Sackmaster (2 page)

“Will do, Coach.” He figured as he jogged
to the clubhouse that the almost fifty-year-old coach could still step out on
the field and run plays if he wanted to. The man could still throw, for sure,
because Jimmy had seen him drilling balls through hoops from fifty yards when
he’d checked in at the practice facility last week. He imagined Coach was
headed out to throw some now, because he was pulling a wheeled box full of
footballs.

Tom Harris, the Rebels’ defensive line
coach, caught up with Jimmy in the locker room. Figuring he was in for an ass
chewing about his lack of conditioning, he sat in front of his locker and took
off his cleats before looking up at Harris. “Yeah, Coach?”

The big former defensive tackle shot a
knowing grin Jimmy’s way. “Heat gettin’ to you, Bronson?”

Lying would do no good, since Jimmy felt
the sweat plastering his jersey to his aching body. “A little.”

“How about toughening up your lily-white
hide by spending five days next week helping out at Zanardi’s football camp out
in Nowhere, Texas? I need to recruit a few more live bodies for him, and you
being single again, I figure you’ve got nobody pantin’ at home for you.” Harris
made it sound like an invitation, but Jimmy could read between the lines. He’d
just gotten an order. Though it stung to admit it, Harris was right. He had
nobody waiting at home for him to roll in the hay with.

Not that losing Belinda bothered him. At
least not much. Yeah, it had stung his pride, finding that whenever he’d been
at away games last winter, his almost-ex-wife had been fucking a rich Dom with
a talent for wielding a cat-o’-nine, and not only in club scenes either.
Obviously when she’d sworn she’d be his faithful slave at the club the year
before, she hadn’t meant it. He ought to have known when she’d flatly refused
to let him cut her long blonde curls when he wanted them short, or even to have
her high-dollar hairdresser do it.

Put the bitch out of your mind, Bronson.
He’d be damned if he’d feel sorry for himself. Forcibly he
squelched the painful memories. “Sure, Coach. I’ll go.” He liked working with
kids, looked forward to getting to know some of his new teammates and coaches
better. Besides, it would mean he had an excuse not to go back to Montana and
face sympathetic stares from the hands at his parents’ ranch. He figured most
of them had probably fucked Belinda at one time or another, too, since she’d
grown up right there on the ranch where her dad was still foreman. Worse, he
worried the whole time he was home that the bitch might blow in to see Daddy
almost any time.

“Good. We’re all meetin’ tonight at the
Rebels’ Roost. You know where it is?”

“Sort of. I’ve never been there, though.”
He’d heard rumors about the exclusive club containing a poorly disguised
dungeon where Rebels with a taste for kinky sex could go without taking chances
of getting in trouble. “Nobody’s invited me.”

“I’m invitin’ you now. Nine o’clock
tonight. Be there. You better program the location into your GPS—the place
ain’t easy to find.”

“Okay.” Jimmy took the paper Coach Harris
handed him and set it on the floor of his locker, next to his wallet.

“You’re lookin’ good. And you’ll get used
to the heat. I’m glad we got you.” With that, Coach Harris headed toward Matt
Rubin, the Rebels’ veteran defensive tackle.

You’re gonna get snookered into
volunteering for this camp, too, buddy.
Or maybe
not. Jimmy had heard Rubin was living with Harris’ daughter and that she kept
him on a tight leash, literally. Not his business. Jimmy draped a towel around
his neck and escaped into the training room.

* * * * *

By eight o’clock darkness was settling in.
Towering pines and grandfather oaks dripping with Spanish moss lined the
two-lane asphalt road that followed the Intracoastal Waterway south from
Savannah. The few tumbledown shacks with rusted-out cars on blocks and washing
machines on porches reminded Jimmy of
Tobacco Road
, clear out of the
1930s or 1940s, whenever the movie was made. A burned-out, redbrick church
stood sentinel on the opposite side of the road.

The twenty-first century obviously hadn’t
made it quite this far. He scanned the road for the turnoff his GPS system
indicated was coming up, didn’t see it. But it had to be there. Slowing to a
crawl, he finally spotted the single-lane, sand-and-crushed-shell road. No sign
or landmark.

“Turn right, now.” He hoped to hell the GPS
knew what it was talking about.

Would his Navigator fit? Gingerly Jimmy
made the turn, found the crushed-shell road was smoother than it looked.
“Follow the road for a mile to your destination,” the sexy female voice
instructed him.

At the end of the winding road sat a large,
square, two-story building in the center of a clearing. Straining his eyes in
the dusk, Jimmy saw half a dozen cars out front, recognized the black, vintage
Porsche that belonged to Coach Zanardi. Coach Harris’ white Escalade shone in
the moonlight, as did wide receiver Sid Conyers’ silver Acura. Jimmy pulled up
next to Matt’s red Ram truck. He saw several other cars but couldn’t match them
with their owners.

He opened the door and stepped outside, was
hit immediately with a brisk, damp breeze that smelled of fish and ocean.
Different but not entirely unpleasant. Crushed seashells crunched under his
feet. Not for the first time since he had arrived two weeks earlier, it struck
him how different this place was from the wide open spaces where he had grown
up. And from Chicago, where he’d played his first three years as a pro.

You wanted different scenery, didn’t
you?

Striding toward what he assumed was the
entrance to Rebels’ Roost, Jimmy reminded himself that Savannah was going to be
his home. Yeah, he’d go back to the ranch to see his parents and sister, but
he’d sworn he wouldn’t live there again. Too many memories. Too much angst. And
too many regrets over a woman who wasn’t worth the effort.

When he tried the door and found it locked,
he rang the bell. Coach Harris opened the door. “Hey, Jimmy. C’mon in. Colin’s
gonna tell us what we need to know about the football camp, and then we’ll show
you around. Meet the staff and all that.”

The staff? Jimmy began to get the idea this
was an honest-to-God dungeon like the one where he and Belinda had played in
Chicago, only more exclusive. He inhaled, caught a whiff of something that
smelled mighty good.

“Yeah, we have to behave in town, so Mr.
Hargraves built Rebels’ Roost so we can play without worryin’ about nosy
townspeople. He went all out, put in a full kitchen and bar as well as hiring
some Doms and subs— they live upstairs—in case you want to play and didn’t
bring your own.” Coach led the way into a contemporary dining room where somebody
had laid out huge platters of prime rib, mashed potatoes, several salads and a
selection of desserts on two of the six large, round tables draped in the team
colors.

“What do I have to do to join?” For the
food alone, Jimmy figured membership would be worth whatever it cost him.
Besides, he’d sworn off Belinda—not off all women. He might not be ready to
look for anything permanent in the way of female company, but he missed the
BDSM play—not to mention the sex.

“You already did. You’re a Rebel, and that’s
all it takes. It goes without saying that Rebels’ Roost is the team’s secret.
Nobody else is eligible, and everybody’s guests have to be vetted before we let
them in. Inconvenient sometimes, but it’s the owner’s rule.” Coach paused.
“Vanilla couples’ nights are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Dungeon’s open Mondays and
Wednesdays, and also Fridays and Saturdays when we don’t have Sunday games.
Sundays, out of season, Mr. Hargraves throws picnics for the kids.”

Something for everybody. Jimmy liked
Hargraves already and he’d never met the billionaire financier who paid his
salary. “I can see I’ll be spending a good bit of my spare time here.”

“Good thing. Keeps our guys out of the
newspapers except for the sports section. Boss likes that.” Coach Harris shut
up at the sound of a microphone crackling at the front of the room. “Coach
Zanardi’s about to tell you guys about the camp schedule.”

* * * * *

Jimmy enjoyed Coach Zanardi’s football camp
more than he’d thought he would. Hedgecock, Zanardi’s hometown in west Texas,
was almost as small as the town near his parents’ ranch, but he could see how
folks down there could get mighty tired of all the sand and cactus.

Once back in Savannah, he bought a piece of
land along the Intracoastal Waterway and was watching his bachelor pad come
together in a clearing among tall, spindly pines and dense palmettos.
Meanwhile, until the house was finished enough to live in, he was hanging his
hat at the same condo building where Coach lived with the new bride he had met
while he was back home.

His weight routine finished, Jimmy showered
and kicked back on his sofa with a protein shake and the latest
Sports
Illustrated
magazine. As usual this time of year, football news was sparse.
Flipping through the pages quickly, he didn’t see much that interested him
until his fingers stopped dead still on a centerfold ad that took his breath
away.

Emphasized with eye shadow and thick lashes
too damn long to be natural, her big, cat-green eyes caught his gaze, held it
like glue. He wanted to taste her lush, red lips, trace the softly angular line
of her cheekbones and throat with fingers as gentle as he could make them. He
imagined diamond-studded hoops swaying not only from her delicate, pink
earlobes but from nipples that would be swollen from his lips, the flesh tight
with the same sort of barely leashed passion he saw in her expression.

Naked. He sensed she was completely naked
though only her face, shoulders and hands showed in the ad. She held a
prism-shaped bottle of some scent he imagined would drive a man insane. It sure
would if he were the man and this perfect female was wearing it as he swooped
down and ran his lips and tongue over her smooth, bald head.

She was bald? Jimmy blinked then looked
again, bringing the latest issue of
Sports Illustrated
closer. Yeah, the
woman was completely hairless, her scalp as ivory-pink and smooth looking as
her throat and the lush upper curves of her breasts. The fact that she had no
eyebrows accentuated her long, thick eyelashes and those compelling green eyes.

He couldn’t draw his gaze away from this
exotic, erotic-looking creature, but he wondered for a moment whether he was
feeling some late effect from the concussion he’d suffered during last year’s
playoffs when a mad-dog offensive lineman had apparently taken offense after
Jimmy had slammed him onto the turf on the previous play, in his hurry to sack
the opposing quarterback.

He could hardly believe any woman as
gorgeous as the one in this ad would let anybody shave her head. But the
hauntingly beautiful model obviously had—probably for money and lots of it. He
wondered if maybe she’d do it again, this time for a lover’s pleasure. His
pleasure?

* * * * *

The woman’s gaze burned into his own again
the following day as Jimmy drove down a two-lane highway toward his brand-new
house. This time she stared down at him from a massive billboard with those
sexy eyes in the face that had haunted his dreams since the first time he saw
the ad.

He’d tried to find that face on every woman
he’d seen, practically tackling a tall, slender brunette in the elevator that
morning because her catlike green eyes reminded him of the woman in the ads.
He’d caught Coach’s wife Susan a few minutes ago in the lobby and described
their neighbor, and Susan had told him the woman’s name was Julie, and that she
lived in the other unit on their floor.

How was he going to finagle an
introduction? Jimmy considered and discarded several ideas until a sudden lurch
of his big, black Navigator brought him quickly back to reality. Damn, he’d
managed to hit a pothole straight-on.

No need to run off the road because of his
growing obsession. He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and continued
gazing at the larger-than-life face as though he hadn’t already seared it into
his memory. “You look like Julie. Or rather she looks like you.” She did. Same
green eyes. Same lips, the lush lower one pouting just a little. She even had
Julie’s dimpled chin.

But the Julie who lived in his condo
building had nicely arched eyebrows and glossy black hair that brushed her
shoulders. Jimmy imagined watching it get shorn, seeing the woman on the
billboard’s pinkish-white scalp emerge. His cock swelled painfully against the
zipper of his jeans.

No way could he deny that he got off on
women with shaved heads. Not that he’d tried too hard to get over the kink,
though he had managed to resist shaving any unwilling subs. He thought back to
the first time he’d seen a woman getting a head shave—it had been for some
charity event up in Knoxville when he was in college. He’d developed a fierce
hard-on then, a lot like the one he was sporting now as he gawked at the
billboard.

He’d wanted to shave Belinda when they were
married BDSM playmates, but submission had never gone that far with her. Fuck,
she hadn’t submitted at all—it had all been an act. Bile rose in his throat
when he remembered how she’d cheated on him at every opportunity, and there’d
been lots of them last year when he was at training camp or out of town for
away games.
Bitch. You’re well rid of her, Jimmy my boy.