Chapter Three Jordan
Chapter Three
Jordan
My cell rang on the way to my kitchen, my brother’s name on the screen. I swiped to connect and held it up to my ear. “Gavin, what’s up?”
“You’re awake?”
An unnecessary question. We were both early risers; he knew that. Me, to work out, Gavin because his son had to get up for school.
“I’m about to go for my run.” I pulled the phone away from my face to check the time. I had exactly three minutes before I had to leave. “What do you need?”
“Have you checked your email?”
“No.”
“Do it, and then you’ll know why I’m calling.”
His order pinged my nerves, like a delivery driver slamming on the doorbell more than once. “Why don’t you just tell me what it says.” I went to the cabinet to collect my vitamins, palming the large pills and shooting them into my mouth.
“We’re in the final stages of the Clover deal.”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.” I grabbed a bottle from the fridge that was premixed with electrolytes, a cocktail my chef concocted when he stopped in every few days.
“He came back with a counter.”
The Clovers, owned by Andrew Clover, were the only professional sports team in Boston we didn’t own. We had the trio of hockey, football, and baseball in our portfolio. The city’s NBA team had been on my father’s radar for years. Every time he’d made an offer, Clover shot it down.
Until Gavin and I decided to speak to Clover ourselves, a meetup that took place in his suite in Costa Rica, where he was vacationing with a woman who wasn’t his wife.
I swallowed the vitamins, moving the bottle away from my lips, but only by an inch. “And?”
“It’s a billion more than what we offered.”
I laughed. “That motherfucker.”
“We’ll counter. By half?”
I set the bottle down and pounded my fist on the counter. “Fuck half. Offer a quarter. Not a million more.”
“What if he doesn’t take it?”
I turned around, pressing my back against the lip of the stone. “He will.”
“How do you know that?”
“The amount of money we’ve presented is more than fair.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s going to accept it.”
I smiled, and damn it, it felt good. “He will once I show him the pictures I snapped during our meeting. I’m not saying the shots of him and his girlfriend will earn him a divorce—not at his age and the money tied up in his marriage—but they’ll certainly cause a media circus if the press gets a hold of them. ”
Gavin went silent for a few seconds. “Hold on. You’re telling me you took pictures of her?”
“Good ones too. Like the kiss they shared after they walked us to the door. Let’s just say I was thinking ahead.” I checked the time again. “Don’t use that card unless we have to. We go in with the counter. If he balks, then we’ll lay down our final hand.”
“Jesus, Jordan. I didn’t think we were going to have to play it like this.”
I adjusted the waist of my shorts. “He has refused every offer Dad made him. I don’t think he ever intended to sell the team to us. I think he took that meeting so we would stroke his financial cock.”
“I don’t know, maybe he’s tired. Dad’s tired, and they’re around the same age.”
I flattened the top of my hair. The way I tossed and turned, tearing up the bed at times, caused the strands to get a little wild. “That asshole has a team of doers who make sure he doesn’t have to lift a finger while he’s making millions in his sleep.”
“Fair.” He chuckled. “Brother, I’ve got to say, you worked this one well.”
“No, I worked it dirty.” I pushed off the counter and headed for the door.
“I have to go. I’ll see you in a few hours.
” I left my phone on the table in the hallway and stepped into the elevator that was built into the back wall of my foyer, taking it down to the lobby and out my private door onto the street.
My watch showed I had thirty seconds to spare.
The first half mile went by painfully slow until I was veering to the intersection, which was the entrance of the cross street where Maya would be coming from.
And there she was.
In baby blue.
The parts of her that were covered were hugged in spandex, curves and tits and hips taunting me like hell. Fuck, Maya was one gorgeous woman.
“You came.” She stopped less than five feet away and smiled.
Came?
Yes.
I’d done that in the shower after yesterday’s run, holding my dick like it was the tightness of her cunt, pumping until I exploded into the stream of water.
But once wasn’t enough. I’d done it again before I’d gone to bed.
Each time with her on my mind. And each time, she didn’t leave my mind once I was done.
“You thought I wouldn’t?”
“I wasn’t sure. You know . . . I didn’t give you an answer.” Her arms dangled at her sides, her nipples hard as if I’d been biting them. “You seem like the type who would make me sweat it out for a couple of days before you reappeared.”
The thing was, Maya had answered me.
With her eyes.
Her body.
An internal desire that spoke to me loud and clear.
“Sweat it out? But I was the one who asked you the question. Not the other way around. It’s more like I’ve had to sweat it out.”
“Have you?” As though she realized how much of her chest I could see, she covered it with her arms.
It was a damn shame too.
“Nah.” I smiled. “Things are all good over here.”
She laughed. “God, you’re full of yourself.
” She took her time glancing at her feet, her breathing still coming in fast and hard.
“How do you do that?” She finally looked up at me.
The smile was gone, but there was a redness in her cheeks and her eyes were different.
There was emotion behind them, when seconds ago they’d been filled with longing.
“Do what?”
“Make the shittiest thoughts in my head completely disappear so I’m only focused on you. The run here didn’t have the power to do that. Yet you show up, and those thoughts are gone.”
I searched her eyes, and when I didn’t get what I was looking for, I said, “What happened, Maya?”
She glanced off into the distance. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear about it—and I didn’t bring it up to drown you in my life. I just can’t get over the power you have. Power you don’t even realize you have. Or maybe you do.” Her voice got softer with each word.
“What if I do want to hear about it?” When she didn’t say anything, I pointed toward the sidewalk, catching her attention, and added, “Come on. We’ll get in a mile, and you can get it off your chest.”
Even though she seemed surprised by my response, she started jogging, staying right by my side.
It took about a hundred yards before she said, “I lost a patient yesterday. I’d been working on her for a few weeks.
She came in with an amputation and was doing so well.
I’ll spare you the details of wound care—I’ll just say I stayed on top of what she needed.
” She became quiet. “The infection came out of nowhere and spread.”
“When you say ‘lost,’ what does that mean?”
“She went into sepsis. At her age and with her underlying conditions, there was nothing that could be done except keep her comfortable. She passed within a few hours.”
We turned at the upcoming street. “It sounds like you did everything you could to help her.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
I watched her while I ran. “Your effort counts for something.”
“When you have to call a patient’s family to deliver that kind of news, your effort counts for nothing.”
“Fuck,” I groaned. “That is shitty.”
“I came home after work and claimed the bathroom for the night and guzzled beers in the bathtub.”
“What do you mean you ‘claimed the bathroom’? Isn’t it yours?”
She smiled. “I share it with three other people.”
“That’s quite an entourage.”
She laughed. “More like roommates. Without them, I’d never be able to afford to live there. The rent in this city is obscene. The only way I’m ever going to have my own bathroom is if I move to the suburbs, and the commute would be as painful as what I pay here in rent.”
I was keeping a mental tab of things I wasn’t going to mention during this run, starting with my Porsche collection and the fact that I never took the bus or the T, followed by the six bathrooms I had in my penthouse condo.
“How’d that bath feel?” I asked.
“With an ice-cold Sam Adams, it was heavenly.”
“What do you do while you’re in there?”
We stopped at a crosswalk, and she jogged in place. “I relax.”
“So you just lay in the water and do nothing aside from sip beer?”
“There are times when I read or scroll social media, but mostly I just listen to music and sink into the water.” Her smile returned. “You look fascinated that someone could do this.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“If I’m lying in water, something is happening. I’m not just doing nothing. Unless it’s a cold plunge—that doesn’t count because that’s fucking torture.”
“What would that ‘something’ look like?”
If Maya recognized me from my NHL career, I assumed she would have said something. If she knew I was a Worthington or part of my family’s empire, she wouldn’t have asked if I took the T or the bus; she would assume I had an extensive car collection with a personal driver.
That told me every question that came out of her mouth was genuine.
It wasn’t based on something she’d read online or an alert she’d gotten from one of the gossip apps, her attempt at distinguishing fact from fiction.
She truly didn’t know that a guy like me wouldn’t lie in water unless his hand was involved.
“Maya, you’re digging for an answer that I’m not sure you really want to hear.”
First, she gave me her teeth as she dragged them over her lip. Then she gave me a squint that told me she was trying to see what my reply would be. “What if I do?”
Even though the cars had cleared and we could pass, neither of us attempted to. “Are you telling me you’re enticed?” A reference to yesterday’s conversation, the one that had ended with me telling her to think about it and then jogging off in the opposite direction.
Her nod was slow. “I think I am.”