The Linebacker’s Betrayal (Miami Sports Wives Revenge Club #6)

CHAPTER ONE

Eighteen years of marriage and Enora Goode could still make Jason cry.

Jason Goode didn't cry, as a rule. But when she'd pressed the watch box into his hands that morning at the kitchen island, coffee going cold between them, his eyes had done that shining thing they'd done at the altar, and at the hospital when Maya was born, and exactly nowhere else in nearly two decades.

He'd turned the watch over and read the engraving out loud.

To the man who always protects us.

"Enora." Just her name, rough at the edges. He'd fastened it onto his wrist right there, next to the tan line where his game-day tape usually sat, and kissed her like the anniversary actually mattered. "Lunch after practice. Anywhere you want. I'll make it up to you, all of it."

All of it was doing a lot of work in that sentence, but she'd let it slide. Eighteen years taught a woman which threads to pull and which to leave alone.

The cancellation text arrived at 11:47.

Emergency defensive mtg. Film issues. Sorry babe. Tonight instead.

Enora read it again at a red light and told herself it was fine.

It was football season. It was always football season, even when it wasn't.

She had built a life around the fixed truth that the Miami Cyclones' defense came before birthdays, anniversaries, funerals, and one memorable emergency appendectomy. She had made her peace with it the way you made peace with humidity. You stopped fighting. You just adjusted your hair.

Then she saw the anniversary card on the passenger seat.

She'd tucked it there to give him at lunch, cream envelope, his name in her careful handwriting. Three drafts it had taken her, because I still choose you had felt too heavy, and happy anniversary, babe too light. She'd found a middle register she was proud of.

The training facility was fifteen minutes away. She could drop the card at his locker, wave at whoever was around, be home before traffic. Wives did it all the time. She'd practically had a parking spot there since the Clinton administration.

The building was nearly empty when she badged in. Off-day quiet, a hush built for two hundred large men currently containing about six.

Her heels clicked down the corridor past the framed action shots, half of them Jason.

Jason splitting a double team.

Jason standing over a quarterback.

Jason with Maya on his shoulders after the championship, confetti in both their hair, the photo the insurance company had blown up to billboard size over I-95 with the tagline THE PROTECTOR PROTECTS WHAT MATTERS.

Enora had approved that tagline. She'd workshopped it, actually, in their kitchen, on a legal pad.

The defensive coaches' office was at the end of the hall, door ajar, light on.

She heard the laugh first. Female, low, delighted.

Enora's stride broke, one heel scuffing tile.

Then Shania Ashford's voice, warm and syrupy as spilled rum. "Does she ever do this for you, baby?"

Enora stopped a foot from the gap in the door and looked through it.

Shania was kneeling on the carpet between Jason's spread legs.

His chair was pushed back from the desk.

His head was tipped against the headrest, throat exposed, one big hand tangled in Shania's dark hair, the same patient, certain grip he used talking rookies through gap assignments. Like he'd done it before.

He was still wearing his practice shorts around an ankle. He was still wearing the watch.

Four hours.

The engraving hadn't even had time to warm to his skin.

Behind them, on the shelf above the film monitors, sat the framed photo Enora had given him three Christmases ago.

Her and Maya on the beach at sunset, laughing at something off-camera.

The frame said FAMILY in driftwood letters, because Maya had picked it out.

The photo watched the whole thing with its stupid driftwood smile.

"My wife knows exactly what I want," Jason said, voice thick and lazy. "She just refuses to give it to me."

Shania pulled back long enough to smile up at him, wiping her mouth. "She can't satisfy a man like you. Not really."

"No," Jason agreed, and pressed her head back down, harder now, making Shania choke. "She really can't." He exhaled. “Fuck, baby, yes, deepthroat me. Take all that cock.”

Enora stood there with the card in her hand and waited for the picture to rearrange itself into an injury consult, a prank, a stress dream, anything.

Because the man in that chair had cried at their wedding, actual tears he'd sworn her to secrecy about.

That man had slept four nights in a vinyl hospital chair when Maya was seven and septic, holding her small foot through the blanket because it was the only part of her not tangled in tubes.

That man had carried Enora through knee-deep floodwater after Hurricane Elsa, both of them laughing hysterically, her wedding sandals held above his head like a trophy.

She waited.

But the picture stayed the picture.

Jason groaned Shania's name, and eighteen years folded in on themselves like a card table.

Enora's fingers opened. The cream envelope dropped to the tile outside the door with a soft slap, his name facing up.

"Someone out there?" Jason's voice, sharpened. The chair creaked. "Hello?"

She ran, heels skidding on polished concrete, no attempt at dignity in it, past the billboards of her husband protecting things, through the first unlocked door she found, which turned out to be the film room, dark and cold and smelling of dry-erase markers.

She got herself behind the projection cart and put both hands over her mouth and shook.

Her phone started buzzing at some point. She watched it light up on the carpet where she'd dropped it.

JASON, said the screen, above their wedding photo, above his young smiling face and her stupid happy one.

It rang out.

It rang again.

She couldn't bring herself to touch it. She could not physically make her hand touch that photograph.

The film room lights came on.

"Enora?"

Gabe Navarro stood in the doorway in coaching polo and visored confusion, a tablet under one arm. Then he saw her face, dropped the tablet on the nearest chair, and crossed the room. "Hey. Hey, what happened? Are you hurt? Is Maya—"

"Maya's fine." Her voice came out wrong, pressed flat. "Everyone's fine. Everyone is doing great, actually."

Gabe crouched to her level. He didn't touch her, just got low and steady, how he had talked panicking rookies off ledges for twenty years. "Talk to me."

"The coaches' office." She heard herself laugh, an ugly sound.

"Jason and Shania Ashford. She was… He was letting her…

" Her throat closed around the specifics.

"The thing he's asked me for. For years.

The thing I wouldn't. She was doing it and he was wearing the watch I gave him this morning, Gabe, four hours, he wore it four fucking hours—"

Gabe's jaw tightened. His shoulders dropped an inch. It was recognition, she'd understand later, not surprise. In the moment, all she registered was that he believed her immediately, no are you sure, no maybe it wasn't.

"He loves me," she said.

Gabe was quiet.

"He does. You don't know him at home. He calls after every away flight, he still. He loves me, that's not, this doesn't just erase—"

God, she wasn’t even speaking properly.

"Enora." Gabe's voice was gentle, but it didn’t bend an inch. "Maybe he does. But love can't make what you saw any less real."

The phone buzzed again on the carpet.

JASON.

The wedding photo.

"I can't answer it," she whispered.

"Then don't."

"He'll come home. He'll walk in the door tonight and I'll have to look at him, and I don't know how to do that. Eighteen years, Gabe. Today. It's today."

"I know what today is."

Of course he did. He'd been a groomsman. He'd given the toast about Jason finally finding someone stronger than he was, and everyone had laughed, Jason the loudest.

Enora got her feet under her. Smoothed her dress with both hands like the wrinkles were the crisis. Somewhere down the hall, faintly, a door closed, an engine turned over in the players' lot.

"Don't tell anyone," she said. "Not yet. I need to think."

"Whatever you need." Gabe picked her phone up off the carpet and held it out, screen down, a small mercy. "Enora. Whatever you decide, decide it for yourself. Not for the Cyclones, not for the cameras. You."

She took the phone.

In the parking lot, the Miami sun hit her hard, bright and ordinary, insisting the world was exactly what it had been that morning.

Only it wasn't.