by Julie Kriss
Work Me Up
Riggs Brothers, Book 3
Julie Kriss
Copyright © 2018 by Julie Kriss
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Work Me Up
Baseball player. Single dad. Hot mess. No woman has ever tamed him… until now.
Everyone knows Ryan Riggs—everyone who follows minor league baseball, that is. He's the player with the hair-trigger temper, the bad shoulder, and the smoking hot looks. He's also a single dad in need of a nanny—which makes him my new boss.
Simple. Except for one thing: We had a one-night stand five years ago.
We're trying to be professional. But it was one of the best nights of my life, and the more I work with him, the more I'm thinking about a repeat.
He's battling his demons, and I might be the only one who can help him win.
He's impossible.
He's unforgettable.
He's unwinnable.
Looks like I have my work cut out for me.
The Riggs Brothers Series:
Drive Me Wild (Book 1)
Take Me Down (Book 2)
Make Me Beg (Book 3)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Make Me Beg
Also by Julie Kriss
One
Ryan
* * *
I’d seen this movie before. This time the doctor was a woman, the office had a painting of a running horse, and the room smelled a little like menthol. Switch up those three things and you’d have any other appointment I’d had in the last year.
“There is another specialist I can send you to,” the sports doctor—Evers, her name was Evers—said as she clicked her laptop. She was about thirty, Asian, and like all of the others, she was entirely competent. “I can forward the scans. He specializes in these kinds of deep tissue problems. You can get an appointment in about eight weeks.”
I sat in the chair across from her desk. I’d put my clothes back on—worn-in jeans, Henley, zipped hoodie. I was suddenly so tired I wasn’t sure I could get up again. “No,” I said.
She blinked in surprise and looked up from her laptop. “No?”
“No,” I said again. I didn’t even have the energy to sound mad. “It won’t work, and eight weeks is too long. So thank you, but no.”
She looked concerned. “Mr. Riggs—”
“Ryan.”
“Ryan. I know that this can seem hopeless, even devastating. I know that this is affecting your career. But I think you need to keep trying to find an answer.”
An answer to why my right shoulder was messed up, frozen and sliced with pain. An answer to why I couldn’t play baseball, which was the only thing that made me money and the only thing I knew how to do. “I’ve been trying to find an answer for a year,” I explained patiently. “It isn’t happening.”
“It doesn’t mean it can’t happen.” God, these doctors—especially the high-paid sports ones—were so fucking smooth. Just the right words, just the right tone. Maybe it was experience with dealing with egotistical assholes like me. “The only way to guarantee you won’t play again is to give up.”
“Nice,” I said. “I saw that on the wall somewhere. Was that in this office or the last one?”
“What?”
“Never mind. Do I win something if I give up? Where do I sign?”
She sighed, as if she heard this kind of pathetic shit every day. Like I say, athletes are egotistical assholes. Except in order to have a big ego, you have to have made it big in the first place. I never did—I only ever hit the minor leagues. Now I was twenty-seven, the MLB didn’t know I was alive, and my shoulder was toast, though Dr. Evers wouldn’t admit it. Hence the pathetic shit.
“This isn’t over,” she said. “Be persistent. Do the exercises every day. Keep up the stretches and the good diet. Add in as much strength training as you can handle. Sometimes these things just take time. We’ll book more scans, and I’ll put in for an appointment. He might have an earlier cancellation—you never know.”
I have this thing I do in the middle of a game, when I’m on the mound and the pressure gets high: I clock out. I go somewhere else and I watch it like it’s a movie, like it’s not really me. I did that now, though Dr. Evers didn’t notice. I nodded and said thank you and took the slip for the appointment for another scan. I signed the papers for the insurance company and I even flirted with the halfway pretty receptionist, watching her smile. I smiled back and said something witty, and I walked out of the office to my SUV, looking at the vivid blue June sky of Detroit.
When you were an athlete in need of a doctor, it was good to be in the city of the Tigers, the Redwings, and the Pistons. I’d never make it to the Tigers, but at least I could see their doctors if I was willing to pay and to wait for eight weeks.
It felt better, being outside. I always hated being cooped up; it was one of the reasons I’d signed up for baseball when I was thirteen. Back then I was almost flunking school and I had to steal the money for a glove, but when I stood on the field under the sunshine for the first time I didn’t want to leave. I sure as hell didn’t want to go home, where my mother was long gone, my dad didn’t give a shit, and my brothers and I ran wild. When I stood in the baseball field in the sunshine I was just me, and everyone left me the hell alone. Then I threw my first pitch, and everything that happened from that moment led in a straight line to this one.
So even in a concrete parking lot in Detroit I just stood there for a second, soaking it up. There was a jagged throb of pain from my right shoulder down to the middle of my back, brought on by the therapy session, but I was used to that. I pulled a small tube of pills from the pocket of my jeans and popped two, swallowing them dry. They were unlabeled and I was damn sure I wasn’t supposed to have them. But an athlete who wants to get his hands on something unlabeled that will make the pain float away always can.
I justified it by telling myself I didn’t take them all the time. Just now and then, when the pain was bad.
Except if I was honest, I was taking them all the time.
The only way to guarantee you won’t play again is to give up.
Interesting.
I had not, in fact, played baseball in thirteen months. I’d come off a six-game suspension for punching another player in the face—maybe not my finest moment—and played a single game, blistering pitch after pitch off the mound until they benched me in the sixth inning to rest. By then we’d pretty much already won, and I could barely lift my arm. I had slices of pain moving from the center of my shoulder down my back, down my arm, shooting up my neck. I felt like I was made of pain, but we won. I hadn’t played since.
There had been workouts, therapy, training. Little white pills. Except for the shoulder I was actually in so
me of the best shape of my life. I ran five miles a day, I could do situps until I puked and pushups until my shoulder screamed. The only thing I couldn’t do was pitch a damn ball.
There were therapy sessions of the mental kind, too—the team had put me in an anger management program, a request from the league that they’d agreed to in order to buy me time. Get your shit back in shape was the message I’d gotten, loud and clear. Now or never, Riggs.
And now, another doctor. Another eight weeks.
It wasn’t just my pride or my ego that were going down the shitter. It was my income. And the problem was, I didn’t have just myself to worry about.
My phone rang in my back pocket. I pulled it out. Amanda, the wife of one of my fellow players. I answered it. “What’s up?”
“Ryan, it’s two o’clock,” she said.
I squinted into the distance. I knew that voice from Amanda—it meant I was forgetting something. “Yeah?”
“And you have an appointment at three.”
Oh. Right.
“Fuck,” I said.
“You promised.” Her voice went dark with threat. Amanda was the nicest woman alive—on the surface. But she was one of those women: cross her at your own peril. It came from having a baseball player for a husband. Athletes’ wives, the ones who actually make it work, are fierce. My friend Wes, who was married to Amanda, had learned early to do anything she said, no questions asked.
“I did promise,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’ll be there. I have to go pick up Dylan from school, and we’re going straight home.”
“You forgot, didn’t you?”
I wasn’t going to answer that. I had forgotten, sort of. Mostly I’d just blocked from my mind that Amanda thought I needed a nanny for my son, and that she believed she’d found just the right person. I’d hoped against hope that she would forget about it—she had two kids of her own and was insanely busy—but I should have known better.
“This is going to work out, I promise,” she was saying to me now.
“You really vouch for her? This is my kid we’re talking about.”
“Ryan, she’s my cousin. I’ve known her since birth. Yes, I vouch for her.”
“But she hasn’t worked as a nanny before.” This part, I remembered.
“She’s very qualified. I’d even say eminently qualified.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means just meet her. Ryan, you need someone. You need help.”
I closed my eyes briefly, because that stung. The truth always did. She was right, I was a fucking mess. I was trying to be a father to a seven-year-old, and even I could see I was failing. “What’s her name again?”
“Jesus, Ryan. You’d forget your dick if it wasn’t attached to you.”
“No. No, I would not.” Really.
“Her name is Kate,” Amanda said. “Kate. Kate. K-A-T-E.”
“Okay, okay.” Kate. That twigged something in my memory. “Have I met her?”
“I don’t think so. She doesn’t travel in baseball circles. She doesn’t like baseball at all, actually.”
That was a strike in her favor. The pills were starting to kick in now, the world receding. “Fine. I’ll talk to her.”
“Talk to her, then hire her.”
Amanda was nice and all, but she continually reminded me why I didn’t get married. “Yes, ma’am.” Though I have no idea with what money.
“I’m right, you’ll see,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Two
Ryan
* * *
My seven-year-old son, Dylan, was waiting in the school doorway when I pulled up. They kept the kids inside the school when the parents were late, because they didn’t want the kids running free for creeps to pick up. Honest to God, this was parenting. From the day I learned to walk my father barely knew where I was, and yet I spent every day freaked the hell out, looking in the bushes for crazies.
I was only fifteen minutes late, but that was a fuckup, of course. Because in those fifteen minutes, someone could have snatched and killed my kid. He came out the door when he saw my car, hefting his backpack. Was he too skinny? I tried to feed him as much as I could. His jeans were two inches too long, and he’d rolled them up. If some kid at school gave him grief for having rolled-up pants, I’d wreak vengeance.
Until three years ago, when Dylan showed up unexpectedly on my doorstep at the age of four, I’d been carefree Ryan Riggs, the guy who pitched ball and fucked any girl he wanted. I hadn’t cared about a single thing. Now, I was certifiably insane.
“Hey, Dad,” Dylan said as he got in the passenger seat.
“Sorry I’m late.” I’d apologized more in the last three years than I ever had in my life.
Dylan shrugged and pulled his seatbelt on.
“I forgot to tell you something,” I said as I pulled away. “We’re meeting someone back home right now. A woman.”
“You have a girlfriend?” He looked stricken, as if I’d told him to get out of the car and find somewhere else to live. My son was easygoing considering all of the changes in his short life, but the one thing that made him panic was the idea of me having a girlfriend. Maybe he thought a girlfriend would take me away from him, and I was the only parent he knew.
I hadn’t even had a date since he came to live with me, let alone screwed anyone or started a relationship. But Dylan had a thing about it, and every time it crossed his anxious seven-year-old mind, he looked like he was going to puke.
“No, dude, I don’t have a girlfriend.” I’d learned that the secret was to sound casual, make a joke of it. That always unwound him. “Come on. Who would date me?”
“Mrs. Thorold,” he said instantly.
I had no idea who that was. A teacher? I was pretty sure I’d met them all at the parent-teacher thing. “Mrs. Thorold sounds married,” I said easily. “That isn’t cool. Anyway, this woman isn’t a girlfriend. She’s a nanny. Or she will be if we decide to hire her.”
He thought about this hard for a second. “What does a nanny do?”
“Help you get ready for school. Pick you up when I have appointments. Make your lunches. That kind of thing.”
“I make my own lunches.”
I’d tried. I really had. But when I packed Dylan’s lunch, he didn’t eat it. It was only after I’d let him start packing it himself that he actually ate lunch every day. He didn’t pack himself junk, either—he just wanted his sandwich a certain way that I couldn’t imitate, apparently. “Well, she’ll help you with that, so you don’t have to do as much.”
“Will she take me to baseball practice?”
He’d started baseball this year, and he loved it. Getting him to practice was always a stretch. “Yeah, she’ll do that, and make sure you have your equipment.”
“Don’t you want to do that?”
Jeez, kid, rip my heart out, why don’t you? “I do, but I have to go make a living, so sometimes she’ll help out when I’m not around. We’re meeting her this afternoon, and we’re going to talk to her. If we like her, we’ll hire her.”
“What if we don’t like her?”
“Then we won’t hire her.”
“Okay.” He looked out the window, then started talking about something he’d learned in geography class. He seemed to be done with it. Score one for me.
Ryan Riggs, world’s number one father.
This was going to go just fine.
She rang the doorbell thirty minutes after we got home. Dylan had gotten himself a snack—crackers and peanut butter, because the world’s number one father didn’t have junk food in the house—and was sitting at the kitchen table with his tablet, playing a game. I didn’t trust the tablet further than I could throw it with my barely functional throwing arm, but I was learning to live with it. Dylan liked it, and he was a responsible kid. I’d learned to access and use the thing so I could make sure there were no creepers there either.
If I’d ever mentioned perverts or serial killers to my fat
her, he would have laughed in my face. Just run, you pussy, and hope you’re fast. My father’s life advice to me and my three brothers was always punctuated by you pussy. That was my one and only lesson in fatherhood: Try not to be Dad.
I walked to the door, thinking that maybe the house was a mess. We tried to be clean, but we were two guys living here, and things got messy. Maybe she wouldn’t want to work for us anyway. If that happened, I’d just tell Amanda to find me someone else. Because I was starting to believe she was right: I could improve things for Dylan, money be damned, if I had some help.
It just had to be the right woman.
I opened the door and a woman stood there. In her twenties, a redhead with her hair tied back in a wavy ponytail. She was wearing jeans, a gray T-shirt with a black cardigan over it, low-heeled boots. She was wearing big sunglasses, and she took them off and looked at me. She was hot in an understated way—curves packed into those jeans, more curves tucked under the cardigan, big dark eyes and a nice mouth. The problem wasn’t that she was hot. The problem was I recognized her.
Kate. The name. Now I knew where I remembered it from. I’d met a Kate before.
I knew this woman. I knew her face and I knew every inch of her body, every curve. She looked at me and I knew she knew me, too.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah,” Kate said. “I know. We slept together five years ago.”
Three