Heather Graham (34 page)

He grimaced, and she was glad. He knew that she was right. Kent tugged at her hand.

“Katie, would you mind if I gave it one last shot? One more year, just to see if we could have made it?”

She bent down to him, loving him so much that it almost hurt. “I want what you want.”

“Just one more year.”

“One more year. It doesn’t matter at all,” she murmured, “because I intend to have you for life.”

He smiled. Julie and Sam were still watching them. The team, beaten and disheartened, started trailing in as the medics were coming for Kent and Sam.

Katie just didn’t care.

She kissed him again for all she was worth.

“E
IGHTEEN, TWENTY-FOUR, SEVEN …”

Sam Loper was calling off the numbers. There was no screaming or shouting in the stadium; everything had gone silent with tension and expectation.

It was the final quarter, and the final seconds of the game were ticking away. The Saxons had made it to the Superbowl for the second season in a row; it was a Washington team they faced this year, and the game had been a rough one. Good football, played hard.

Kent felt a sizzling along his spine; it was right, everything was just right. He was playing with top-notch guys, not like last year …

Sam’s “diplomatic” way of handling things had been to go to the NFL with advice regarding the rumors. Nothing could change the outcome of the last game, but after the game, things had happened—quietly but severely. Paul Crane and Harry Kolan would never again play professional ball.

But that was last year. This was now. And Kent continued to feel that sizzle. It was time. The Sarasota Saxons were about to come into their own.

The score was even; if it remained so, the game would go into overtime until it was won. There could be no tie for the Superbowl.

“Come on, Sammy, come on, Sammy,” Kent whispered. God, how he wanted that ball! He was hunched down at the scrimmage line, staring at a hefty cornerback named Lou Sutton. Sutton started to smile; it was a narrow-eyed smile that warned, “One move, boy, and I’ll be on your tail.”

The temperature was cool, but Lou was sweating away. Kent could see the drops and grime on his face; he knew it was a mirror image of his own. The game was wearing on him badly. He ached in a thousand places.

“Fourteen,” Sam called.

Kent returned the grim smile being given him. He felt a new surge of energy. They were thirty feet from the goal.

Thirty feet, Kent thought, that’s not so far, Sammy. We can do it, Sammy, we can do it.

“Eight!”

The ball was in Sam Loper’s hand. He was doing an impossible backstep. Kent lifted a brow to the brawny Lou Sutton, neatly sidestepped him—and ran.

Come on, Sam, give it to me … I’m in the clear … Come on …

Sam saw him. The ball went up, up in the air. It sailed as smoothly and sweetly as a missile, right into Kent’s hands.

His legs moved, his chest heaved. The adrenaline was with him. Longer, longer, his legs stretched out. Excitement and the sweet expectation of victory swept through him. It was going to be the last professional play of his life, and damned, if he wasn’t going to go out in a blaze of glory!

Kent could feel the air sweeping by him, the strain and pulse of his muscles, the ground beneath his feet.

Lou Sutton made a grab for his legs and missed, inertia sending Sutton crashing heavily to the ground.

Kent kept running, elated, the roar of the crowd spurring him on. One after another, the tackles and backs after him fell by the wayside.

The magic line stretched before him. He knew he could reach it, knew he could sail over it …

He did. He raised the football high in the air. It was a sweet moment. Sam was rushing to him, leading the rest of the Saxons. The raucous crowd had risen, and horns were blaring.

“Cougar, Cougar, Cougar …”

It was nice, nice to hear Sam’s shouted cries, nice to feel the thunder of his teammates’ arms pounding him.

But he wasn’t seeing any of them. He was searching the crowd.

Then he saw her. She was being jostled and delayed as she made her way to the field, but she was a bit of a fighter, he knew, and she was going to get to him.

He caught her eyes above the milling heads and faces, sea blue and sea green; shining with pride and love. She really hadn’t given a damn about the game—she would be happy because he was happy.

She finally reached him. The noise of horns and shouting was still a cacophony around them.

Kent swept her into his arms. More than any touchdown, she was the magic line in his life. They had passed an elusive goal together. In her arms he was all that he would ever need to be.

Kent jerked off his helmet to kiss her. A long kiss, full of promise. She drew away, grimacing at the salty sweat and dirt that smudged her cheeks. Then she smiled. His hands were tangled into the wealth of her blond hair, his eyes were locked with hers.

“We made it, babe.”

“I know. Congratulations, Cougar.”

“Want to go to the locker room with me?”

“I’d love to.”

He grinned. They were being shoved off the field. There was a score of microphones sticking in his face, and questions were shouted to him. Kent kept an arm firmly around Katie. He admitted that he was retiring from pro ball. He even told them he had accepted a broadcasting position with one of the networks in New York. Did that decision have anything to do with his wife? Yes, of course. There were rumors floating around that he and his wife—the late Dante Hudson’s daughter—would be working together on certain sports projects. Were they true? Yes, Kent told them, but he refused to give them any specifics.

“Hey—there’s Sam Loper. Go hound him for a while, will you?” Kent teased the reporters, but they did as he asked and joined the throng around Sam.

Kent and Katie paused on the field for a minute. Kent gave it one last, sweeping glance.

“Are you sorry?” Katie asked softly.

He looked down into her eyes, eyes so like Dante’s, so uniquely her own. Those sea-changing eyes that had captured his heart and his senses.

“I would never want you to be sorry, Kent,” she continued quietly. “I don’t want you to quit because of me.”

He smiled and hugged her closer, oblivious to all the spectators still crowding the stands.

“I’m quitting because of both of us. Because I want to … and because I want us to be together. It’s time.”

She smiled contentedly and leaned her head against him. They started walking off the field. Kent knew he wouldn’t look back.

“I was just thinking, though …” he murmured.

“Thinking what?”

“Well, Dante Hudson brought me into pro ball, and Dante Hudson’s daughter brought me out.”

“Kent!”

He laughed, pausing to kiss her very thoroughly, then laughed again as she squirmed beneath the public eye.

“I haven’t got a single regret, Mrs. Hart. I’d rather hug you than an old pigskin ball any day!”

“I don’t think that was much of a compliment,” Katie observed, then added, “You never had to make a choice, Kent. I’d be with you no matter what.”

“I know that, Katie. And I appreciate it.”

He smiled suddenly. A warm rush of sweet excitement swept through him. They’d been together a year; thoughts of her could still make his senses swim at the most inopportune times.

“Let’s get going. Annie and Paula and Ted will be waiting. I want to see them and …”

“And what?”

“I seem to have this streak of adrenaline still racing through me. I want to be alone with my wife and see where it leads.”

Katie laughed and touched his cheek, mindless of the grime. “I’ll count on a touchdown, Cougar.”

“Count on several!” he warned her. “After all, it takes a lot more than one play to win the game.”

“Got ya, Cougar.”

The sun was setting as they continued off the field, arm in arm. Somehow, it seemed right to Kent that it should do so.

He smiled. They would say he had gone out in a blaze of glory. But to him, all the glory lay ahead, because of one lovely and loving woman …

Hudson’s daughter.

Heather Graham (b. 1953) is one of the country’s most prominent authors of romance, suspense, and historical fiction. She has been writing bestselling books for nearly three decades, publishing more than 150 novels and selling more than seventy-five million copies worldwide.

Born in Florida to an Irish mother and a Scottish father, Graham attended college at the University of South Florida, where she majored in theater arts. She spent a few years making a living onstage as a back-up vocalist and dinner theater actor, but after the birth of her third child decided to seek work that would allow her to spend more time with her family.

After early efforts writing romance and horror stories, Graham sold her first novel,
When Next We Love
(1982). She went on to write nearly two dozen contemporary romance novels.

In 1989 Graham published
Sweet Savage Eden
, which initiated the Cameron family saga, an epic six-book series that sets romantic drama amid turbulent periods of American history, such as the Civil War. She revisited the nineteenth century in
Runaway
(1994), a story of passion, deception, and murder in Florida, which spawned five sequels of its own.

In the past decade, Graham has written romantic suspense novels such as
Tall, Dark, and Deadly
(1999),
Long, Lean, and Lethal
(2000), and
Dying to Have Her
(2001), as well as supernatural fiction. In 2003’s
Haunted
she created the Harrison Investigation service, a paranormal detective organization that she spun off into four Krewe of Hunters novels in 2011.

Graham lives in Florida, where she writes, scuba dives, and spends time with her husband and five children.

Graham (left) with her sister.

Graham with her family in New Orleans. Pictured left to right: Dennis Pozzessere; Zhenia Yeretskaya Pozzessere; Derek, Shayne, and Chynna Pozzessere; Heather Graham; Jason and Bryee-Annon Pozzessere; and Jeremy Gonzalez.

Graham at a photo shoot in Key West for the promotion of the Flynn Brothers trilogy.