by Lauren Layne
And that’s when Alex Cassidy had dropped his bomb.
The job wasn’t Cole’s for the taking.
So, goodbye to Easygoing Cole. Hello, Gladiator Cole.
Because, really, what the fuck?
Cole hadn’t minded that they’d had to publicly post the position. He understood there were HR boxes that had to be checked. But never had Cole thought there’d actually be competition. Not only were the Oxford guys practically his family, but Cole was the best damn sportswriter in the city.
His application should have been a formality. Their request that he update his résumé and submit a portfolio should have been just a matter of documentation.
The position was his, damn it. Cole was the Oxford sports section.
Except he wasn’t. Not yet anyway.
Cassidy had called him yesterday to inform Cole that he was a finalist. A fucking finalist.
Pissing Cole off even further, Cassidy wouldn’t tell him who his competition was. Cole had named every worthwhile sportswriter in the city, but Cassidy wouldn’t so much as grunt in confirmation.
Damn Cassidy and his unshakable professionalism.
His friend hadn’t left him completely in the lurch, though.
Cassidy had pointedly mentioned to Lincoln that the other candidate had been invited to the suite reserved by Berkin’s Hospitality Group for tonight’s Yankees game.
Lincoln had, of course, told Cole.
So here they were, trying to sniff out the competition.
It was the only reason Cole would be caught dead in the luxury suite. Cole hated luxury suites.
This wasn’t what baseball—or any game—was about. Baseball was about the peanuts, the rowdy crowds, the overpriced beer. It was about the sound of a fastball smacking against the catcher’s glove, the satisfying crack of a wooden bat when a rookie pinch hitter really got hold of one.
For Cole, watching baseball was about sitting with his brother in the stands, watching Bobby’s face go positively ecstatic every time they did the wave, and the way his brother never, ever got tired of the seventh-inning stretch.
That was baseball.
And Cole wanted nothing more than to be an anonymous part of the rowdy crowd, preferably on the third baseline, watching the Yankees hopefully trounce the Blue Jays.
Instead, he was stuck here with a bunch of fools who wouldn’t recognize a line drive if it hit them in the ass.
Adding insult to injury, it was all for nothing. There was no sign of his competition. Cole knew every decent sportswriter in the city, and none were here tonight.
It was possible, he supposed, that Cassidy was considering some out-of-town jock for the position, but a quick scan of the room showed only familiar faces, all corporate bigwigs.
“Let’s get out of here,” Cole said to Lincoln, downing the rest of his beer in three gulps.
“You don’t want to wait for Cassidy?”
“Nah, I’ll catch him tomorrow.”
Before Cole turned to leave, he couldn’t resist one last look in the direction where his Tiny Brunette had been sitting.
He paused when he saw that she’d returned and, incredibly, the woman had just become more appealing.
Her face was turned to the side slightly, her notebook now on the open seat to her right instead of her lap, and she wrote furiously with her right hand, while her left hand held…
A hot dog.
Be still my heart.
Apparently, Miss Glued-to-the-Game had managed to tear herself away long enough to get a good old-fashioned hot dog. Mustard only, from the looks of it. Personally Cole would have added some ketchup, but still…a woman who’d so unabashedly eat a hot dog?
He had to talk to this woman, risk of rejection be damned.
Cole was beside her before he’d even fully committed to the decision to move, ignoring Lincoln’s snicker behind him.
Up close, she was even smaller than he expected. Narrow shoulders, no chest to speak of, skinny little arms.
He had yet to see her face full on, thanks to the cap pulled low on her forehead, and suddenly he wasn’t sure what he was more desperate to see, her face or her notebook.
He cleared his throat. “Hey.”
Not exactly his best opener, but it sufficed to get her attention.
Tiny Brunette’s pen stopped its furious scribbling, and her jaw paused in its steady chewing of the hot dog.
Slowly her face lifted to his and Cole had the strangest sensation of the breath catching in his chest as he waited to finally meet this woman’s eyes.
And, wow. What a pair of eyes they were.
If the rest of her was tiny, her eyes were enormous by comparison. Huge and dark brown and friendly.
Damn she was cute.
Not gorgeous. Not beautiful. But she had the girl-next-door, wanna-grab-a-pitcher? kind of appeal.
She also wasn’t Cole’s type. At all. He liked ’em blond and leggy and seductive.
Still, that damn notebook…
“Cole Sharpe,” he said, sticking out a hand.
Her eyes widened just slightly, and for a second he thought maybe she’d recognized his name, but then she smiled and it was pure friendly curiosity.
“Hi!” Her voice matched the rest of her. Girlish and guileless.
Cole found himself oddly enchanted. She was so…different.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing with his chin toward the seat beside her.
“Of course!”
Cole started to reach for her notebook under the guise of making room for himself, but she pulled it onto her lap before he could touch it.
Damn.
He sat and allowed himself to fully satisfy his curiosity, taking her in now that he could see her face-to-face.
The Yankees cap still shielded the top part of her face, but he could clearly make out a pointed chin, small nose, and those big, gorgeous brown eyes. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup, which allowed a light dusting of freckles to display loud and proud over her nose and the tops of her cheekbones.
Cute. Definitely cute.
And already, she was refocused on the game.
Cole’s eyes narrowed slightly as he realized that he’d been the only one doing any staring. Her attention had returned to the field, almost before he’d sat down.
What was this bullshit?
The lack of female appreciation was unusual enough—and uncomfortable enough—to make him slightly peeved. So, instead of doing the decent thing and letting her watch the Yankees’ starter reclaim his spot on the mound, he talked to her.
At her, really. She still wasn’t looking his way. Not even to check him out.
“First game?” he asked.
Brown eyes flicked to him, barely. “What?”
“First baseball game?”
That got her attention. For the first time, she seemed to really look at him. Her eyes drifted over him slowly, before returning to his, her tone just slightly annoyed. “No. Not my first game.”
“Ah,” he said, already mentally maneuvering into a backpedal. “Bad assumption of me. You were just so into the game…”
“So you figured I must be trying to figure out how it all worked?” she asked. “That I must be trying to understand why some of the field is green and some is brown, and whatever could those white squares on the dirt be, and why-oh-why are those men running toward the white squares, but only sometimes…”
“All right,” Cole said with a laugh. “I’m an ass. You know baseball.”
Her smile was quick and easy, and he was relieved to see that she wasn’t one of those snippy, hold-it-against-him-forever types. “I know baseball.”
Is that what’s in your notebook? Baseball stuff?
She took a huge bite of her hot dog, completely unabashed at her bulging cheeks, and Cole hid a smile, pretending instead to be fixated on the game.
Hell. When had he ever had to pretend to be fixated on the Yankees?
“You were partia
lly right,” she admitted, after swallowing.
He glanced at her. “Oh yeah?”
She grinned. “This is my first Yankees game.”
“I knew it,” he said, matching her grin full on. “I knew there was something virgin about you. But tell me, how come a baseball fan like you never made it to Yankee Stadium until now?”
“Well…” She licked a spot of mustard off her finger, but not in the slow, deliberate way that most women he knew would have done it. “It’s a long way from Chicago…”
Cole tore his eyes away from the way her lips closed around her thumb, sucking off that mustard. “You’re from Chicago?”
“From there, yes,” she said. “But let’s just say that as of two weeks ago, I’ll be spending a lot more time here than at Wrigley.”
“Ah. You’re new to New York.”
“Quite.”
“How do you like it?”
She hesitated. “It’s…intense.”
“Meaning…we New Yorkers are scary as hell?”
She smiled. “Well, it’s not as hostile as I’d been warned, but yeah. We Chicagoans are a bit more openly friendly than you New Yorkers.”
“I’m friendly,” he countered.
Tiny Brunette laughed. “No. You’re just incredibly charming. And a smidgen good-looking.”
He gave her his best bedroom look. “Am I?”
She smiled. “You know you are.”
Their eyes held for a moment, and Cole was startled to realize it was the most relaxed—the most himself—he’d felt around a woman in…hell…he didn’t know.
Mostly he was used to throwing out a couple of witty lines, a few slow smiles, and watching women counter with moves of their own.
There were no moves with this woman. She merely was.
Cole realized he didn’t even know her name.
“So tell me, as a Chicago baseball fan, are you Team Cubs or Team White Sox, Ms….”
“Pope,” she said. “Penelope Pope. And both.”
Cole’s subconscious acknowledged that Penelope Pope was somehow exactly what this woman’s name should be. Perky and alliterative. His consciousness, however, latched on to another fact. “Both?”
It was not a typical answer. Most people had one baseball team, even if you were from a city with two teams, as Penelope was.
She shrugged. “Baseball’s not about who wins. It’s not even about who’s playing. It’s about the game. The consistent flow of it, the smack of the ball against the glove when you’re lucky enough to be sitting along one of the baselines, instead of stuck up here in this stuffy box—”
He stared at her. The words so closely echoed his own thoughts from just moments before that he wanted to kiss her.
She might just be his dream woman.
“That explains the hot dog,” he said.
“What?”
He nodded his chin at the last bite of hot dog, ignored in her left hand. “The hot dog. You’re in a luxury suite in Yankee Stadium with a whole buffet of gourmet foods, and yet you went and fetched the most basic hot dog you could find.”
She grinned. “Guilty.”
Cole turned his body all the way toward her now. “Tell me, Penelope Pope, what brings a Cubs and White Sox fan all the way to New York where you’ll face a whole new dilemma of choosing between the Yankees and the Mets…”
Tiny Brunette never got to answer.
The shadow of someone coming up behind their seats caused them both to turn. It was Alex Cassidy, Oxford’s editor in chief, looking down at them with a half-amused, half-worried expression.
“Cassidy,” Cole said. He lifted an eyebrow and silently added, Nice of you to show up.
“Sorry I’m late,” Cassidy said, not really sounding sorry at all. “I got held up.”
Automatically, Cole’s eyes scanned the luxury suite until he found the pretty woman he knew was likely to be somewhere around here…
Yup, there she was.
Emma Sinclair, Cassidy’s long-ago runaway bride, with whom he’d recently reconciled, was surreptitiously wiping smudged lipstick from the corner of her mouth.
His eyes returned to his boss, this time looking closer…
“Third button, dude,” Cole said wearily.
The always polished Cassidy glanced down, and without so much as wincing, fixed the misaligned buttons of his shirt.
Cole should have known. A naked Emma Sinclair was the only thing that could throw Alex Cassidy off his rigid timetable.
But Emma and Cassidy’s sex life was where the predictable part of the evening ended, because Cole was absolutely not prepared for Cassidy to reach out a hand to Tiny Brunette, a polite smile on his usually impassive face.
“Alex Cassidy. I’m so sorry I’m late, Ms. Pope.”
Cole glanced between the two of them. They knew each other?
“Not a problem,” she said, turning an easy smile on Cassidy. It was the exact same friendly smile she’d given Cole, and it very much made Cole want to punch his friend in the mouth.
“It’s refreshing to see you two playing so nicely,” Cassidy said with a droll look at Cole.
He narrowed his eyes at his boss, not sure what he was missing, but certain that he was missing something.
Cassidy answered Cole’s silent question with his usual professional businessman smile. “Cole, this is Penelope Pope.”
“We’ve met,” Cole said slowly.
“Excellent. So then you know that Penelope is our late-stage applicant for the sports editor role at Oxford?”
Very slowly, Cole turned toward Tiny Brunette. Took in her friendly smile even as he took in the sorry-not-sorry glint in her eyes.
This was his competition. This was the person standing between Cole and the job he so desperately wanted.
“I suppose I should have been more thorough when I introduced myself,” she said sweetly. “Penelope Pope. Sports editor.”
Plus side? At least now Cole knew what was in her damn notebook.
The downside? Everything else.
Chapter 2
It wasn’t that Penelope never wore high heels.
She did. Sometimes.
Say, like…her best friend’s wedding, or her grandmother’s funeral. Oh, and then there’d been that date with the investment banker at one of Chicago’s premier steak houses.
And…well, okay, those three occurrences were just about the only times in recent memory.
The problem: not one of those events had occurred in the past year.
The bigger problem? The lack of practice walking in stilettos had caused just the tiniest stumble, which had in turn caused a not so tiny coffee splotch all over her white blouse.
The biggest problem of all?
The only reason she was wearing a white blouse and the damn high heels in the first place was because she needed to be at the biggest interview of her career in—
Penelope glanced at her watch.
Thirty minutes.
Thirty minutes until she had to convince the editor in chief of Oxford magazine that she was the best possible candidate to take over the new sports section.
Thirty minutes to figure out how she was going to outdo Cole Sharpe on his turf, all with a big coffee stain between her boobs.
Ordinarily, half an hour would have been plenty of buffer for an interview, but it certainly wasn’t enough time to run back home and change her clothes. And seeing as she’d been a resident of New York City for all of two weeks, she didn’t have a single friend to call upon to help bail her out.
“Crud. Crud, crud, crud,” Penelope whispered quietly to herself, glancing around the massive and fancy lobby of the building that housed Oxford magazine.
It didn’t help that the place looked like a palace, at least to someone who’d spent the past two years working from her tiny home office at a wobbly desk on beat-up hardwood floors.
Penelope was suddenly acutely aware that she didn’t belong here. She didn’t fit in with the glamorous women stridin
g across the floor in stilettos far higher than hers without so much as a stumble.
Penelope stubbornly pushed the thought out of her head as she wiped futilely at the stain.
So the Manhattan office building was a touch more glamorous than her Wicker Park apartment. So she had coffee on her shirt. So she would have sold a small part of her soul for a pair of tennis shoes.
None of that was important.
What was important was that Penelope was a darn good sportswriter. What was important was that she could convince Alex Cassidy of it, regardless of the big old stain on her shirt.
What was important was that…
Ah, screw it.
Penelope could absolutely not go into the most important interview of her life with a giant brown stain between her boobs.
She looked up again, her eyes locking on the discreet LADIES’ ROOM sign on the far side of the lobby. She didn’t know what she’d do once she got there, but maybe someone would have a Tide pen. Or twelve.
Penelope began walking—okay, teetering—in that direction when she heard her name.
“Penelope?”
She froze. The masculine voice was familiar. Penelope pivoted slowly.
There, staring down at her with a bemused expression, was one very gorgeous, very well-dressed, very non-coffee-stained Cole Sharpe.
Dear God. Are you freaking kidding me with this?
“Hi Cole!” Penelope kept her voice cheerful even though he was quite possibly the very last person on earth she wanted to see right now.
Why, of all the people to witness her coffee snafu, did it have to be the very man who was standing between Penelope and her dream job?
“Morning,” he said, returning her easy tone.
His eyes dropped to the coffee stain, but she had to give the man credit, because he returned his gaze to hers almost immediately. Of course, that could have been due to the fact that her flat-as-a-board 32A chest was hardly worth a lingering look.
Still, she appreciated that he managed to withhold a smirk, even though he had to be doing a mental victory fist pump at her unfortunate clumsiness.
“It’s nice to see you again,” she said, shifting her weight awkwardly from one foot to the other.
“Here for your interview?” Cole asked.
“It’s in a few minutes,” she replied. “You? Just wrapping up?”