Player (A Secret Baby Sports Romance)(248)

God, is that colluding? I think to myself, shivering at the thought.

Why couldn’t I say no to him? More importantly, why couldn't I say it to myself? Why couldn’t I say no to the pure need I had for him

The thought occurs to me that I still wouldn’t trust myself to say no even now; not when it comes to this man with the almost frightening and dangerously magnetic draw sitting next to me.

I've had to think for myself for longer than I should have had to do. Quinn and Reagan were already older when our dad passed, and it's not like I wasn't amply provided for, but I guess I just went inside my own head more often than not. I've made all the right choices, gone to all the right schools and programs, and aced all the tests to get to where I am today with the Agency.

So why do I slip up now?

I think back to Javier teasing me about joining because of my dad. Truth be told though, he was right.



I'm not supposed to be in here, but my aunt is out late and the household staff is already gone for the evening.

And honestly, he's been dead for a year; at the risk of being insensitive, I don't think my dad will be upset that I went into his study.

I'm not even entirely sure what I'm looking for when I push open the heavy wooden doors and step into the musty oldness of the room. It smells like him in here, and I feel a pang in my chest at the still fresh hurt of his passing. I trace my fingers over books that line the shelves; some that I remember him reading to us, some that I remember him reading to himself there in his reading chair, and some I just plain don't know.

I take one down at random and sit in my father's chair. Again, I’m unsure why I’m here, even if I know it’s probably just to try and keep him close though he's gone. It's as if wrapping myself in his life and the scent of him keeps me close to his memory.

The book is Mark Twain's “War Prayer”, and what starts as me leafing through the forward ends with me curling into a ball in the chair and reading the whole thing straight through.

“If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! Lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time.”

I go to close the book, but a piece of paper tumbles from the last page into my lap:

33 - 19 - 7



Years of treasure hunts, mystery books, puzzles, and brain twisters with my father have me grinning as soon as I see the numbers; I know exactly what they are.

My eyes drag up to the combination safe sitting darkly in the corner of the room beneath a mahogany table covered in maps. I've have no memory of my father being anywhere close to that safe, and in fact I barely remember noticing it before this very moment. But I'm stepping towards it, slowly, reverently; the page of scrawled numbers held tight in my hand.

I'm not sure what I’m expecting when the dial clicks for the third time. Money? Jewels? Horrible family secrets?

Certainly not books; twelve of them, to be exact.

They're all bound in the same leather, and marked with the same stamp across the cover: “W.A.” I pull one from its forgotten tomb and bring it into the light. It's when I open to the first page that for the first time since entering the room, I start to cry.

They're diaries; all twelve of them are my father's diaries.

It's everything we never knew about what it is he did. Our father's company historically sold weapons, but it was a subject he always hated to talk about. For all his traveling to conflict zones- well, we put two and two together and got “making deals.”

Except they weren't the deals we all thought, as I learn in the books; not by a mile. They aren’t deals of war at all.

He was dealing peace.

The diaries tell of building hospitals in war-torn areas; orphanages in places of sickness and strife, wells where there was no water. Logan and Hudson and Bryce are in there as well, off with him changing the world across the pages of his life sitting in my lap, as I cry here in the now.

So why is it a girl like me, from a family like mine, ends up in the C.I.A.?

Because my father wanted to save the world, in any way he could.

And apparently, so do I.



“Oh, she's not as scary as she looks from the outside.”

Esteban, Javier's pilot friend pats the fuselage of the rusted-looking single-engine plane with a big grin on his round, friendly face; “She flies like a dream; you won't feel a single bump.”

I can hear Javier snort behind me; right.

Esteban and Javier move off to the side, embracing again and cracking jokes as I skeptically eyeball the rickety-looking plane again. But hey, beggars can't be choosers, as they say, and Esteban was perfectly willing to take us out of Aruba and fly us to Venezuela without asking so much as a single question.

We've already established on the drive here that that it'd be best to keep the nature of our relationship - or, lack thereof - away from Esteban; or who I am, for that matter. He’s hardly prying, but as far as the portly pilot knows, his old pal Javier the criminal needs a lift under the radar to the mainland, and I'm just his - what, accomplice?