Lakisha selected a braid and rolled the beads between her fingers. “He said the time wasn’t right.”
“What, he was going to wait until the players filed pay grievances and the power company shut off the lights?”
“No.” The secretary abandoned her hair to consider the palm tree motifs on her impossibly long acrylic nails, then shrugged and turned away, saying, “I guess I could get you the file.”
“That would be nice,” Catherine muttered. She leaned back into the massive leather chair and closed her eyes. “It would have been even nicer a month ago.”
Tom might have owned the team, but the plain truth was that Lakisha Leonard was the one who made the machinery run. And turning the controls over to Tom’s baby sister wasn’t something she’d been willing to do without certified proof of competency.
It had been a grueling thirty days. But somewhere between hauling her life across two states, the endless meetings with the league’s governing board and getting the new season started, she’d somehow managed to assure Lakisha that Tom had indeed been of sound mind when he’d drawn up his last will and testament.
Of course Lakisha was the only one who believed it. Cat sure didn’t. The vote of the governing board was still out. The players, while terribly respectful, were openly uncomfortable. Carl Spady always called her “Little Lady” in a tone that implied that she really ought to be home baking a cake and doing the laundry. John Ingram had called her “Sweetie Pie.” Well, until she’d fired him for nonperformance and then Sweetie Pie had morphed into a power-hungry bitch.
And she could understand how he’d come to feel that way. He’d been the Warriors’ GM for the last ten years. But, as far as she could tell, he’d stopped putting any effort into it somewhere around the sixth. Tom had never called him on it. She had. Not because she could—as John had claimed—but because she simply hadn’t had any other option.
It was done, though. She’d put a man out of work. There was no going back, no point in wishing things were different. The franchise was on the financial rocks and what had to be done to save it had to be done. There was no one else to do it. It was the responsibility of ownership. She owed it to the players. To the fans. It was business. And while every bit of it was absolutely true, none of it made her feel any less guilty. Nice people didn’t make other people unhappy.
The dull click of beads announced Lakisha’s return and Cat opened her eyes just as a fat, brown expansion folder landed on top of the past due bills.
“There you go,” Lakisha announced, already on her way out again. “You read while I go make sure John doesn’t steal my only decent stapler. Replacing it could bankrupt us.”
That wasn’t all that much of an overstatement. Catherine sat forward and turned the folder around. Across the flap, written in Tom’s characteristic block lettering, was a name: Logan Dupree.
She slipped the band and pulled the contents out—a stack of papers, pieces large and small, of yellowed newsprint and glossy magazine and photo stock. The top one was a clipping from a long ago sports page. Lord, what a smile the kid had. Wide and bright and full of life. Eighteen-year-old Logan Dupree, the caption said, had been signed to play center for the Wichita Warriors, the minor league affiliate for the Edmonton Oilers. Tom had written at the bottom of the article: Des Moines. July, 1984.
Catherine mentally ran the math. Over twenty years ago. The kid wasn’t a kid anymore. He was almost into his forties. And two years younger than she was.
She flipped the clipping over, moving on to an eight-by-ten color publicity photo of Logan Dupree in a Wichita Warriors’ jersey. Sweater, she corrected herself with a quick wince. They called them sweaters. Pants were breezers. She had to remember those sorts of things. Like that the C on his left shoulder meant that he’d been the captain of the team. A manly man among men.
She skimmed Tom’s recruitment notes. At eighteen, Logan Dupree had been six foot two and weighed an even two hundred pounds. He shot left and had a slap shot clocked at eighty-seven miles an hour. Catherine grinned. Tom had failed to note that Logan Dupree had thick, dark hair, a chiseled jaw, cheekbones to kill for and the kind of deep brown, soulful eyes that could melt panties at fifty paces.
She worked her way down through the stack of newspaper clippings, photos and magazine articles, through Logan Dupree’s life. She read about his being called up to the majors, about his success there, the trades, the big money contracts, the houses, the cars, the beautiful women.
And she watched him, from picture to picture, change over those years. His shoulders broadened and his chest thickened. The angles of his face became even more defined, more ruggedly handsome. He developed a sense of presence, too; an in-your-face sort of confidence that made his good looks even more dashing, more dangerously appealing.
But it was his smile that changed the most. What had been wide and bright became studied and controlled. Genuine and real were replaced by superficial and plastic. The price of success had been his happiness. The sacrifice of himself. It was so sad.
“Get a grip,” she grumbled as she flipped through the photo spread from GQ, past a picture of Logan Dupree in a tux and seemingly unaware that he had a Hollywood starlet draped around his neck. “You don’t even know the man.”
She gasped and recoiled, then slapped her hand over the picture, unwilling to see any more of the gory details than she already had. The caption was sufficient. An accidental high stick. A freak injury. The sudden end of his playing career. Of his hopes for Lord Stanley’s cup.
And at the bottom of the article, highlighted in yellow, was a quote. “I’m not interested in coaching. If I can’t play, I’m done.” And beside it, in the margin, was a simple note in Tom’s handwriting: Ha!
Chapter One
Logan Dupree didn’t need more than one eye to tell him that the woman in the navy blue suit was a problem looking for a place to happen. He took a sip of his scotch and racked his brain, trying to put her into a place, into a group of people. And couldn’t. Which didn’t necessarily mean much. Long stretches of his memory were nothing more than a chemical-induced blur.
The boat beneath him rocked on the wake of a vessel slowly leaving the yacht club marina. The motion brought him back to the moment and the curly-haired blonde standing on the floating dock. She was shading her eyes from the Florida sun with one hand and studying the stern of his ship. In her other hand she clutched a battered leather bag.
He skimmed her from head to toes. Navy skirt, navy blazer, navy pumps with barely a heel. Run-of-the-mill stockings. A simple white blouse with the first two buttons left open. On a woman who had decent cleavage it would have been sexy. On her… She wasn’t a supermodel; that was for sure. Or a model, period. She was too short, too plain. Not his type at all. She looked more like a—
He dragged a slow, deep breath into his lungs and considered her again with narrowed eyes. A reporter? No, reporters almost always had a photographer in tow. A lawyer? Yeah, that was the more likely possibility. She was wearing the uniform. Logan thought back, ticking through the calendar and the parade of women who’d knotted his sheets over the last year. There weren’t that many of them; his stock had plummeted the day they’d announced that he’d never again meet the NHL’s vision requirements.
But in the years before that there had been a hell of a lot of women. Most of them without names that he could recall on the spur of the moment. Which was about as clearly as he could recall the particulars of their encounters. Safe sex was automatic, though. Even when three sheets to the wind. If this woman was here to