controvert the accusation of impeding inebriation, Avery straightened her spine. “I’m sorry you were clit-blocked on the phone sex, Mil.”
Kate opened her mouth to say something, but Millie held up a hand to stop her. Millie appreciated the sentiment. “Thanks, Ave.”
“Clit-blocked,” Kate muttered under her breath as she lifted her beer.
Unable and unwilling to dance around the topic anymore and desperate for the reassurance only her closest friends could offer, Millie blurted her biggest fear. “But what if he didn’t want to because I was bad?”
The question seemed to jolt Avery from her stupor. “Bad? What do you mean bad? Like God is going to strike you down, bad?”
“No, bad as in I sucked at phone sex,” Millie corrected.
Kate was quick to shake her head. “I highly doubt you were bad.”
“How do you know? You and I have never had regular sex, much less phone sex.”
“And we’re going to keep that little bonding activity in the never column,” Kate said firmly. “But come on. I can’t even imagine how bad a woman would have to be for a guy, any guy, to be all, ‘No, that’s okay, don’t talk dirty to me,’ you know?”
“Men are not verbal,” Avery added, nodding sagely.
“Right, I know, but come on.” Millie practically wailed the last part. “We go from ‘I’ve thought about you for years’ to ‘I want you so bad, I can’t take it anymore’ to ‘We’re never doing this again’ in, like, a split second.”
“God, I must be drunk,” Avery said, her eyes fixed on a point beyond Millie’s shoulder.
Desperate for input, insight, a little female compassion, Millie cast a baleful look at Kate. “Hell, I was still basking in the self-induced afterglow and the sonuvabitch was deleting my phone number. Can I really be that bad at phone sex?”
But Kate didn’t seem to have the words to give her the reassurance she needed. As a matter of fact, her attention appeared to be locked on whatever Avery had been staring at across the bar. Peeved, Millie twisted on her seat, anger rising inside of her as she sought out what could possibly have snagged their interest.
And there stood Ty. Live. In person. Gorgeous as ever and standing not two feet away from her, clearly surprised by her outburst.
He cleared his throat, then nodded greetings to Avery and Kate before taking the single step to close the distance between them. “The answer to your question would be a resounding no.”