isn’t going to be happy, either,” Lakisha said warily. “The two of them go way back together.”
“Yeah, well,” Catherine countered, setting aside the neat stack of bills with a sigh, “if I could find another coach willing to work for stale peanuts and flat beer, they could go forward together, too.”
Lakisha drew back slightly, puckered her lips and wiggled her nose back and forth. In the month since Catherine had inherited her brother’s hockey franchise, she’d seen Lakisha’s “rabbit look” often enough to know that there was something to be said. “What?” she asked, her pulse racing. “You know a decent coach who can be had cheap?”
“I didn’t want to mention it right off,” Lakisha began, looking like she really wasn’t all that excited about mentioning it now. “Your plate being as full as it is and all. You’ve barely had time to get your feet under you.”
“But?” Catherine pressed.
“Your brother was working on a plan.”
Of course he was. Tom had always been working on The Next Big Thing. All the intricate details of his various plots to take over the economic world had been scribbled on napkins from one end of his office to the other. Putting them together to actually understand the grand plan was proving to be a bit difficult, though. “I must have missed that particular note,” Catherine quipped, eyeing the pile on the credenza. “Do you happen to know which restaurant he had the brainstorm in?”
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
