Payton burst out laughing. The sound was more magical than the cheer of all Sabers fans combined.
She stared at him with rapt attention, complete and utter wonder shining in her eyes. “It sounds marvelous,” she said.
“You really do love this game, don’t you?”
Her eyes softened around the edges. “I do.” She let out a soft laugh. “When I was a little girl, I would kneel next to my bed and say my prayers at night. And they always ended the same way. ‘God, please let girls play football.’”
Cedric’s chest tightened with pity for the little girl who never got her prayer answered.
“There’s nothing I wanted to do more,” she confessed. “One of my first memories is being on my daddy’s shoulders while he yelled at his players to keep their legs up as they ran sprints. I was probably two years old. I spent nearly every afternoon on his shoulders until I was six.”
“What happened when you turned six that you had to stop going to their practices?”
“Oh, no. I never stopped going. I’d just gotten too heavy to be on my dad’s shoulders. I had to settle for standing next to him on the sideline. I had my own whistle and clipboard. The guys on the team even got me a Manchac Mustangs cap with ‘Coach Moe, Jr.’ embroidered on the side.”
Cedric couldn’t keep the smile from tracing across his lips. He could just imagine a six-year-old Payton barking at a bunch of hefty high school players five times her size. He’d bet they all fell in line when she talked, too.
“My dad would have loved this,” she continued. “No one loved football as much as he did.”
“Did he play for the Longhorns? You said you were from Texas, right?”
“Yeah, from West Texas.” She studied the goalpost. “Dad never played. He was born with a heart defect. You’d never know it by looking at him. He was six foot five and two-hundred-eighty pounds of muscle. But you don’t have to play the game to love it.”
Cedric couldn’t help it. He reached out and captured her hand, the feel of her soft skin sending a shock of desire through his bloodstream.
“No, you don’t,” he said. He could see that now. Payton would never play football, but she loved it as much as any of the players on the Sabers squad. Cedric had no doubt about that.
Their gazes met and his heart turned over in his chest.
She averted her eyes, glancing at their intertwined hands. Cedric’s palm tingled where it touched her. He ached to bring her fingers to his lips and satisfy the yearning to taste her skin. But after another long moment she lifted her gaze and pulled away.
“So,” Payton said, rubbing her arms as if she were cold. “Can you handle Gianni’s on your own Wednesday or do you need me to be there?”
Awareness of her lingered on his fingertips. He knew he shouldn’t have touched her, but he’d
had
to. The desire had been too hard to fight.
He was a bit taken aback by her suggestion to join him at the pizza parlor. Gus Houseman had never offered to accompany him anywhere. He was always too busy with his other clients.
“If you want to drop by Gianni’s, that would be fine,” Cedric answered.
“I’ll try to make it. It will all depend on how my schedule looks by midweek. I have something else I’m working on that may have me tied up.”
“Is this ‘something else’ something I should know about?”
“Not yet.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. But I promise to call you as soon as I have something more solid to go on. Just trust me.”
“You say that as if it’s so simple,” Cedric teased, trying to diffuse some of the awkwardness that had sprouted between them after he’d touched her. Even though he was aching to touch her again.
“Ouch!” Payton laughed. “Have a little faith in your agent, Mr. Reeves.”
Her words struck a chord inside him that pushed all joking aside. Cedric looked her in the eyes, the weight of everything that was at stake suddenly smothering him.
“I’m putting all of my faith in my agent.”
Chapter 6
P
ayton sipped from the crystal tumbler she’d been given when she first sat in the main conference room of Morrison Products. The water had grown lukewarm, while the tempers on the other side of the table had risen even higher. The VP of marketing and the company’s chief operating officer were at odds over the deal, and to Payton’s surprise, the men were actually allowing her to witness it.
In practicing law, you never let the opposing counsel observe any dissention in the ranks. Morrison Products’s upper management seemed to have missed the day they taught that rule in business school. The COO was ready to pull the offer off the table but the marketing VP was still fighting. Apparently, Cedric’s bad-boy reputation didn’t faze him. The man seemed determined to make a deal with his favorite Sabers player.
Payton kept her cool. She’d decided before ever stepping through these doors the dollar figure she would accept in order to make Cedric the new spokesman for Soft Touch Shaving Cream. They had passed that figure twenty minutes ago.
But what kind of agent would she be if she didn’t try to get as much for her client as possible? She’d given Morrison Products a number that was twenty-five percent more than the amount she was actually willing to settle for, and she would not bite until they reached it.
Matt Shuster, the marketing guy, folded his hands on the table and leveled Payton with a shrewd stare. “One million, one hundred and fifty thousand,” he said.
Payton lifted her glass to her lips once more, hoping the men across the table could not see the water shaking in her unsteady hands.
This was one of those defining moments that would dictate how she was perceived as an agent. If she backed down from the amount she’d requested she’d always be seen as a pushover, an agent who could be bullied. On the other hand, if she continued to play hardball, she could potentially walk away from over a million dollars for her client.
Payton’s heart pumped a thousand miles per second. Her leg had begun shaking in a nervous rhythm, but she willed it to stop. She refused to show a modicum of fear. Since the minute she’d sat at this table, she’d fallen back into lawyer mode. These two had nothing on the opposing counsels and judges she’d faced in the Texas civil court system.
“Well, gentlemen,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table. “I thank you for your time today. But I’m afraid I can’t accept this offer.”
Matt Shuster’s jaw dropped open.
“You’re going to leave over fifty thousand dollars?” Louis Crane, the COO, asked, his voice incredulous.
Payton leveled her gaze on the balding man who had given her the toughest fight she’d had since her days of practicing law. “A better question is ‘are you going to lose Cedric Reeves over fifty thousand dollars?’” She braced her hands on the table and started to rise.
“Fine,” Louis Crane said.
Payton did her best to stop a smile from creeping onto her lips as she lowered herself back into the chair. She’d done it! She’d played hardball with these shrewd, intimidating businessmen and won. If this was the bliss she had to look forward to as a sports agent, Payton had no doubt she’d chosen the right career. The past hour had been the ultimate rush.
Payton refused to allow any emotion to show on her face until she slipped behind the wheel of her car and squealed like a child. She smiled the entire hour it took to make it back to her apartment in New Jersey. She smiled as she loaded two weeks’ worth of laundry into mesh laundry bags and packed them into her backseat.
She was still smiling several hours later when her cell phone rang. She checked the caller ID and her smile widened even more at the name that appeared.
“So, how was it?” she asked, balancing her cell phone between her ear and shoulder. She stuffed the mix of jeans, T-shirts, underwear and bath towels into the washing machine, thinking of the different ways her mother would kill her if she ever found out Payton did laundry without separating it into proper batches.
“It was better than the folks at Gianni’s expected,” Cedric answered. “The place was packed. The restaurant manager said they did more business in that one hour than they had ever done on an entire Wednesday.”
“That’s awesome,” Payton said. “I really wanted to be there but I was busy with that ‘little something else’ I mentioned on Monday. I’ve got some news for you,” she continued, unable to keep the enthusiasm from her voice.
“Reliant?” was Cedric’s excited response.
Payton rolled her eyes. He sure knew how to let the air out of her balloon. “No, not Reliant,” she lamented. “Would you forget about them for a while? I told you Reliant Sportswear will take time.”
“Sorry,” Cedric answered, contriteness coloring his voice. “What’s the news?”
“I got you another endorsement deal.”
“A real one?”
“Of course a real one.”
“One where I actually get paid?” he clarified.
“Yes,” Payton said with a long-suffering sigh. She added quarters to the washing machine and turned it on, then returned to the folding table where the load she’d removed from the dryer sat in a heap. Maybe with the Soft Touch deal she could finally afford a place with a washer and dryer.
“So who’s the deal with?” Cedric asked.
“You, Mr. Reeves, are the new face of Soft Touch Shaving Cream,” she announced.
There was a pause, then, “Shaving cream?”
Incredulousness oozed from his end of the phone. Payton clutched her fist around the rayon top she was about to fold, wishing for a moment it was her client’s neck.
“This is good, Cedric. It’s a national campaign, and I got them to add twenty-five percent to their initial offer.”
“Which comes out to?”
“One point two million,” she said with way more gaiety than a professional sports agent should display. Forget being professional; she got twenty percent of that money. Payton saw her mountain of student loans crumbling right before her eyes.
Adjusting the cell phone, she folded a bath sheet and added it to the laundry basket piled with clean clothes.
“Cedric, you still there?” Payton asked after several beats of silence.
“Sorry,” he answered. “I was still digesting the news.”
“So, you’re good with this?”
“You just got me a seven-figure endorsement deal. What do you think?”
For a minute she’d thought he would throw the deal right back in her face. Compared to his teammates who had sneaker and video game endorsements, shaving cream was small potatoes. But it was a start. It showed that someone was willing to see past Cedric’s bad-boy reputation and take a chance on him. All Cedric had to do was live up to the model player she’d painted him to be in her negotiations with the people from Morrison Products.
“So, what’s next?” Cedric asked.
“First, you sign the contract. Then there’s a commercial shoot they’d like you to do as soon as possible.”
“When do I sign?” he asked.
“I can email the contract so you can read over it.”
“Have you read it?” he asked.
“Of course I have.”
“Then that’s good enough for me.”
The blanket of trust that came through with that one statement threw Payton off kilter. She wanted his trust. It was a necessity if their working relationship was going to be a successful one. But with his trust came a rush of responsibility Payton had, up until this point, not fully comprehended.
Cedric’s career was in her hands. He was entrusting her with everything he’d worked years to attain. The enormity of it settled upon her chest like a crushing boulder.
“Do you have the contract with you?” Cedric asked. “I’m in Jersey, on my way from practice. I can come over and sign it. You’re in Weehawken, right?”
“Yes,” Payton said, thinking how truly weird it was that she knew where Cedric worked, lived and even some of his favorite restaurants, yet he wasn’t even sure what city she lived in. She really
had
been stalking him. “I’ll be at the laundromat at the corner of Palisade and Thirty-Ninth for another hour,” she finished.
“I can be there in twenty minutes. And, Payton?”
“Yes?”
“Good job.”
“Thank you,” Payton answered, pride blooming in her chest. She
had
done a good job. She had not realized Cedric’s praise would mean so much, but it did. It was the first dose of validation she’d received since becoming his agent. Sure, landing Cedric as a client had been a big deal, but having a client meant nothing if you couldn’t make anything happen for him.
Today, Payton had made things happen.
She smiled to herself in the middle of the crowded laundromat as she recalled the rush of adrenaline she’d experienced in the meeting room at Morrison Products. On the outside it had seemed like an unfair fight—two distinguished businessmen in two-thousand-dollar suits against one petite female—but she’d come out on top.
Her real challenge would be making sure Cedric didn’t do anything to blemish the new reputation she was trying to create for him. But she’d do that, too, even if she had to stick to him like glue for the rest of the football season.
Cedric made the block three times before finding a spot that had just been vacated not too far from the laundromat. He did a bad job of parallel parking his SUV, but hey, he’d grown up in South Philly; the city bus had been his way around town.
He pocketed his keys as he rounded the corner, spotting Payton through the laundromat’s smudged glass window. She was standing in front of a metal table, folding a bath towel. Cedric paused to take a much-needed breath before entering the building. His heart had predictably started racing as soon as he saw her. He’d been trying to fight this…this
thing
he had for his agent, but some things were too damn strong to fight.
This was the absolute last thing he needed to deal with right now. Payton was his agent, and to Cedric’s immense satisfaction, she was turning out to be a very good one. She’d shown him in the past couple of weeks that she was the real deal. And landing him a seven-figure endorsement deal today had solidified that fact…even if the deal was for shaving cream.