Page 4 of Velvet Vaughn

Chapter One

Leonardo De Luca had walked a lot of golf courses in his life, but Bellerive in early April was the one he measured the rest of them against.

The cart path along hole seventeen curved gently toward the green, and the midday sun had dropped low enough to turn the fairway into a long stretch of gold. Shadows from the oaks stretched across the grass in cool blue stripes. Behind him, a foursome from the morning flight was laughing about a drive that had found the water, and closer by, the smell of freshly cut grass mixed with the drifting smoke of somebody’s cigar. Leo breathed it all in and tried to remember if he’d ever been unhappy in a place that smelled like this.

Probably during spring training in Florida, when the humidity had tried to drown him, and the coaching staff believed running sprints at noon built character instead of heatstroke.

But not today.

Still, a part of Leo’s brain never quite shut off. Years in professional sports had trained him to read rooms the way quarterbacks read defenses. Even on a golf course, his instincts registered things automatically: who was watching, who wasn’t, which conversations stopped when he passed.

Desmond Roule ambled beside him, a polo stretched tight against wide shoulders that had absorbed a decade of defensive ends. He walked with the deliberate, rolling gait of a football player whose left knee had stopped cooperating around year eleven. Des was six-six and carried three hundred and change on his frame, and he moved with the tranquil dignity of somebody who’d decided, somewhere around the last two-minute drill of his last playoff loss, that he was going out on his own terms.

On Des’s other side was his son, Marcus, all of twenty and trying very hard not to look it. The kid had inherited his father’s height without quite growing into it yet. Marcus was the one asking most of the questions.

“So when guys go into broadcasting,” Marcus began, angling his head toward Leo, “is that something the agent sets up, or does the network just call?”

Leo kept his pace easy. “Both, usually. If a network’s interested, they’ll reach out. If they’re not, a good agent makes the case for them. It depends on the client, though. Some guys want a booth while others want out of football entirely and don’t realize it yet.”

Marcus nodded slowly, as though he were filing that away. He was asking about how to build a life after football, because his father was about to need one, and the family had clearly talked about it more than Des was letting on.

The real question came three steps later, framed as casually as a twenty-year-old could manage.

“Dad mentioned some of his guys have had trouble keeping brand deals after they retired. Like the endorsements just kind of evaporate.”

“It happens,” Leo agreed. “Usually because nobody was managing the relationships during the last playing year. Companies don’t drop a guy because he retired. They do it because they stopped hearing from him and a younger name walked in the door. Marketing departments have the attention span of golden retrievers. If you stop throwing the ball, they wander off. The trick is to start the conversation a year early, not a month after the last game.”

Marcus snorted. Leo didn’t press. The best thing you could do with a man like Des Roule was let him arrive at his own conclusions with you standing close enough to catch the fall.

He also noticed Des’s shoulders loosen slightly after the explanation, a subtle shift that suggested he’d been bracing for worse news.

The scoreboard beside the seventeenth green came into view as they crested the rise. Leo ran his eyes down it out of reflex. Most of the names were charity ringers and local pros, but halfway down, in the red ink reserved for under par, he found the one he’d been checking on all afternoon.

Steele, R.: Minus three through sixteen.

Leo smiled. Reed Steele was somewhere ahead of them, probably grousing at his caddie about the wind, and he was three under at Bellerive in a charity tournament that didn’t mean a thing except that Reed enjoyed winning and always had.

Reed once spent ten minutes arguing with an official over a call that mattered to absolutely no one but Reed. Leo had watched him present his case with the solemn intensity of a man addressing the Supreme Court instead of participating in a charity event.

Seeing Reed’s name sitting three under brought back a familiar rush, and for a second, Leo was right back in the locker room with men who’d once depended on each other to make a play.

He and Reed had both left the game in the same way. Knees. Leo’s had been a third baseman’s nightmare, a runner dropping a shoulder into him on a botched slide, and he still remembered the sound more than the pain. The pain had been abstract. The sound had been specific, and it had quietly decided the rest of his life.

Six years on, he wasn’t bitter about it, which sometimes surprised him more than it should have. He’d made a second career out of being the guy who walked beautiful golf courses with men such as Des, and on days this good, he wasn’t even sure he’d trade back.

“Mr. De Luca?”

Leo turned. A woman in a wide straw visor and a pink Bellerive polo was smiling at him with the half-apologetic, half-delighted expression he’d come to recognize from twenty feet away.

“Ma’am.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt. My husband will never forgive me if I don’t get a picture.”

“Happy to.” He stepped toward her, mindful of Des and Marcus giving him polite space. The woman fumbled with her phone, and Leo took it gently and flipped it to the front camera, the motion automatic after a thousand similar requests. “Here, let me. The light’s better from this side.”

She laughed, flattered, and leaned in. He tilted the phone, smiled the genuine smile he’d learned to summon for strangers who meant well, and tapped the button twice for insurance.

“Perfect. Tell your husband I said hi.”