The Champion's Secret

Former JAG officer Will Garrett took a job as a lawyer with the Outer Spiral Trading Company for one reason only. To keep his ex out of jail. The case is over, his ex is free -- and engaged to someone else. So, Will's seeing out the final months of his contract as legal counsel for a sports team of Modern Gladiators on a Company sponsored tour of the Deneb sector. After that he must decide if he's going to go home and become the corporate lawyer his parents always wanted him to be. Even though that prospect is what made him join the military as a JAG officer in the first place. Fight fans love Jimmy Campbell, mighty Highland warrior, the captain and champion of promoter Lenny Sheridan's Team Spartacus. But Jimmy is really James De Villiers, half-Scottish, half-South African, ex-soldier. He's only in this gladiator game for the money. He's already older than most of the team, carrying a nagging shoulder injury, and tired of hiding his sexuality because Lenny thinks it will damage his image. One more season of this, then he's gone. Though he said that last year too ... Will and James get together, thinking only of killing time in bed during the dull trips between tour stops. But as they grow closer and Will makes friends with the gladiators, trouble starts with team manager Lenny, who wants Will and James to split, to preserve the champion's secret. When the gladiators are involved in a crisis on a space station orbiting a xenophobic alien world, they become the focus of all the media in the Deneb sector. James is forced to decide if keeping his secret and his career is more important to him than acknowledging his relationship with Will, whatever that costs him.