Levi grins over his beer. “You’re making that pompous older brother face.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“That face. It means you’re thinking everyone else had fun while you kept us in line. Have we forgotten Berlin? And Denver? And Rio?”
“My nuts still hurt from Rio.”
“Got the girl, though, didn’t you?”
“I mentioned my nuts hurt, didn’t I?”
He chuckles as he tips the beer back, but fine.
I’m smiling. A little.
There may have been too much cachaça consumed the night I decided I needed to be the mechanical bull riding champion in that club in Rio. And to this day, I don’t know how bull riders manage to perform in the sack with squished nuts and broken dicks, but maybe they have tricks I don’t know about.
Tricks I don’t want to know about, because I’m never doing mechanical bulls again.
Performing though—okay, yes.
I miss sex.
“You’ve earned some fun, bro.”
“I forgot how to have fun.”
“It’s easy. Just pretend you’re me.”
Victoria slides to our table in her stilettos and squats beside Levi with the pricey bourbon and two rocks glasses on her tray. “You gentlemen need anything else?”
If he says I need four minutes with her in a broom closet, I don’t care how much that bourbon cost, it’ll become a murder weapon.
He grins like he once more knows what I’m thinking. “You’re the best, Vickie. We’ll let you know.”
She’s barely left before a string of musicians and actors rotate through our table, most of them acknowledging me but actually here to schmooze with Levi. When the band broke up, Levi set out on a solo career while I hung up the keyboard and moved to Hollywood.
Not to act, but to settle down with an actress. And when she passed away, I moved our kids back home and started investing in local businesses. I’m out of the inner circles here in New York now. Nothing to offer most of these people, and they don’t have much to offer me either.
Except Al Beversdorf.
The current Fireballs owner is supposedly here somewhere tonight, celebrating the end of baseball season with a tour of New York’s best clubs while his team licks their wounds from setting a new league record for the worst season in professional sports ever, but he’s not circling over to our table, so I’m going to have to go find him.
I rise as elegantly as I can in these tight-ass jeans, nod to Levi’s musician friends, who make jokes about getting me back in the studio, and I give my brother the I’ll be back, don’t be an asshole and abandon me look.
He replies with a wink and a silent Go have fun. Pretend you’re me.
I’m reminded all too well by the way my dick’s suffocating in these pants that I’m not Levi.
Still, I make an effort to smile as I head down from our private balcony and around the edge of the dance floor, looking for the guy who pretends to be the Hugh Hefner of baseball team owners, but is actually a disaster.
My former boy bandmates and I intend to take one of his messes off his hands. Tonight, if we can.
We might not play and tour together anymore, but the five of us—along with all of our best buddies from the neighborhood we grew up in—are still tight. Still believe Copper Valley—our home city overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Virginia—can support a pro baseball team. And we’re willing to put our money where my mouth is.
Levi and I have a formal meeting with the baseball commissioner tomorrow to discuss a hostile takeover—I’ll get into the Fireballs any way I can—but I heard a rumor the commissioner’s also talking to an oil tycoon who wants to move the team to Vegas.
With as bad as the Fireballs have done the past five years, the commissioner is within his right to entertain a hostile takeover bid. There’s always a worst team of the season. But the Fireballs’ repeated performance sinking lower and lower in the history books means they barely qualify to be called a pro sports team anymore.
Has to sting for Beversdorf.
The team’s belonged to his family for three generations.
And he’s the one driving it into the ground.
It’s time to make the man an offer he can’t refuse. At least, if he still loves the team as much as I hope he does.
And there he is.
Third-floor balcony, surrounded by women and bodyguards. He’s seventy-three, with a thick white pompadour, a cigar clenched in his teeth, a rocks glass in one hand, and a supermodel in the other.
I grit my teeth and head toward the staircase. The bouncer guarding this section of the club nods to me. “Evening, Mr. Wilson. Welcome home.”
I’m three stairs up when I realize he thinks I’m Levi too.
Hell. Maybe I should just be Levi.
Best way to have fun, his voice whispers in my head.
He’s not wrong.
Tripp Wilson doesn’t know how to have fun by club standards. Levi Wilson?
Yep. That dude’s all about the fun.
I smile and wink at a woman walking down the stairs.
She smiles back demurely like I’m not good enough for her, and I wonder what Levi would think of that.
Probably not much.
He has no shortage of offers, and even if I give him shit about being a manwhore, I know he’s picky about who he takes home. Or to a hotel. Or backstage.
I’d actually be surprised if Levi took anyone to his private sanctuary. He plays the playboy well, but he’s exactly as jaded as a guy with over fifteen years in the industry should be.
Which means he knows how to give the appearance of having fun.
But is he actually having fun?
I decide to worry about Levi’s not-actual-problems another day, because I’m approaching the third floor landing as the music thumps below and the sea of bodies bop along to the beat, spotlights spinning over all the beautiful people with all the right moves in all the right clothes and all the right words.
You could say I don’t miss Hollywood or the music scene.
I’m also not going to miss these pants. Christ. I can’t even lift my legs without worrying I’ll split the seam, except these seams are double reinforced, which means I’ll break my cock before the denim gives.
I round the corner at the top of the steps. Beversdorf does a double-take when he sees me, mutters a fuck that I can clearly read on his lips, and gestures to a bodyguard.
But it’s not a bodyguard who stumbles into me.
No, that’s a tall, curvy woman with…a strawberry daiquiri in her hair? “Whoa. You okay?”
She grips my arm as I reach out to steady her, and suddenly the jeans are the least of my concerns.
Two bright emeralds blink rapidly at me as the slushy pink drink drips down onto her shoulders. Her lush lips part, my heart starts beating for the first time in forever, and my throat is suddenly so parched I briefly wonder if I spent the last six years singing solo, nonstop, in a desert.
Her makeup is too light for her to belong here, and her black dress is too business formal for a night on the town. She looks just as out of place as I feel.
“You okay?” I ask again like a total dumbass, sounding more like a prepubescent boy wheezing over his first cigarette than a mid-thirties single father of two on the verge of offering to buy a baseball team.