Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Elizabeth’s meeting with Mr. Philips was short and to the point. He wasn’t angry with her; he wasn’t even disappointed with her judgment. He was just worried and out of ideas.
“Liz, I’m a birder. I watch golf, but I don’t even read the sports pages. I know, I know,” he said, frowning at her look of astonishment. “Why would someone like me want to dip his toe into the sports marketing world?”
Elizabeth shook her head in disbelief. He was lost. Clearly, she was on her own in fixing this.
The stout, bald man gestured at the family photos behind his desk.
“I have kids; they have kids. None of them cares a whit about a crested woodpecker or a bluebird nest. None of them needs another flash drive or mouse pad from one of our direct-marketing campaigns. But this book and the events we’re planning—they’re a different story.
They’re cool! Which makes me cool! I can make the kids awfully happy with the team merchandise I bring home.
These athletes, for good or bad, are their heroes. ”
Mr. Philips sipped from a half-empty glass of cranberry juice. “So, a few of our ‘heroes’ are not such heroes. I know, I know, they’re innocent until proven guilty. But we can’t take a chance.”
Elizabeth nodded. “I called Stefan. His boyfriend told me he can’t talk to anyone.”
He really was pumped up. I should’ve wondered about it. Gymnasts aren’t usually quite so bulky.
“Elizabeth, we missed the Father’s Day market when the press run was delayed.
I’m on my knees asking the printer for an extra week or two, but we still need to have it all ready to go by July 1.
Maybe July 10 if I’m persuasive.” He looked at her, his brow wrinkled. “The timing is key, you know that?”
“Definitely. The kickoff to football season, back-to-school, baseball playoffs…I know.” And the book launch party. She didn’t want to think about that.
“You’ve lost the gymnast, the skater and…?”
“Two baseball players.”
“Two!”
“Apparently.” She couldn’t even look at him.
“But, you only had two baseball players.”
“I know, sir, I know.”
“Can you fix this?”
She nodded even as her stomach lurched. How in the world was she going to find sports stars as noteworthy as those she’d lost?
And find out whether they’d ever been tested and what the results were, or whether there was a hidden history of performance-enhancing drug problems that she couldn’t find on Google. How?
Mr. Philips gave her an understanding smile. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll have Tim Hudgins help you with research. He always has his nose on that ESPN app, and he’d love to be part of this. He can help you with names, and he’ll do all the research into medical records and these drugs.”
Tim, the vacant-eyed, Red Bull-swilling intern?
Mr. Hill’s nephew? Okaaay. She’d take any help she could get.
It was time to call in every chit she could think of and have Tim help thoroughly vet every single person she’d already profiled.
Football was easy; there was no official drug-testing policy enforced in the NFL.
There was an honor code. But baseball players and Olympians—now there was the rub.
She needed squeaky-clean, well-known superstars. In the next week or so.
Okay, Bennet. Focus.
It wasn’t easy to text when there were bandages on two fingers, but Darcy wasn’t about to take them off.
And they weren’t going to fall off either.
Apparently, Elizabeth Bennet was highly talented and perhaps deeply experienced at securing Band-Aids on wounded fingers.
He’d been tending his own cuts and scratches for so long that he’d forgotten what it was like to let someone else take care of him.
It was…wonderful. Awkward, but wonderful.
He was still breathless when he thought about the quiet moments they shared at Pemberley, listening to music, talking, even laughing together.
And when she smiled at his questions about her book on the blacklist, it seemed she wasn’t simply thanking him for cutting off her family’s inane comments but acknowledging a connection between them.
She’d dismissed him months earlier for making such an assumption.
“It’s not like we had a mind meld or something… ”
But this wasn’t Netherfield. This was different.
For a few hours, it felt as though they were on the cusp of some new, unspoken understanding.
A friendship, perhaps. Something that wasn’t wary or angry or mistrustful.
There, he had followed her into the house, hoping to talk about her research, learn more about her interests, and perhaps touch base on their responsibilities as best man and maid of honor—anything that might provide him with a chance to see her when they were back in the city.
But it all went south when he found Elizabeth sitting on his couch, shocked and crying, so he backed off.
She barely wanted him in the room; he knew that.
But he had to push as far as he could. The best he managed was to get her to talk to him, a “disinterested party,” unlike her judgmental father.
And she allowed him to drive her home though she didn’t seem particularly happy that he knew where she lived.
That was a kick in the gut. And God, he was an idiot for even touching her phone, but she was drained, and he wished her a little peace.
The flare in her eyes when she realized what he’d done brought back uncomfortable memories from months ago when she really didn’t like him and he’d presumed far too much about her feelings.
At least she’d accepted his card. She might not accept his assistance, but he had ways to help her.
Had she forgotten, or had she missed, his family’s connection to the Yankees?
She’d hate that it was he who helped. His assistance wouldn’t negate the fact that it was someone he knew, a man whom he hadn’t prosecuted, who had been her connection to these disgraced, tainted athletes: George Bloody Wickham.
Has he been arrested yet? How can I help facilitate it?
He could almost laugh at the perfect irony of Wickham being a sports agent.
He hadn’t known him well; he was just a slick-talking summer kid in Southampton who could throw a baseball and rig a sailboat when his father wasn’t making him help out on landscaping jobs.
Jerome Wickham: the man who designed gardens and planted the seeds that led to everything that went wrong.
During the short time he was in the therapy that his Fitzwilliam aunts and uncles forced on him, Darcy was able to work backward in time and figure out all the “ifs” that had led to his family’s devastation.
If his mother had never decided to tear out the front garden.
If she hadn’t gotten Jerome Wickham’s name from a neighbor.
If they hadn’t hit it off. If she hadn’t slept with him.
If she hadn’t written him letters and let him take pictures.
If he hadn’t been careless in storing them.
If he hadn’t been the first chip in the crumbling of her love of England.
If she hadn’t been angry and decided to drive off to London.
And if Wickham’s wife hadn’t discovered his pattern of affairs and told George to blame his father and the Darcys for their downward economic spiral.
Idly, he wondered whether George had gone after any of the other families his parents had known.
That would be some pleasant Hamptons cocktail party banter: “When did Jerome shag your wife?” Darcy could only be grateful his mother’s affair with the man was short-lived and seemingly as deep as a wading pool.
And that his father was an ocean away and apparently unaware of it.
Now the question was how far Wickham had gone.
How desperate was he? Did he simply represent clients who took PEDs?
Was he somehow involved in supplying them with the drugs?
And most importantly, had he implicated Elizabeth in ways that damaged her beyond her still-unpublished book? More fucking “ifs.”
Darcy stared at his phone, willing it to ring. How long could it take Rich to call him back? What was he doing on a Sunday afternoon anyway? His cousin hated golf, and the Yankees were in Baltimore.
Sighing, he clicked through the weekend photos.
Some pictures showed their subjects posed.
He smiled at the pirates, wet and victorious, Ava showing off her sandcastle, and Elizabeth smiling with Jane and Charles at the clambake.
Others, taken furtively, had a singular subject.
He gazed at Elizabeth at the pool, in profile while talking to her Aunt Maddie, and standing on the dunes, sunglasses in hand, gazing at the water.
He was still staring at the last one when his phone chirped. He nearly dropped it on his foot.
“Hey, are you up for an early dinner?”
Richard Fitzwilliam was used to his cousin’s often brittle approach to social niceties, but he was less accustomed to the quietly angry, laser-focused Fitzwilliam Darcy whom he found waiting at their club an hour later, sitting at a dark corner table with a half-empty glass of Laphroaig in hand.
Scotch at six o’clock was an unusual choice for the man, but after a moment’s reflection, he realized that unusual was a good word to sum up Darcy’s behavior these past few months.
It took less than two minutes for Darcy to get to the point: the Fitzwilliam connections to the New York Yankees. “How chummy are you with Jeter these days?”
Rich raised his eyebrows and sat back, waiting for an explanation. When Darcy finished, his eyebrows rose again.
“You spent the weekend with Elizabeth Bennet?”
Darcy frowned. “That’s not the material point.”
“Well, of course it is.” He stroked his goatee. “You spent two days in the company of a woman you purport to love, and you’re focused on baseball?”
“Are you even listening? Her career is on the line.”