Match Me If You Can (Chicago Stars #6)(63)

Still, trying to nail a friend was a rotten thing to do. Even a sexy friend, although she didn’t seem too clear about that, which made the effect of those mischievous eyes and the swirl of that amazing hair all the more enticing. Still, if he was going to blow his training for marital fidelity, he should have done it with one of the women at Waterworks, not with Annabelle, because she was right. How could she sleep with him then introduce him to other women? She couldn’t, they both knew it, and since he never wasted his time supporting an unsupportable position, he couldn’t imagine why he’d done it tonight. Or maybe he could.

Because he wanted his matchmaker naked …and that definitely wasn’t part of his plan.



Heath slept on the porch that night and awakened the next morning to the sound of the front door closing. He rolled over and squinted at his watch. It was a few minutes before eight, which meant Annabelle was heading off to meet the book club for breakfast. He rose from the mattress he’d dragged out to the porch for the best night’s sleep he’d experienced in weeks, a hell of a lot better than tossing and turning in his empty house.

The men had a round of golf scheduled. As he showered and dressed, he went over the events of the previous night and reminded himself to mind the manners he’d worked so hard to acquire. Annabelle was his friend, and he didn’t screw over friends, figuratively or literally.

He drove to the public course with Kevin but ended up sharing a golf cart with Dan Calebow. Dan kept himself in great shape for a man in his forties. With the exception of a few character lines, he didn’t look all that different from his playing days when his steely eyes and cold-blooded determination on the field had earned him the nickname Ice. Dan and Heath had always gotten along well, but whenever Heath mentioned Phoebe, as he did that morning, Dan always said pretty much the same thing.

“When two hardheaded people get married, they learn to pick their battles.” Dan spoke softly so he didn’t distract Darnell, who was lining up his tee shot. “This one’s all yours, pal.”

Darnell hooked his ball into the left rough, and the discussion returned to golf, but later, as they were riding down the fairway, Heath asked Dan if he missed his head coaching job, which he’d left for the front office.

“Sometimes.” As Dan checked the scorecard, Heath spotted one of those rub-on tattoos on the side of his neck. A baby blue unicorn. Pippi Tucker’s handiwork. “But I have a great consolation prize,” Dan went on. “I get to watch my kids grow up.”

“A lot of coaches have kids.”

“Yeah, and their wives are raising them. Being president of the Stars is a big job, but I can still get the kids off to school in the mornings and be at the dinner table most nights.”

Right now, Heath couldn’t see anything too exciting about either activity, but he took it on faith that someday he might.

He finished the round only three shots behind Kevin, which wasn’t bad, considering his own twelve handicap. They turned in their carts, and then the six of them headed into the clubhouse’s private room for lunch. It was a dingy space with cheap paneling, battered tables, and what Kevin insisted were the best cheese-burgers in the county. After a couple of bites, Heath found himself agreeing.

They were enjoying replaying their round when, out of nowhere, Darnell decided he had to spoil it. “It’s time to talk about our book,” he said. “Did everybody read it like you was supposed to?”

Heath nodded along with the rest of them. Last week Annabelle had left him a message with the title of the novel all the men were supposed to read, the story of a group of mountain climbers. Heath didn’t get to read for pleasure much anymore, and he’d enjoyed having an excuse. When he’d been a kid, the public library had been his refuge, but once he’d hit high school, he’d gotten wrapped up in the demands of working two jobs, playing football, and studying for the straight As that would put the Beau Vista Trailer Park behind him forever. Reading for fun had gone by the wayside, along with a lot of other simple pleasures.

Darnell rested an arm on the table. “Anybody want to start the ball rolling?”

There was a long silence.

“I liked it,” Dan finally said.

“Me, too,” Kevin offered.

Webster held up his hand to order another Coke. “It was pretty interesting.”

They stared at one another.

“Good plot,” Ron said.

An even longer silence fell.

Kevin made some accordion folds in a straw wrapper. Ron messed with the saltshaker. Webster looked around for his Coke. Darnell tried again. “What did you think about the way the men reacted to their first night on the mountain?”

“Pretty interesting.”

“It was okay.”

Darnell took his literature seriously, and storm clouds were gathering in his eyes. He shot Heath a menacing look. “You got anything to say?”

Heath set down his burger. “Combining adventure, irony, and unabashed sentimentality is always tricky to pull off, especially in a novel with such a strong central conceit. We ask ourselves, where is the conflict? Man v. nature, man v. man, man versus himself? A fairly complex exploration of our modern sense of disconnection. Bleak undertones, comic high notes. It worked for me.”

That cracked ’em all up. Even Darnell.

Finally, they quieted down. Webster got his Coke, Dan found a fresh bottle of ketchup, and the discussion turned right back to where everybody except Darnell wanted it to be.