FULL NOVELXO The Bombshell Effect: Chapter 1
“I cannot believe you’re the asshole who missed the team owner’s funeral.”
The sigh that came from my chest was deep and slow, a technique I’d mastered early in my career when I was trying to hold my tongue. My agent, Randall, was good at his job. Really good. In the twelve years that I’d been a quarterback for the Washington Wolves, he scored me enough endorsement deals that I barely needed to touch my salary. What Randall was not good at was being understanding when he thought I messed up.
Even though I hadn’t messed up.
“Faith broke her arm, Randall.” I rubbed at my forehead because of course, I felt like complete and utter shit for missing my boss’s funeral. I didn’t need him to remind me of the gravity of them burying Robert Sutton the Third in my absence.
He let out a short puff of air, his exasperation clear. “Someone else could’ve taken her to the emergency room.”
Another thing Randall was not good at was understanding what it was like to be a father. A single father, at that. The extent of his fatherly instinct was to dump lukewarm water on the parched cactus that always sat on the window ledge in his office.
I nodded even though he couldn’t see me. “Someone else could have.”
When he started to speak, I cut him off.
“Except that’s not how I do things. It’s the first time she’s ever broken a bone, and my mom is out of town. Don’t push me on this. It’s over, the media didn’t care, and my endorsement deals won’t suffer.”
The vacuum of silence after I spoke told me two things.
1- I was crankier than necessary at his questioning my decision.
2- I was crankier than necessary because I was exhausted.
Those two things carried far more weight than they should have on my already weighed-down shoulders. To my right, Faith sat on the long gray couch and played quietly on her Kindle. One arm in a bright pink cast with only my signature on the fabric, the other deftly swiping across the screen for whatever game she was playing or book she was reading. The sun streaming in on her from the large sliding glass doors overlooking Lake Washington made her look far older than her six years.
I rubbed a spot on my chest, in the general area where her name was permanently inked into my skin because sometimes the thought of her growing into a young lady was enough to make me think I was having a heart attack.
Randall finally spoke, aware by my tone that I wasn’t in the best of moods. “It’s the off-season, Luke. The media will make a story of anything they think will get hits. Including you missing Robert’s funeral.”
“I’m not making a statement about it,” I snapped. “The guys know I respected the hell out of Robert. The front office knows that. There’s no reason I need to explain shit to anyone else. I shouldn’t have to.”
“Agreed.” His tone was placating, which pissed me off even more. “You shouldn’t have to. But you’re in your mid-thirties, and you don’t have Twitter, you don’t have Instagram, your social media presence is worse than my eighty-year-old grandma’s, which means your fans don’t have the window into all your thoughts they feel entitled to.”
There was a reason for that. When I got home after a long day of practice, I wanted to focus on Faith. I didn’t want to take pictures and come up with hashtags or try to fit a clever thought into a hundred and forty characters. Or even worse, filter through the shit that used to come into my direct messages. The day Faith grabbed my phone and touched her thumb to the wrong place, opening up a message with a picture of a naked woman asking if I’d like to meet up, I deleted all my accounts.
I didn’t want to see it, so I certainly didn’t want Faith to see it. It had nothing to do with football. None of those things were necessary for me to win games.
“Boobies!” a two-year-old Faith had exclaimed. It was enough to drive a non-drinking man to drink.
Randall cleared his throat, and I forced myself back into the conversation.
“Randall”—I sighed—“I don’t need those things to play football. Peyton Manning never did social media, and his career didn’t suffer because of it.”
“Are you comparing yourself to Peyton Manning?” he asked innocently. I wanted to punch him in the scrotum.
Faith winced when she shifted on the couch, so I pulled the phone away from my ear. “You okay, turbo?”
At her nickname, the one I’d given her when she was barely two, she flashed me a quick smile. “I’m okay, Daddy. Just hurt when I set it down too hard.”
I nodded at her answer and let out a deep breath before I turned back toward the kitchen counter, bracing my fists on the gleaming white surface after wedging my phone between my face and shoulder.
“Listen,” I told him, “unless a reporter shows up on my doorstep asking why I wasn’t there, I’m not making a statement.”
“Why not?”
The sound out of my mouth was pure skeptical amusement. He wanted a list?
Oh, media, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
“Because it doesn’t matter what I say, Randall. They’ll make up their own version of the truth, twist my words, and make it fit their story with a neat little bow.”
“Lord, you’re cynical.”
“Can you blame me?” I asked.
He was silent.
“I guess not.” He cleared his throat. “But come on. One sentence.”
“No.”
The last conversation that I’d had with Robert before his sudden massive heart attack had been a good one. Substantial. He told me he was proud of all that we’d accomplished, but we had a long future ahead of us to keep achieving more. I told him he was a great owner, a good man, and he’d slapped me on the back.
I didn’t need to share that story with anyone. It was my history with him, not to be used for a sound bite or fodder for public consumption.
Through the speaker, there was a sound of slight exasperation. “You’re such a stubborn ass, Pierson. Haven’t you ever heard of being proactive?”
I almost laughed. Almost. My lips curled slightly at the edges, because what flipped through my brain was dawn workouts, muscle work to combat the normal deterioration that professional football players fought against the second the season kicked off, and the hours of film I watched from the office perched in the northwest corner of the lower level of my house.
“Nope.”
“Whoa,” Faith said in a short burst of air. I turned around to see her off the couch, nose pressed to the sliding glass door. “She looks like Barbie.”
“Who does?” I asked her.
“Who does what?” Randall said in my ear.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“The man signed your paychecks, Piers,” Randall said, using the nickname that was common among my teammates. “You need to say something about the fact that he ended up with his forehead down on the dining room table. Did you know that? Right on his dinner plate.”
“Holy shit, Randall,” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose. Faith didn’t notice my slip, or else I’d have to put a buck in the swear jar. “Have a little respect. He had a heart attack.”
“At least he had the grace to do it before the season started. Maybe it won’t upset the balance of anything too much. Do you know who’s going to replace him?”
“After twelve years, I’m still not entirely convinced that you have an actual soul.”
“Of course, I do.”
Faith’s jaw dropped open, and I peered through the doors but couldn’t see anything. She was standing so close to the glass, I could see it fog up when she spoke. “Look at her bathing suit. I wish I could wear one like that.”
Fatherly alarm bells clanged noisily in my head.
“Um, Randall, I have to go.”
“You have to make a statement. Robert Sutton the Third was a class act owner, great leader, blah blah blah, something. Anything. Because I bet you a hundred bucks they’ll make a big deal out of this.”
“Daddy,” she practically whined, “can we please go say hi? She’s looking over here. I think she sees me!”
The hair lifted on the back of my neck because the house next to us had been empty for as long we’d lived here. It wasn’t unheard of for fans to find out where players lived, but we’d managed to stay off the radar for the past eighteen months since we moved into the modest house on Lake Washington, just outside Seattle.
Well—I thought as I looked around the immaculate open space, the sprawling view from the back of the house, sun glinting off the water like a mirror had been draped over the surface—modest for an NFL quarterback.
But anyone with working knowledge of Google could dig deep enough if they wanted. Like the woman who showed up at the team hotel a couple of years back, found out which room I’d been staying in, and opened her trench coat for me when I thought she was from room service.
There’d been nothing underneath that trench coat.
If Faith hadn’t been asleep in the room, I would have slammed the door shut in her face. Instead, she got an icy, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Randall, I have to go.”
“No,” he said urgently, “you don’t.”
I pressed my thumb to the screen and tossed the phone onto the counter. Faith rose up on her tiptoes for a better look, and it made the brown braid I’d managed that morning swing across her back.
“Who you lookin’ at, turbo?”
When she looked over her shoulder at me, her smile was as big as her eyes. “Maybe she’s our new neighbor. She’s so pretty, dad. You should go say hi. You should welcome her to the neighborhood. Maybe she’s lonely.”
If her rushed words, loaded with excitement and awe, hadn’t touched on such a sore subject, I might have smiled. Might have laughed. Instead, I pinched my eyes shut because all I could hear between the letters, the words grouped together so innocently in her sweet voice, was a girl who missed a mother she never knew. Stuck with a dad who had a career so demanding that it probably seemed like nothing was ever really about her. Even though everything I did was about her.
When I stepped behind Faith, I kept my eyes down on her while I braced my hands on her tiny shoulders. So much about her fragile now after her broken arm. I’d had my share of bruises, a couple of concussions, tears in my muscles that had interfered with half a dozen games, and a sprained ankle two seasons ago that had cost us a chance at the playoffs. But nothing felt as terrifying as seeing Faith fall off the playground equipment, hearing her cry of pain, and seeing her fear when she was lying in that hospital bed.
Now, when my hands landed on her skin, all I could feel was the delicate length of bone, and all I could imagine was how far I’d go to make sure nothing ever happened to hurt her. It was illogical, completely irrational, but I could stop it about as easily as I could try to stop my heart by sheer willpower.
“Daddy.” She sighed, tilting her head back to look at me.
“What, turbo?”
“You’re not even looking at our new neighbor.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t know she’s our new neighbor. Maybe she’s lost.”
Faith rolled her eyes and giggled.
Finally, I looked up. Definitely wished I hadn’t.
Because if that was our new neighbor, then I was in hell.
Like our home, the one next door was three levels facing Lake Washington. The deck on the main floor, similar to mine, was large and stretched the entire length of the house, but it was normally empty. As long as we’d lived here, I had yet to see a single person anywhere on the property, save the regular landscaping crew that came during the non-winter months to keep it tidy.
It wasn’t empty now. As close as Faith was in saying that she looked like Barbie, the first thing that came to my mind was why is there a playmate strolling across the deck next door?
In the few seconds that I spent, regrettably, cataloging what I was looking at, I felt like someone shoved a stick of dynamite under my firmly planted feet and lit a one-inch fuse. It was impossible to escape and inconceivable to ignore the effect it had on me.
Her legs were endless, tan, and toned; her stomach flat; her hair long and blond and full. The black bikini she wore barely covered her ample, clearly natural chest, and that was when I had to look away for my own sanity. My daughter was standing in front of me, and there was no good place that my thoughts could go when staring at a chest like the one currently on display at the house next door.
“Please, please, please can we go say hi?” Faith asked again, turning around and giving me her full arsenal. Eyes? Wide and pleading, the exact same shade of brown as mine. Her hands? Clasped together as best as her cast would allow and centered over her heart like I’d break it if I said no.
“We don’t know who that is, sweetheart,” I explained gently. “Maybe she’s a new neighbor, or maybe she’s just renting it for the weekend. What do I always tell you about strangers?”
Her shoulders slumped, and I felt like the Grinch. “She wouldn’t be a stranger if we introduced ourselves.”
“That’s true,” I conceded, “but we’re still not going to say hi.”
Looking down at her disappointed face, I saw traces of myself. But I saw a lot of her mother too, something Faith would only be able to recognize from the few pictures I had of Cassandra. Our fling had been brief, the effects now permanent, and she’d died in a car accident before Faith had turned six months old.
In those six months, I’d seen Cassandra’s sweet and sexy nature slowly turn green with greed; her demands for child support increasing while the time she wanted to give me with Faith decreased at almost the same rate. Unless I paid up.
Her solution to my firm denial to be her unending ATM was to sell some bullshit story to the gossip rags about our “romance.” One I couldn’t contest when she died a week later. At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I didn’t want to brand her a liar when Faith would easily be able to use Google herself someday.
The fact that we’d already done a paternity test at Randall’s insistence was the only reason my claim on her in the wake of Cassandra’s death was uncontested.
The press had had a field day with that. The star quarterback was now a single father, and after the story she sold, my relationship with Cassandra had been romanticized to the point of being nauseating. It hadn’t taken long for the frenzy over my story to die down, but it was enough to leave a sour taste in my mouth when it came to the media.
It was those aspects of the game that I hated. The groupies thinking that because I wasn’t married, I’d climb in bed with anyone who spread her legs wide enough. The media prying into details of my life, piecing them together until they resembled a story they thought would sell magazines and up their ratings.
Faith pushed her bottom lip out in a pout when she realized I would not budge, but she didn’t argue. Once she settled on the couch again with her Kindle, she gave me a sad look. “I’m just bored. There’s no one for me to play with here, and I miss Grams.”
Wearily, I made my way to the couch and sat next to her, slinging my arm around her shoulders until she was curled up into my side. “I know. She and Grandpa will be back in a few days, okay? You know she needs to take her vacations now because we need her help too much once I go back to work all the time.”
“You’re already working,” she pointed out. The look on her face, sweet and a little sad, made my heart turn over. She wasn’t wrong. I was at our team facilities every day to train, and we had team meetings every week. Not to mention practices taking up my days. It wasn’t the rigorous, exhausting schedule of the regular season, but it was still work.
“When did you get so smart?”
She smiled and snuggled in deeper. “In first grade. I’ll be even smarter in second.”
The directness of her answer, so literal, made me smile and close my eyes. At moments like this, I could pretend I was a regular dad who made crappy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, who did lopsided braids because my fingers were too big to be nimble when faced with all her hair. I could pretend I didn’t worry about whether the media would sensationalize my absence at Robert’s funeral, or if the bombshell on the deck was a random groupie trying to get a closer look.
My phone buzzed on the counter where I’d left it, and I dropped a kiss on Faith’s head before I went to grab it.
Randall: Turn on ESPN, you asshole. You owe me $100. Let me know when you want to make your statement.
Instantly, it was like someone dropped a steel beam over my shoulder blades. I could feel the weight of it so clearly that it made my back ache. Aiming the remote at the TV mounted on the wall opposite the couch, I flipped to ESPN. The familiar desk and studio background of SportsCenter came into view. When I saw my picture in the graphic on the upper left of the screen, I scowled.
“Yesterday, friends, family, and members gathered to honor the life of Robert Sutton the Third, longtime owner of the Washington Wolves, who passed away suddenly last week from a massive heart attack. Noticeably absent, however, was the team’s longtime quarterback, Luke Pierson. A source close to the Wolves organization told ESPN that there was tension between Sutton and Pierson over the past year, stemming from Pierson’s inability to make it to the Super Bowl for the second time in his career. His time with the Wolves has been plagued by injury and disappointed hopes from one post-season to the next.”
Her co-anchor glanced to the side with a sly smile. “Would you miss your boss’s funeral?”
She took on a shocked face, and I wanted to punch someone again. Preferably Randall. “Of course not. I love my bosses.”
Off-screen, you could hear the muted laughter of the camera crew.
Her co-anchor lifted his hands in a what are you gonna do? gesture. “Maybe it’s nothing, but when the leader on the field can’t show up to pay his respects to the guy leading off the field, I think there’s something wrong with that.”
She nodded. “Agreed. There’s definitely a story here, and it can’t bode well for the Wolves heading into the regular season.” Her smile was bright and practiced as she faced another camera. “We’ll be right back, so stay tuned.”
I punched the off button on the remote harder than necessary and braced my hands on my hips. “Son of a bitch.”
“Daddy.” Faith giggled.
After scratching the back of my neck, I fished a dollar bill out of my wallet and dropped it on her lap as I walked past. “Sorry, turbo.” Frustration made my skin feel hot, my hands restless and tingly. “I’m going to go downstairs and work out for a little bit, okay? Yell if you need anything.”
On the way down to my home gym, I grabbed my black boxing gloves and hand tape. And I kept my eyes off the slider when I saw movement on the deck again.
There was absolutely nothing there that I needed to see.