Page 7 of The Play

The check was in there, blue ink on a white background. And a Post-it note, bright yellow, stuck to it.

Good luck in the NFL, it read.

Grant hadn’t signed it, but the man who’d written it felt like the real Grant. Not the stranger who’d tried to distance himself in that email.

He shouldn’t have, but he saved the note anyway, carefully folded in his wallet.

Every time he was afraid—the night before the Combine, at the Draft, when he first went to Charleston, and for so many moments in the years after that—he’d pull it out, brush those bold blue letters with his fingertips.

Remember that Grant had believed in him, even though he’d had no reason to.

Chapter 2

Twelve years later

There were just over three thousand billionaires in the world—and in Grant’s humble opinion, despite being one of them, that was just way too many. Nevermind how none of them actually had that kind of money in their accounts. Most of them were billionaires on paper, only.

Grant certainly was, these days.

He’d been broke before. Not that long ago, in fact, he’d scrounged for pennies in his couch, bought the small coffee and not the large, and tutored for extra cash.

Now his accounts, twelve years of hard-won and accumulated wealth, were essentially cleaned out. Yet, on paper, he was not only very, very rich, he was the owner of the Charleston Condors football team.

The conditional owner of the Charleston Condors football team.

He was here at the annual meeting, outside Miami, at the Piranhas’ owner’s enormous compound, on his own private island, waiting for the rest of the NFL owners to pass the final vote.

In the last twelve years, Grant had faced a number of hostile board members, gone toe-to-toe with titans of his industry, and yet he’d never been as nervous as he was now.

It wasn’t even the thirty-one other team owners that terrified him.

It had started yesterday, with the NFL commissioner pulling him to the side, into one of the small empty meeting rooms, to say some of the other owners had made a request of him.

With the way the last owners of the Condors had destroyed the team from the inside out, there was a . . .reluctance, the commissioner had said, to allow the team to be purchased by someone the team didn’t approve of.

And, he’d continued, there was one player, who had become the de facto representative of his teammates.

The commissioner hadn’t even had to say who it was.

Grant had known.

He’d expected to have to see him sometime, of course. He was going to be the owner and general manager of Deacon’s football team, and probably perform half a dozen other jobs too, because they couldn’t exactly afford to pay people right now. Avoiding Deacon Harris wasn’t going to be possible.

He didn’t even want to avoid Deacon Harris.

So why was he so terrified right now?

It might be the vehement argument his body—his brain, his heart, his whole fucking self—was making to stop avoiding Deacon Harris.

They hadn’t parted well. Grant knew that. He’d written and rewritten the email he’d sent Deacon probably a thousand times. There’d been so much he wanted to say. So much he shouldn’t say. So in the end, he’d said nothing at all. That had seemed like the only safe choice.

It was entirely possible Deacon might not be happy to see him. It was entirely possible Deacon had forgotten him completely.

But Grant didn’t think so.

He took a short breath, centering himself the way his business coach had taught him, way back at the beginning, when he’d first started facing down hostile boardrooms, and he approached the big broad back sitting in front of the shiny mahogany bar.

Deacon had been big back then, when they’d hunched over those spindly library tables, Grant helping him to pass statistics. But Deacon was even bigger now, his shoulders impossibly broader.

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