Like a magnet, Cora’s gaze was drawn back to the page.
I didn’t always do right by my children in life, but I’m hoping the acknowledgement of my progeny can make up for it.
Not hardly, Daddy. They’d probably all go to therapy together.
“I don’t care about these people. His…The others.” Cora’s breath was ragged. She was falling apart in front of a former lover’s home, cracking into shards made fragile by her childhood’s emotional scars. The finely cut grass beckoned for a face plant. “I sound like a bitch.” What else was new? “I mean, I’d care if they were searching for Daddy and answers about who they are, or struggling to make ends meet while battling a terminal illness. But I don’t…I can’t make finding them my goal.”
“Cora – ”
“No. I’ll go on working for you for a salary. But not for a sales quota to satisfy Daddy’s will and earn my inheritance.” Three million dollars. What was she doing? “I have to make a stand.” She’d go buy a pair of impractical designer shoes – breaking another stipulation of Daddy’s will.
Amber rubbed her shoulder, looking sympathetic. “Before you make any rash decisions, read the last line.”
Remember, if you abandon your goals, princess, the monthly stipend your mother receives will cease.
Much love, Dad.
“Crap.” Her mother had once loved Dooley, but that emotion had shriveled to bitterness long ago, leaving Lucia with a thirst for revenge, quenched only by Dooley’s hush money – money her mother didn’t need since she’d landed a wealthy Brit years ago, and then divorced him. And yet, Lucia had always threatened to go public with dirt on Daddy if her stipend ceased. She’d claimed her mud-slinging would do more than bring the Dooley Foundation down. It would ruin Daddy completely.
“Do you think this is my mother’s secret?” Cora looked to Amber, who’d questioned Cora about Lucia’s stipend last month.
Amber shook her head. “I don’t think that type of secret would mean the end of the Foundation.”
Bummer. That would have made her decision to bail that much easier.
Six months ago, Cora wouldn’t have cared about the Dooley Foundation’s demise. Now, things were different. If the Foundation collapsed, Amber and Blue would be crushed. They’d worked hard to rebuild the company to its former glory. And, surprisingly, Cora cared about her work and her clients, too.
Daddy was trying to hedge his bets and box her in, something he’d been unable to do when he was alive.
Her hands began to shake again.
Cora wanted to resort to the rebellious defensive tactics of her youth – to fling a dramatic comeback, to down too many tequila shots, to have hot sex with a handsome stranger.
And then a handsome stranger appeared on the drive.
Chapter 3
“Holy Mary...”
Trent stopped admiring the sex appeal of the black Ferrari parked in Jack Gordon’s driveway, and followed the direction of his young assistant coach’s gaze to admire the sex appeal of two beautiful women standing at the apex of the drive – a lithe brunette and a curvaceous redhead.
The voice of Minister Bishop, his ex-father-in-law, echoed in his head: Put to death what is earthly in you – sexual immorality, impurity, passion, and evil desire.
For too many years, Minister Bishop had marked every wayward glance Trent made, every inappropriate word Trent uttered, and shoved his religious wisdom down Trent’s throat. For too many years, Trent had built his coaching reputation at a strict Baptist college under the thumb of a strict moral clause in his contract. A month after his divorce from Minister Bishop’s daughter and just weeks after he’d given notice to Holy Southern Cross, Trent was ready to cuss, to desire, to indulge in some sexual immorality and passion.
There was just one problem. He needed his pious image as the Reverend to succeed.
“Hollywood bimbos. At last,” Archie said gleefully. Women in sight, his stride quickened.
Okay, there were two problems. He had his father’s tarnished reputation to repair. Without it, Archie would have trouble finding work to support Trent’s little half-brother or sister. Now wasn’t the time to live the American Dream by picking up a beautiful woman and having wild monkey sex.
The redhead smiled and waved. The brunette eyed them like a savvy shopper browsing a clearance rack. Her gaze lingered on Trent, almost as hungrily as his had lingered on the Ferrari. Something primal and instinctive stirred below his belt, and it wasn’t the hamburger he’d eaten for lunch.
“Dad,” Trent cautioned. “Please think before your jaws flap. We’re not in Louisiana anymore.”
Archie made an unintelligible noise of complaint.
Randy hung back as the driveway narrowed, deferring the lead to Trent and his father. “How do you talk to women like that?” He wasn’t just wet behind the ears, Randy was drenched in naivety.
“Wave a twenty and ask what it’ll get you.” Archie’s voice was as rough and loud as oversized tires on gravel.
Trent’s jaw ticked.
The brunette heard his old man. She laughed and tucked a piece of paper into her purse behind what looked like a small, black dog.
“What did we talk about in the car, gentlemen?” Trent prompted.
“Don’t cuss. Don’t drink. Don’t make a fool of yourself.” Randy was nothing if not obedient, parroting back the gist of Trent’s lecture to Archie.
Archie said nothing.
“Dad,” Trent warned in his earnest, Reverend voice. A voice that usually garnered respect.
His father stopped and turned. His peppery, bushy brows lowered. “I have forty years coaching experience, and you want to tell me how to behave at a meet-and-greet?”
Trent nodded curtly. “No cussing. No drinking. No disrespecting anyone, including me.”
“Shoot me now.” Archie sighed, then reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out his best booster-club smile. He turned, long legs eating up the distance to the women with his distinctive swagger, Mary Sue Ellen seemingly forgotten. “Ladies, you shouldn’t be standing out here in the summer sun. I hear there’s a bartender inside who makes a mean whisky sour.”
“I was waiting for a man who spoke my language.” The brunette grinned, falling for his father’s charm. Or maybe she was calling the shots. From the street, her lithe frame had made her seem fragile. But her smile was bold and commanding, the kind of smile Trent had fantasized putting the Reverend to bed with. Someday.
“Is that a pooch in your pouch?” Archie eyed the brunette’s shoulder bag, which did, indeed, hold a small, black animal. “Back home, that wouldn’t qualify as a dog.”
The brunette laughed, allowing Archie to lead her toward the front door. “Shhh, Brutus doesn’t know he’s a dog.”
“Hot damn, honey,” Archie said. “My son’s right. I’m not in Louisiana anymore.”
The pair disappeared into the house, leaving Trent feeling passed over.
The redhead extended her hand to Trent. “I’m Amber, Evan Oliver’s wife.” She had a firm handshake and a steady gaze, nothing like he expected based on her Playboy curves or what he knew of her.
Amber was the CEO of the Dooley Foundation. Like his former father-in-law’s church, the Dooley Foundation had some fanatical followers. Their shtick – choose, voice, trust, welcome – was a gimmick, designed to suck people in and convert them to regular paying customers. He’d heard the Dooley Foundation was deeply embedded in the Flash organization, so he’d researched them. Not a sports psychologist on the payroll. Amber’s firm was at the top of his housecleaning list, along with the old regime’s coaches, and a couple of dead-weight players. The fact that Amber was married to Trent’s star player made things tricky, but not unworkable.
Trent introduced Randy and himself.
“Coach Parker, this is the calm before the storm.” Amber claimed Randy with one arm and Trent with the other, and led the two men toward the party. “Take a deep breath, because once you go through that doo
r, your lives will change forever.”
On the brink of achieving his lifelong dream, Trent felt surreal, as if he and Randy were the Tin Man and the Scarecrow to Amber’s Dorothy, entering the gates to the Emerald City. The crowd noise had faded after Archie and the brunette went in. The door remained open. Amber released them, and let them step inside first.
If the women out front hadn’t distracted him, Trent would have prepared himself for the grandeur the expensive sports cars in the driveway hinted he’d find inside. He was used to homes with pomp – his ex-wife’s father made a damn good living as a televangelist, and Holy Southern’s athletic boosters always seemed to live in showplaces. But this…this house put theirs in shadow.
The white marble entry led to a living room as large as Trent’s first home, opening to a two-story rotunda with intricate wrought iron banisters. On the opposite end of the house, French doors led to a large patio and pool. The furnishings were black leather, with modern, square lines, and dark wood.
Archie and the brunette stood outside at the bar near the pool. The bartender was pouring his dad what looked like whiskey on the rocks – damn Dad to Hades. The man lived to make Trent’s life miserable. Archie laughed at something the brunette said. That feeling, like indigestion, gnawed at him again.
“I was beginning to wonder where you were, Coach.” Jack Gordon met them in the foyer as the room quieted. The change in him from a month ago was startling. The man’s pale features and dark-rimmed eyes made Trent’s boss look as if he hadn’t slept in days. Jack was only in his mid-thirties, but he could have easily passed for fifty. “Everyone, this is the Reverend, Trent Parker, our new coach.”
Something twitched at the base of Trent’s spine, a reflexive need to deny his pristine image, but he wouldn’t have landed this job without being the Reverend, wouldn’t have been able to work at salvaging his father’s reputation, or give Randy the start he deserved after the star point guard had sacrificed his body and his own NBA career for Trent’s Final Four win. All their futures depended on him being the Reverend a little while longer.
Players and staff set their drinks down and moved forward to meet Trent. Someone turned the music off.
The Reverend had arrived and killed the party.
~*~
On the limestone patio, Cora only half listened to Archie Parker’s monologue about the year he’d won college football’s highest trophy – the BCS.
Daddy had lied about something no man should ever lie about. How could she trust anything he’d ever said to her? Anger twisted with hurt, and noosed around the need to do something reckless, until she was chafing inside her own skin. If it wasn’t for Amber, she’d be downing shots at a bar somewhere.
Instead, she gripped a water bottle and waited for a chance to talk to Vivian. The Flash’s owner wanted a divorce from Viv – now – and had hired the Dooley Foundation with the promise of a big retainer to help Vivian find inner peace, or at the very least, a man.
Polite laughter from attendees washed over her, along with Archie’s thick Southern twang. The party held no appeal. Inside the house, men and women who made the L.A. Flash a success stood butts-to-nuts, jockeying for a get-down-on-my-knees-and-give-head opportunity with Jack, the team’s owner, and the Reverend, their new coach. She’d stopped sucking up to Jack Gordon more than a month ago. And anyone with the nickname Reverend wasn’t likely to be good company for her.
Outside, clustered around the pool were the demi-gods who played for the Flash and a smattering of wives and bimbos, and wanna-be wives and bimbos. Cora wasn’t interested in being a demi-god’s disposable accessory.
Where in this hell did she fit in?
“We scored two touchdowns to win in the last forty-five seconds,” Archie was saying, chest thrust out with pride. “Can you believe it?”
“I was at that game.” Cora struggled to keep her voice even and her smile in place. “With my dad.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.” She and Daddy had taken two foster kids to the Rose Bowl.
Foster kids? Not effing likely.
What had their names been? Would she be meeting them again if she caved and did as Daddy demanded?
Something hot and desperate injected itself into her veins, pounding urgently: go, go, go. But she had no destination. No outlet for her frustration. There was Amber on the pool deck. She couldn’t leave and let her down. Only, in Cora’s black mood, she was likely to blurt out a totally insensitive truth to her new client, Vivian. Something like, “I slept with your nearly ex-husband.”
That kind of thinking was dangerous. “Whatever happened to that player of yours who broke his leg on the winning touchdown? Did he make it to the NFL?”
“He never returned to that level of play. I think he’s a farmer in Georgia now.” He swallowed the last of his drink. “I know I just met you, but I’d like you to meet someone. Someone important to me.”
“Your son?” Cora asked politely. No amount of good looks could make up for his son’s saintly, plain as dry toast image.
“No. Mary Sue Ellen.” Archie cleared his throat again. “She’ll be my wife come Christmas. We’re expecting.”
“I heard something about that.” A successful football coach in his sixties hooking up with a woman one-third his age? Who hadn’t heard? It was her father all over again. She tried to a smile. “Congratulations. How’s Trent taking it?” Badly, if he was anything like Cora.
The old man had the decency to blush. “He’s…uh…warming to the idea.”
Cora had a sudden burst of compassion for Trent. Her gaze found his rigid back in the living room.
As if reading her mind, Archie said, “Trent’s had a stick up his ass ever since his mother died.” Archie’s gruff voice rumbled into a lower, more fragile octave. “Wanted me to live alone the rest of my life. Didn’t understand me dating. Didn’t understand the women I found attractive.” His voice dropped to a rumbly whisper. “Didn’t understand me. I was hoping that working for him would change things. It’s important to Mary Sue Ellen that we get along.”
Cora made sympathetic noises, although she clearly had one idea in common with the Reverend. Archie needed a good kick in the ass. If only someone had done that to Daddy.
Just thinking about her father had Cora’s Dooley Foundation training kicking in. Who was she to judge who Archie slept with? “You have to choose your own path, Archie. Your choices don’t require family approval.” Her smile felt more natural. “Half the time, my family doesn’t approve of me.”
“I bet you’re a hell-raiser.” He flashed her a kindred-spirit grin.
“Takes one to know one.” She nodded toward the group surrounding his son. “Now, your son…”
“Do you want to meet him? He could use a little welcome to the NBA, if you get my drift.” Archie’s cheeks pinkened again, bringing out the gray in his hair.
What the hell? He’d called her a bimbo earlier. Was he suggesting she use her hoo-ha as a welcome mat?
“I didn’t mean that like it sounded,” Archie rushed on, lowering his voice. “I just think it’d be good if Trent met a woman with balls.” His cheeks turned a ruddy red and he shook his glass, rattling the ice. “I meant balls in the best sense of the word, because I don’t think you have a pair.” He glanced furtively in the region of her invisible panty line. “I mean…A man can drink with a girl like you and not watch what he says.” And then he gave her a grin so like the mischievous ones her dad used to bestow that she couldn’t help but smile in return. “Can I get you anything before I circulate and put my other foot in my mouth?”
She declined and watched him walk to the bar, wondering…If Daddy had told her about other siblings when she’d been younger, would it have hurt any less?
She wanted a drink. She stayed where she was, clutching her water bottle.
At her feet, Brutus sniffed her heels, giving them a tentative lick before Cora gave him a stern warning, “Sink one tooth in these shoes and you’ll die
.” Not that she’d ever hurt Brutus, but the little dog gave credence to her threat. He sighed and looked away.
Vivian Gordon snagged Trent Parker’s arm and drew him out to the pool deck to mingle with the players. She looked runway chic in the latest DKNY – a red lace sheath dress and studded booties. By contrast, Trent was a Fashion Don’t. He wore a sports jacket that fit like he’d purchased it at a discount store. On clearance.
A shame, since he was hot in a diamond-in-the rough sort of way. Built like a six-foot UFC middle-weight fighter, Coach Parker moved with a confident detachment, ignoring the way the players put down drinks and straightened up when he came near. He had close-cropped, brown hair, large hands, sharp eyes, and a crooked smile he’d inherited from Archie, although it lacked the older Parker’s wicked charm.
After what seemed like forever, Amber managed to cut Vivian from the pack and brought her over to Cora. This was it. The moment Cora found out if Viv knew or cared who her estranged husband slept with.
“Viv, you remember my sister, Cora.” Amber’s overly-bright expression was a silent cue for Cora to perform.
And perform, she would. As if she’d never seen Viv’s husband naked.
“So nice to see you again,” Viv said with a gloss of I’m-better-than-you frost, infinitely preferable to a cat fight that started with, “You bitch. You slept with my husband!”
Finally, something was going right. Cora picked Brutus up, tucking him into the crook of her arm. “Amber tells me you’ve signed up for another of our programs.”
“Let’s not play games. Jack believes you can convince me to sign divorce papers.” Vivian glanced through the open French doors to the throng around Jack. Her expression softened. Or she could have swallowed back a small belch, because in a blink the ice-queen mask she’d been wearing returned. “Does the program include legally castrating my husband?”
“We were thinking something more along the lines of balance.” Amber tucked a red curl behind her ear. “Something to help you deal with the stresses of life.”
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