Saving Hearts

by Rebecca Crowley

  “Bye, Brendan.”

  He lifted a hand, then watched her cut across the grass to the parking lot. The headlights of a brand-new sports car flashed and chirped as she unlocked it remotely. A door slammed, an engine revved, and she was gone.

  He took his time on the walk to his own car, parked at the other end of the lot. This would be the first of lots of goodbyes, he reminded himself, and probably one of the easiest. No sense in getting maudlin about it.

  Still, he lingered beside his car for an extra couple of seconds, enjoying the warm air, the clear night sky, the knowledge that tomorrow he would train with the best soccer team in the CSL.

  In three months everything would be different, but tonight he knew exactly where he belonged. He might as well enjoy it while he could.

  Chapter 2

  “And that’s how we can significantly increase match attendance and ticket sales with relatively little capital expenditure. In time, I truly believe this could elevate the profile of the women’s game worldwide and expand opportunities for female soccer players for generations.”

  Erin clicked to the last slide in her presentation: a photograph of three preadolescent girls of different ethnicities, arms linked, soccer balls at their feet, broad smiles on their young faces.

  She turned to face the boardroom table, lined on both sides by white men—and one woman—all over the age of fifty. The Executive Board of the Championship Soccer League.

  Her heart ran at a pace competing for a hundred-meter world record. Her whole body trembled with nervous excitement and adrenaline, and her stomach informed her there was a very real possibility she might throw up. But she smiled as though no one had told “no”—as though she hadn’t spent her entire career hearing that word over and over.

  “We have a few minutes left, and I’d be happy to answer any questions.”

  She looked from person to person. The chief marketing officer smiled encouragingly but said nothing. The deputy commissioner glanced at the clock on the wall. The HR director—the only other woman in the room—stifled a yawn.

  Randall Morenski, the chief financial officer, and her line manager, finally broke the silence. “What’s happening with the gambling task force?”

  She blinked. “Uh, well, I’m reviewing the work that’s been done by the regulatory affairs and compliance teams.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “We can’t put that in the annual report.”

  Had the floor just dropped slightly, or was it her imagination? “I wasn’t aware you required any content on the task force for the annual report.”

  Randall smiled wanly as everyone shifted their attention to him. “I know you’ve only been in the job a couple of weeks—and that your job has only existed for a couple of weeks—so don’t worry about not being up to speed on everyone’s expectations. Thing is, after the big gambling scandal with that betting website in February, we need to make it clear to our sponsors, our regulators—everyone—that the CSL is taking gambling seriously. It’s important for us to show we’re cracking down on unethical behavior.”

  “Understood,” she agreed. “Happily, from what I understand of the investigation so far, player gambling doesn’t seem to be a pervasive problem. On the other hand, the women’s game—”

  “But there was that one guy, the local. Plays for Skyline. The leaked data showed he was winning tens of thousands of dollars betting on soccer. What’s his name?”

  “Brendan Young,” she supplied grimly.

  Randall snapped his fingers. “Brendan Young. You should speak to the Skyline manager, the Swedish guy—Roland Carlsson. Find out how Roland punished him. Maybe we can include something on that.”

  “I certainly will,” she offered brightly. “But it might be worth bearing in mind that the data breach was six months ago, at the beginning of the season. As far as I’m aware, Brendan completed his suspension and hasn’t been off the bench since. I’m not sure there’s much more we can—”

  “But was that enough?” Randall challenged, brows raised.

  “If Roland Carlsson felt his—”

  “We need a big bust,” he decided. “Something splashy for the annual report, proving the CSL is tough on gambling and tough on players who violate the code of ethics. Take the investigation deeper. See if you can root out any other major gamblers. If not, let’s make Young do his penance in a full-color spread.”

  “Perfect,” she lied. “If we can quickly go back to my presentation, I really believe there’s still time left in the season to lay the groundwork for a focused women’s game promotion campaign next year, and—”

  “Sorry, I’m going to have to step out,” the executive vice president for Communications announced, rising from his seat.

  “I also have a hard stop at eleven.” The general counsel was on his feet, and soon the entire Board began to file out of the room.

  “Feel free to email me with any questions, or if I can clarify anything further,” Erin told the line of departing executives.

  “I’ll ask Lizzie to find time for us to meet about the task force.” Randall gave her a thumbs-up, then followed the others out of the room.

  “Fantastic, thanks,” she muttered, turning to close down her presentation and unhook her laptop from the projector.

  She made her way back to her office with significantly less spring in her step than on her walk into the boardroom an hour earlier. She left her door half-open, dropped into the big leather chair behind her desk and swiveled to stare out her floor-to-ceiling windows at downtown Atlanta. The sky was a brilliant blue and the bright, high summer sun glinted off the skyscrapers. By all accounts, it was a beautiful day.

  “Fuck,” she whispered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  The Board wanted quid pro quo. Fine. She’d taken this job knowing she’d be alone in her fight to improve the women’s game, and that the creation of the Director of Ethics and Advocacy position was the league’s response to a couple of iffy news stories over the last year. She expected to face ambivalence. Opposition. Even suspicion.

  She never expected to face Brendan Young.

  The resistance, the lack of buy-in, the full awareness that her appearance probably helped her land this job as much as her experience—she was used to it. She’d been underestimated by people in positions of power since she was ten years old, hovering outside her father’s home office while he phoned every boys’ traveling soccer team in New Jersey until he found one that would give her a tryout.

  Not that it made her special. Every successful female athlete she knew had run a gauntlet of skepticism and pushback. Leaving the game and transitioning to the business side of sports only made it worse. Goals on a scoreboard were indisputable, but professional competence was a lot harder to prove.

  Still, she made it. From a low-ranking policy analyst at a think tank to a talking head on major news networks, and now an executive director with a sprawling office and a paycheck to match. She should be delighted. Even if she had to give the Board what they wanted in order to get what she wanted, she couldn’t be in a better position to marshal the resources and exposure to finally give women’s soccer the boost it deserved.

  “Except for Brendan fucking Young,” she muttered.

  She wasn’t the type of woman to have an Achilles’ heel, but damn if he wasn’t as close as she got.

  She leaned back in her chair, remembering the first time she saw him. A naïve freshman in her third week of college—and the product of a parochial, all-girls private high school—she’d had one amaretto sour too many at a soccer party. She was running her mouth, on a tangent about women’s soccer, totally oblivious to the predatory attention of two sophomores when Brendan pushed a bottle of water into her hand and led her away.

  He’d been kind but slightly aloof that night, and through the next two years they overlapped at Notre Dame before he graduated. She developed a fero
cious crush on him but even then she’d had no time to waste on relationships or romantic dramas. When she wasn’t sleeping, studying, training or playing…actually she was always sleeping, studying, training or playing. A few seconds of swoony fantasy usually accompanied the rare occasions when she ran into Brendan, but every other minute of her life was dedicated to building her future around soccer.

  Erin bit her lip, transposing the cool-headed twenty-year-old he’d been then with the man she’d slept with on New Year’s Eve, and then the man she saw last night in the church basement. He still commanded every one of the six feet and four inches that made him especially attractive to a tall woman like her. His ash-blond hair was still thick, his green eyes still piercing, his body the same lean perfection she’d enjoyed over and over again in Las Vegas. But as a college kid, even as a one-night stand, his characteristic calm had always been underpinned with a glimmer of humor. A flash of the unexpected. The potential to be totally surprising.

  Instead, he’d seemed weary last night. Drained. Resigned.

  Yet not quite defeated.

  She exhaled, propping her tablet in its docking station and shaking her mouse to bring the screen to life. Brendan had just about scraped through the gambling scandal with his personal legacy intact. Randall Morenski wanted to change that—and she was responsible for making it happen.

  “Can I come in?”

  Prinisha, the whip-smart Head of Advocacy she’d pulled over from the think tank, stood in her half-open doorway. Erin nodded.

  “How did it go?” Prinisha asked, settling into a chair.

  “About how I expected.”

  Her face fell. “Then they weren’t tossing confetti to celebrate the bright future of women’s soccer.”

  Erin shook her head. “No, but they didn’t set up roadblocks either, which I saw as tacit approval.” She reconsidered. “There is one roadblock.”

  “What?”

  “Morenski wants a big piece on gambling crackdown in the annual report.”

  Prinisha frowned. “Why? They’ve already done a four-month investigation that shows gambling isn’t a major problem.”

  “I don’t know, but I believe the words he used were ‘big bust’ and ‘splashy’.”

  “That sounds more like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition than a year-end report.”

  Erin shuddered, picturing Randall’s beaklike nose and liver-spotted bald head. “Amazing, thanks. Now, whenever I see him I’m going to wonder about the stack of magazines he keeps under the bed.”

  “Or in the toilet,” Prinisha added. “I bet the pages are all stiff with—”

  “I can’t unthink that and he’s my boss, so let’s not.”

  “Sorry,” Prinisha offered, although her grin suggested she was anything but. “So, it sounds like if you get Randall his gambling piece, we can expect support for the women’s advocacy program. Is that right?”

  “That’s that gist. If we can’t get anything else from the investigation, he wants me to go after Brendan Young.”

  “Brendan Young,” Prinisha repeated, her eyes brightening as the name registered. “The online betting dude. Didn’t he get fired from Skyline?”

  Erin shook her head. “Suspended, then benched. He’s still there until the end of the season.”

  “So we hang the guy out to dry. Sucks for him, but if that’s what Morenski wants, then.” She lifted a shoulder.

  Erin nodded slowly, her mind working. That was what Randall wanted, and if she gave it to him, she might gain an ally where she had few. She and Brendan hadn’t been friends for years, not really—not since he graduated and became one of the most successful American players in the game, signing first for a major club in England, then in Spain. There was no shortage of money and opportunity and attention for a player like him.

  But for her? She’d fought for everything she had. There were no lucrative international contracts waiting for her when she graduated, despite being one of the highest-scoring strikers in the history of the college game. She slogged through a few years in the women’s side of the Championship League before the microscopic pay rises and empty stadiums became too depressing. Then she traded the dressing room she’d struggled so hard to get into for an office where she was right back at the bottom.

  Brendan wouldn’t know anything about that. He became a multimillionaire at the age of twenty-two.

  She owed him nothing. He had money and an apparently profitable gambling habit he could resume with gusto once he left the sport. He was leaving Atlanta, leaving soccer, leaving the world where she was finally getting a foothold. Even if she had the remotest interest in dating, Brendan would be at the bottom of a long, long list of potential candidates, if for no other reason than it wouldn’t exactly behoove the Director of Ethics to be on the arm of the sport’s biggest ethical shit-show.

  There was no good reason why she shouldn’t give Randall his punitive pages and secure her future at the league.

  Except for Brendan’s smile. That reluctant, almost sheepish quirk of his lips. And the way he’d looked out for her when she was an eighteen-year-old he’d never met before. And his expression as he’d slid inside her in Vegas, that flash of awe and disbelief and sheer delight.

  And, of course, that he might be the only person in the world with enough clues in hand to realize that she was a gambler herself. A compulsive gambler. Maybe even a problem—

  “You’re right,” she told Prinisha firmly, shutting down that line of thought. “Brendan’s career is over. We might as well dig what we can out of the ruins.”

  Prinisha grinned. “Where do we start?”

  Erin took out her phone and began scrolling through her contacts. “Leave it with me.”

  * * * *

  Brendan returned the security guard’s friendly smile as he signed in on the ground floor of the towering building that housed Championship League Soccer.

  “Long time, no see.” The guard leaned over the side of his desk to buzz Brendan through the security gate. “I thought they were done hauling you in here.”

  “Apparently not.”

  He pressed the button for the eleventh floor without having to be told. He’d been to league headquarters more times in the last six months than most players racked up in their careers. The only difference on this occasion was who’d summoned him.

  Erin Bailey.

  He looped a tie around his neck as the elevator swished up. He’d debated whether he needed it but decided he was better safe than sorry. Who knew, she might spring the commissioner on him.

  He wouldn’t put it past her. The Erin who lied about why she was at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting wasn’t the Erin he knew—or the one he thought he knew, anyway.

  The elevator doors slid open, revealing another set of glass doors bearing the CSL logo. The receptionist barely looked up as he entered.

  “I’ll let Erin know you’re here,” she informed him. He took a seat on the low couch opposite her desk.

  He didn’t wait long. He’d barely taken out his phone when Erin appeared in the doorway behind the receptionist.

  She wore a tight black dress and her hair was smoothed into some kind of high, complicated knot. Her eyes flicked to his tie and he instantly regretted wearing it.

  “Come on back.” She nodded for him to follow her, flashing her fake smile.

  He trailed her around the edge of the open-plan area to what he gathered was her office. She shut the door behind them and he stopped short, taking in the sweeping view of downtown.

  “Nice digs,” he remarked as she took a seat behind her desk.

  “Thanks. Sit.”

  But he decided to treat himself to a tour instead. He moved along the wall, studying the framed pictures. Her senior-year college team. Her professional team, New York’s Empire Ladies. Her national team, next to which hung—“Wow, you’ve got i
t here.” He took the frame down from the wall, studying the Olympic gold medal up close.

  “Figured I might as well put it where I can see it.”

  “I never got one of these.” He tilted the frame, watching the light play over the gold surface before replacing it on its hook.

  “Don’t worry, I think your name found its way onto a couple of big trophies in Europe. And from the way the season is wrapping up, maybe onto this year’s CSL championship trophy too.”

  “Doesn’t really count if you spent the championship season on the bench.” He turned to face her. “Is Donald coming?”

  “The commissioner? No, why?”

  “Just checking.” He unknotted his tie and shoved it in his pocket.

  “I thought that was for my benefit.”

  He shook his head and finally dropped into the chair in front of her desk. “What’s this about?”

  Her fake smile returned. His heart sank.

  “As you know, as the league’s Director of Ethics it falls to me to assure our stakeholders—sponsors, staff, even the fans themselves—that Championship Soccer is above reproach when it comes to conduct on the pitch and off. The SportBetNet data breach raised a lot of—”

  “Cut the shit,” he interrupted. He’d seen her naked—he was entitled to curse in her office. “What do you want?”

  Her amicable façade fell away. She sat back in her chair, taking his measure with narrowed eyes.

  “I’d like to run a profile on you in our year-end report. The Board wants to show the league is tough on ethical violations, but I think we can spin it to be redemptive. I spoke to your manager this morning, he said you completed all—”

  “What do you want from me?” he clarified, impatience tightening his muscles. How many times was he going to be punished for something that only dubiously qualified as an ethics violation?

  “I’m doing you a favor,” she snapped. “The Board would happily vilify you in high-gloss color. I’m giving you the right of reply and an opportunity to help me help you. If you’re not interested, you can leave and I’ll give them free rein.”