The Lucky Charm (The Portland Pioneers)

by Beth Bolden

  “You look terrible.” Izzy didn’t even turn around. She knew who it was, and she was literally too tired to actually scold him for acknowledging her while in the very public setting of a hotel corridor.

  “You’d better have food with you,” Izzy mumbled into the wood veneer of the door, “because this particle board is beginning to look mighty appealing.”

  She heard footsteps behind her, and didn’t have to glance at Jack’s arms to see he was carrying a pizza. Pepperoni, with extra cheese. She could smell it.

  “Someone must have forgotten to tell you. You need a key to get into your room. A brain scan doesn’t work anymore.”

  Izzy didn’t know how he did it, but three weeks in, Jack was still chipper and sarcastic, even funny. She freely admitted to not having a sense of humor anymore. Maybe that was why she still kept him around—at least that meant the only jokes she heard weren’t Toby’s about her terrible performance each game.

  “Key, Izzy,” he repeated, still patient. Always patient. Someone should have made him a saint by now. St. Jack Bennett, who stood for green grass and cleats and pizza.

  “I’m getting to it,” she finally said. “Really soon.”

  Even though he didn’t say a word, she could practically hear his brain whirling with unsaid comebacks behind her.

  Finally, he spoke. “You know, I’m actually convinced that you’re exhausted because you’re not overreacting about the fact that we’re standing in this hallway together, and I’m holding a pizza. Someone could see and think we’re engaged.”

  She said nothing. Didn’t really trust herself.

  “Too soon?” he asked.

  “Too soon,” she mumbled into the door again.

  “Actually, I thought that was pretty clever.”

  “Of course you did,” she said, finally leveraging herself off the door and pulling her purse up to begin the likely extended search for her key.

  “I would also suggest that you might not want to stick your key in the black hole that doubles as your purse, but that might be ill received,” Jack said pointedly, glancing over her shoulder as she searched.

  “Yeah, only because you know how that conversation ends, having had it…um…twenty days in a row, now?”

  “Which is why I’m not saying a word,” he said, all protested innocence.

  “I was thinking,” Izzy said, pausing in her search and finally glancing up to meet his gaze, “what does Noah think you’re doing every night?”

  “Because I’m not hanging out in our room?” Jack asked. It was the one single fact that still worried Izzy. She and Jack had worked out all these rules—okay, she had worked out the rules and he’d begrudgingly agreed to them—that mainly consisted of “stay in the hotel room and don’t interact in public, ever,” but that didn’t mean they were safe from exposure.

  Izzy nodded and he just shrugged. “He knows I’m with you. And he won’t say anything. That’s not Foxy’s way.”

  “Good,” Izzy said unnecessarily because they both already knew how she felt about other people finding out about their friendship. She’d nearly had a coronary when that waitress had asked for his autograph the first and only time they’d gone out in the evening together. So far, nothing had come of that, but while he brushed off her concerns, she still worried about it.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t support her, or that he’d failed at being the singularly most understanding individual she’d ever met. Plain and simple, he just couldn’t understand because he didn’t have to take those phone calls from Toby. He didn’t have to fight off blonde hair every day of the week.

  Jack might ask how it was going and she might tell him, but Izzy knew he didn’t realize she was currently in a war for her integrity and she couldn’t give Toby a single advantage because he’d use it to crush her into dust.

  She was officially losing her mind. She’d actually just had a hallucination of Toby stomping on her until she blew away into the wind.

  Izzy’s fingers finally closed over her key and she shoved it unceremoniously into the slot, stumbling into the hotel room on unsteady feet.

  “Thank God,” she said, collapsing onto the bed, shoes still on, arms still full.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Izzy watched Jack set the pizza box onto the desk and lean against the edge, his gaze never leaving her.

  “You’re not okay,” he stated.

  Izzy stared up at the ceiling, wondering how she could possibly explain how not okay she was without bursting into tears.

  “I’m worried about you. We spend hours studying every night, and you’re still wound so tight I think you might explode.”

  Izzy blinked away a tear and prayed that he wouldn’t see it as it slid down her cheek, leaving a damp streak in its path.

  When she still said nothing, she saw him cross his arms over his chest and it was a testament to how awesome his biceps were that she still noticed, even on the verge of some kind of meltdown. And wasn’t that just the icing on this particular cake? Jack Bennett was so awesome; funny and caring and smart and selfless and he liked her so much. He didn’t even have to tell her; she could see it in his eyes when they followed her around the hotel room when she paced in her yoga pants, and in the dinners he brought her, forcibly shoving food in front of her when she wouldn’t eat, and in the way he was still here.

  There was a part of her that wanted nothing else but him. But if she settled and let that half of her win, she knew she’d eventually lose the pride and the ambition that made her her—the half that, ironically, had made him care about her in the first place.

  Surreptitiously, she wiped her eyes as she rose up to sit on the edge of the bed. “I’m fine,” she lied as blithely as she could. “Nothing that a piece of that pizza won’t fix.”

  “It’s not as good as Rizzo’s by my place,” he said apologetically as if she actually cared. She’d probably eat the box it came in if only to get her blood sugar up. The truth was, the next time she heard a woman complain that there were no good guys, no men who cared about women anymore, she was going to have a wonderful case study to present. Jack Bennett, for pretty much no benefit of his own, had kept her sane over the last three weeks and that wasn’t a particularly easy task.

  Izzy kicked off her heels and padded over to the desk. She grabbed a piece of pizza, noting that he’d started eating on the way to her room, and took a bite, mechanically chewing and swallowing. “It’s fine,” she said.

  He just shrugged. She should have known better when he didn’t have anything to say, but she was too tired to be on her toes around him.

  “What you need is to get out of a hotel,” he said, so carefully that it got her attention right away.

  Izzy raised her eyes to his, and her heart dropped at the determination she saw there. He was maybe as stubborn as she was, and she really didn’t want to fight with him tonight about this. Not tonight. All she wanted to do was lie down in the bed with him and put on some horrible sitcom reruns that didn’t require her brain to function, and despite all her good intentions, let herself fall asleep against his shoulder.

  She didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to talk. And she definitely didn’t want to argue.

  “I get out of hotels,” she said. “I go to the stadium every day. Sometimes twice a day. Today I was there for ten hours.”

  “Okay, let me rephrase. You need to get out somewhere that’s not a stadium and not a hotel.” He paused and glanced down at the floor. “Even if it’s not with me. Nobody says you have to spend every minute of your precious free time with me.”

  Suddenly, she was definitely paying attention, her second slice of pizza halfway from the box to her mouth. She set it down decisively and turned toward him. “No, nobody says I need to. I like spending time with you.”

  “So much that you’re w
illing to hide yourself away?” he asked and she hated the edge of bitterness in his voice.

  “I like to think the choices I make are my own,” she told him coldly. “Good, bad or indifferent.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his face. “God, Izzy, you know that isn’t what I meant.”

  “Then what did you mean?” Suddenly this thing, whatever it was, didn’t feel like an argument as much as a confrontation.

  “What I mean is that I don’t have to come here every night,” he spat out.

  Humiliation settled low in her stomach. “Oh,” she sneered, “I see. Why didn’t you just tell me you didn’t want to come here? I think we could have given you a night off.”

  The air between them practically heated and Izzy belatedly remembered that for the last three weeks, in an attempt to keep things platonic, she’d been keeping her distance. Even though she was embarrassed and angry and hurt, she could feel the inevitable sexual pull of him, and she shouldn’t have let it happen, but she couldn’t exactly stop it now.

  “I don’t want a night off,” he yelled in frustration. “I want you.”

  Izzy opened her mouth and then shut it again. She didn’t know what to say to him after he’d just smashed all the platitudes she’d used to keep their friendship G-rated.

  “We both know I was hopeless a long time ago,” he finally said with a sigh, and she hated how he wouldn’t look at her now. As if she’d see something in his face she didn’t like. She’d given that possibility up a while ago; even when he did and said things that made her crazy with frustration, she liked him anyway.

  “Jack,” she murmured, shifting closer to him, a step closer than the normal distance she kept to prevent her from doing anything stupid. “What are you saying?”

  Take it back, she wanted to plead with him. Take it back and say you didn’t mean a word of it so we can go back to pretending.

  He looked up at her now, and the truth in his eyes was sharp and sweet. “You know exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said breathlessly and suddenly she was right there, only a step away from practically being pressed up against him. Even though her head was screaming at her that this was the worst idea in a long line of bad ideas, she couldn’t seem to find the motivation to move away from him.

  The one time she and her dad had gone to California and had walked the length of the pier in Santa Monica, even the ocean hadn’t been as deeply, truly blue as Jack’s eyes were right now. His hair was still damp from his shower after the game, curling a little at the temples. He needed a haircut, and she wanted to run her fingers through his hair before he got it trimmed and see if it was as soft as it looked. He had a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and she ached to press her lips against each one, and memorize the way his skin tasted.

  “Izzy,” he said in a low, rough voice, “you’ve got to stop looking at me like that.”

  Her eyes drifted lower, skimming over the tanned skin of his neck, and his broad, capable shoulders, and the muscles under the navy blue T-shirt he wore. She could practically see his heart beating under the thin fabric and without thinking, she pressed her palm against his chest, against his heart. It accelerated under her touch, and she curled her fingertips into his shirt and imagined the bare skin underneath. He’d have a trail of blond hairs, and maybe more freckles. She hoped so.

  “Your heart’s racing,” she murmured in awe, more to herself than him. The manic pounding she felt, so sturdy and sure and true against her palm—that was for her. Temptation was only a word, and what she felt had to be something more.

  “It’s…it’s you,” he stuttered, and it was almost too much that he was past words, nervous and scared and running on adrenaline. The same fire was racing through her own veins, and she felt dizzy and lightheaded with it. She’d craved him for so long that it was hard to even remember a time when he hadn’t affected her. If he didn’t stop her, she was going to kiss him.

  That was the problem. There was no way he was going to stop her. The capitulation was ripe in his eyes and her blood hummed with it. His heart was pounding so hard against her hand, it was echoing in her ears, each beat louder than the last, but before she could lean in those final few inches, he pulled away abruptly.

  Izzy blinked hard and had to catch hold of the desk chair so she didn’t go toppling over from the haze she was under. She glanced up and watched in bewilderment as he walked toward the door.

  “Someone’s knocking,” he said, and suddenly Izzy realized that the loud thumping hadn’t been his heart after all, but the sound of someone at her door.

  Oh god, she inwardly moaned, I almost kissed him.

  She still could. She felt drunk with the possibility.

  Jack peered through the peep hole and the look he shot her was rueful. “It’s Foxy.”

  “Oh,” she barely managed when she realized he was waiting for her to give the okay to open the door. No doubt one of the rules she’d repeated to herself until she was blue in the face. Not that she couldn’t remember a single one of them. The heat between them had burned them all to ash. “Oh, of course. Let him in.”

  Izzy watched as Jack opened the door and as they held a quick conference, and when Jack turned back to her, she knew what he was going to say.

  “The guys are going out,” he said and she gripped the edge of the chair harder.

  “Of course,” she repeated, all too aware of how stupidly repetitive she sounded. Her tongue felt heavy and foreign in her mouth. “Of course. I’m just going to take a hot bath and go to bed. It’s late and I’m exhausted.”

  “Right,” he said, and she thought she saw a flicker of disappointment in his eyes. It was insane, but she thought he might have wanted her to beg him to stay. But they both knew what would happen if he stayed.

  Nothing good.

  Or maybe everything good, that annoyingly persistent, annoyingly right voice inside her mind chimed in.

  “Have fun,” she added, encouragingly, but it sounded fake and wrong to her and probably to him, too.

  “Yeah.” He sounded like he was being marched to his death, but Izzy knew she couldn’t keep doing this. She was only thankful that they’d been interrupted before she stepped over the line. Even worse, she’d drawn the damn thing herself, and spent the last three weeks fortifying it, and tonight, she’d forgotten it even existed.

  Obviously, she was going to have to work on her self control. Okay, maybe she was going to have to work more on her self control.

  “Seriously,” she repeated in the brightest voice she could manage. “Go on. And thank you for the pizza.”

  “Early game tomorrow then we get to fly home,” he said, hope blooming in his face again and she knew he thought that things would change when they were home, but she couldn’t afford to let them. They were still friends. Only friends.

  “It’ll be good to be home,” she said and she hated the finality in her own voice.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said, and then he was gone.

  Only then did Izzy let herself slump against the desk. Wrapping her arms around herself, she wondered what the hell she was going to do about the mess she’d just created.

  With a rhythmic thump, the baseball left the pitching machine at ninety-four miles per hour.

  One of Jack’s first coaches had told him that facing down anything hurling objects at you at almost one hundred miles per hour was tantamount to insanity and to defend yourself you had to rely purely on instinct.

  It was a good thing his instinct was still fairly intact because otherwise his nose would have been broken just about now. Instead, Jack swung the bat in an arc and as the ball connected with a satisfying crack, he felt the jolt of the impact all the way to the marrow of his bones.

  He’d been at it for hours, and he still couldn’t get Izzy’s
eyes out of his head. He’d once thought they reminded him of a dawn sky, and last night, it had been fucking cloudy. Hot and steamy and electric. Like a summer storm. He still didn’t know how he’d walked away from her.

  “A little worked up this morning?” Noah leaned over the fence of the batting cage Jack was taking swings in. “Hector told me you’d been down here for hours. I think he’s a little worried you’re going manic.”

  “I’m not manic,” Jack growled at his best friend.

  “Tell that to the machine,” Foxy said. Hanging unspoken in the air between them was that Izzy was both the reason why he’d played amazingly and also why he was down here, putting in yet another batting practice.

  Jack rolled his eyes.

  “Touchy, touchy this morning,” Foxy laughed, pushing away from the fencing as if Jack was going to come after him with fists cocked. Objectively, Jack knew it was just one of Foxy’s ridiculous acts, a joke that had unfortunate roots in reality. After all, he had gone after Noah once, and though they never talked about it, it was still there, hanging between them, like the smell of rank gym socks in the clubhouse. It felt like déjà vu, standing here with him, arguing about another female reporter.

  “If you hadn’t showed up when you did,” Jack finally said. “Then made me leave her.”

  “Bullshit,” Noah smirked, looking way too satisfied with himself. “If you wanted to stay, you could have.”

  “It’s not that simple. I’ve cried off a bunch of times in the last three weeks. Everyone was getting suspicious.” But she hadn’t asked him to stay, and though he was doing everything to convince her they weren’t just friends, the call was still hers to make. As it turned out, Izzy Dalton was a little more stubborn than Tabitha King had been.