Saving Hearts

by Rebecca Crowley

  “Sorry,” she chirped, dropping into a vacant chair in the middle of his line of sight.

  Convenient.

  She nodded for him to go on, which seemed to satisfy the curious stares of the other attendees. Once again he became the center of the room’s focus.

  “I, uh—” He stuttered, recollecting his thoughts, adjusting the narrative to fit the new, unwelcome addition to his audience. Although he studiously avoided looking at her he felt the pressure of her gaze, the weight of her attention.

  “I used to bet on the sport I play. But not my team,” he added hastily. “Not even the same league.”

  He glanced at Lenny, who’d heard this before and would know if he was lying. He exhaled, caught between two listeners to whom he wouldn’t give the same account if he could help it.

  Anxiety flared in his chest and he took a long, slow breath to beat it down, simultaneously trying to ignore the stock ticker of worst-case scenarios running at a breakneck pace behind his eyes.

  He couldn’t tell the story they each wanted to hear. Lenny expected self-flagellation and guilt, but anything other than a declaration of innocence would strengthen Erin’s power over him. There was no way to appease them both. He was trapped.

  He set his back teeth, talking himself down out of his fevered thoughts.

  What did he do when he stood between the goalposts, waiting for a player to take a penalty kick? He planned as best he could. He read the player’s posture, considered their penalty record, readied himself physically—but in the end he could only ever do one thing.

  Pick a direction and dive.

  He looked between Lenny and Erin. Then he made a choice.

  “But I did bet on teams I used to play for. Players I used to play beside. Whether you have a position on gambling or not, I think almost anyone would agree that’s a little immoral.”

  He was sure he sensed Lenny’s tacit approval, right alongside Erin’s arched brow.

  He plowed ahead. “I never saw the problem with my betting. I was good at it. I won a lot of money. It was a stress reliever, a hobby to take my mind off whatever was happening in the rest of my life. Although, in retrospect, I must’ve known it wasn’t the right thing to do because I kept it secret.

  “Anyway, earlier this year my gambling became public in a way that was totally out of my control. My family found out, my friends found out, and worst of all, my boss found out. What I thought was a harmless extracurricular activity put my entire career into the firing line.”

  He stole a glance at Erin. She hadn’t moved an inch, her face totally unreadable.

  He exhaled as he neared the end of the story, bracing himself for what might result. Lenny had heard his practiced, slightly untruthful version before—he couldn’t change it now—and Erin would instantly know he was lying.

  He had everything to play for and no option left but the one right in front of him. Straightening in his seat, he looked her square in the eye.

  “The day my manager told me I was suspended was my rock bottom,” he lied, deploying the organization’s preferred rhetoric. “I stepped away from my charts, my graphs, my notebooks full of player stats, and fixture schedules. I started attending meetings and never looked back. It’s been five and a half months since my last bet.”

  Smiles adorned the faces around the circle—except for one. As Lenny thanked him for sharing, Erin’s expression was impassive, offering neither accusation nor affirmation.

  He crossed his arms over his chest, refusing to look away before she did. Everything was out there, now. She knew exactly what he was doing—and what he wasn’t. She said she wanted to be friends. He had no choice but to hold her to it.

  * * * *

  To her credit, she waited until most of the meeting’s attendants drifted outside to smoke before approaching him. He watched her with narrowed eyes, steadying himself as he rode a surge of irritation at her presence, her doggedness, her outright refusal to leave him the hell alone.

  She held up her palms as she stopped in front of him. “I know. I’m the last person you want to see, especially here. But we should talk.”

  He said nothing. He had no words for her in that moment.

  She glanced left, then right, almost certainly noticing Lenny’s watchful attention from a few feet away.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she suggested quietly. “I’ll buy you breakfast. There must be a diner nearby.”

  He couldn’t help himself. He smiled.

  “A diner,” he repeated. “You can take the girl out of New Jersey…”

  She returned his smile, and it was the first of hers that he’d seen since Vegas that seemed genuine.

  He couldn’t trust her. But maybe he didn’t have to fight with her, either.

  He nodded to the door. “Come on. I know a place.”

  Fifteen minutes later they slid into opposite sides of a booth in a café.

  “I’ll have the egg-white omelet with asparagus and peppers. No muffin. And coffee, with skim milk on the side,” Erin ordered.

  Brendan didn’t bother opening the menu. “Two eggs, scrambled, with cheddar cheese. Sausage, bacon, mushrooms, wheat toast. Black coffee. And a cinnamon roll.”

  Erin scowled as the waitress walked away. “That’s just unfair.”

  “Be nice to me and I’ll let you have a bite of my cinnamon roll.”

  “Speaking of.” She folded her hands on the table. “I want to call a truce.”

  He regarded her steadily, considering his response as the waitress returned to place two mugs of coffee between them. He watched her stir milk into hers, then asked, “Why?”

  “Because this is exhausting and stressful, and it doesn’t need to be.”

  “I think it does unless your plan to sell me out in the year-end report has radically changed.” He raised his mug, testing the temperature between his palms.

  “It has.”

  He looked up with renewed interest, surprised by her response. “Say more.”

  She exhaled. “We’re both in predicaments. I have certain things I want to achieve in my job, and I can’t get the authorization or resources I need to do them until I deliver other things. Right now, I have to deliver you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I want to launch a campaign for the women’s game,” she explained. “Doing so requires a travel budget. I’ve been told I can’t have this travel budget until I show results on the anti-gambling initiative.”

  He nodded, the pieces coming together. “And I’m all you’ve got.”

  “Exactly. On the flipside, you’ve just become the number-one goalkeeper for a team headed to the league final. You’re about to be redeemed and leave the sport in a blaze of glory—if you don’t get nailed in the year-end report, and if no one finds out about the pretty detailed odds-making activities going on in your basement.”

  He opened his mouth to protest and she held up a finger. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re also currently banned from fully partaking in one of your preferred stress relievers. Meanwhile you’ve got stressful times ahead.”

  He couldn’t argue. He drummed his fingers on the mug, waiting for her to continue.

  She grinned. “We can change it all.”

  Suspicion stirred in his gut, pinching his brows together. “Go on.”

  She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “Quid pro quo.”

  He eyed her carefully, trying to read any hints of deception or manipulation in her body language. Her expression seemed open, her tone sincere.

  He took a long sip of coffee, then replaced his mug squarely on the table.

  “I’m listening.”

  She paused as the waitress arrived with their plates. He watched Erin warily as she thanked the server and took up her fork and knife, swallowing two bites before speaking.

 
“You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” she explained. “You must know other gamblers in the league. Each piece of information you throw my way pulls the spotlight further away from you.”

  “What makes you think I know anything or anyone that could be useful?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You do, though. Don’t you?”

  He did. Of course he did. He wasn’t the only gambler in the league—not by a long shot. That didn’t mean he was happy to sell people down the river to save himself, though.

  “You’re asking me to rat on players. I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can. Don’t pretend you’re friends with every single player in the league, or that they’ve all had your back as you’ve been vilified for the same thing they’re doing. Anyway, you don’t have to give me names. Leads would be enough. Point me in the right direction and I’ll do my own digging.”

  He chewed thoughtfully on a slice of toast. She had a point. There were plenty of Judases in the game who’d gone from begging to learn his system to barely looking at him.

  As far as having his back, no one had, not really. For the most part his Skyline teammates had the good grace not to mention it, and a couple of them—Pavel, most notably—had privately expressed supportive opinions that the punishment didn’t fit the crime.

  But everyone else? Could go fuck themselves.

  Not that she needed to know that.

  He whistled to suggest the enormity of what she was asking. “I don’t know, Erin. I’m not sure what you’re offering is enough to justify it.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not done.” She stuck her fork across the table and snagged a piece of bacon. “Let’s be honest. Neither of us is exactly a twelve-step success story.”

  He declined to respond, still guarded about implicating himself. She brushed off his silence with a dismissive hand.

  “It’s fine, you don’t have to confirm or deny. Just hear me out. We both love to gamble. If you’re anything like me, playing without real money on the table isn’t enough. I tried downloading some phony slot-machine app where you don’t bet actual cash, but I didn’t make it more than a half a day before I deleted it and reloaded a real one. With no money, there are no stakes, and with no stakes, there’s no rush, no release, no high. I believed you when you said you were working the odds but not betting, so tell me whether I’m right. Is it the same?”

  Her words resonated so perfectly that he exhaled, dropping his defensive shields on a rush of air. “No. It’s awful. I hate it.”

  “But you can’t even attempt to put money down because if it somehow gets out, your career is well and truly over, and neither I nor anyone else in the sport can save it.”

  “Correct.”

  “This is where I come in.” She winked, and God help him, his dick stirred in his jeans. “I’ll be your proxy. I’ll place the bets for you. I have so many credit cards on the go, no one will ever connect the dots. If along the way you decide to teach me some of your system, maybe even share the winnings, I certainly won’t complain—and neither will my credit limit.”

  He sat back in the booth, regarding her steadily. It wasn’t a bad idea. In fact it bordered on being a pretty good one.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said, punctuating his words with a piece of bacon. “I give you some leads on gambling in the league and you’ll place my bets. I stay out of the year-end report and you make a little money from our winnings.”

  “You’ve got it,” she confirmed. “And if you want, we can have sex, too.”

  He choked on the bacon. He coughed harshly and repeatedly, his eyes watering as he grabbed a glass of water, desperately trying to suck in air around the pork lodged in his throat.

  “Oops, sorry.” She shifted into his side of the booth, patting his back—and then dropping her hand to his thigh.

  “Slow down,” he commanded, and she reluctantly retrieved her hand and resumed her seat. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  She shrugged, evidently completely unbothered by the bombshell that had nearly turned his breakfast into a lethal weapon. “You know I like to be direct. We had fun in Vegas. I thought maybe we could have fun here, too.”

  He held up his palms. “I’m flattered, I guess, but that’s not how I play. Vegas was a one-off. I don’t do the casual thing.”

  “That’s fine,” she replied, sounding like it genuinely was. “I’m not in the market for anything but the casual thing, so it probably wouldn’t work. Just thought I’d put it out there.”

  “Okay, well, you can put it back in now.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t solicit you again, especially not when you’re eating.” Her eyes gleamed playfully. “Does that mean you’ll be wife-hunting once you get to Nebraska?”

  He took a noncommittal bite of egg. “Maybe.”

  “I can see it already, the tall, blond Midwestern girl who will never understand the offside rule no matter how many times you explain it. She’s probably a teacher, and her first name ends in ‘i’. She wanted to marry a quarterback, but she’ll settle for—”

  “Settle?” he interrupted. “No one settles for a multiple clean-sheet record holder and Golden Glove recipient.”

  She shook her head, smiling fondly. “Brendan. How many people in Nebraska know what ‘clean sheet’ means? They’ll think you ran a laundromat.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he muttered, ignoring that she had a point. In high school he was nationally ranked, recruited to the best college soccer program in the country and awarded a full athletic scholarship. Yet the yearbook superlative for Most Likely to Play Professional Sports went to the mediocre quarterback, who followed up the team’s sixth-place finish with immense weight gain, two years of community college and a drunk-driving charge Brendan’s mother had cut out of the newspaper to show him.

  But times changed. People, places, attitudes—it was all up in the air at any given moment.

  Anyway, he owed it to his parents to come back. At least for a little while.

  “Are we done?” he asked more briskly than he intended, trying to shake off the suddenly negative pivot of his thoughts.

  “I don’t know,” Erin replied. “Are we?”

  He stared unseeingly at his plate, listening for any internal alarm bells. It wasn’t the most morally upright plan—trading information so he could place bets in contravention of the terms on which he’d been reinstated. In fact both of them would be in enormous trouble if their collusion ever became public.

  But it meant he’d be able to bet again. Real money. Real odds, real results. The temptation was immense, especially considering the pressure he was about to face on the pitch over the next two months. In barely a week he’d gone from cold shadow to scorching spotlight, and if he was honest with himself, the mental release of working odds, placing bets and winning or losing was probably all that stood between him and a nervous breakdown.

  High stakes. The highest.

  He couldn’t say no.

  “We’re good.”

  “Shake on it.”

  They clasped hands over the table. Hers was soft and small in his much-bigger one, her grip confident and firm. Suddenly he was back in that Vegas hotel room, her hand around another part of his body, moving with the same assuredness, the same strength yet underlined by an unexpected tenderness, a part of her she didn’t want anyone to see…

  “Pleasure doing business with you.” Her comment jerked him out of his thoughts. She tossed her napkin on the table and stood up. “I have to get back to the office.”

  He waved her on. “Go. I’ll get this.”

  “I should hope so. You’ve seen my credit card statement. You know I can’t afford it.”

  He looked up just in time to catch her flirty wink before she sauntered out of the restaurant, flicking her hair over her shoulders. Two men in suits twisted in their seats t
o watch her leave, and he sighed as he signaled for the waitress to bring the check.

  He’d made a deal with the devil. Now he had to work to keep his soul safe and his hands clean—and off of her.

  Chapter 8

  Erin shivered on Brendan’s porch in the pre-dawn chill, waiting for him to answer the door. She glanced from side to side, doubtful any of his neighbors would recognize her but paranoid nonetheless.

  Then again, it was Brendan who’d insisted they meet at his house to place their first round of bets, so he had to be reasonably confident they didn’t run the risk of discovery.

  Or stupid, she reasoned unhappily.

  Her finger hovered over the bell, about to press it a second time when he opened the door.

  Be cool, she coached herself, managing to keep her jaw from falling open as she took in his early-morning appearance. Finger-combed hair, white cotton T-shirt, slim-fitting gray joggers that weren’t quite long enough. She fought the urge to fling her arms around his neck and kiss his stubbly, drowsy face.

  “Nice of you to dress up for the occasion,” she said tartly instead.

  “The invitation didn’t stipulate formal attire.” His gaze swept her from head to toe.

  “I don’t own anything else,” she fibbed. Truthfully she’d put an inordinate amount of thought into her jeans-and-dressy-top combination, particularly since he’d made it clear he wasn’t interested in anything more than a business partnership. She was fine with that—she was, really—but it didn’t hurt to let him know what he was missing.

  He motioned her inside. “Coffee’s brewed. I assume you remember the way to the kitchen.”

  “Hard to forget those granite countertops.” She stepped over the threshold and followed him into the spotlessly clean kitchen. “I hope your neighbors aren’t nosy. I can’t think of any non-shady reasons I’d be on your doorstep at five o’clock on a Saturday morning.”

  “Unlikely any of them would notice, but I see your point. I’ll give you a garage remote when you leave. Next time you can park inside and come straight in.”

  “Next time? Why can’t we do this over the phone?” She propped one elbow against his expensive counter as he filled a mug with coffee and passed it over.