Page 6 of Velvet Vaughn

Leo huffed out a laugh. His smile came from a place deeper than amusement. It was the relief that arrived whenever he saw her alive, safe, and being ridiculous.

Crawfish. Of course Kayne had made her consume the crustaceans. Kayne would die on the hill of his Cajun grandmother’s kitchen, and Chloe, who had once tried to argue Leo into believing that ketchup was a vegetable, was about to learn things about hot sauce she had no business learning.

He thumbed back: Tell him welcome to the family. You’re his problem now.

Three dots appeared, and then her answer landed: RUDE. Then, a second later: Love you. Go schmooze somebody.

Leo chuckled and hid the phone away again. The day wrapped around him in an easy, uncomplicated way. If someone had asked him right then whether anything in his life felt unstable, he would have said no without hesitation.

Then his phone buzzed again with a different rhythm. It was a short double-pulse his settings used for breaking alerts. Leo tugged the phone back out and angled the screen against his palm to read it in the slanting light.

KSDK Breaking News: St. Louis area sports agent Victor Shaw found dead in Kansas City hotel room. Authorities investigating as apparent suicide.

Leo read it once, then again, because the first pass hadn’t actually made it into his brain.

Out on the tee box, Des connected with his ball with a ringing crack, and the sound felt as though it were coming from a different country.

Vic Shaw.

Three days ago, Leo had watched Vic push a ribeye around a plate at Tony’s downtown and drink a bourbon he didn’t seem to taste. Vic had laughed at the wrong beats and kept glancing at the door. Leo had chalked it up to Vic being Vic. He always looked as if he were expecting a bill collector or a process server or possibly a jealous husband. Maybe all three. Leo had paid for his own steak and left, and he honestly hadn’t thought about the man since.

Now the memory rearranged itself in Leo’s head, every detail shifting a fraction of an inch.

Suicide.

The word didn’t belong in the same sentence as the man Leo had seen at that table. Vic had been a lot of unpleasant things in his life. Leo had clashed with him over clients, tactics, and a specific rookie wide receiver whose mother Vic had charmed with a bouquet of roses and a set of lies. Vic was slippery. Opportunistic. He was a professional poacher. He was the reason Leo had a policy about not leaving prospects alone with rival agents at combine week.

Vic was not, as far as Leo had ever been able to tell, the type of man who ran out of road inside himself.

The no came from deep inside before he had finished processing the headline. It was an instinct that started in his head and moved outward. This was wrong. The whole shape of it felt wrong.

He became aware, distantly, that he was standing on a cart path at Bellerive with a phone in his hand and the afternoon light running off the edges of the fairway as the day faded. Marcus was watching his father’s ball climb against the sky. Des lowered his club with a smile, knowing he’d struck it pure.

Leo slid the phone back into his pocket without acknowledging the alert.

He didn’t know yet what he was going to do about it. He only knew that his body was two moves ahead of his head, and his body was saying no. The uneasy little urge that had pushed him to text Chloe minutes before the news hit suddenly didn’t feel quite so unprovoked.

He started walking toward the eighteenth tee because a man had just struck a beautiful drive and was waiting for his agent to tell him so. You didn’t flinch in front of a client, no matter what was on your phone.

But the cut fescue didn’t smell the same anymore.

#

Leo made it through the cocktail reception by smiling at the right people, drinking club soda with lime, and keeping his left hand in his pocket. These events attracted two types of people: those trying to sign you up and those trying to sell you something you had no intention of buying. Sometimes they were the same person.

He stayed long enough to shake the tournament chairperson’s hand and congratulate Reed Steele on a round of sixty-nine. Reed came off the eighteenth green sunburned and grinning, his hair standing up in the back as if he’d wrestled a leaf blower and lost. He pulled Leo into a one-armed, back-breaking hug that smelled like sweat, grass, and whatever cologne Reed’s wife had slipped into his shaving kit that morning, hoping he might remember to use it.

“You staying for dinner?” Reed asked.

“I have to go to the office.”

Reed checked his watch. “This late on a Friday afternoon?”

“Something came up.”

Reed had the disconcerting ability to read a face with the same precision he used to read a pitcher’s grip, and Leo watched him clock the expression that Leo had been trying to hide for the last twenty minutes.

“You good?”