by Beth Bolden
He shouldn’t have worried. She was a pro. Maybe not on a Tabitha-like level quite yet, but she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself, which she acknowledged with a slightest tilt of her head in his direction. He knew her well enough to know it meant, “thanks, but I’ve got this.”
“Beautiful and charming,” Ismael said, his own glacial expression threatening to crack into an answering smile. “You have to understand, Ms. Dalton, my concern about media representation. I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea about me.”
“No need to worry, Mr. Butler. I pride myself on fair-and-honest representation.”
Jack glanced toward Pilar, but he was too late. She’d already intervened. “A representative from the hospital will be here shortly to take us on a tour of the wing. Jack, I’m assuming you brought the usual.”
“The usual?” Izzy spoke up. “I’m sorry, I’ve never done this before.”
Jack waved to the box on the chair next to him. “Balls, posters, cards, a few gloves. Signed. To hand out to the kids.”
“Very sweet of you,” Izzy said, and her smile seemed to warm him up from the inside out.
The door opened again, and a black-haired woman with kind eyes, wearing a gray suit, walked in. “I’m Rhonda, your tour guide today. Welcome to Doernbecher’s.”
Their group was on the way to the first wing, Izzy speaking to Rhonda about the work Doernbecher’s did for the community, with Hector and Pilar chiming in, when Ismael brought up the one subject Jack didn’t want to discuss, with him or really, with anyone.
“Starting second baseman on the American League All Star team. Quite an honor,” Ismael said as they walked down the white, austere hallway.
Jack wanted to ignore him, but it would have been too pointed and he’d already promised Izzy that he wouldn’t make today about his grievances. Still, he could be polite and also keep it short. “Thank you.”
“Did your agent also mention anything about your jersey sales?”
Jack shook his head. “He knows better. I couldn’t care less about that sort of thing.”
“Ah,” Ismael said with a cold, wry smile. “That’s right. That’s not why Jack Bennett plays baseball. Not for the fans or the money or the endorsements. How could I have forgotten?”
He could only shrug.
“Then let me be the first to congratulate you,” Ismael added. “You’re selling fantastically well. Third in the American League, to be precise.”
Jack didn’t care about his jersey sales, but that was crazy enough to make even him do a double take. “That is well,” he conceded. “I didn’t know.”
But he’d suspected. He wanted to walk up to every single fan wearing his jersey and apologize, telling them the real reason they’d bought his jersey was a girl most of them didn’t even know. The truth was, it was a hell of a lot harder to enjoy his success when guilt kept bubbling up inside him.
He should have told Izzy that first night what she meant to his baseball because now he couldn’t. The luck hadn’t passed, as Foxy had predicted it would, and now there was no way she’d believe that he was with her for her. She’d hear the story and see a man manipulating so he could sell the third most jerseys in the American League.
“Your play has been phenomenal, even to a man like me who doesn’t care about that sort of thing. You could say we’re opposites, of a sort. I don’t care about baseball, and you don’t care about money. Normally, we wouldn’t get along very well,” Ismael said, “but in this particular scenario, our purposes seem to have aligned.”
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” Jack lied.
“I know Hector told you. The rumors have been flying for months, and I’m going to confirm them. They’re all true. I want to move the team to Las Vegas. Wait, let me rephrase, I was going to move the team to Las Vegas, but then Jack Bennett happened, with his extraordinary plays and his home runs and his jersey sales and his ticket sales. Now, I’m not so sure.” The casual, almost playful tone of Ismael’s voice slid down Jack’s spine and gave him chills. God, Izzy. The guilt swelled like the worst heartburn and he felt like he was holding onto her damn hair like a mothballed rabbit’s foot.
“The team should stay in Portland.”
“Then prove to me this isn’t a fluke. Hector’s a good-enough manager, I suppose, but you’re the real heart of this team. You can be the example, set the tone. I want a winner, because a winner makes money. Lots of money. If you get us into the playoffs, I’ll postpone the move indefinitely.”
Jack let out a shaky breath and glanced over at Ismael. “I can’t get over the way this team, and all the people who depend on it, are so trivial to you.”
“I didn’t buy the Pioneers because I cared about baseball,” Ismael sneered. “So the team and its employees are just that—employees. And I fire employees who don’t do their jobs. In this case, their job was to make me money. So far you’re the only one who’s done that, which is why you’re getting this chance.” Ismael pinned him with his dark stare. “So, don’t fuck it up.”
They reached the cancer-ward door, and Jack tried to pull himself together, but anger was surging like lava.
Izzy seemed to have a sixth sense for when he was about to fuck up, because she glanced back before they went through the door, and he was reminded of his earlier promise.
He let out a shaky breath and clenched his hand into a fist as they passed through the doorway. He wasn’t going to let Butler work him up, and pull his attention away from the ones actually deserved it—the kids in this ward.
Izzy watched as Jack crouched down beside a hospital bed and casually propped an elbow on the mattress next to the little boy who’d lost all his hair. The smile on his face and the light in his baby-blue eyes told the whole story—Jack was his hero, and it meant the world that he was here, just talking with him. Her hand clenched on her notepad and she hoped her skin hadn’t gone too pale.
From the first moment they’d walked into the ward, Izzy had been dying inside. The unfairness of losing her mother so young was something she’d buried so deep it rarely surfaced. She’d survived because she’d kept away from every reminder that might bring hard memories of death and failure to mind.
And this ward was the worst possible reminder that she’d lost her mother and then failed her.
“This is a wonderful thing,” Izzy said to Pilar, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. “A really wonderful thing.”
Pilar’s smile was bittersweet. “It’s never easy to see the kids like this, but I think the players do a lot of good.”
Hector was fitting a glove on the hand of a little girl who could barely lift herself upright, and Ismael was leaning down, talking earnestly to another boy sitting in a wheelchair with an IV following close behind him.
Izzy saw her mother’s face, framed in that crazy colorful cloth, bending low to her, whispering so intently that she had to be brave.
But she hadn’t been brave at all. She’d set out to make sure no daughter lost her mother again, and she’d only buckled under her own expectations.
“I still can’t believe you brought Ismael Butler,” Izzy said, forcing a subject change before she lost control over the threatening tears. “After all those rumors.”
Shrugging, Pilar tossed another baseball toward Jack and he caught it deftly, scrawling his name across its surface before handing it to another little boy with hero worship in his eyes. “That’s exactly why he’s here. He needs to see how important these players are to this city. And it doesn’t hurt for him to see how popular Jack’s become.”
Izzy forced herself not to flush when Jack’s name came up. It wasn’t easy. Even being in the same room with him raised her internal temperature about twenty degrees.
“Very popular,” she managed. “All Star popular.”
“I thought he’d tell you,” Pilar said matter-of-factly.
“Oh.” Izzy paused, flustered, even though she’d already freaking known Pilar knew. “Oh.”
Izzy could see Pilar barely restraining an epic eye roll at her lame attempt to deflect. “Isabel, chica, you can barely look at him. And he lights up whenever you’re anywhere in the vicinity. And never mind what my sister saw in the women’s bathroom at the Met Grill in San Francisco.”
She couldn’t help it; her jaw just dropped. “That was your sister? Crap.”
Pilar’s smug little nod was all the confirmation Izzy needed.
Laughing, Pilar turned to her. “It’s not the end of the world. You care for him very much, yes?”
Izzy let her gaze drift to Jack, who was sitting on the corner of a bed, tossing a ball back and forth with its occupant, a boy of about ten, with the telltale bare head that spoke of chemotherapy. They were both laughing as Jack made a big show of bobbling the simple catch. The lump formed in her throat again.
“Of course I do,” she confessed. “I wouldn’t be involved with him if I didn’t.”
Pilar gave a sharp nod of approval. “He is a great favorite of my husband and me. If I thought for a moment you were using him, I wouldn’t stay silent. You’re a good girl, Izzy, and you’ll be good to him.”
Izzy glanced Jack’s direction again. “I hope so.” She paused, wondering if she could confide in Pilar. “He’s been odd lately, almost pushing me away,” she confessed.
“A man like Jack who’s been through the last year wouldn’t take his relationship with you lightly. He trusts you, but it doesn’t come naturally.”
She understood all too well, after hearing the story Jack had just told her about Tabitha’s betrayal.
“I should talk to him about it, I guess.”
“There is no guessing about it,” Pilar insisted. “Jack, he likes honesty. No games.”
“Except baseball.”
Pilar smiled. “Except baseball.”
“You did good today,” Izzy said, jingling her keys in her hands as she and Jack paused at the front steps of the hospital. “Thank you for coming.”
“I need to do more of this.” Jack turned on the step to look at her, a smile on his face, his happiness at that moment completely transparent. She couldn’t help but wish that she could take as much uncomplicated joy in their relationship as he did, but she was stuck in a rut. She wasn’t sure he was the right person to pull her out of it, but she couldn’t wait and see any longer.
“I can suggest it to Pilar,” Izzy said, then paused, hesitating, wondering if she could really do this.
But it wasn’t only that she could, it was more like she had to. Without it, she might lose Jack, and that was something that couldn’t happen. “Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”
Jack smiled at her, his heart practically radiating out of his eyes. “I don’t drink coffee.”
She fidgeted with her keys, suddenly, ridiculously afraid of his rejection. “A beer, then. Is there somewhere really private we can go?”
“I know just the place.”
Jack took her to the bar he’d been going to since he was drafted by the Pioneers—long enough that nobody who frequented the place gave two shits that sometimes Jack Bennett liked to grab a beer after a long day.
Izzy settled into the booth in the back with a slight glance of distaste at all the brown vinyl—an identical look to the one Foxy wore every time Jack insisted they meet here.
“It’s not much,” he apologized, “but you said private. And I’ve been coming here long enough that I can fly under the radar.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I appreciate you being so understanding, considering the circumstances.”
Her formal, stilted tone and the uncertainty in her eyes finally clued him into the fact that the circumstances were much more serious than he’d thought. He was just about to ask what was wrong when she started talking.
“I’m an orphan,” she abruptly confessed, so matter-of-factly that one would have to know Izzy Dalton well to realize how difficult this was for her to say. “My mother died when I was eleven. Cancer. And my dad when I was twenty-one, in a car accident.”
She wouldn’t look at him. Instead she was staring at the brown vinyl-covered wood that passed as a table, picking at the peeling edge. He knew how hard this was for her, but some selfish, needy part of him wanted her to be able to look him in the eyes as she said it. He reached for her hand and tucked it into his, cradling it the way he wished she would let him cradle her.
Izzy Dalton wasn’t the cradling kind—but that didn’t stop him from trying. Today, though, she let him keep her hand, and as he held it, feeling the pulse fluttering underneath his fingertips, she told him the rest of her sad story.
“After Mom, it was just my dad and I. And I was so lonely and I missed her so much. Too much. I didn’t want to get out of bed, or eat or even breathe, really. So one day, my dad sat down next to me and told me that she’d always be looking after me.”
Jack knew from the crack in Izzy’s voice that this particular phrase was one she’d thought about for years—hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times. That maybe this phrase was the key to her entire being, and he wanted nothing more than to finally unlock her secrets.
“She’d always be looking after me, he said.” The sadness in her voice nearly tore him apart. “I was only eleven, Jack,” she said, and for the first time she looked up at him, tears in her eyes. “Eleven years old. I thought it meant she was going to be watching me, and that if I did good, I could still make her proud. I think he just said it because he wanted me to get out of bed and start being a kid again.”
He couldn’t keep quiet. He’d tried, because he knew how hard this was for her to say, but he couldn’t stop himself. “She’d be proud of you,” he insisted. “She couldn’t help it.”
The only acknowledgment was a tiny dip of her head and then she’d stared at the vinyl tabletop again.
“I decided I’d be a doctor,” she said. “A research doctor. And I’d cure cancer.” She laughed then, low and bitter, and he had to resist another urge to comfort her before she was done.
“What happened?”
“I flunked Freshman Bio. I’d taken advanced-track science in high school, and I’d thought I’d prepared enough that I’d be fine. I never imagined that I’d do badly.” Her voice trembled. “But I did. No matter how much I studied, I couldn’t get it. So I had to drop the class and move out of the pre-med program.”
Jack couldn’t even imagine if he’d committed himself to baseball then found out he couldn’t play well enough. Simply, he’d have been destroyed. The fact that she was here, sitting in front of him, outwardly normal and well adjusted spoke to how strong she was.
“It was a bad winter,” she admitted, “then I came home for holiday break, and because I couldn’t even listen to my own thoughts anymore, I sat down and watched TV with my dad. He had ESPN on, and they were playing a documentary on Bo Jackson.”
He was pretty certain he’d seen that documentary, one of those long nights on the road and he wasn’t even ashamed of the handful of tears he’d cried.
“Bo Jackson was my father’s hero. And when I saw what had happened to him and how he’d never given up or felt sorry for himself, I couldn’t either.”
“So you decided to become a journalist.”
Izzy sighed, and she gently pulled her hands away, crossing the arms across her chest. “Yes, and no. I got a journalism degree but I never intended to be a sideline reporter. I wanted to produce documentaries. But getting hired by ESPN, who’s pretty much the only name for sports documentaries today, is nearly impossible for someone with no experience. So I went to work for the Pacific Northwest Sports Group. I was the assistant for one of their producers. I worked
there for a few years, and was on the fast track to becoming a producer myself, but then my boss had a heart attack.”
“Why would that have anything to do with you?”
“Normally, it wouldn’t. But there’s this manager. A real dick. And he’s in charge of programming, unfortunately. Even worse, he’s been trying to wrest power away from Charlie forever, and he basically forced him to retire and sent me down to Portland so he wouldn’t have to deal with me.” The shadowed look in her eyes told the silent story: if this jerk off caught wind of her becoming involved with a player, he’d have the ammunition he’d need to get rid of her entirely.
“So, you see,” Izzy said, spreading her arms in mute plea, “it’s not just a job for me, Jack. I already failed my mom. I’m doing this for my dad. Right before he died, I showed him the documentary I was working on in college. He was so proud, so certain that this was what I was meant to do with my life. And I was sure of it, too, sure enough that the guilt I’d felt flunking Biology, I was finally able to let it go.”
Izzy twisted her hands together, white knuckles prominent even on her pale skin. “I know this is a lot. And I wouldn’t have even told you, but…I can’t mess this up. Not now.”
Jack knew love was supposed to be a unselfish emotion, and he was supposed to give the person he loved everything they wanted, even at a horrible cost to himself. But even though their entire friendship, never mind any relationship they might have, jeopardized the emotional security Izzy had found after her devastating losses, Jack resented the hell out of the fact that he should give her up and let her go on her own way. He was good for her, he knew he was, deep down, in the marrow of his bones.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.