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1
ASHER
“Last hand?” I rolled my neck, stretching the protesting muscles as one of my oldest friends, Weston Rutherford—the owner of the Raleigh Raptors NFL team—shuffled the deck of cards at the table beside me. Freshwater cave diving this morning had been invigorating. It was an epic experience, especially here on the Yucatan.
Crossland McFarland, another of my friends—and the owner of the pro hockey team in Calgary—had outdone himself with this one. Since he’d lost last month’s game, he’d been the one to put this month’s game and experience together. Given the way the last hand went, there was a genuine chance that I’d be on the hook for the next time if I didn’t watch my bets.
“I’m good with one more hand,” Ethan Berkeley, the owner of the Charleston Hurricanes, our local MLB team, said, leaning back in his seat in a perfectly pressed polo. Didn’t matter that we were thousands of miles from work, the guy always looked ready to take a Zoom call with his board if he had to. I wasn’t sure he actually knew how to relax, not that I was one to talk.
“One more,” Gareth Maxfield agreed, taking a long drink of his beer. No fruity cocktails for that guy. He overflowed his rattan chair, but considering he was six foot five, he almost never looked comfortable in whatever furniture we ended up in. Pretty sure everything at his house and in his office was custom made, because he wasn’t just tall—he was built like he could bench press an elephant while closing a deal.
As he shifted his weight, the sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt stretched across his inked biceps, and I bit back a laugh. Gareth was as serious as they came, and if I was being honest, a pretty menacing motherfucker—which made him a strict, no bullshit owner when it came to the Charleston Cougars NFL franchise, but he’d lost a hand last month to Weston that had put him in bright pink and orange flowers, a startling contrast to the tattoos that covered him from his hands upward.
“I could go for two,” Crossland chimed in as he stroked the thigh of the woman in his lap and smiled at a brunette walking by on her way to the pool.
“You can always go for two,” I muttered, rubbing my hand over my hair. We all had our addictions. Crossland’s just happened to be women. My addiction was something a little more predictable: routine. I liked structure and rules everywhere but my bedroom, and then all bets were off, but lately I’d pulled back from the casual dating and hookup scene. Watching almost every hockey player on the team I owned—the Carolina Reapers—fall in love over the last few years was like going out to eat with a bunch of fuckers who were dining on filet mignon every night while I was feigning satisfaction with a fast food burger left on the grill too long. No one seemed to satisfy me anymore.
Maybe that’s why I’d started living for these poker games every month. They’d started off as a way for the five of us to blow off some steam and push ourselves to experience new things, but over the last few years, they’d become my safe haven, my flash of color in a monotonous world, and the only time I allowed myself to relax.
And the guys? Weston and I had been close since our early twenties, and the other three had quickly become the friends I hadn’t realized I was missing. We were all connected in some way, either by geography or prior friendship, and we were all the youngest franchise owners on the North American continent, all in our late twenties and, in my case, very early thirties. Our game was the worst-kept secret among the exclusive club that was professional sports franchise owners, and true to our reputation, we were pricks who didn’t let anyone else play in our sandbox.
I picked up my stack of chips and let them fall through my fingers. To an onlooker, they were nothing special, just generic, plain white poker chips. It was the Sharpies next to each of the five of us that got us into trouble. Betting money was boring. All five of us had more money than we’d be able to spend in this lifetime. We bet the stuff that kept life interesting—information, collectibles, and favors.
“What’s wrong, Silas?” Weston asked, smirking like the asshole he currently was. “That last hand a little too much for you?”
“Fuck off.” I glared at the chip in his pile that read Team with Rapt for new helmet line. My sister, Harper, the head of our sports technology division was going to be fucking furious when she found out I’d bet our own team’s exclusivity to her new technology, and even more pissed when she realized that meant she’d be flying to Raleigh to gather all the test data.
