Page 76 of The Devil In Denim
“You three did.”
“Yeah, but we’re a little bit crazy.”
“You think he’ll want to move the team.” Maggie’s skin went cold. The Saints. Moving. To Texas? Or wherever the hell else Sutter thought he could get a good deal from a city who wanted a new sports franchise.
“Who knows? Maybe. It’s what I’d do if I had an oil conglomerate to manage.”
It’s what someone who really wanted to get back at the man who’d fired him would do, Maggie realized. Even worse than having to sell the team to someone he didn’t respect would be the knowledge that his legacy had been uprooted—even renamed—and taken out of his reach forever. That would kill her father.
“Well, we need to make sure we have the numbers, don’t we?” Maggie asked. “Sutter can’t simply outbid you. Not if Dad wants to sell to you. So we need to get out there.”
“We need him to help,” Alex said. “His support will carry a lot of weight with the other owners. There are a few teams who won’t be for us regardless … the Yankees and the Mets would be more than happy for there not to be another team in the city cutting into their TV and gate takings. I called Tom not long ago but there was no answer.”
“I’ll go talk to him,” Maggie offered.
“Thanks. But this is something that Mal and Lucas and I need to do.”
The quick rejection of her offer stung. A little too much. But there wasn’t time for emotion. They needed an action plan. Logic. “He’s my dad. He’ll listen to me.” The question was, would Alex?
He grimaced. “I appreciate the offer. And I’m not trying to cut you out. But this is about the deal. My deal. You can come with us when we do go see Tom but we’ll do the talking.” He stopped, paused, scrubbed his hands through his hair, making it spike up even more. “Shit. Sorry. This is not how I wanted this morning to be.” He leaned toward her, kissed her quick.
Quick was still enough to make her pulse bounce and her stomach tighten in pleased remembrance.
“I know we have things to talk about but I need to get to work. Lucas and Mal are coming to my apartment to talk about things and then we’ll try your dad again. I’ll call you once I have a better idea what’s going on.” He stood and looked around the room. “I really need to find my shirt.”
Maggie bit her lip, torn between anger and feeling helpless. She wasn’t the boss’s daughter anymore. And sleeping with Alex didn’t mean he was going to include her in anything he didn’t want to. That much was becoming clear.
“I could come with you, to your apartment. I could be useful.”
Alex shook his head. “I’ll need you later, I’m sure, but right now, I need Mal and Lucas.”
She fought down the stab of envy. She’d only known Alex for a few weeks. Mal and Lucas had been his friends for years. They were the inner circle. Not her. She hadn’t earned that yet. At work or elsewhere.
Damn.
She watched as Alex found his shirt and his shoes and jacket, dressing on autopilot, his eyes returning to the TV screen where the presenters were having a field day recapping the press conference. She listened as well but couldn’t concentrate. She wanted to make him stop. Make him see her for a moment. Make him let her help.
But she couldn’t think how, other than by doing something overly dramatic like bursting into tears. And there could be no tears, no matter how she felt. She’d slept with her boss. Which meant, when he was in boss mode, she needed to keep things strictly professional no matter how she felt about it.
This was exactly why office relationships were a bad idea. It was the worst of both worlds.
But she’d done it and she’d known what she was doing.
Now, as she watched Alex pull the door shut behind him as he walked away without even another kiss, she just had to work out how to live with it.
Thank God for coffee. Maggie swallowed down the remains of her second cup and eyed her iPhone as it vibrated on the counter. The number on the screen wasn’t one she recognized so she, like she had with the twenty or so calls she’d received in the forty-five minutes since Alex had left, let it go through to voice mail. Press, no doubt.
One call had been from Ollie but she hadn’t felt like dealing with him right now. She wasn’t ready to hear what the team felt about Sutter’s announcement; she was too busy working out how she felt about it. She’d replayed her conversation with Will at the game last night over and over, searching her memory for hints that she should’ve picked up. But no, nothing. Sutter wouldn’t have wanted to tip his hand. Not if he was doing this for revenge. He’d want her shell-shocked, like her dad. She hadn’t known him well but that seemed to fit.
Get his pound of flesh.
God. He couldn’t get the Saints.
Problem was, she could see that he might hold some appeal to the other teams’ owners. He had, on the face of it, better baseball credentials than Alex, Mal, and Lucas, and his pockets were just as deep. She’d done some quick Googling. The Sutter companies had taken a bit of a hit along with the rest of the economy, but the oil was standing them in good stead and, from what she could find on such short notice, it looked like his finances were doing just fine.
Which was more than she could say for her stomach.
It protested, curling greasily, as she forced down a piece of toast to avoid the caffeine shredding her stomach. Between not getting to talk to Alex about last night and now this, her nerves had turned to a mass of twisting, turning, acid-coated worms. Five minutes of scalding hot water blasting on her head in the shower hadn’t helped, and the coffee, though it had temporarily burned away her sleep-deprivation brain fog, definitely hadn’t eased her stomach.
