Free The Player's Club: Finn by Cathy Yardley

for the location, and only twenty or so of the members could show up since so many had been hanging out the night prior.
    Maybe it was silly, Finn considered. It had started out as both a joke and a source of adventure—meeting at ungodly hours, ostensibly to hype the meetings, and just to have that secret-society feel. But they had a growing group and a set routine now: the new recruits, the challenges, talking about what adventures people wanted to go on and when. Maybe it was time to find something more permanent: a set time, a set place. He blinked. In all nine years—God, nine years already—that they’d been running the Club, he’d never really thought in terms of any “permanence” for what they were doing.
    “Could we wrap this up quick?” his friend Scott drawled. “Some of us poor suckers have boring day jobs, Finn. We need sleep!”
    Finn struggled not to make a face. If I screw this up, I’m going to be one of those poor suckers.
    “Where are we?” Diana asked in an exasperated voice. She was leaning against him, which he liked; she was pissed as hell at him, which he was getting used to.
    “New pledges are always blindfolded,” he said. “Sort of a ritual to keep our meeting location secret in case a new recruit decides to back out. Speaking of secrecy, how the heck did your crew of spy wannabes find me before?”
    She smiled. “Trade secret.”
    “You are one dangerous lady,” he whispered into her ear. “Maybe I’ll just have to torture it out of you.” Doing so, he got a whiff of her perfume…subtly sexy, intriguing, mysterious. Much like the lady herself.
    “Okay, enough fun,” she said curtly, but he could’ve sworn he felt her shiver. “Are we there yet? Can we get on with this?”
    He saw Lincoln glaring at him, motioning to him. “Soon. Could you just, ah, sit here?” He guided her to a folding chair. A number of people were muttering and nudging each other as they nodded to Diana’s rigid figure.
    “Another pledge, Finn?” his friend Tucker yelled. “You’ve already got your hands full with that daredevil Ben. What does this one want to do? Fly in space?”
    “Maybe invade Canada,” another person joked.
    “After this year, I don’t know if there’s anything Finn hasn’t done,” a third Player joined in. Finn took the teasing good-naturedly. Lincoln’s dark expression conveyed the opposite.
    “What’s she doing here?”
    The truth was Finn’s only option. “I texted…”
    “You told me you had another pledge, and that we had to convene an emergency meeting. You neglected to tell me why. And I seem to remember we all agreed we weren’t going to run another pledge until this group…” He paused. “Why do I even bother trying to tell you these things? You’ve made me the den mother of this damned Club, and it’s beginning to piss me off.”
    “If you don’t like that, then you’ll hate this,” Finn said, took a deep breath, then dived ahead. “She’s my family’s lawyer.”
    Lincoln looked completely baffled. “She’s…what?”
    “Lawyer,” Finn continued, his palms actually sweating. Even when he’d climbed out on the top of the Transamerica building, his palms hadn’t sweat.
    He couldn’t imagine what he’d be feeling if Lincoln ever found out that Diana had researched Lincoln’s financials. It had taken years for Lincoln to even admit to Finn, his best friend, that he’d gotten a fortune from the father who had never claimed him publicly. Lincoln still chose to bury that association. And the money from his father’s Swiss bank account, while not from criminal activity, would still throw Lincoln’s life open to a world of scrutiny—and pain.
    Finn was willing to risk a lot to keep his friend’s past protected.
    “I’ve, uh, cut a deal.” And was hoping Lincoln would be able to figure out a way out of it, but first things first. “I really need her to have a good experience with all of this. She’s super repressed, wound like a