Crushing It: A Love Between the Bases Novella

by Jennifer Bernard

  His raw words made her pulse jump sky-high. “We can’t do this here.” But oh, how she wanted to. She lifted one hand off the counter to trace the outline of his erection. Long and thick and oh my God…She wanted him with an intensity she’d never felt before.

  And now his hand was sneaking under her skirt, smoothing along her panty-hose covered inner thigh. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve fantasized about shoving your little business suits up to your ass?” He growled as he stroked across her mound, as she bucked and whimpered. “You know how I want to see you? I want you bent over that goddamn desk of yours, skirt over your head, panties at your ankles, and my head between your thighs.”

  “Stop …stop …” she whimpered. “Stop talking, you’re going to make me…”

  “What? Make you what? Make you cream your silk panties? I want that sweet stuff on my tongue, baby. I want to feel every little quiver and pulse, I want you coming apart under my mouth, I want you—”

  It was too much. His hot words overloaded her senses and all of a sudden she knew she was going to come, she just needed, she needed… She shoved her sex against his palm, needing that…pressure, friction…him…and he was there, pressing right back, grinding into her while she exploded into an orgasm so fierce she thought she might break her kitchen counter.

  “That’s right. Get it, girl. God, you’re amazing.” With his words, Crush kept pace with her as she rode out every last spasm.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered as she finally came down from that dizzying climax. “What just— What did I—”

  The front door burst open, then slammed shut. “Wendy? Crush? Where are you?”

  “Oh geez! It’s Teri!” Scrambling, turning every which way while she dragged her blouse together, she couldn’t think what to do. Finally, she dashed behind the counter and dropped to a crouch. She tucked her breasts back into her bra, buttoned her blouse and frantically fluffed her hair.

  She heard Teri’s quick footfalls as the girl jogged into the room, bringing a whiff of sweat and open air with her. “Hi, Crush. How did it go? Where’s Wendy?”

  “Oh, she…uh, she’s here, she’s just checking on something.”

  “Why are you holding that fruit basket like that? Crush, you look like you slept on the baseball field again. What’s the matter? You didn’t drink again, did you?”

  “Of course not. That was a one-time thing in honor of the Hall of Fame.”

  “Oh, so did Wendy give you that fruit basket? To congratulate you?”

  Crush cleared his throat. “No, the fruit basket belongs here. I was just looking for a banana. In a very, um, awkward way.”

  Wendy stifled a burst of laughter as she finally realized why Crush was holding her fruit basket. He must be hiding his erection behind a pile of oranges and bananas. It really wasn’t fair to leave him all alone to deal with Teri.

  Woman up, Wendy.

  Rising to her feet, she aimed her most practiced, mayor-like smile at Teri, but it didn’t have its usual effect. Teri gaped and peered at her head.

  “Whoa. Your hair. What happened to it?”

  “Oh, um, I’m trying out a new brand of hair spray. On sale.” She touched the top of her head, where Teri was staring, and felt a weird, stiff, tsunami-shaped wave. “Maybe I’ll go hop in the shower.”

  Teri blinked but didn’t pursue the topic. “Did you two…uh…discuss anything?”

  “We did,” Crush said. “We discussed a few things, but not quite as thoroughly as I’d like.”

  His devilish sidelong glance made Wendy fight to keep from laughing.

  “I believe I presented a pretty good case. She seemed very excited about the whole thing. But maybe that was just me getting carried away by the possibilities. Wendy, the ball’s in your court. What do you think?”

  Wendy walked from behind the counter, thankful for every beauty pageant/spokesmodel/spokesperson moment of training she’d received in her life. Dignity, that was what she was aiming for. Calm, cool, collected dignity. “I think, Teri, that in this case, you should do exactly what you want to do.”

  With a scorching glance at Crush that he could interpret however he wanted, she swept out of the kitchen in search of a shower.

  Chapter Five

  Wendy Trent had been on Crush’s radar for a while, but in one short morning she’d taken over the entire thing and smashed the sensors so no one else even registered. Despite his reputation as a playboy who dated models, Crush was drawn most strongly to smart women. His ex-wives included a newscaster—Paige’s mother—a lawyer—that divorce settlement had stung—and a U.N. Interpreter. He appreciated brains. He loved a strong woman who gave as good as she got. He also liked big blue eyes and a nice rack. Wendy Trent checked every one of those boxes and a few he hadn’t known existed.

  For instance, backbone. He’d known that Wendy could hold her own in the political realm. But the bits of Wendy’s story that Teri had let slip sent chills down his spine. Someone—he was guessing Teri’s father—had put her in the hospital. She’d been so desperate that she’d begged someone else to take her baby. And now she was the respected mayor of a mid-sized Texas city. How much strength and sheer will to survive had it taken for her to make that journey?

  Maybe even more than it took to win three hundred and twenty-five games with a lifetime 3.24 ERA.

  So, yeah…respect. He had that for her. He also had the hots for her. Bad. There was no possible way that one incredible morning make-out session was going to be enough. He couldn’t stop thinking about how quickly they’d both caught fire, how hard she’d come against his hand, how freaking sexy she looked with her hair all mussed and her eyes so dazed.

  Which was damn awkward, because he was coaching her daughter now. And every time he saw Teri, he couldn’t help remembering that morning. If Teri hadn’t assigned him the task of getting Wendy onboard, if she hadn’t gone for a run and left them alone—well, he owed Teri, that was all.

  Since he wanted to keep this project on the down low at first, he invited Teri to train at Bullpen Ranch, where he had—appropriately enough—his own bullpen. Her expression of awe when she first laid eyes on his spread was pretty gratifying, considering she still occasionally called him “Homeless.”

  “Is this an actual ranch? With cows and all?”

  He tossed a ball into the air as they walked across the back meadow toward the bullpen. “I got the cows and I got the cowhide.”

  “That’s kind of gross. Do you live all alone here?” She was wearing her usual tomboy outfit of loose basketball shorts and a tank top over a sports bra. Her sense of style definitely hadn’t come from Wendy.

  “Mostly. People show up, stay for a while, take off. I have a few big parties every year and guests seem to stick around for weeks afterwards. But mostly, yeah, I live alone.”

  She tore her gaze away from the cows in the near pasture to give him a speculative look. “Has Wendy seen your place?”

  “Sure. A few times. She’s my mayor. I try to stay on good terms with my local civic leaders.”

  “Yeah, I figured that’s what you were doing.”

  He blanched a bit. How much had Teri seen? What did she suspect?

  She giggled at him. “Don’t worry, Crush. I won’t tell anyone Crush has a crush.”

  “I don’t have a crush.”

  “Okay. Then you’re crazy in love with her.”

  “Do you want to learn how to pitch or not?” Grumbling, he swung open the gate of his own personal bullpen. Even if he did have a thing for Wendy, it probably wasn’t going to go anywhere. After that hot moment in her kitchen, she’d frozen him out all over again. She hadn’t answered any of his calls the past few days. “First thing I want to do is put a radar gun on you, then I want to record some tape. No one ever believes me when I tell them what they’re doing wrong, so I’ve learned to put it on video.”

  “A tape? Awesome!” Teri danced to the rubber at one end of the bullpen and swung her butt back and forth. “Oh y
eah! Oh yeah! I’m going to be on YouTube! Oh yeah!”

  Oh sweet Lord. Coaching an exuberant young girl was definitely going to be a whole different experience.

  * * *

  “So. Your fastball tops out at about eighty-two miles per hour, which is pretty damn good, but not exactly Major League material.”

  “But you can fix that, right? That’s why I’m here.”

  After a morning of speed tests and video analysis, Crush figured they deserved a break. They sat on the bench in the dugout and ate from a bag of “power greens.”

  “Yes and no. I can probably get you another five miles per hour. But that’s obviously not enough to beat big leaguers. Not even Triple A. But your curveball, now…that’s where it’s at for you. We’ll build your repertoire around the deuce. We’ll still work on your fastball, because you have to have it. But we’ll be focusing on control. An eighty-five-mile-per-hour fastball on the inside corner is going to beat everyone except the greats.”

  She nodded, popping a handful of kale into her mouth. “You know, your snacks suck. I can’t believe you’re making me eat green stuff.”

  “It’s good brain food. I want you eating lots of protein and lots of greens, lots of Omega 3’s and 6’s. Pitching is mental to a large degree. And I know you must be smart because Wendy’s one of the sharpest women I know.”

  She made a face at him. “Yeah, but maybe my dad wasn’t much for brains.”

  “Why do you say that?” It wasn’t cool to try to finagle information about Wendy’s ex from Teri, but he’d never claimed to be all that honorable.

  “Well, the thing is…” She shifted her feet uneasily, crossing one over the other then switching back. “It’s in her journal, so this is top-secret. Don’t tell her I told you.”

  Oh shit. That was a real invasion of Wendy’s privacy. He cleared his throat to tell her to stop there, but she launched into her story before he could.

  “She only ever called him by his first initial, M. And she said right in it that she wasn’t worried about him seeing it because he hated to read. And she hid it with the cookbooks because he never looked at those. When she met him, she was doing beauty pageants and stuff to try to win scholarships for college. But he told her he’d send her to college after they got married. It was all a big lie, though. They got married on her eighteenth birthday. He wanted her to stay home after that. They lived on a turkey farm.”

  A farm. Could he picture the perfectly turned-out Wendy Trent on a turkey farm? “I guess that’s not so different from city hall.”

  “Yeah, you shouldn’t joke, Crush. It’s a really bad story.” She hung her head, her usual sparkle dimmed, as if someone had turned down the lights. He realized that it was weighing on her. She wanted to talk about it. Maybe even needed to.

  “Maybe you should talk to Wendy about all this.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “No way. I’m sure she doesn’t want to dig all that up again. It was really bad.”

  Crush rolled his neck from side to side. He felt caught between a rock and a hard place. Teri needed to talk, but this was Wendy’s private, personal business. Not only that, but a big part of him had to know. “What…” He cleared his throat. “What happened?”

  Teri chewed on her lower lip for a while, as if she too felt between a rock and a hard place. Then it all came out in a rush. “He was crazy. If she got him mad, sometimes he’d lock her in the basement and leave her there. He was really big and strong and fast. Once she tried to run away from him and even though she had a twenty-minute head start, he caught up with her.”

  Crush leaped to his feet and paced across the bullpen. “Mother of God, I wish I knew where he was now. I’d hunt him down and rip him apart. Who was the bastard? Sorry, no offense to you.”

  Teri hung her head and traced a pattern in the dirt with her foot. “That’s okay.”

  But how could it be okay? What was it like to read a journal about what a fucker your father was? “No, really. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I hate him too!” she burst out. “He nearly killed me before I was even born! He’s not really my father, not in my eyes. My father is Nick Dimitri, and he’s an electrician and the best dad in the world.”

  “You’re absolutely right.” Crush returned to the bench and sat next to her. He didn’t know what to do. Try to hug her? Pat her on the back and say everything would be all right?

  “Still, I kind of wish…I don’t know. He gave me half my DNA. I wish I knew more about him, whoever he is. I guess that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s true.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is now?”

  “No. I don’t know anything about what happened to him after she left. I wish I could ask her, but…” She shrugged.

  “Not her favorite topic,” he said, remembering the conviction in her statement. “I will never ever say one word about him.”

  Teri nervously tossed a ball between her gloved hand and her bare one. “Do you think maybe you could ask her? You did so good the last time.”

  “So you have a sarcastic side. Girl after my own heart.”

  She flipped the ball to him and he caught it without even thinking. “I’m not being sarcastic. I’m here, aren’t I? What you said to her worked.”

  “Yeah, but that was different.” All the ways in which that conversation had “worked” flooded his brain and shorted out his thought process for a second. “She…I…kind of sprung it on her. Took her by surprise.” That was one way to put it. And she’d responded beyond his wildest dreams to that surprise. “She’s not going to let her guard down a second time. Besides, it ain’t my business, she’d tell me that straight out. You want to know more about your father, that’s reasonable. It’s not so cool for me to be prying into her past.”

  Teri sighed, then seemed to shake off the topic. She rose to her feet. “Want to show me that thing I’m doing wrong again?”

  “Which thing? I mentioned a few.”

  She made a face at him, and skipped to resume her position at the rubber.

  “Before we get started again, let me plant something in your brain. Your most important skill as a pitcher is what?”

  “Um…throwing strikes?”

  “Yes, but what if your motion is off and you’re not throwing strikes, you’re throwing sweet, fat home run balls right over the plate? Someone hits a grand slam off you, you just walked three in a row, and the crowd is screaming for your blood?”

  She scratched her head under the Kilby Catfish cap he’d given her. “Wouldn’t the manager just take me out?”

  “He might, but maybe he’s decided to leave you in for the experience, because the game is already lost. What mental quality is going to get you through this in one piece?”

  “Um…denial?”

  He surprised himself with a deep laugh. “That’s one way to put it. How about ‘resilience’? A good pitcher is one who can respond well to adversity. If you can block out the shit storm you’re in and focus on the next batter, the next pitch, you’ll be fine. If you get upset and keep thinking about the crap pitch that Barry Bonds just smashed out the county, you’re done. Know what I mean?”

  Her big brown eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Wait, is this some kind of story with a moral, like I’m not supposed to think about the past and where my bio-father is and all that?”

  “God no. What am I, Yoda? Focus on the past all you want. Just not while you’re on the mound.”

  “Okay, Homeless.”

  Chapter Six

  Wendy lasted two weeks. Two weeks of pretending the kitchen incident hadn’t happened, that she wasn’t thinking about Crush at all. Two weeks of watching Teri head off every day to work with him at Bullpen Ranch. Every day, Teri would drive off in the Land Rover Crush had lent her. She’d work there for a good chunk of the day. Afterwards, she’d go to a gym to lift weights or go for a run. She’d even started taking Pilates, apparently based on Crush’s advice.

  What she wouldn’t gi
ve to see Crush in a Pilates class.

  In the evenings, Teri would be so tired she’d eat with her head resting on her hand. When Wendy asked her what sorts of things she was learning, she’d look thoughtful and say things like, “to look inside for the answers” or “if you’re not feeling, you’re not pitching.”

  It all sounded a lot more mystical than Wendy had imagined. She was almost jealous that Teri was getting to know a different side of Crush Taylor. A fascinating side. “How many times has he shown up hungover to your coaching sessions?” she asked one day.

  “Never. He’s very serious about pitching. He gets all quiet when he talks about it. Like it’s church or something.”

  “Hm. Well, at least he’s serious about something.”

  “You know, a lot of the crazy stuff he does is an act.”

  “Why would he have to put on an act? He’s Crush Taylor, legend and multimillionaire.”

  Teri yawned over a forkful of mac and cheese. “I think he tries to throw people off. Otherwise they’d be all over him all the time and he’d never get any privacy.”

  “Hm.” She turned that over in her mind and found that it made sense. In her dealings with Crush, she’d occasionally seen a flash of that other side, the thoughtful person behind all the games. “So he’s not trying to throw you off?”

  “He doesn’t have to. We’re buds.”

  Buds. Her daughter was buddies with the notoriously degenerate Crush Taylor. Not only that, she seemed to regard him as some kind of friendly pet panda. Wendy would love to know what they talked about—minus the baseball stuff, which flew right over her head.

  Of course, what she really wanted to know was if Crush ever mentioned her.

  But that question wouldn’t suit her position as mayor and official Kilby ice queen. And Teri might think that she was interested in Crush. Which of course she wasn’t. She was interested in jumping his bones, yes. She’d admit to that. As the two weeks dragged by, she wanted that more every day. But if anything got out about her and Crush, it would be very bad for her public image.