So much had happened these past three years. Ray Hardesty had suffered a fatal heart attack before he could go to trial. Reed Chandler had taken the hint about leaving town, and the last anybody’d heard, he was selling cheap condos on a run-down Florida golf course. There had been weddings: Ron and Sharon, Darnell and Charmaine. He’d be surprised if Valerie and Jason Keane ever got married, but they certainly made an interesting couple. There had been a wrenching funeral when his friend Tully Archer had died of pneumonia. The Stars had lost their first two Super Bowls and failed to qualify the third year. This year, however, they’d finally won it, and the Lombardi trophy was sitting in the lobby of the Stars Complex to prove it. Best of all, he’d become a family man.

He smiled as he remembered that glare Phoebe had shot him over the dinner table tonight when he’d been grilling Molly about her love life. Although he tried to keep it a secret, having his wife in a snit was something he never failed to enjoy. He was a competitive person by nature, and the sheer challenge of seeing how long it took him from the time she started fussing at him to the time he got her naked appealed to his sportsman’s nature. So far, his record was eight minutes, and that had been after a serious snit—too—the same night he and Ron had badgered her into signing Bobby Tom’s new $10-million contract.

Phoebe loved Bobby Tom—he and Viktor were the twins godfathers—but she was a real tightwad when came to big-money contracts. The smartest thing he’d ever done was sic his lawyers on her right after they got married. That had been a battle and a half. Damn but he loved being married to Phoebe!

Not long before his twin daughters were born, Phoebe and Ron had signed an agreement to reorganize the Stars. Unfortunately, that agreement had put an end to all kinds of enjoyable conflicts. Ron was now the Stars’ president and the person in charge of day-to-day operations, while Phoebe was proving to be a real whiz at her new job as Director of Finance and Budget.

Under the terms of the agreement, only Ron had the authority to make personnel decisions. Signing over that responsibility had been a wise move on Phoebe’s part. She loved crunching numbers, but she didn’t have the stomach for the whole business of cutting and trading players. She still liked to poke her nose into Dan’s coaching practices, however, especially when one of the players ran whining to her about being benched. On those occasions he took great pleasure in reminding her that he reported only to Ron.