The Player's Club: Lincoln

by Cathy Yardley

  She thought about George. Could he really help her out?

  I’d rather put my own eyes out with a shrimp fork.

  But he’d claimed to be in the Player’s Club…and he claimed to have a producer’s interest. She thought he was probably lying on both counts, although there was a ring of truth there that most of his bloated claims didn’t have.

  What if George actually had started the club with his cousin? They had the money, and the connections, to create a secret society of thrill seekers and hell-raisers. Maybe George’s boorish act was just that, a facade. Maybe he was hiding his true nature.

  Although, considering he was bragging about it, probably not, she thought with a frown. As far as she knew, he only had one cousin, the heir to the bulk of the family fortune, Finn Macalister. She hadn’t partied with Finn in a long time; she remembered him as a gangly, almost shy kid, and George had mentioned something about an illness that she couldn’t remember. Still, Finn had been cute, and he hadn’t been grabby—he’d had a subtle sense of humor she’d enjoyed.

  Could a kid like that start as infamous a secret society as the Player’s Club?

  Then she stopped short, blinked twice.

  Infamous.

  If there really were a club, and she could become a member…

  What producer wouldn’t be interested in a show like that?

  She smiled. Maybe she’d just have to find ol’ Finn Macalister.

  LINCOLN STONE DIDN’T consider himself a particularly spiritual guy. He also didn’t consider himself a Native American—probably because he wasn’t one. However, he did consider himself a team player. Which was why he was sitting in the sweltering heat, in a large, leather-covered tent on a big patch of land somewhere south of Lafayette, listening to an ancient, wrinkly-looking Indian chief hum and wail in a guttural chant.

  Finn hit him on the arm, then motioned for him to follow. Lincoln nodded at the other guys sitting around the circle and gave a discreet thumbs-up to the one in the center—the pledge, Jerry Knox.

  They exited the tent, and the cool night air was like a shot of ice-cold vodka, refreshing and intoxicating. “You okay?” Lincoln asked, inhaling deeply. “Sometimes guys pass out in sweat lodges. It’s no big deal.”

  “Nah, I’m fine,” Finn said, waving a hand. He knuckled sweat from his forehead. “And this has been a pretty decent challenge, all things considered.”

  Lincoln sighed. “But…?”

  Now it was Finn’s turn to sigh. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad we kicked out George.”

  “Damn straight,” Lincoln muttered under his breath. He knew Finn had some residual guilt about kicking his cousin out of the Player’s Club, but Lincoln, for one, could only see the pluses in getting rid of the drunken, arrogant misogynist. “So, what’s the problem?”

  “I agree with the rules we set out, and I think we’re being more careful about who we’re bringing in,” Finn said. “Maybe we’re being too careful, though.”

  Lincoln frowned, taking a few steps in the grass, working the kinks out of his legs. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting in the sweat lodge. “What do you mean, ‘too careful’?”

  “The challenges. I’m glad we’re asking what you’d do if you only had six months to live, but we’re getting the same thing, over and over. I like traveling, but I’ve been to Amsterdam, Paris, India—hell, even Antarctica, you know?”

  “That was not a boring challenge,” Lincoln pointed out.

  “But it’s all been done. We need some fresh blood…somebody who’ll have some new challenges. Something different.”

  Lincoln grimaced. “We’re doing a new challenge right now. Jerry’s a good kid.”

  “Yeah, yeah. They’re all good kids,” Finn said. “But he’s the first pledge we’ve added in two months. And we’ve got plenty of other requests. Why can’t we bring more people in?”

  Lincoln turned to his friend, surprised. “There’s thirty of us,” Lincoln said. “Hard enough to keep a secret, and if we keep adding members…”

  “We had closer to sixty before we peeled off George’s crew.”

  “Again, look how well that was going.”

  Finn huffed out an irritated breath. “Listen, I’m not saying we should go back to what we were with George. I don’t want the drinking and hazing and all that macho crap. But I don’t want us to get so careful that we forget why we started the club—to face what scares us, to do what we’d regret missing. Besides, I don’t think we need that many new recruits. But I am saying, if you’re going to cherry-pick and keep it down to just a few people every couple of months, let’s make them people who are really going to challenge us, as well as themselves.”

  Lincoln stared at Finn. Finn was his best friend, had been for nine years. Albeit, sometimes there felt like a barrier between them, a difference in basic opinion. Finn hadn’t been like this nine years ago. He was growing more and more restless…almost dangerously so.

  That might not be a great thing for Finn, Lincoln thought, with a nasty jolt of concern. But bottom line, it would not be good for the club.

  Still, he trusted Finn…and no way was he going to ignore what Finn was saying.

  “Do you have anybody in mind?”

  “I’ve got a couple of candidates, sure,” Finn said.

  “Anybody I know?”

  “How about Tark?”

  “Ellis Tarkington?” Lincoln said. The wail inside the sweat lodge grew louder as somebody started playing a tom drum. Lincoln felt the sweat chilling on his body and wished he’d thought to bring his shirt with him. “The guy who tried to imitate that magician and froze himself in a block of ice?”

  “They got him out in time,” Finn said, shrugging. “But okay, good point. How about Mike Romello? He made it up to Everest, for God’s sake. Twice.”

  Lincoln closed his eyes. “I think he’s not going to be available.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because he just went to jail for embezzlement,” Lincoln told him, and was gratified when Finn’s eyes widened. “How, exactly, do you think he afforded the teams to go to Everest?”

  Finn sighed. “I mean it, I’m not like George. He wanted to use the club as his own private fraternity, an ego trip, and he would’ve cut anybody out that didn’t agree with that. That’s not what I want at all,” he argued. “Right now, it’s predictable and frankly, I’m getting bored with it.”

  Now Lincoln drew his mouth in a tight line. “You know why I started the club, Finn.”

  Finn ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of frustration. “You know, I can barely remember.”

  “We were in that hospital room,” Lincoln said. As if he could ever forget it. “You’d just finished up a bad bout of radiation, and I’d totaled my car and had both legs in casts.”

  Finn grinned. “Well, yeah. It’s not like I’m going to forget that.”

  “And…”

  “And we both decided that if we were almost going to die anyway, we might as well do something fun before it happened.”

  “Well, that was more your thing. I just figured that it was time I stopped acting like an idiot, trying to kill myself with stupid stunts, trying to run away from my past.” A past he’d never really gone into detail about with Finn, he acknowledged. Not that Finn had ever asked. His loyalty and his willingness to accept Lincoln as he was were what made Finn like a brother to him.

  Finn nodded. “So we wrote our list. Did our challenges.”

  “And you got bored,” Lincoln pointed out, with a grin of his own. “So we decided to bring on some other people. Like your cousin George.”

  “I’m never going to live that down, am I?”

  “It was a good idea,” Lincoln said. “Not George, but sharing it, making it into the club. Now, whenever I bring on a new member, that’s what I see. I see myself, back when I thought life was just something you conned your way through, something that didn’t matter. Before we pushed ourselves to try stuff we’d barely
dreamed about. And I know the new guy is about to change his whole life, and he doesn’t even know it yet.”

  Finn let out a breath. “Okay, I feel a bit ashamed.”

  Lincoln shook his head. “Wasn’t meant to make you feel ashamed. I’m just telling you what I feel the club’s about.”

  “Live like they were dying?” Finn asked.

  “Cliché, perhaps,” Lincoln said. “But I’m not complaining. And neither are the other members, Finn.”

  “But if they’re going to move to the next level…if we’re going to keep people in the club,” Finn persisted, “I think that it wouldn’t hurt to bring on someone who can show them something new. That is not just traveling the world or skydiving. We need something new.”

  “All right, Finn. Whoever you want to bring on next, I’m okay with it. Go ahead.”

  Finn smiled. “Thanks, man. I’ll see who I can find this week.”

  “Just…” Lincoln clenched his jaw. He knew the club was sort of his family—his baby. He had some trouble letting go. “Let me meet him first, okay?’

  Finn shrugged. “Okay, Dad. You ready to get back in there?”

  They were going to “stomp” Jerry into the Native American tribe. It was something Jerry had wanted to do all his life—something he’d dreamed of. Something he’d swore he’d do before he died.

  “Yeah,” Lincoln said. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  2

  JULIANA SMILED WHEN her phone rang. “Hey, Finn.”

  “Hey, Jules. Listen, my friend and I are just about there…are you sure about the address?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  There was a pause. “Because…it’s a store.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Another pause. “Are you telling me you want to meet us at Agent Provocateur?” There was a laugh in his voice.

  “Yup.”

  “Um, mind if I ask why?”

  “Because I could use some new thongs,” she said. “So come meet me at the dressing room, okay? The salesgirls will tell you where it is.”

  “I know where it is, actually,” he said, and now she laughed. “I think I mentioned that my friend might be a little hesitant about letting you into the club.”

  “That’s why I chose the meeting place,” she said. “Don’t worry, Finn. I know how to persuade men. If your friend’s straight, I’ll have him eating out of my hand in about thirty seconds.”

  “I would pay cash money to see that. We’ll be there in a few minutes,” Finn said, and hung up.

  She tucked her phone back in her purse, and surveyed herself in the mirror. Yes, she knew men…especially the type of men, like George, who would want to be in an extreme, fraternity-style secret society like the Player’s Club. She didn’t judge them, she simply knew which buttons to push.

  She adjusted the demicup of her royal-purple merry widow, did a quick turn. Her hair was up, Brigitte Bardot-style, with a few curls tumbling down along her shoulders. She looked sexy, and dangerous, and a bit naughty. Only her eyes showed the slightest hint of…not nervousness, she realized, checking her makeup. Just weariness, and a bit of calculation. She plumped up her breasts. With her girls on full display, very, very few men actually looked into her eyes.

  “Jules? You there?”

  She smiled, debated pulling on a filmy gray robe. Then shook her head, letting a few more curls escape as her cheeks pinkened to a nice rosy color. She blew herself a kiss in the mirror.

  Then she stepped out of the dressing room. “Right here.”

  She took in the two of them. Finn had filled out a bit, she noticed with appreciation. He’d always been cute, in a gawky boy-next-door sort of way—always the quiet younger cousin to George’s brash, aggressive charm. Finn was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of long shorts with some suede skate shoes. If you didn’t know he was worth a few million, you’d never have guessed it passing him on the street. She liked that about him. It made it easier to just be yourself around him. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, with some genuine affection, although she stepped away quick enough so he didn’t get any ideas. Then she turned her attention to the real problem: her opposition, Finn’s buddy. She smiled.

  Then she got a good look at him, and all the rest of her thoughts blanked.

  He was about six-two, with hair the color of walnuts, dark enough to be almost black. His eyes, in contrast, were light…a soft hazel, shades of green and gold and brown, hypnotic in his lean, chiseled face. He wore a suit as though he was born to wear one, and had broad enough shoulders to make her heart beat noticeably faster. He was somber, too, his stern expression a strange counterpoint to Finn’s foolish grin.

  Yum, she thought, forcing herself to focus as she regained her composure. Well, he wasn’t going to be a hardship to charm. She held out a hand. “You must be Lincoln,” she murmured. “Finn’s told me so much about you.” But not that you were tall, fine and seriously hot.

  He held her hand for several seconds, a firm pressure—he was strong, she could tell, not someone whose only exercise was pushing away from his desk or doing an office jog to the copier. For some reason, he reminded her of a medieval knight. Or maybe of someone else—God knew, she’d met so many people in her life that after a certain point they all started bleeding together in her memory.

  “He hasn’t told me anything about you.”

  She quickly pulled her hand away from his and reevaluated the situation. Lincoln openly glared at Finn. “I’m the new pledge,” she said, remembering what Finn had called her. “I’m going to join your Player’s Club.”

  Now Lincoln’s glare shifted over to her. He seemed to be scouting the lingerie store to see if anyone was listening to their conversation. One of the saleswomen was folding tank tops on one of the glossy black tables, another was adjusting a silky negligee over a faceless, curvaceous mannequin in one of the windows. Having reassured himself that no one was eavesdropping, he turned his gaze back to her.

  “You’re not joining the club.”

  There was controlled fury in his voice. He was staring at her as if he wished he’d never met her, much less was letting her in his precious club. She crossed her arms.

  “Why not? Is it because of who I am?”

  “What?” He faced Finn. “Who is she?”

  Finn sighed. “She’s Juliana Mayfield,” he replied in a low voice. To her shock, Lincoln’s face remained blank.

  “So?”

  “She’s…um, famous,” Finn explained. “Sort of, anyway.” He sent her a look of apology.

  She knew she wasn’t a true celebrity, but damn it, she was famous. Some would say “infamous.” Now she was not only completely ignored by this gorgeous, arrogant man, but her old friend Finn was apologizing for her.

  Well, this wasn’t going at all the way she’d planned.

  “She’s one of those celebutantes, isn’t she?” Lincoln’s tone was one of sheer revulsion.

  “No, no. She’s cool.”

  “And she’s standing right here,” Juliana interrupted. She quickly cloaked her vulnerability with her second-best weapon: anger. And not just any anger, but Southern-woman anger. She might’ve been born in Los Angeles, but her mama had been a Georgia peach with an iron fist. Even as a waiflike model, her mother’s words could cut men to ribbons like razor wire, as she smiled and offered pie the entire time.

  “I didn’t realize that you needed Lincoln’s permission for me to join, Finn.” She paused, letting that sink in. “What, do you work for him?”

  Finn might not be the macho jerk his cousin was, but no man wanted to be considered his friend’s subordinate.

  “I don’t,” Finn said, scowling at Lincoln. “I seem to remember that someone told me I could choose the next pledge. Remember?”

  “She’s not a pledge,” Lincoln replied quietly. His hazel gaze swept over her, she could feel the heat burning from its sheer intensity. He was pissed at her, obviously.

  He also wanted her. She smiled, letting her tongue lick h
er lower lip in a quick, almost imperceptible gesture. He might not want to show it, or even admit it to himself, but he wanted her.

  She would use that, she thought, sharpening her smile.

  “Oh, really? I’m not a pledge, hmm?” She stepped closer to Lincoln, smiling coquettishly even as she let her eyes blaze. She knew her chest was heaving slightly as she breathed a little harder, and she let it work in her favor. “So what, exactly, am I?”

  He surprised her again. Despite her shameless display of cleavage, his eyes never left hers.

  “You’re a woman who courts publicity, who lives for it.” Even upset, his low, husky voice made her want to shiver with pleasure. “You’re a woman who knows what she wants and doesn’t anticipate that anyone will say no to her. You’re smart enough to think that traipsing around in lingerie is going to get a man wrapped around your finger—you’re dumb enough to think that I would be that man. And you’re clearly a woman who thinks that by joining the Player’s Club, you’ll get something out of it, rather than add something to it.”

  He stepped back from her with a withering glance. “Finn, she’s out. Pick another pledge.”

  He turned on his heel and walked away.

  Finn’s face was red. “Sorry, Jules.”

  “What? That’s it?” she said, shocked. How had things jumped the rails so irrevocably? “He says no, and you’re just letting him? Just going to follow instructions?”

  Finn straightened his shoulders. “Don’t push, Jules,” he answered, then let out a frustrated breath.

  “Who the hell is he?” she asked, crossing her arms.

  “Lincoln Stone. He’s my best friend and, lately, a bit of a horse’s ass,” Finn muttered. “Listen, let me work on him. Either way, I’ll call you soon, okay?”

  And with a gentle, apologetic shoulder squeeze, he darted out, catching up with Lincoln’s retreating frame.

  Juliana stood, cold in her tarted-up garb.

  “That merry widow is gorgeous, such a lovely color on you! Will you be buying that?” the saleswoman asked, gliding up to her smoothly.