“I know what I did. And I’m so sorry. Believe me, you’ll never know how sorry I am.”
“I had a feeling you’d be here,” she whispered, looking down at her clasped hands. “Rowan said he was inviting some of his teammates. I could have asked him, but when I didn’t see your name on the guest list…”
“I didn’t come here to hurt you,” he said, praying she believed him. “I did this because…” How could he make her understand? “I wanted to take some of your pain away, if I could.”
“How are you going to do that?” she asked incredulously. “You can’t bring my brother back. You can’t give my parents their only son back. So tell me, Mace, how are you going to take that pain away?”
Ace was a baseball nickname he’d earned, but those who knew him before he made it to the big leagues still called him Maceon or Mace. “I know saying I’m sorry is little consolation—”
“I heard your apology in court.”
She had stayed for his statement, while her parents left the courtroom after his sentencing.
“But I want to say things to you now I couldn’t then. I wasn’t mature enough back then to make sense of what I did.” He thought of those countless hours he’d spent in a juvenile detention center, planning a life he wasn’t even sure he deserved to have when he got out and remembering the life he’d taken and the future Linc would never have, because of him.
“You don’t deserve any face time with me,” she said, standing.
He reached for her wrist, looking up at her, his eyes pleading with her for just a few precious minutes. “You loved me once.”
“That was a long time ago,” she said, her breath catching on a sob.
“I know.” He lowered his head, his hand still wrapped around her slim wrist. “But if I ever meant anything to you, just give me this. A few minutes to tell you what I’ve been wanting to tell you for years.”
She shook him off before reclaiming her seat. “I have a job to do here tonight, so make it fast.”
“When I lost my own brother, a part of me died.”
His brother had been fifteen years old. Not even old enough to drive. He was at a friend’s house, messing around with the old man’s guns, and one went off, shooting him in the face at close range. He’d never had a chance.
“So I do have some idea of how you feel.” Ace wasn’t sure he was making it better or worse, since she now looked as if she wanted to spit on him. “When I lost your brother, another part of me died. He filled a void in my life, the void my brother left.”
“Yeah? Then I guess you were lucky, ‘cause I never found anyone to fill the void my brother left.” She flattened her palm against her chest. “My heart is still broken every time I think about him. The man he would have been now, the life he could have had if he’d been spared.”
“I think about that too,” he said gently. “He loved playing baseball almost as much as I did. I really believe he would have made it to the majors. Maybe we’d be playing together, or on opposing teams, who knows?”
Her eyes softened marginally. “You might be right. He would have loved that.”
“I know he was your brother, your other half.” It killed Ace to think she’d been going through life feeling like half a person, because of him. “And I know he’s gone because of me, but I can give you something no one else can.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked skeptically. “What’s that?”
“I can give you back a part of your brother through the memories I have of him, the knowledge that I have of him. That’s something no one else has.” He knew her twin better than he knew himself, and Linc would have wanted Ace to share those stories with his sister, to give her a modicum of peace, if that was even possible.
“What are you talking about?” she asked before biting her lower lip.
“I have this box back in my hotel room. It’s a bunch of stuff: letters, pictures, videos…” Some of Ace’s most treasured possessions of a man he never wanted to forget.
“Why did you keep them? You could have sent them to us,” she said, folding her arms. “Don’t you think that was the least you could have done, under the circumstances?”
“Would you have accepted anything from me?”
She shrugged, looking away. “Probably not.”
“That’s why I hung on to it, because I couldn’t stand to see it destroyed.” If she wanted that box now, he’d give it to her. It would be one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do, but she deserved it more than he did.
“Why are telling me this?” she asked, looking him in the eye. “It doesn’t change anything. Nothing can or will.”
“I know. I just thought it would…” What did he hope to accomplish by showing her another side of her brother, reminding her of the kid he’d been and the man he could have been? “I don’t know. Help, maybe?”
“Nothing you can say or do will make any difference now. It’s too late.” This time when she stood, he let her.
“If you change your mind, I’m in room 323. Pass by anytime. We can go through the stuff, and you can take anything you want back home with you. Hell, take it all if you want.” He didn’t know if she realized it would have been easier for him to write a check for ten million dollars than to part with those mementos.
“I’ll think about it… but I don’t know if I can.”
Chapter Three
Ace watched Dani move through the crowd, speaking to her staff and directing the events, but all the while, she kept stealing glances at him. He knew that because he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“She’s a seriously hot piece, ain’t she, man?”
That came from their starting catcher. He was one of the best in the game, with an ego and bank account to back it up. But putting him in his place was sport for Ace, mainly because he reminded Ace of the guy he used to be: arrogant, cocky, and opinionated.
Ace was still all of those things at times, but he’d earned the right to be. Their team was one of the best in professional baseball, and as their lead-off hitter with a .323 batting average last season and .342 post-season, Ace was a big part of the reason.
“Watch your mouth, Brooks.”
“Hey, hey,” he said, raising his glass. “I didn’t know you were banging her. I’ll back off.”
“I’m not banging her. But you will treat her with respect. If I hear you were giving her a hard time, you’ll have more trouble than you can handle.”
“I hear ya,” he muttered, bringing his longneck bottle to his lips.
“If you’ll excuse me.” Ace walked away without waiting for Brooks’s response. He was tired of wasting his breath on a kid whose ego was bigger than his brain. Besides, he had more important issues to tend to—namely the server disrespecting his ex-girlfriend.
“Maceon,” she said, looking startled when he approached. “Is there a problem?”
“I need to have a word with you.”
Dani waited for the server to excuse himself before she unleashed on Ace. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I was having a discussion with him. How dare you interrupt—”
“He was undressing you with his eyes.”
“He was not!”
“He was.” Ace slipped a hand into his pocket, seeing his one chance at forgiveness slipping away because he couldn’t keep his big mouth shut. “I know because I’m doing the same thing right now.” His eyes glided over her body, settling on all the places he remembered branding with his tongue.
“Stop.” She shivered ever so slightly, just enough for him to know he still affected her, not that she’d ever admit it. When she tipped her head back to look at him, her breathing was labored and her pupils were dilated.
He probably knew her body better than she did. He’d had countless hours in that prison cell to relive every moment they’d spent together. It was branded in his memory, and even though years had passed, he felt as though he’d spent a lifetime thinking about it.
“Why are you doing this?”
Seducing her had never been part of his game plan, but seeing her again ignited feelings that had been dormant for years. “You’re fighting with your fiancé, aren’t you?”
“That doesn’t mean I’m looking for someone to take his place.”
“He doesn’t make you happy. You’re with him because you think you should be. He’s a safe bet, something I never was.”
“You don’t even know me anymore,” she said.
“I know you better than you think, Dani.” He got lost in the eyes he’d seen glaze over with lust, hunger, and desperation. “There was a time I knew you better than anyone.”
“That was a long time ago,” she said breathlessly.
“Maybe, but some things are visceral. You feel them no matter how much you wish you could remain numb. You want to hate me, but the part of you that swore you’d always love me can’t forget what we had.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, her luminous eyes belying her inner turmoil. “My love for you turned to hate a long time ago.”
He knew she wanted to believe that. If he were a gentleman, he may have let her, but he couldn’t. “Remember the first time we met?”
Ace could tell she was thinking about the way she’d felt the first time they saw each other. The pull was magnetic, as though they couldn’t repel the other even if they tried. Which they didn’t. They didn’t have to, didn’t want to.
“You can try to walk away and forget you saw me again. But we both know you’ll go back to your hotel room tonight and lose sleep thinking about me.”
“God, you’re as arrogant as I remember,” she said, dragging her eyes away from his.
“Call it what you want, but you know I’m telling the truth.” He reached into his breast pocket and extracted one of the two key cards to his room. Lowering his hand, he pressed the key discreetly into her palm. “I’m going to call it a night. In case you’d like to continue this conversation in my room…”
“I can’t take this,” she seethed. “I don’t want it.”
Ace shrugged as though he was indifferent. “Suit yourself. The invitation stands.”
***
Danielle was sitting alone at a table, one of the last few people remaining in the restaurant, when Rowan approached and pulled up a chair beside her.
“I hope everything was to your satisfaction tonight.” She forced a smile, trying to remain professional even though she was pissed he and his friend had tried to pull one over on her.
“It was perfect, Danielle. Thank you.” When the waiter returned with water glasses for each of them, Rowan reached for his. “I saw you talking to Ace earlier. How did that go?”
She glared at him. “You must know the story, since he enlisted your help to pull this off. So how do you think it went? The man killed my brother.”
He sighed, sinking back in his chair. “I’ve known him a long time. He’s one of my closest friends. And I can tell you without a doubt that your brother’s death still haunts him every day.”
She believed him. She knew Maceon would never have intentionally hurt Linc, but how could he have gotten behind that wheel and allowed her brother to get in the passenger’s seat, knowing he was taking both of their lives in his hands? Not to mention the other innocent lives he could have taken if anyone else had been involved in the accident.
“It haunts me too,” she said, reaching for her water glass.
“Have you ever done anything so stupid it defies logic?”
“Sure,” she said, shrugging. “Haven’t we all?”
“Yeah, I think we have,” Rowan said with a sad smile. “But most of the time our stupid mistakes don’t cost someone’s life. In Ace’s case, it did.”
She sucked in a breath as she imagined what he had endured while he was incarcerated. But she couldn’t allow herself to feel empathy for him. That would mean opening the door to forgiveness, and if she did that, her parents would feel she’d betrayed her brother’s memory.
“I hate that it happened,” she said, remembering the sound of Mace’s guttural cries as the paramedics covered Linc’s body with a sheet at the accident scene. After a call from a friend, she’d rushed to the accident, praying it wouldn’t be as bad as she feared. But by the time she got there, it was too late. She didn’t even get the chance to say good-bye to her brother. “I hate that my brother is gone. I hate that so many years of Mace’s life were wasted in prison. I hate that my parents lost their son and their hearts will never heal.”
“I saw a man die once,” he said softly. “On the field. In the minors. He got hit in the head by a fastball. He was only nineteen years old.”
“What happened?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Rowan’s eyes looked haunted, and she knew from experience that no one should have to witness the death of another.
“Brain aneurysm,” he said, shaking his head. “It could have happened anywhere. Doctors said it didn’t have anything to do with the hit. But the pitcher felt responsible, like he’d killed him.”
Danielle knew there was a story there. Rowan was trying to tell her they weren’t the only ones who hadn’t been able to get over losing Linc. Maceon wasn’t over it either. He never would be.
“The pitcher who hit him went down a pretty self-destructive path after that. He never wanted to play ball again. He stopped training, started drinking. Rumor has it he started taking drugs.”
“What happened to him?”
“Ace happened.” Rowan sat forward, resting his elbows on the table. “He talked to the guy, worked with him, helped pull him out of it. He even paid for his rehab and therapy.”
If he was trying to remind her that Ace was a good man, he didn’t have to. She’d once loved Maceon more than anything. She knew better than most that beneath his tough exterior beat a heart of gold, but that didn’t change anything.
“And now he’s pitching again?”
Rowan shook his head. “No, he works in the front office now. He wasn’t good enough to go pro. Point is, Ace could have let him crawl inside that bottle and never thought about him again. But he didn’t, because that’s not the kind of man he is. He befriended this kid because he understood how he felt and he wanted to help him in any way he could. If you ask me, that’s the mark of a man who’s learned from his mistakes.”
“You think I should forgive him?” She knew for her own sake she should. But her parents had never been able to let go, and she felt she should follow their lead since they were the ones who had lost their only son.
“What do you think you should do?” Rowan asked. “I know it can’t feel good to carry around all this bitterness and resentment.”
“No, it doesn’t.” She sighed. She was tired of being angry, first at Mace, then at her fiancé for betraying her.
“My mom died of cancer when I was just a kid,” Rowan said. “I was mad at God, mad at the world for a long time.”
“How did you work it out?” she asked, propping her chin in her palm as her elbow rested on the table.
“I got into sports. Having a distraction like baseball, something I was passionate about, helped a lot.”
She smiled the sad, hollow smile she’d become accustomed to. “Are you saying you think I should take up a sport?”
“I think you should do whatever you have to do to work this shit out.” He leaned back, pulling up a chair across from him so he could rest his feet under the table. “Tell me about your brother. What was he like?”
She still thought of Linc every day, but it had been a long time since someone had asked her to describe her late brother. She immediately thought of the thing she missed the most. “Linc always made me laugh. Me and everyone else. He had a great sense of humor.”
“I have a feeling you haven’t been doing much laughing since you lost him. You think that’s the way he would have wanted it?”
She wanted to lash out at Rowan, to tell him he didn’t understand, but he’d made it clear he did understand how difficult it was to lose someone close to hi
m. “No, but—”
“You feel guilty.” Rowan nodded. “I felt guilty for being happy after my mom died too. I didn’t think it was fair that I should be happy when she was cut down in her prime. But then I realized my mother would want me to live full out, because she couldn’t.”
Linc would have wanted that for her too. He would have hated how guarded she’d become.
“Tell me something else about Linc,” Rowan said, obviously sensing that she needed to talk about him, to remember him.
“He had a sweet and sensitive side, but he was pretty badass, so only a few people ever got to see that.”
She thought of the mangy, flea-bitten dog he’d rescued on the way home from school when he was thirteen. Their parents had wanted to take it to the pound, but Linc begged and pleaded with them until they gave in. That dog was the only thing that got them through the days after Linc died. He’d loved that dog, and that meant they had to take care of him the way their son would have wanted them to. Dani would never forget their reaction the day the vet announced they’d have to put the dog down. It was like they’d lost Linc all over again.
“Sounds like someone else I know.”
She didn’t have to ask who he meant. “I guess that’s why they were such good friends. There were a lot of similarities between them.”
“Ace is one of the few people who can help keep his memory alive, you know.”
She’d never thought of it like that.
“Do you know that he set up a scholarship in your brother’s name?” When her jaw dropped, he nodded. “I didn’t know about it until a few months ago, but apparently it was one of the first things he did when he had some coin.”
“Linc would have loved that,” she whispered. He’d always complained how unfair it was that some of their friends couldn’t go to college because their parents couldn’t afford it. He thought everyone deserved an equal chance at a good start in life.
“Ace said it was the least he could do to honor his memory.”
She blinked back tears, knowing it was probably pointless.
Hit and Run (Summer Rush #2) Page 2