Match play, p.1
Match Play, page 1
part #1 of Last Chance, Inc. Series
Match Play
Sports Billionaire Meets His Match
Last Chance, Inc.
Blair Babylon
Malachite Publishing LLC
To my readers. I love you all.
And thank you for reading.
MATCH PLAY
Sports Billionaire Meets His Match
By: Blair Babylon
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Mitchell Saltonstall needs a girlfriend right now, and a pretend girlfriend is just fine with him.
One drunken New Year’s Eve, Mitchell and his buddies wagered a hundred mil each against Gabriel “The Shark” Fish that they were better at business than he was. Never, ever bet that kind of cash against a guy with a nickname like “The Shark.”
Mitchell tried to buy a golf course, but that fell through. He tried to buy a sports store, and that deal blew up in his face. Finally, he found a golf tee-times booking app that was floundering. He bought it from the original investor for pennies on the dollar and rechristened it Match Play, a dating service app for single golfers, assuring them that “It’s just golf!” and they can “Play a round!” with golfing singles in their area.
Oh, the puns are endless, but pictures of “giant knobby-headed drivers” are strictly forbidden.
The problem is that Mitchell accidentally became the face of Match Play in an interview, and no one will trust a dating app with a single CEO.
The very last person he should have conscripted to be his fake fiancée was Arielle Carter, the cute, sassy brunette HR admin in the front office, whom he’d literally grabbed around the waist during an interview and dragged against his side, whispering that he’d pay her ten thousand dollars to kiss him for the cameras.
He didn’t know she’d melt against him and her kiss would turn him on like stadium lights.
Or that with a makeover for the television commercials, Arielle Carter would become an absolute bombshell, and he wouldn’t be able to take his eyes off her.
And he really hadn’t known that Arielle’s father was the original investor who’d lost his life savings in the failing tee-times app, and that’s why she hates Mitchell’s guts.
During the months-long promotional tour to regional golf shows to sign up new singles, the air between them crackles with attraction, and their kisses and caresses seem more real. In Los Angeles, after a particularly convincing photo spread for Golf Journal, they discover that the five-star hotel room has only one bed.
They’re stuck together until next New Year’s Eve when the bet with The Shark ends, or Mitchell will lose everything he’s worked for.
Assuming Arielle doesn’t bean him with a golf club first.
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Published by Malachite Publishing LLC
Copyright 2022 by Malachite Publishing LLC
Contents
1. New Year’s Day
2. Match Play
3. Betrayal
4. Honey Bear
5. The New Owner
6. Launch
7. Brinksmanship
8. Selling her Soul for a Free Mani-Pedi
9. The Trophy Girlfriend
10. Wiggle Puss
11. LA Trade Show
12. Bad Kiss
13. If We Were Really Together
14. Clickbait
15. No Contact
16. Las Vegas
17. A Prayer to All the Episcopalian Saints
18. Practicing
19. June
20. Shark Trap
21. Photo Spread
22. Long Ride
23. Only One Bed
24. Allow Me
25. Oops
26. Awkward
27. Match Play: Special Edition
28. Protecting Mitchell
29. Practicing #2
30. Practicing #3
31. Dead Phone
32. Chicago
33. Hate Boink
34. Confusion
35. Westcott Cove
36. Arielle’s Lipstick
37. Exposed
38. Fall Formal at Newcastle Golf Club
39. Truths and Lies
40. Just Asking
41. A Man with A Plan
42. The Rough Draft
43. Skins
44. Ad Lib
45. Mitchell’s Spectacular Failure
46. Love on the Links
47. New Year’s Eve
48. Red Flags
49. The Crazy Cat Lady
50. Homeless
A Note from Blair
Also by Blair Babylon
About Blair Babylon
Copyright
1
New Year’s Day
Mitchell “Match” Saltonstall
Tinny clangs of metal crashed, piercing his eardrums and skewering his brain.
Bad, was his first thought. Very bad.
Opening his eyes was worse. Glaring sheets of light rained sand into his eyes, and his eyelids scraped his corneas as he tried to open them.
Very, very bad.
Mitchell “Match” Saltonstall ran one hand over his face, his morning beard rough on his palm. It didn’t hurt too much except for a wrenching pain in his shoulder.
That wasn’t new.
His skin seemed intact, if grimy and overly sensitive. With that information, it seemed unlikely he’d been set on fire last night, which had been one of his first theories about why he felt so awful.
Had he gotten so plastered the night before that he’d enlisted in some foreign military, somewhere with intense desert sunlight like a nuclear bomb that had filled his eyes with blowing sand? Radiation poisoning might explain the hydrochloric acid gurgling in his stomach and the taste of metal and puke in his mouth.
The glare resolved into prisms, and the room around him slowly took shape.
Mitchell had been passed out—yeah, probably passed out—on one of the leather couches of the Narragansett Country Club, and the three other possibly not-dead bodies draped over the other furniture were his three best friends from boarding school, where they’d grown up.
New Year’s Eve decorations hung from the rafters far above. The sunlight was reflecting off the snow outside and blasting in through the floor-to-vaulted ceiling windows like the heavenly glare of vengeful angels.
Angry, vengeful angels.
Mitchell shielded his sore eyes from the beams with his hand.
The fireplace that looked like King Henry the Eighth could have roasted an entire boar in it was deep with cold ashes. Last night, a bonfire had raged in there against the bitter chill outside.
Twenty or more bottles of liquor littered the coffee table and must have been the cause of his destruction. Mitchell rolled to his side, nearly falling off the damn couch when his hand slipped off the leather cushion as he squinted at the bottles.
Tito’s. Macallan. Pappy Van Winkle. Cristal.
They’d poisoned themselves with the good stuff. Mitchell wasn’t sure if that would improve or worsen their hangovers, but he suspected it had irreparably damaged their bank accounts.
He grabbed a mostly empty Pappy bottle and drained the last few sips. Hair of the dog, man. He needed some sort of goddamned anesthesia. A poison pufferfish was bloating and farting inside his skull to the rhythm of his pulse.
Between the liquor bottles and empty glasses in the center of the coffee table, a thick stack of paper stood like a pristine block shining amongst the rubble.
Mitchell flopped back on the couch for a moment, breathing hard from the exertion, and swallowed the sick in his throat.
He did not do this anymore. He wasn’t a damn high school student in Swiss dorms sneaking hooch to take the edge off the homesickness and stress. Mitchell was a grown man with a venture capital company he co-owned with his aforementioned three best friends, who were currently splayed over the couches and chairs around him.
He hoped they weren’t dead.
Mitchell was the alcohol heavyweight of the group. If they’d tried to keep up with him last night, Mitchell might have become the sole proprietor of Last Chance, Inc. this morning.
Except that Jericho Parr was snoring.
And Morrissey Sand winced when he tried to open his eyes.
Kingston Moore might be dead, that great lump.
Okay, good. Mitchell probably wasn’t going to end up running Last Chance by himself. They’d all poured their sweat and tears into the company, though Mitchell was the blood-and-guts businessman of the group. He was the one who drove the hardest bargains. He was the one who made the savviest deals. Last Chance wouldn’t be alive and solvent without him.
And it was solvent. The four of them had gone from recent college grads to wealthy within only a few years. They were well on their way to becoming part of the world’s billionaire elite, as their boarding school had trained them to be.
Part of Mitchell’s business acumen was noticing when things in a business seemed out of place. His instinct had saved them from buying some real lemons, and it had guided him to see the diamonds in the rough that had returned their investment hundreds of times over within only a few years.
And right then, his intuition had lo cked onto that neat stack of paper, shining in the center of the alcoholic debris from the New Year’s Eve party the night before.
What the hell was that?
He crawled over the edge of the couch and table and reached to slap the paper. Empty bottles rolled over the table’s edge and thudded to the floor.
The other Last Chance guys stirred.
Jericho’s snores were interrupted by a groan and a throaty cough.
Mitchell grabbed the top sheet of the paper stack and dragged it toward him.
A sheaf of paper came with the top sheet because they were stapled together in the top corner.
Weird.
Mitchell squinted at the paper, his eyes still raw, and began to read. The sunlight bounced off the white paper and made it glow like a star in his hands, hurting his eyes and tightening the steel band around his temples.
A Contract between Mr. Gabriel Fish and—here, it listed the four inebriates currently half-deceased on the country club’s couches.
Gabriel Fish?
Gabriel goddamn Fish?
What the hell had Gabriel Fish been doing at the goddamn Narragansett Country Club last night? Mitchell didn’t remember Fish even being at the party. A country club party wasn’t Gabriel’s shtick. It wasn’t even Mitchell’s shtick, but he’d gone home to his parents’ house for the holidays to spend time with them and his siblings, especially his sister, Emily. A guy like Gabriel Fish should’ve been strutting around some nightclub in Singapore or a Russian oligarch’s mansion with a model on each arm, bragging about his latest business conquests on any given New Year’s Eve.
Oh, Jesus.
Mitchell shouldn’t have gotten drunk with Gabriel Fish in the room.
He struggled to a sitting position and rubbed his face as he read the rest of the contract.
And it was a goddamned contract.
As Mitchell reached the clauses that specified the asinine bet that they four idiots had made with Gabriel goddamn Fish the night before, he gasped, “What did we do?”
That woke Jericho up, who half-curled from his couch, wincing and blinking in the glaring sunlight. He squinted so much that his blue eyes were barely visible as he looked around. “I say, Match, what have you got there?”
Every damned line was worse than the last as he read. “We’re in trouble.”
“What could we have done that is so horrible?” Morrissey grated out from where he was trying to rise.
Morrissey Sand was the cautious one of their little band of brothers, literally voted the least likely to be involved in something that would live forever on the internet in high school. He grumbled, “We spent New Year’s Eve at an exclusive country club in Rhode Island, not at the casino in Monte Carlo. Surely, we haven’t gotten ourselves involved with international arms trafficking or Bitcoin speculating at one of the oldest, stodgiest, most boring parties on the face of the planet.”
Mitchell covered his mouth with his hand, literally shushing himself, as he continued reading the sheer hell in the document. Finally, when he couldn’t stand the crazy anymore, he flipped to the end page and saw worse. “Jesus, it’s notarized. How did he get somebody to notarize this thing in the wee hours of the morning at a country club New Year’s Eve party?”
“Considering the types of business deals that have been closed in this room over the past century, I imagine several of the staff are also notaries public so that contracts can be finalized and deposited before the signatories have a chance to rethink and back out,” Kingston Moore said. He stretched his muscular arms over his head. Waking shivers ran through his broad shoulders and thick arms that looked like he was a bodybuilder. Kingston had begun working out at the gym in high school before the rest of them had realized girls liked that kind of thing. Thus, Kingston had gotten tagged with the nickname “Skins” because he’d been the first to strip off his shirt at every pickup basketball game to display his gym results to the girls. “What did we sign?”
Mitchell was flipping through the document, unsure where to begin explaining the trap they were all in.
Jericho asked, “What did we sign, Match?”
“It’s a bet,” Mitchell finally said. “Was Gabriel Fish here last night?”
Jericho Parr rubbed his face. Jericho was the regular guy of their group, the one who didn’t have his head up his ass most of the time. He was the steady-Eddie who got the job done, day after day, and made sure the businesses that Last Chance had invested in met their quarterly goals. His spreadsheets ran to dozens of pages and thousands of lines. “I saw him early in the evening. He had a model fresh from fashion week in Milan on his arm and said he was in town because his grandfather was tottering near the edge of his grave. Was The Shark in on the bet?”
Mitchell cringed at Gabriel’s school nickname. Yeah, Gabriel Fish had picked up the nickname “The Shark” because he could swim into any situation and, staring at you with those dead, black eyes of his, eat your lunch.
Everyone considered him an apex predator.
Gabriel reveled in it.
Mitchell nodded as he continued to read the horrid contract, admitting that they had indeed wagered with a guy who had a nickname like The Shark.
Jericho asked, “Who was stupid enough to make a bet with The Shark?”
Mitchell swallowed the sick in his throat. “All of us.”
Jericho sprang up and wrenched himself around to stare at Mitchell. “What?”
He took a deep breath. They needed to know. “We all signed this, all four of us, plus Gabriel Fish. It’s a five-way bet.”
Mitchell had all their attention now, and the other guys leaned forward with their elbows on their knees.
Morrissey said, “Well, it can’t be that bad. How much could we have bet?” But his blue eyes creased with concern.
Mitchell shook the paper he held. “A hundred million dollars each, winner take all. Whoever wins, the other four saps have to pay him a hundred million dollars each.”
Jericho leaped off the couch like someone had pinched his ass. “Are you serious?”
Kingston slapped his palms on the coffee table. “If the four of us lose, we’ll owe Gabriel Fish four hundred million dollars. That would bankrupt Last Chance, Inc.”
Yeah, he was right. Liquidating four hundred million dollars’ worth of investments from Last Chance at whatever price they could immediately get would destroy the company.
And even a fire sale to sell off all their properties wouldn’t raise nearly enough. Each of them would be millions of dollars in debt, too.
Morrissey shook his head, his dark hair falling over his forehead. “We were drunk. We were not of sound mind when we signed that contract. It’s not enforceable.”
A sliver of hope sliced through Mitchell’s despair. Morrissey would know. He’d gone to law school and passed the New York State bar. Morrissey could get them out of this stupid sucker bet.
Except that he couldn’t.
Mitchell shook the paper at him. “It’s got two notarized sections. One is us agreeing to the contract. The other one states that we were of sound mind and body. Ten witnesses co-signed and attested to it, including Justice Marissa Otis.”
Morrissey grabbed another copy of the contract from the stack on the coffee table and started going through it.
Jericho raised his hands as if they were being held up, which they were. “Gabriel got a Supreme Court justice to witness the document stating that we were of sound mind and body when I can’t even remember what happened?”
