AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Thirteen
The clattering buzz of his phone woke him. Alex squinted one eye open and then looked toward the phone where it was jiggling over the surface of the bedside table. Not his bedside table. He registered the warm weight against his side.
Maggie.
She murmured something in her sleep and curled closer against him, and he was suddenly far less interested in whoever was on the other end of the phone line. Surely they’d give up?
As if to validate his theory, the phone went still and silent. Alex started to roll back to Maggie when it buzzed into life again.
Shit.
That wasn’t a good sign.
He scooped the phone up and looked at the caller ID. Lucas.
He pushed himself out of bed, grabbed his boxers off the floor, and headed for the bedroom door, not wanting to wake Maggie. “Yes?”
“Are you near a TV?” Lucas asked.
“Not exactly. Why are you calling so early? It’s Saturday.” He tried to hold the cell still while he pulled on the boxers.
“It’s nearly nine,” Lucas said. “Hardly early.”
It was when you’d had very little sleep because you’d finally gotten your hands on the woman who’d been driving you crazy. But that wasn’t exactly an excuse that he could use with Lucas. “I went to the game, remember? Late night.”
“Are you near a TV yet?”
“Lucas, just tell me what the fuck is going on.”
“You want to be near a TV. Because Will Sutter is holding a press conference.”
“Sutter? He was at the game last night.”
“Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Did you, by any chance, do anything to piss him off?”
“Not really. Why?” Fuck. What had Sutter done?
“Because he’s launching a bid for the Saints. Says we don’t have the votes and that he’ll pay more. Does he have more?”
Alex scraped through his brain for the little he knew about Will Sutter and Sutter Corp. Will’s dad had been good at what he’d done. His group of companies had been quite the empire. He must’ve left Will a few billion at least, though most of that would be in the value of the companies themselves rather than cold hard cash. So the question was how well Will had been managing the companies since his father had died. And how much cash he could scrape up. More than their offer?
“It’s possible,” he admitted. “Particularly if he’s got some joint investors.” Maggie’s living room. TV. Check. Now he just had to find the remote. And his jeans.
“Nothing about that yet. Piss anyone else off lately?”
Half the Saints organization probably. Anyone who liked Tom Jameson. Not to mention he had a few other non-baseball-related deals in the works. “Probably. But I wouldn’t have thought that anybody would want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to take something away from me. What about you? Chop off the wrong leg or something?” He found his jeans, yanked them on, then looked around for the remote.
“Funny man. No. Completely free of vengeful patients. Not even the faintest whiff of a malpractice suit.”
No remote on the coffee table. Who didn’t leave the remote on their coffee table? “Maybe Mal … no. It’s Sutter. It might not even be about us. He apparently used to work for the Saints and the Preachers. Tom fired him. Maybe he’s just got a grudge.” He flipped up the couch cushions. Score. One remote. Hopefully the right one. Maggie’s entertainment system was as complicated as his.
He pressed the power button and the TV came on. “What channel?”
Lucas told him and he flipped to it. There was nothing to see yet … they were playing the morning news, but there was an information banner running across the screen that said the press conference was scheduled for nine A.M. According to the time showing in the top corner of the screen that left him about fifteen minutes.
“Have you told Mal?” he asked Lucas.
“He’s next.”
