“Bailey!” she yelled even before she jumped out. The woman was in an absolute panic.
Her stomach dropped as she grabbed her kit and ran to meet Missy.
“What is it, Missy? Is someone sick? What’s wrong?” Please, God, not Marc. What if it was more than a headache, something that she would have caught if she had not been distracted and so intent on being mean to him? A headache was the first sign of so many things — aneurysm, stroke, tumor, meningitis. She hadn’t even asked where his head hurt or if he was nauseated! She began to mentally tick through the names of the doctors playing in the tournament.
“Nothing like that,” Missy said. “But Miss Mississippi 2010 has a stomach virus!”
Relief settled over her. “Where is she? I’ll take a look at her. It could also be the heat or something she ate.” It wasn’t like her to overreact, but Missy inspired that, and she might be overstating Miss Mississippi’s illness.
“She’s not here. She’s still in Mississippi,” Missy said.
What the hell? “Then how does this concern me? I’m not going to Mississippi to take care of her.” Though, come to think of it, that wasn’t a bad idea. If she did, she for sure would never see Marc again. Almost against her will, her head turned to scan the course for one more look …
“Oh, Bailey! Of course not. But were you going to the gala tonight?”
“No.” Thank God. By then, even if she had to see this tournament through, she’d be safe and alone at home with a Lean Cuisine and a romance novel. Or murder mystery. Yes. That would be a better choice given her current mood.
“I need you to go with my cousin. Miss Mississippi was going to be his date, but she’s throwing up her guts.”
“No,” Bailey said, forgetting for a moment that no one ever told Missy no. “I absolutely cannot do that. I don’t even have a dress.”
Missy narrowed her eyes. “Yes, you do. You must. You were at the benefit ball for breast cancer in May. And you were not naked or inappropriately dressed. I would have remembered.”
Busted. It was true enough that she had a dress, a dress she liked — gold and bronze-sequined from the strapless sweetheart neckline to the floor. It was the kind of dress that might be over the top for the red carpet but was perfect for a country club dance south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Under other circumstances she might have liked for Marc to see her in that dress, but other circumstances were long gone.
“Believe me,” Missy plowed on. “I’m just the woman to understand not wanting to wear a special occasion dress more than once. But I don’t remember the dress, so no one else will. Heck, I don’t even remember what I wore. Anyway, most importantly, my cousin hasn’t seen it.”
The dress was so not the point.
As Bailey cast around for the words to make Missy understand that she was not going to that gala, six feet of blonde Lone Star State Sass prissed up like she owned the world and put a hand on Missy’s arm.
“Missy, I need a ride out to watch the tournament? I want to watch Polo play?”
Missy nodded. “Just a second.” Then she turned back to look at Bailey, which was more than Miss Texas had done. “Please, Bailey. I’ll owe you. I really need this.”
Bailey would have caved but — wait. Had Missy said her cousin? Hadn’t she heard those Beauford brothers from Tennessee were Missy’s cousins?
“Who’s your cousin?” Bailey asked.
Missy smiled like she had just been dealt a king to go with the four aces in her hand. “Jackson Beauford,” she said.
Jackson Beauford — the country music superstar and most famous of the three brothers, not to mention the best looking.
“Yum!” Miss Texas said. “Jackson Beauford is your cousin? Aren’t there two others? Twins? A pro football player and a rodeo cowboy?”
“There are actually four, including one you would not have heard of. But yes,” Missy said, “first cousins, Daddy’s side.”
That’s when it hit Bailey. Like the football player and the cowboy, only people who followed his sport knew who Marc MacNeal was. And, well, as far as Miss Texas — would anyone recognize her on the street? But everyone who had ever turned on a radio, looked at a magazine cover, or watched television knew who Jack Beauford was.
“All right, Missy,” she said. “I’ll go. Sure.”
“Oh, Bailey! Thank you,” Missy said. She was already hauling ass back to her golf cart with Miss Texas in tow. “Jacky will pick you up. I’ll get with you on the arrangements!”
They were barely out of sight before a sick feeling settled into Bailey’s stomach. She had let her pride get the best of her. Not only was she going to have to go to that dance where he would be, but now faking the bubonic plague to get away from this tournament was no longer an option.
Suddenly, wanting Marc to see her on Jackson Beauford’s arm seemed terribly childish.
Chapter Three
Marc had not played a worse game of golf since before puberty. He’d be lucky if he didn’t get one of those booby prizes tonight, like shortest drive or most balls in the water. Damn.
Still, he smiled and glad-handed about because that’s what a good sport did. And now he had to go eat barbecue with the press and anyone who had been willing to pay for the privilege of eating with a bunch of sweaty golfers who were supposed to be somebody — though with his abysmal score he sure didn’t feel like much of anybody right now.
He had to hand it to his date — Jessica, aka Miss Texas, had really hung in there and watched the whole tournament, despite that his late arrival that morning had put him in the last group to finish. She didn’t even seem to care how bad he’d played.
Then again, maybe she didn’t know. When he’d broken a hundred, she’d thought that was a good thing.
“Polo?” She sidled up next to him. “I’m about to catch a ride in the next golf cart back to the clubhouse for lunch? Would you like to come?”
The clubhouse was less than a hundred yards away.
“Well, honey,” he said. “That would be real nice, but I’m all sweaty, so I think I’ll walk. But I’ll see you back there.”
She looked torn between disappointment and relief that she wouldn’t have to be exposed to his sweat. Maybe he wouldn’t shower before that shindig tonight. He wasn’t exactly sure why Miss Texas set his teeth on edge. Generally, he liked a beauty queen, and Texas had some of the best. But usually his beauty queens were nowhere in the vicinity of Bailey. He tipped the kid who had caddied for him and started walking.
Damn that Bailey. It was her fault he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn today. Good thing he hadn’t been playing baseball. He’d have been traded, if not sent back to the minors. What were the odds of finding her here in this little Podunk town anyway? Nothing had ever surprised him more. He’d been doing so well, too; he hadn’t even thought about her in close to three days.
The route to the clubhouse took Marc right by the hospitality tent, and he couldn’t help looking toward Bailey’s station. She appeared to be packing up her medical supplies. Marc knew he had no business going anywhere near her, but his feet carried him there anyway.
She lifted her head and gave him a tired look. “Do you need more Tylenol?”
He intended to say something nice. He really did. But a sullen eighth-grader took hold of his faculties and made him say, “No. I’m reporting for my colonoscopy.”
“Ha. I wish,” she said.
“I’ll bet you do.” If a fourteen-year-old had been running the show inside him — and had been ever since he’d laid eyes on Bailey this morning — now a cranky toddler, badly in need of a snack, a nap, and a time out, pushed that boy out of the way and stomped in. “I don’t like you!”
She waved her hands in the air on either side of her face and widened her eyes. “Oh, no! What will I do?” Then a grim look moved in to repla
ce the mockery on her face. “Believe it or not, I get that, Marc. I got it when you cheated on me.” She slung her canvas bag over her shoulder and turned to walk away.
Oh, hell, no. He did some fancy footwork and stepped in front of her. “We’re about to have a conversation.”
“We are not.” She stepped around him and turned toward the parking lot.
It would feel so good to stomp his foot, grasp her arm, and say, “Don’t you walk away from me!” But he didn’t. He took a deep breath and banished the toddler and the eighth-grader.
“I would like to have a conversation,” he said evenly. “It’s clear that by the way we’ve both been acting, we need to close the book on eight years ago, and we need to do it like adults.” He hesitated. “Closure.” That’s what they called it on talk shows and in the books, though he’d never understood what it meant until now. “I need closure.”
She must have been taken off guard at him using such an anti-man-friendly word because she let him take her heavy bag.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said.
Bailey actually moved her head in what might have been a nod … or what might have been shaking a fly off her face. Nevertheless, she started walking, falling into step beside him. Finally, Marc thought. Here we go.
• • •
With trembling hands, Bailey unlocked the trunk of her Honda Accord.
“Just put my bag there,” she said.
“Got your keys?” he asked.
“Right here.” She held them up. Once, when they were at school, she’d locked her keys in her trunk and they’d had to call a locksmith. After that, he had always asked if she had her keys before closing her trunk.
Conversing with Marc like “normal people” was disconcerting.
He slammed the trunk and looked around. “Do you want to go somewhere? It’s really hot.”
She shook her head. “Don’t you have to go do something at the clubhouse?”
“I’m supposed to but what are they going to do if I don’t? I’m not afraid of Missy Bragg.”
“You should be. That woman flosses her teeth with barbed wire.” He smiled, and she relaxed slightly. This probably wouldn’t take long — after all, he cheated, she walked away. What more was there to say? “We can sit in my car. I’ll turn on the air.”
Just as they started to climb in the car, five boys wearing Little League uniforms ran across the parking lot from the direction of the ball fields. They looked to be about nine.
“Mr. Polo!” the leader of the pack called out. If she wasn’t mistaken, that was Laura Cochran’s boy.
Marc turned to them, and Bailey paused, too, uncertain if she wanted to curse or rejoice at the boys’ timing. Then again, it’s not like the kids knew they were prolonging a conversation that she’d been waiting to have for too many years. A conversation that, conversely, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to have at all. She looked over to Marc, worried that the snappishness he’d had earlier would manifest again, and crush the boys’ obvious case of hero worship. But if he was irritated by the interruption, his open expression didn’t show it.
“We know we’re not supposed to ask for your autograph,” the Cochran boy said. “’Cause guys like you charge money for that now. But we wanted to say hello.”
“We watch you play on TV all the time!” another boy that Bailey didn’t recognize blurted excitedly. “You got so gipped!
“Yeah!” A third kid — Louisa Bennet’s — spoke up. “We think you should totally be playing in the All-Star game on Monday.”
“Do you?” Marc laughed and squatted down to eye level with the boys. “I’ve gotten to do that lots of times, and I’ll probably get to again. Not everybody gets to go every year. And I’m kind of glad I’m not playing this year. I wouldn’t have gotten to come here and meet all of you.”
His tone was teasing and sweet, his enthusiasm genuine. As a celebrity, Marc probably had to deal with this — being in demand — all the time. Yet he spoke to the boys as if he were a peer, not a star who had to be polite or patient to maintain his image. It was uncalculated and, frankly, quite charming.
“Now, about those autographs. I don’t usually charge, but I think I want something from y’all.” He paused and smiled at the boys. Her knees went weak. “How about this: I’ll give you mine, if you’ll give me yours.”
“Sweet!”
“All right!”
“Yeah!”
There was lots of high-fiving, and then they discovered that no one — including Marc — had anything to write with.
Bailey opened her trunk and located a Sharpie in the bottom of her bag. She looked on as he signed for each kid in turn. If Marc felt any impatience at writing personal messages on the boys’ ball caps, he didn’t show it.
“I don’t have my cap,” he said. “Too bad. I guess I’ll have to let you write on my arm.”
While shaky little hands inscribed their names on the inside of his forearm, Marc asked what positions they played, how their team was doing, and about their coach. When he was done, he gave the Sharpie to the Cochran boy, who looked at it like it was the Holy Grail.
“I’ve got a sneaky feeling that y’all have run off,” Marc finally said. “Maybe you’d better run on back before somebody misses you.”
As they ran back the way they had come with shouts of joy, Bailey tried to hide her smile. “That Sharpie isn’t going to come off your arm any time soon,” she said as they climbed into the car and she started the engine.
He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go to a tattoo parlor and have them tattooed over so they never come off.”
“That might be carrying things a little too far. Still, it was good of you to do that.”
“I’m not all bad, Bailey. In fact, there was a time when you thought I was more good than bad.” This he said with no anger, no fire.
So that was how they were going to do this: calm, rational, quiet. Not a bad idea, if she could manage it. Maybe she could pretend they were discussing something that didn’t matter. Cheese. Think about cheese.
“There was a time when you had not cheated on me.” And I like a good sharp saga blue.
“I have been waiting for eight years to say this to you: I never cheated on you.” I like a plain old chunk of Velveeta. Can’t beat it. “There was no possibility that woman’s baby was mine. The paternity test proved that.”
He ran his finger over the bottom lip of his beautiful mouth.
To distract herself, she adjusted the air conditioner vents. “No,” she said tersely. “The paternity test proved the baby wasn’t yours. If there had been no possibility, there would have been no need for a test.”
“There was every need,” he snapped. “I’d just been called up to the majors. I’d just signed a multimillion-dollar contract making me the highest paid rookie in the MBL. And there was all that talk that I was going to be all that.” He rolled his eyes in a self-disparaging way, but it hadn’t been just talk. He had turned out to be all that, and the money — so much money — had followed. “You know what the baseball groupies were like, even in college and the minors.”
Marc’s face was wrought with raw emotion. So much for cheese. She gripped the steering wheel. “I do know. And when I saw your picture splashed all over the paper with her, I felt like the groupie! And there you were, the new bad boy of baseball, making headlines and having fun!”
“Oh, believe me, honey,” — the sarcasm in Marc’s voice hung heavy in the air — “you were no groupie. Groupies are always willing to talk to you.”
“Talking? Is that what you call it?” There was a sneer in her tone, and she wasn’t proud of it, but full-on angry had hit — for both of them.
“I already told you I didn’t cheat on you! Not with that woman and not with anyone else!”
“No? What
about that very chummy picture of the two of you with your arms around each other?” Let him explain that away!
“It was a fan picture, Bailey. And I knew her a little.” He was working hard to keep his voice calm but not quite succeeding. “She was a groupie, came to all the home games in Scranton, hung out at the place we went after games. Lots of the guys slept with her, but I never did, never was tempted. She used to call me ‘Romeo’ and ‘old married man.’ I thought she was harmless, but I guess she took it personally that I wouldn’t go home with her.”
A sick feeling took root in Bailey’s stomach. What if he was telling the truth? But he couldn’t be. “Then why the paternity test? Why would she want it if there was no possibility the baby was yours?”
“She didn’t want it, damn it!” He punched his left hand with his right fist. “She wanted to be paid off for keeping quiet. She knew what you meant to me!”
Bailey opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. She wasn’t interested in talking about what she had meant to him.
Marc closed his eyes for a second and then continued. “My agent said we had to send a message that people couldn’t come after me. We asked for the test. And I would have told you that if you’d taken my calls, if you’d even bothered to open your dorm room door the day I flew down to talk sense to you.”
“If all that’s true, the time to talk sense to me would’ve been before I read it on the front page of the paper!” She hadn’t meant to raise her voice, but calm had walked out the door a long time ago.
He nodded and raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Yes. I know that now. But back then … it blew up really fast. I guess I just hoped it would all go away and you’d never have to know I’d been accused of such a thing. But, Bailey, we both knew what your state of mind was. If I had been able to get to you, to tell you this then, would you have even believed me?”
Whirlwind Romance: 10 Short Love Stories Page 2