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  Free Agent

  Boys of Fall

  By Mari Carr

  Free Agent

  Copyright 2015 Mari Carr

  Formatted by IRONHORSE Formatting

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Out of Bounds: Excerpt

  Going Long: Excerpt

  About the Author

  Other Titles by Mari Carr

  Prologue

  Tucker stared out the window of his bungalow in Turks and Caicos. The beauty of the sun setting over the crystal-blue water did nothing to ease the pressure pushing against his temple. He’d come here hoping to find some sort of peace and an answer to the question that had been plaguing him for months. But, for the first time in his adult life, the ocean was failing him.

  He’d spent the last few weeks here falling into a mindless routine—one that offered neither comfort nor insight. He rose each morning after a restless night tossing and turning, and walked a couple of miles along the shore before returning for breakfast. After that, he sat on the porch, staring out at the horizon, his mind consumed with a million thoughts. If it was a good day, he could sit there until dinnertime, breaking the monotony with long jogs. On bad days, the headache returned and he would drag himself to his bedroom, pulling the room-darkening curtains and burrowing under the sheet for hours, waiting for the pain to subside.

  Every few days, someone from the team called—his coach, the offensive coordinator, his agent or the trainer—to see how he was feeling. The phone calls always gutted him, sent him spiraling to a dark place. They needed a decision. Hell, he owed them one.

  But everyone had a different opinion—and none of them had trouble expressing their feelings. His coach was in the this-too-shall-pass camp, suggesting he take the rest of the summer to recover so that he could come back strong when the season began. The trainer told him he was a fool to even consider stepping back onto the gridiron.

  Meanwhile, his agent, Marty, was lining up commercials and interviews like there was no tomorrow, trying to pad Tucker’s bank account—and his own—in case there really wasn’t a tomorrow. The man had actually spent the better part of an hour with him yesterday on the phone, attempting to convince Tucker to consider a career in acting. He started listing all the great athletes who’d gone on to become successful in Hollywood. Tucker had laughed his ass off until he realized Marty was serious. Jesus. The man must have taken one too many hits to the head himself if he thought Tucker would entertain that idea for a split second.

  Tucker rubbed his brow, praying the twinge of an ache wasn’t the beginning of another migraine. He hadn’t had one for more than a week and he was actually starting to hope he’d turned a corner. Of course, he’d had similar bouts of optimism before and they’d all been laid to rest by another round of agonizing, nausea-producing, head-splitting pain.

  His cell phone rang. Tucker ignored it for one beat, then two. He ran through the list of people constantly calling him and acknowledged he didn’t want to talk to any of them. He glanced at the screen, then frowned. It was a Texas number, but one he didn’t have contact information on. Not that that was unusual. Tucker was sort of shit about filling in his contacts. His last girlfriend-slash-booty call had added herself to his phone when she’d realized that after two months of dating, he still hadn’t attached her name to her number.

  Curiosity won out as he reached for his cell.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Is that you, Tucker?”

  Tucker recognized the voice immediately, his spirit lightening. “Yep. It’s me.”

  “Hey man. I thought it was, but your voice sounded sort of off.”

  “How are you doing, Joel?”

  Tucker’s lips lifted as he spoke the man’s name. It occurred to him he could count on one hand the number of times he’d smiled in the past six months. Hearing Joel’s voice was a welcome respite from the depression he was drowning in.

  “I’m doing fine. Just busy with work.”

  Typically Tucker tried very hard to avoid his past. He hadn’t returned to his hometown of Quinn since he’d made good on his escape twelve years earlier. However—that departure came with a cost. By cutting ties to his hometown, he’d left behind quite a few people he genuinely missed. The guys on his high school football team were pretty far up on that list. “Jesus, bro. It’s good to hear your voice. What’s it been? Two years? What the hell are you up to?”

  Joel had been a decent center on the state championship team, but his friend hadn’t stepped on the field since that last game they’d played senior year. For Joel, football had been a high school game, a way to make friends and be a member of something cool. His future—his entire life—hadn’t depended on the sport like Tucker’s had.

  “Well, I’d like to say I’m calling to shoot the shit and catch up, but the truth is I have some bad news.”

  Lela.

  Her face was the first to flash in Tucker’s mind. He sat up straighter, his heart suddenly racing with a fear he hadn’t felt since he was a young boy hiding in his closet to avoid his drunken father’s fists.

  “What is it?” Tucker forced himself to ask. If anything had happened to her—

  “It’s Coach Carr.”

  Tucker stood quickly, walking over to grip the railing of the porch.

  Fuck. No. Not Coach.

  “What about him?”

  Joel blew out a long breath. “He had a heart attack three days ago. He’s in rough shape.”

  From the strength in Joel’s voice, it occurred to Tucker this wasn’t the first time his friend had broken the news to someone. Joel had always been the responsible friend, the one who took it upon himself to keep their gang of guys up-to-date with what the others were doing. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. It was touch and go for a few days, but the doctors seem pretty hopeful now. Lorelie’s been with him ’round the clock.”

  Tucker grinned as he recalled Coach Carr’s willful, headstrong daughter. She’d been a couple years behind them in high school and more than a handful. Coach had charged the football team with keeping an eye on her, casting them all in the big-brother role as she was his only child. Tucker figured Coach had set up those parameters to ensure none of the lead-with-their-hormones teena
ge boys on his team looked at his pretty daughter with anything other than protective feelings. Plus Coach had made it perfectly clear there would be hell to pay if anyone on the team ventured toward her in a romantic way.

  Not that any of the guys ever would have. And it wasn’t fear of Coach’s vengeance that kept them honest. It was Lorelie. None of the young bucks he called friends had been brave enough to take her on. So instead, they’d kept an eye on her at the parties down by Beyer’s Creek, thwarting her attempts to sneak away with older guys and keeping her from drinking too much. She hadn’t appreciated their efforts.

  “I’m damn sorry to hear that, Joel. Is there anything I can do?” Tucker would email his accountant as soon as he hung up to ensure that Coach’s medical expenses were covered. It was the least he could do for the man who’d been like a father to him in high school.

  “Naw. We got it covered. As you recall, Coach has a pretty substantial amount of property.”

  “I remember the ranch. Spent enough summers working there in high school.”

  Joel chuckled. “Yeah, conditioning through back-breaking work. It was Coach’s standard training plan. I think I told you I’ve been working there full time along with another fella, Oakley.”

  “You did. Did we go to school with Oakley?” Tucker tried to recall that name, but came up empty. There were very few people from home he could remember after so many years away.

  “Nope. He’s from Austin. Moved to Quinn a couple years back. Thing is, a lot of the chores were usually done by Coach. I’ve been telling him for years that the ranch is a five-, maybe six-guy operation, but you know how he is. His idea of a normal workload is always twenty times what the rest of us mere mortals can do.”

  Tucker recalled the sheer burly strength their football coach possessed. The guy was a giant, a powerhouse. Tucker had no doubt Coach really was doing the work of five guys around that ranch and not even breaking a sweat.

  “Lorelie’s been trying to do as much as she can, but she’s at the hospital most of the day. Me and Oakley have been pulling longer hours, but we’re struggling to keep up. So I’ve been calling some of the guys to see if they’d be willing to come home for a couple weeks to lend a hand. I know that’s not a possibility for you, with training camp gearing to start up in a few weeks. I’m not asking for that. I just…I knew you’d wanna know about Coach.”

  Tucker looked out at the ocean, trying to capture that sense of peace he’d felt the first time he’d stepped onto these islands years earlier. The white-sand beaches, the crystal water, the gentle breezes had eased his weariness, made him feel stronger. It wasn’t working this time.

  “I’ll check out flights, Joel. With any luck, I’ll be back in Quinn tomorrow or the day after at the latest.”

  Tucker could tell from the silence on the other end of the line he’d surprised his friend. “Seriously?”

  “I got some time. I’m on the injured reserve list right now anyway.”

  “Oh, damn, man. I didn’t know. You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Tucker said, the lie bitter on his lips. “Just a concussion.”

  Just a concussion.

  He wished that was true. In reality, he was on concussion number seven in six years, and this one wasn’t going away. He’d taken a hell of a hit in the final game of the playoffs. The sack had benched him just after the third quarter started and he’d had to sit in the locker room watching his team’s last chance at making the Super Bowl evaporate. Since then, he’d seen countless specialists as he suffered one migraine after another. In addition to the headaches, he kept experiencing bouts of dizziness that left him disorientated and nauseated. The general consensus was the migraines would eventually come less often and be less severe until they just stopped. The other thing all the doctors agreed on was the thing Tucker was struggling with.

  Another hard hit to the head could cause serious brain damage. It could even kill him. His coach didn’t agree, insisting the doctors were playing a game of cover-your-ass.

  Tucker understood where his coach was coming from. Hopes were riding high that this would be the year their team made the Super Bowl. They’d come so close the last two, but injuries during the playoffs had knocked them out of contention both times. This year, all the sports analysts were pointing at Tucker, swearing this would be the season he took his team all the way.

  While the coaches and the doctors disagreed on the prognosis, there was one thing they all understood as the truth. The choice of returning to the gridiron was Tucker’s.

  And so he’d spent months agonizing over the decision. Super Bowl or permanent brain damage. Both were very real possibilities.

  “Coach will be beside himself to see you, Tucker. He never misses watching your games. Just about busts with pride every time you throw a touchdown pass.”

  Tucker grinned, then winced. The pain in his temple flashed hot, dark spots clouding his vision. He wasn’t going to escape it tonight. The migraine was coming.

  “I’ll get there as soon as I can, Joel.” He needed to wrap up the conversation.

  Joel thanked him, and then said he had a couple more guys to contact. He told Tucker to call him when he got back to Quinn.

  They said their goodbyes and Tucker turned toward the front door of his bungalow. He wanted to take his medicine and get into bed before flashing white lights behind his eyes blinded him.

  As he entered the bedroom, the panic hit and he realized what he’d just committed to do.

  He was going home. Quinn.

  He hadn’t stepped foot in that town in a dozen years. At the time he’d left, he’d sworn there was nothing—no force on Earth—that would send him back there.

  Time had a way of making a liar out of everyone.

  As he crawled between the sheets, he tried to fight, tried to find something to concentrate on that would help him combat the fire blazing inside his head.

  He imagined Coach, lying in a hospital bed, recovering from the heart attack that could have killed him. And Lorelie sitting beside him, holding his hand.

  He envisioned the picture of the tombstone in the cemetery next to Quinn Methodist Church, marking his mother’s grave. He’d left town immediately after her funeral. His dad certainly hadn’t had the money to give her a proper tombstone, so Tucker had sent money to Coach right after he signed with the NFL and that first pile of money hit his bank. He’d never seen it in person, but Joel had snapped a photo of it for him and emailed it.

  He remembered the anguish, the devastation in Lela’s eyes as he’d driven away, refusing to turn around to comfort her as she’d cried.

  And he recalled the smell of the whiskey on his father’s breath when Tucker turned the tables, throwing the punch instead of receiving it.

  His last memories of Quinn were that of his drunken father, lying in a pool of his own piss with blood trickling from his split lip, and Lela crying, begging him not to go.

  Tucker closed his eyes.

  Fuck it.

  For the first time, the oblivion brought on by the migraine was actually a welcome relief.

  Going home was a mistake.

  Chapter One

  Lela Whitacre stepped out into the sunshine and considered turning right back around to return to the hospital.

  It was another scorcher in Texas. The late June sun beat down on them hard, offering day after day of humid, heavy, breath-stealing heat. As a result, Lela’s summer break had consisted of moving from air-conditioning to long, refreshing swims in the lake before quickly returning to the AC.

  She’d only broken the routine this week, stopping by the hospital daily to check on Coach Carr and to see if her friend, Lorelie, needed help with anything. It was hard to accept that the larger-than-life man she’d always looked up to and respected could be brought down so quickly. Coach had looked almost frail in the hospital bed, his face drawn, his eyes tired.

  But even his failing heart couldn’t dim his lively spirit. His face lit up when she walked into the room
and for the first time in days, she felt genuinely optimistic that he would fight and defeat his health problems and be back on his feet in no time.

  She was almost to her car when her cell rang. A quick glance confirmed it was Carl. She briefly considered letting the call go to voicemail, but guilt won out. “Hello.”

  “Hey, pretty lady.”

  “Hi Carl. What’s going on? Aren’t you at work?”

  “Yep. I’m not some lucky teacher lounging lazily by the pool for months.” She knew he was teasing, but it was one of those jokes he’d repeated far too often. It was starting to wear thin.

  “Did you need something?” she asked as she unlocked her car and climbed behind the wheel.

  “I thought I’d see if you were available for lunch.”

  Lela considered briefly, trying to come up with an excuse not to go. Unfortunately, she wasn’t quick enough.

  “You’re in town, right? I remembered you saying you were going to go visit Lorelie’s dad in the hospital. Thought if you were nearly finished we could meet at Sally’s for a sandwich. It’s Tuesday, which means her chicken salad special.”

  Lela’s stomach responded before the rest of her could come up with a reason to resist. “That sounds great. I’m leaving the hospital as we speak. Meet you there in ten minutes.”

  “I might be closer to twenty. If you get there first, you can just order me a sweet tea and the special. I’ll get there as quick as I can. Okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll see you soon.” Lela disconnected with a sigh, glad that Carl’s call had come after she’d left Lorelie and her dad. Her friend had been encouraging her to break up with Carl for several weeks. It wasn’t that Lorelie didn’t like Carl. It was just that she didn’t like him for her. Problem was Lela wasn’t sure how—or even why—she would break things off. They didn’t fight. He wasn’t cruel. They had a good time when they went out.

  Lorelie swore none of that was a good enough reason to stay with him. And lately Lela was starting to believe it.