It Had to Be You (Chicago Stars Book 1)

Dan opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a quart of milk, and unscrewed the cap. Behind him he heard Valerie coming into the kitchen of the house they had once shared. Because he knew it would irritate her, he lifted the milk container to his lips and took a swig.

“For God’s sake, Dan, get a glass,” she said in that snotty voice he hated.

He took another swig before he screwed the cap back on and returned the container to the refrigerator. Resting the side of his hip against the door, he studied her. She had scrubbed the makeup from her face, revealing her sharp bone structure with a nose that was a bit long but well balanced by a high, smooth forehead. Her light brown hair, free of the silver barrette, fell almost to her shoulders, and her teenybopper clothes had given way to a midnight blue peignoir set trimmed in black lace.

“Where’d you get the cheerleading jacket?”

“My secretary’s daughter. I told her I was going to a costume party.” She lit a cigarette, even though she knew he hated being around smoke.

“This escapade tonight crossed the boundary into creepy. Sixteen-year-old girls haven’t turned me on since I was twelve.”

She shrugged and exhaled. “It was different, that’s all.”

Not so different, he thought. In one way or another, all of Valerie’s sexual fantasies tended to lead toward male domination. Pretty damn funny considering the fact that she was a Class A ball buster. Unfortunately, the only person he could share the joke with was Valerie, and he knew she wouldn’t laugh. Besides, she got all riled if he criticized any of these weird scenarios she set up, and they already had enough other things to fight about.

Her hand crept to her rear. She rubbed it through the dark blue silk and gazed at him with resentment. “You shouldn’t have hit me so hard.”

“Honey, I was holding back.”

He could tell by her expression that she was trying to make up her mind whether to sink her teeth into him or not. Apparently she decided against it because she walked over to the small kitchen desk and began thumbing through the Filofax she had left there. “I don’t have to be in Washington for a few more weeks. How’s your schedule for the weekend?”

“I’ll be at the Meadowlands. We’re playing the Jets.” He moved away from the refrigerator and took a banana from a stainless steel fruit bowl that looked like the terminal at Dulles.

She slipped on the pair of half-glasses that were lying on the desk and set her cigarette in a chunky black glass ashtray. “What about Thursday evening before you leave?”

“Meeting. Friday’s all right, though.”

“The vice president’s going to be in town that night, and there’s another reception.”

“Wednesday night if we make it after midnight.”

“That looks like it’ll work. Except—” She slammed the book shut. “I’ll have my period.” Slipping off her glasses, she rubbed the bridge of her nose, took another drag from her cigarette, and said briskly, “We’ll work around it. We have before.”

“We’ve been divorced for nearly a year, Val. Don’t you think it’s time we talked about putting an end to this?”

“There’s no need to end it yet. We agreed this would be the best arrangement until one of us finds someone else.”

“Or until we kill each other, whichever comes first.”

She ignored his crack and showed that rare vulnerability that always got to him. “I just—I just can’t imagine how to go about it. I’m attracted to powerful men. How am I supposed to tell someone like that I won’t sleep with him until I’ve seen a complete workup of his blood chemistry?”

He tossed the banana peel in the sink. “Sex in the nineties. It makes for strange bedfellows.”

“No one should have to screw an ex-spouse just because that ex-spouse happens to be HIV negative.” She stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Amen to that.” He disliked the arrangement a lot more than she did, but whenever he tried to break it off, she made him feel like a heel. Once he found his baby-makin’ woman, however, he was putting an end to this.

“We’re both too smart to play sexual roulette,” she said.

“And you’re crazy about my body.”

She didn’t have much of a sense of humor these days, and his wisecrack set her off. Her nostrils began to breathe fire, and before long she was accusing him of gross insensitivity, reckless behavior, a bad disposition, not caring about anything but winning football games, and emotional dishonesty.

Since she was pretty much on target, he tuned her out while he polished off the banana. In all fairness, he knew her problem was worse than his, and the fact that he felt sorry for her was one of the reasons he went along with this sick arrangement. As a female member of the House of Representatives, she was judged by a stricter moral standard than her male colleagues. The voters might forgive some hounding around from their congressman, but they sure wouldn’t forgive it from a woman. For someone who liked sex as much as Valerie, but didn’t have either a husband or a man she cared about, it was a definite problem. Besides, she was one of the few honest legislators in Washington, and he figured it was his patriotic duty.

Not that there weren’t some benefits for him. He’d had so much free sex during his early playing days that he’d lost his appetite for promiscuity. He also wasn’t stupid, and he had no interest in taking chances with groupies. But despite Valerie’s kinky little scenarios, sex hadn’t been much fun for a long time.

He knew now that the two of them had been incompatible from the beginning, but they had generated so much sexual heat that neither of them had noticed until they’d made the mistake of getting married. Valerie had been initially fascinated by his rough edges and fierce aggressiveness, the same qualities that had later driven her crazy. And her breeding and sophistication had been irresistible to a kid who’d grown up dirt-poor in backwoods Alabama. But he had soon discovered that she had no sense of humor and no desire for the family life he craved.

Her latest tirade against him was beginning to wind down, and he remembered that he had a score of his own to settle. “While we’re airing our grievances here, Valerie, I’m going to dish out one of my own. If you give any more interviews like that one last week, your lawyer’s going to get a phone call from mine, and this won’t be a friendly divorce any longer.”

She refused to meet his eyes. “It was a mistake.”

“It’s like I tell the team. There’s no such thing as mistakes—only a lack of foresight.”

He had been intimidating people with his physical size for so long that it had become automatic, and he instinctively moved closer until he was hovering over her. “I don’t appreciate public discussions of our breakup, and I’m not crazy about having anybody but sportswriters call me a borderline psychopath.”

She began to fiddle with the lace on the front of her negligee. “It was an off-the-record remark. The reporter should never have printed it.”

“You shouldn’t have made the remark in the first place. From now on when anybody asks you about our divorce, you restrict yourself to the same two words I always use when I get interviewed. ‘Irreconcilable differences.’ “

“You sound like you’re threatening me.” She was trying to work up a good lather, but she couldn’t quite manage it, so he knew she was feeling guilty.

“I’m just reminding you that a lot of men in this town aren’t going to keep voting for a woman that bad-mouths an ex-husband who once completed twenty-nine passes against the 49ers’ defense in a single afternoon.”

“All right! I’m sorry. I’d just talked to you on the phone, and you’d irritated me.”

“Valerie, I irritate you all the time, so don’t use that as an excuse to go for my jugular.”

She wisely changed the subject. “I heard Bert’s funeral was quite entertaining. It’s too bad all his old mistresses weren’t there so they could have seen that dog pee on his coffin.” Valerie smiled in her thin-lipped way. “There is a God after all. And She watches out for Her own.”

Dan refused to get into a debate with Valerie about Bert, especially when he knew he was on shaky ground. Men liked Bert, but women didn’t. He had been too free with his hands, too quick with the raunchy joke and patronizing comment. That didn’t go over well with women like Valerie. It didn’t go over all that well with Dan, either, but Bert had been the boss so he’d kept his mouth shut.

“It wasn’t funny, Val. A man died, and his daughter managed to turn his funeral into a circus.”

“I’ve heard stories about her. What’s she like?”

“A high-class hooker, except not that smart. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I met a person who struck me as being so completely worthless.”

“She was Arturo Flores’s mistress for years. She must have some redeeming qualities.”

“Other than the obvious ones on her chest, I can’t imagine what. Bert talked to me about her a couple of times. It embarrassed the hell out of him knowing his daughter’s naked body was showing up on the walls of every big museum in the country.”

“Flores was a great artist. Don’t you think Bert’s attitude might have been a bit provincial? Remember that we’re talking about a man who wanted to hang gold tassels from the crotches of the Star Girl cheerleaders.”

“None of those girls was his daughter. And ticket sales have been real slow.”

She bristled. “That kind of blatant sexism isn’t funny.”

He sighed. “It was a joke, Val. Loosen up.”

“You’re disgusting. Everything about sex is one big joke to you, isn’t it?”

“I’m disgusting! Now you correct me if I’m wrong here, but aren’t you the one who’s been dreaming up all these kinky little sexual scenarios, including tonight’s semi-repulsive dip into kiddie porn? And haven’t I been warming that butt of yours whenever you decide you want it warmed, even though beating up women has never been high on my list of aphrodisiacs?”

She stiffened. “That’s not what I’m talking about, but as usual, you’ve chosen to misinterpret. I’m talking about your attitude toward women. You’ve gotten so much free sex over the years that you’ve forgotten women are anything more than tits and ass.”

“Now that’s real nice talk coming from a representative of the United States government.”

“You won’t discuss your feelings. You refuse to share your emotions.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to remind her that whenever he’d tried to share his emotions with her, she’d turned it into an all-night discussion of everything that was wrong with him.

“And women let you get away with it,” she went on. “That’s what’s really galling. They let you get away with it because—Never mind. I can’t talk to you.”

“No, Valerie. Go on. Finish what you were saying. If I’m so terrible, why do women let me get away with it?”

“Because you’re rich and good-looking,” she replied too quickly.

“That’s not what you were going to say. You’re the one who keeps telling me I need to be more open in my communication. Maybe you should practice what you preach.”

“They let you get away with it because you’re so confident,” she said stiffly. “You don’t seem to have the same self-doubts as everybody else in the world. Even successful women like the security of knowing they have a man like that standing behind them.”

Although to another man her words might have been flattering, they had the opposite effect on him. He could feel a red-hot coil of rage burning deep inside him, a rage that went all the way back to boyhood when too much emotion had meant a trip to the woodshed and a walloping from his father’s belt.

“You women are really something,” he sneered. “When are you going to figure out that God might have made two sexes for a reason? You can’t have it both ways. Either a man’s a man, or he’s not. You can’t take somebody whose nature is to be a warrior and then expect him—at your command—to curl up on the couch, spill his guts, and, in general, start acting like a pussy.”

“Get out!”

“Gladly.” He snatched up his keys and headed toward the door. But before he got there, he threw his final punch. “You know what your problem is, Valerie. Your underwear doesn’t fit right, and it’s made you mean. So the next time you go to the store, why don’t you see if you can buy yourself a bigger-sized jockstrap.”

He stormed out of the house and climbed into his car. As soon as he got settled, he jammed Hank Jr. into the tape deck and turned up the volume. When he was feeling this low, the only person he wanted to be around was another hell-raiser.

The Sunday afternoon preseason game against the Jets was a disaster. If the Stars had been playing a respectable team, the loss wouldn’t have been so humiliating, but getting beaten 25-10 by the candy-ass Jets, even in preseason, was more than Dan could stomach, especially when he imagined his three unsigned players lounging in their hot tubs back in Chicago watching the game on their big screen TVs.

Jim Biederot, the Stars’ starting quarterback, had been injured in their last practice and his backup had pulled a groin muscle the week before, so Dan was forced to go with C.J. Brown, a fifteen-year veteran whose knees were held together by airplane glue. If Bobby Tom had been playing, he’d have managed to get free so C.J. could hit him, but Bobby Tom wasn’t playing.

To make matters worse, the Stars’ new owner had apparently returned from her vacation, but she wasn’t taking any calls. Dan kicked a hole in the visitors’ locker room wall when Ronald McDermitt delivered that particular piece of information, but it hadn’t helped. He’d never imagined he could hate anything more than he hated losing football games, but that was before Phoebe Somerville had come into his life.

All in all, it had been a dismal week. Ray Hardesty, the Stars’ former defensive end, whom Dan had cut in early August, had driven drunk one too many times and gone through a guardrail on the Calumet Expressway. He’d been killed instantly, along with his eighteen-year-old female passenger. All through the funeral, as Dan had watched the faces of Ray’s grieving parents, he’d kept asking himself if there had been something more he could have done. Rationally, he knew there wasn’t, but it was a tragedy all the same.

The only bright spot in his week had occurred at a DuPage County nursery school where he’d gone to film a public service announcement for United Way. When he’d walked in the door, the first thing he’d noticed was a pixie-faced, redheaded teacher sitting on the floor reading a story to a group of four-year-olds. Something had gone all soft and warm inside him as he’d studied her freckled nose and the spot of green finger paint on her slacks.

When the filming was done, he’d asked her out for a cup of coffee. Her name was Sharon Anderson, and she’d been tongue-tied and shy, a welcome contrast to all the bold-eyed women he was accustomed to. Although it was too early to speculate, he couldn’t help but wonder if he might not have found the simple, home-lovin’ woman he was searching for.

But the residual glow from his meeting with Sharon had faded by the day of the Jets game, and he continued to seethe over the loss as he endured the postgame activities. It wasn’t until he stood on the tarmac waiting to board the charter that would take them back to O’Hare that he snapped.

“Son of a bitch!”

He pivoted so abruptly he bumped into Ronald McDermitt, knocking the acting general manager off-balance so that he dropped the book he was carrying. It was what the kid deserved, Dan thought callously, for being born a wimp. Although Ronald was no more than five-foot-eight, he wasn’t bad-looking, but he was too neat, too polite, and too young to run the Chicago Stars.

In pro teams the GM directed the entire operation, including hiring and firing of coaches, so that, theoretically, Dan worked for Ronald. But Ronald was so intimidated by him that his authority was purely academic.

The GM picked up his book and looked at him with a wary expression that made Dan crazy. “Sorry, Coach.”

“I bumped into you, for chrissake.”

“Yes, well . . .”

Dan shoved his carry-on bag into Ronald’s arms. “Get somebody to drop this off at my house. I’ll catch a later flight.”

Ronald looked worried. “Where are you going?”

“It’s like this, Ronald. I’m going to go do your job for you.”

“I—I’m sorry, Coach, but I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“I mean that I’m going to look up our new owner, and then I’m going to acquaint her with a few facts about life in the big bad NFL.”

Ronald swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Uh, Coach, that might not be a good idea. She doesn’t seem to want to be bothered with team business.”

“Now that’s just too bad,” Dan drawled as he set off, “because I’m going to bother her real bad.”