One thing I learned early in my career was to trust my gut. If a defensive end twitched in a way I didn’t like, I never questioned the zip along the back of my neck that told me a blitz was coming. If I started doing that, I’d hold the ball for a second too long, and a single second had the ability to change the outcome of a game.
Currently standing in the hallway of conference rooms at the Wolves front office, I couldn’t erase the feeling of my gut screaming. Coach Klein pulled at the collar of his shirt, clearly as uncomfortable as I felt on the inside.
“Why are we doing this before the team meeting tomorrow?” I asked him quietly, just before we entered the room that held our GM William, our CEO Cameron, and the other two team captains besides myself. This morning when I’d woken with the sunrise, I had a text on my phone saying we were needed for a meeting regarding the new owner. Instead of the team as a whole, they only requested the small group of people who led the team. Meeting with the whole team would be during the regularly scheduled time about twenty-four hours later.
Coach Klein shifted again, and I gave him a strange look. “You okay, Coach?”
“It’s the daughter.”
It took me a second to place his strange comment, the sluggish gears in my head clicking into place with a loud, clumsy clack. “The new owner?” I hissed, eyes wide.
He nodded. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I know you well enough that you can’t filter your reaction for shit when something truly blindsides you.” His finger pointed at me, and his gray eyes looked icy and hard under the lights. “And you need to be the one to set the example for the team.”
“His daughter,” I repeated slowly, choosing to ignore his entirely accurate statement that I didn’t always react well in surprising situations at this level of importance. “His daughter is our new owner.”
Coach scraped a hand over his haggard looking face. “Yeah. None of us have ever met her. I don’t think she was around much the past few years.”
“She wasn’t around at all, Coach.”
“You paying attention?” he asked grumpily.
My mouth flattened before I could answer. “No, but he and I talked about her a grand total of one time in the past twelve years. He wanted to know what my plans were for our bye week, which happened to be over Thanksgiving that year. I told him, then asked him the same thing. And you know what he told me? He’d had Thanksgiving at his assistant’s house for the past decade because his daughter never came home.”
Coach grimaced.
The thought of Faith ever abandoning me like that felt like someone was choking the air out of my lungs with tight fists. Yeah, the man was rich as hell, but his daughter was the only family he had. Who does that?
“She was living somewhere in Europe,” I said when Coach didn’t say anything. “Off playing dress up. Some business she’d tried to open failed horribly from what he told me. And now we’re giving her the reins of all of this?” I gestured down the hallways.
Anger ripped through me, frustration like a hot wind coming right on its heels. Because whoever she was, she hadn’t done a damn thing to earn the right.
Coach rubbed his forehead and sighed heavily.
“Does she know anything about football?” I asked furiously.
“I don’t know, Pierson, but you better not ask her that in this meeting.”
I propped my hands on my hips and worked to breathe evenly. “I don’t like this. I really, really don’t like this.”
“You don’t need to like it,” he reminded me with lifted eyebrows. “You need to play football and play it well. That is your job.”
“Got it,” I said through tight lips. A burst of laughter came from the conference room, and I put on my game face, hypothetically speaking. Coach saw the transformation and nodded in satisfaction. “She in there?”
“I don’t think so. Cameron wanted to explain it to the captains first before she came in for introductions.” He pointed at me again. “Now, no matter what you happen to think about this situation, remember that she lost her dad last week, and this situation can’t be any easier for her than it is for us.”
I barely held back my snort of disbelief. Yes, it must be terribly trying for the only child of Robert Sutton the Third. The woman probably became a billionaire the moment his heart stopped beating. Growing up with that kind of wealth at your fingertips was unfathomable to me.
The son of a school secretary and a mechanic meant that we never went hungry, always had a roof over our heads, and clothes that fit us, even if they were secondhand. But my roots were humble and as blue collar as the grease-stained uniform that my dad wore every single day of his life.
He’d drilled into my sister and me that wealth was fleeting, money wouldn’t cure unhappiness, and if you were smart, you’d keep your head down, pay your bills, and live a life that didn’t break your bank account, saving the rest so your family would have a good future.
Growing up in mansions and a world of private planes and boarding schools was as foreign to me as if someone had dropped me into a different country without speaking the language. The wealth I had now still felt fragile and flimsy, which was why I lived modestly. I never wanted Faith to think that her privileged life was anything she was entitled to. That it was normal. Because I damn well knew it wasn’t.
“You coming?” Coach asked when I hadn’t moved.
Following him in, I greeted the other two captains. Dayvon, our left tackle, was huge and hulking and terrifying when you didn’t know him, and he was the only man I’d trust to protect my blind side, which he did amazingly well. He held his fist out when I passed, and I bumped mine against it.
“Hey, man, did you thank Monique for those cookies she gave Faith?” I asked him.
At the mention of his wife, he smiled widely, his teeth bright white against the dark skin of his face. “She wants to take that girl home with her every time you bring her in. Says that after having four boys, she needs to try one more time so she can get a little girl just like Faith.”
I laughed, a small knot of tension unwinding in my chest as we spoke. I could do this. It would be fine.
Logan, our veteran safety and the captain representing the defense, lifted his chin in greeting. I did the same. No fist bumps for us or small talk since Logan was a quiet guy when you weren’t part of his inner circle. Not something I would hold against him. He led the defense the same way I led the offense, by example and with thorough preparation.
Cameron, the team president and CEO, sat at the opposite end of the long rectangular table, flipping through some papers in front of him. When I reached the empty chairs on the other side of Dayvon, he held his hand out. His face looked more lined than usual, so maybe everyone was having some trouble adjusting to the change.
“Pierson,” he said when I shook his hand. “Thanks for coming in.”
“Of course.” Like I had a choice was what I wanted to say.
Once I sat, Cameron took a deep breath and glanced around the table briefly. “I received a call from Robert’s attorneys the day before last, informing me of a trust he’d created just a couple of weeks before his heart attack. Given that Robert and I enjoyed a forthright working relationship for many years, I have to assume he thought he’d have time to explain his actions to me, which, unfortunately, didn’t happen. He and his late wife only had one child, and it was my understanding that her relationship with Robert was not a close one. I’m under the impression Miss Sutton has gotten as little clarification as we have to explain why he took these steps.”
While that information settled into the tensely quiet room, I took a few moments to slow my racing thoughts. Perfect. Not only did she not earn this, but she also wasn’t expecting it and had no preparation for what to do. It took everything in me not to bang my head against the table.
“The reason I’m explaining this to you now, before she and William join us,” Cameron continued, referencing our general manager, “is so that we don’t subject her to the awkward announcement that she had no warning she was about to own a professional football team. It’s for this reason,” his voice turned firm, and I knew that four of us were getting crystal clear instruction for how we were about to proceed with this meeting, and the team meeting the next day, “that we’re making sure you—the leaders of this football team—are on board to extend her grace as she assumes this massive responsibility and ensure that the rest of the team does as well.”
“Of course,” Coach Klein said, his hands folded neatly in front of him. “Right, guys?”
Dayvon nodded. “Might be good to get some fresh blood in here.”
Logan glanced at me briefly like he was checking my reaction before speaking. Or maybe it was because my hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists and my leg was bouncing furiously under the table. He looked away. “No argument from me.”
I didn’t answer right away because I felt like any words coming out of my mouth would be filled with the four-letter variety.
After another deep breath, I realized every eye at the table was aimed in my direction, and I lifted my hands up, knowing what they needed me to say even if it felt like chewed up glass coming up my throat. “She’ll get every bit of the respect that we gave Robert.”
Cameron let out a small sound of relief, his suit-clad shoulders dropping slightly. “Excellent. They should be here any second.”
From down the hall, there was the indistinct murmur of William’s low, gravelly voice along with an answering laugh. They were too far away for it to sound like anything other than generically female. I had nothing against a female owner, but still, my gut was screaming at me to run, that something was wrong, that shit was about to go very, very badly.
Despite my less-than-stellar interactions with my neighbor, I was no sexist. I wanted Faith to grow up to be any damn thing she wanted, which was why I’d worked my skin off my bones to ensure her those opportunities. So why was my spine crawling like I was situated in the crosshairs of a loaded gun?
Just before they entered the room, something snapped through my ears at the sound of her voice, but it was nothing I could place, nothing I could pin down with certainty. We all stood to greet her, and as soon as I got the first glimpse of her dress, everything around me slowed to a sluggish, weighted crawl.
It was almost as if my brain couldn’t process what I was seeing, so the vision of her was reduced to blocks of color.
Tan shoes.
Tan legs.
Red dress.
Blond hair.
Red lips.
White teeth.
Blue-green eyes.
When it all snapped together, I lost my breath in a pained whoosh. This could not be happening.
As she smiled brightly at Dayvon, giving him her full attention, I realized she hadn’t seen me yet. My next-door neighbor, the one who had called me an arrogant asshole less than twenty-four hours earlier, was the new owner of the Washington Wolves. And she hadn’t seen me yet.
Suddenly, I understood the rampant tug of nerves and the unshakable feeling that something was about to go very, very wrong. I swiped my hand over my mouth and let out a slow breath, straightening my shoulders and holding my head up high. I could do this. I’d stared down three hundred-pound linebackers who wanted to rip the helmet off my head as they tackled my ass to the ground.
I could do this.
She turned in my direction, and I saw the moment it registered. The hitch in her step, the narrowing of her eyes, the slight purse in her scarlet red lips.
“You,” she whispered.
Everything stopped. All eyes turned in my direction. The temperature in the room with that one hushed word from her went from cordial to downright glacial.
“Oh, shit,” I muttered under my breath. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest. The chest I’d ogled while she shoved cupcakes at me.
There was absolutely no part of this that could end well.
“Well,” Dayvon said, injecting obviously fake warmth into his voice. “Y’all know each other already?”
