Back in the Game

by Lori Wilde

  “Don’t bother. You’re not mentioned in the book.” Rowdy smiled sweet but when he spoke his voice held a warning burr.

  What? Of course Potts was mentioned in the book. It would be a pivotal part of the climax of his autobiography.

  “No?” The cigar seemed permanently stuck to his lower lip. When Potts talked the cigar bobbed, as if it was saying yes, yes, yes.

  “Not once.”

  “I find that strange. A book about your life and you don’t mention me? My feelings are hurt.” Potts gave a nicotine-stained, bulldog-in-a-spiked-collar smile.

  “I saw you on television,” Rowdy said as lightly as if they were best buddies having drinks at a bar, but he leaned forward aggressively. Loomed over Potts. His hands clenched into fists, back flat, arms welding stiffly to his sides. His entire body was a hard, straight line. As if he was a sheer mountain face about to fling a crushing boulder down onto the general manager.

  “Yeah?” Potts’s hands went to his hips and his chin jutted up, eyes hard and dark, as if just daring Rowdy to make a physical threat against him.

  “You were with a guy who looked exactly like the man who attacked me. Right down to the snake tattoo on his right forearm. Imagine that.”

  “No kidding?” Potts grunted, shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “You know what they say, everybody’s got a look-alike.”

  They eye-wrestled each other. Neither one blinked.

  Breeanne pressed her palms together, brought her fingertips to her lips, thought, Mongoose and cobra.

  “Why did you pick up Zach?” Rowdy’s voice turned steely enough to cut Irish oats.

  “Why do you think?”

  The humid air twisted with tension. The men stayed locked in their stare-down. Abel and Alec kept glancing at each other and shrugging. Something was going on here that no one except Rowdy and Potts knew anything about.

  “I just want you to know,” Rowdy said, “that you’re not in the book.”

  Why did he keep saying that? She was going to have to corner Rowdy about this. They couldn’t finish the book without including Rowdy’s suspension from the Gunslingers. When and why had he decided to leave Potts out of the book? He disliked the guy, and clearly, the guy disliked him right back.

  The veins at Potts’s temple bulged, and he laid on the sarcasm like butter. “Thanks a lot for leaving me out.”

  Rowdy raised a fist. “Hands off Zach.”

  Breeanne pasted a palm to her mouth, smothering her gasp. Was he going to deck the general manager?

  “Or what?” Potts sneered, but his fingers were twitchy, tapping along his belly like he was playing piano keys.

  “You know what.”

  “You threatening me?”

  “About as much as you’re threatening me.”

  Potts pointed a militant finger in the direction of the exit. “Get off my property.” To Abel and Alec, he snapped, “Do your job, dammit.”

  Immediately, each man clamped one of Rowdy’s arms, spun him around, and marched him to the parking lot. He didn’t try to charm or cajole or resist.

  Breeanne hurried after them.

  “Young lady,” Potts called.

  She stopped, turned back around, put a hand to her chest. “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Heads-up. Don’t believe a damn thing that character says. He’s a liar and a cheat.”

  “I haven’t found that to be true.”

  “You don’t know everything there is to know about him.”

  That was true enough, but she was not about to betray Rowdy. “And I don’t know everything about you either.”

  “Fine.” Potts waved a dismissive hand. “Go ahead and trust the sneaky sonofabitch, but you can’t claim you weren’t warned.”

  CHAPTER 23

  I don’t know why people like the home run so much. A home run is over as soon as it starts . . . The triple is the most exciting play of the game. A triple is like meeting a woman who excites you, spending the evening talking and getting more excited, then taking her home. It drags on and on. You’re never sure how it’s going to turn out.

  —GEORGE FOSTER

  “What happened back there?” Breeanne asked as the Escalade sped toward Stardust.

  Half an hour into their two-hour drive back to Stardust, and those were the first words either of them had spoken. The radio was on, and they were listening to the play-by-play of the game. Zach was pitching decent for his starting debut in The Show. But then, for no discernible reason, Zach was pulled from the game.

  Rowdy white-knuckled the SUV through Dallas traffic, his shoulders stiff, his eyes intent on the road, his body language yelling, Don’t tread on me. She had not ever seen him this angry, and she’d been afraid to broach the topic until he had time to take a deep breath, and calm down.

  There was a beat inside the car, like the pulse of a contracting heart. As if she were the top part of the heart, the atrium, responsible for setting the pace and regulating the blood flow into the bottom part of the heart.

  And he was the ventricle. The strong pump responsible for flooding the body with oxygenated blood.

  She rubbed two fingers down her breastbone, felt the ridge of scars, and the reassuring throb of her own heart. She had to set the pace, control the rhythm. She would not push. She would wait until he was ready.

  A heartbeat passed. Another. And then another.

  Finally, he said, “Dugan Potts happened.”

  “You’re not talking about just tonight, are you?”

  He clenched his jaw, turning his profile hard.

  A skip of her pulse, an erratic beat. Breathe.

  “Were you serious when you told him you weren’t going to mention him in your book?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “And you’re not going to share them with me?”

  He swallowed so hard he made a strangled sound as if he was choking on poisonous words.

  “Your publisher is going to be upset about this,” she said. “We’re starting the book with your suspension.”

  “We can write about the suspension without mentioning Potts by name.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll just say general management suspended me for insubordination and I freely admit I was insubordinate.”

  “You called Potts a hamster on television. Fans want to know what provoked it. They will feel cheated if you don’t go into details.”

  “Fans don’t own my soul.”

  His jaw snapped back into place so hard it sounded like the snapping turtle she found in the backyard when she was a child. The thing had come at her with its mouth open, moving startlingly fast for a creature with a plodding reputation. She’d fallen back on her palms, scrambling away from it like a crab. Grabbed for anything she could use to protect herself, found a stick and thrust it at the turtle. The thing cracked the stick cleanly into two pieces. Her shrieks had brought Dad running. He scooped her into his arms and carried her into the house.

  Whatever was eating on Rowdy was buried deep. Could she dig it out of him? For years, he’d been using charm, and constant activity, and physical pleasures as a shield. All the hours she’d spent with him over the last few weeks told her that his lifestyle, values and beliefs, goals and ambitions, all related back to things he would not talk about.

  She curled her hands into fists to keep herself from touching him, from pushing. But she had to push. If the atrium didn’t do its job, then the heart pump would fail. Set the pace. Guide the rhythm. It was up to her.

  “You owe Jackdaw the manuscript you promised them,” she murmured.

  “Too bad. If they don’t want the book we turn in, I’ll pay the advance back. Get out of the contract.”

  “What happens to me? I will have to give back my portion of the advance too.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll cover your part of the advance just like I promised when I tried to quit.”

  �
�I don’t get it. There’s something else going on here. Something you’re not telling me. Something you’ve not told anyone. Something you’ve been holding on to for a long time.”

  He slung his head around, pinned her to the seat with a hard-edged stare. For a moment, he looked like a complete stranger.

  She drew back, instinctively angling her body closer to the door.

  How well did she know this man? She believed that because she’d gotten him to open up about his past lovers, and he’d given her tidbits about his childhood, she knew him. During their budding romance she believed she’d bonded with him, but had she really? And that silly scarf had made her believe they shared a connection, but it was all silliness, wasn’t it? How well could two people really know each other? Especially two people who’d been together less than two months.

  Deep down, she feared she didn’t know him at all.

  The SUV bulleted into the night. Rowdy kept his focus trained on the highway. Breeanne didn’t say anything for a long time, giving him space to open up on his own. But finally, she couldn’t take the silence any longer.

  “Is it true?” she asked, taking a different approach.

  “Is what true?”

  “That the man who attacked you is connected to Potts?”

  “Yes.”

  She gripped the shoulder harness of her seat belt with both hands. “You’re saying that Potts hired someone to attack you?”

  “He did.”

  Blood pounded through Breeanne’s ears. There was a sharp tearing away of her mind from her brain, blood, and bones—cells and nerve endings burned into cinders, her heart bumped, and the hollow air of her lungs hissed out of her throat, over her lips, and spilled into the Escalade.

  Her body numbed, her mind floated free—a helium balloon detaching from its tether—as she struggled to process what he’d just told her. Potts was capable of orchestrating a beating so severe that it had ended Rowdy’s career?

  Abhorrent.

  She floated in the separateness for a moment. It was safer here, in this weird suspended animation where people’s employers did not arrange to have them beaten up, but the buffer was an unsustainable haven.

  Eventually, she dropped back into her body, blinked. The sun had slipped over the horizon, and darkness filled the sky.

  She kicked off her shoes, tucked her feet up underneath her in the seat, folded her arms over herself, shivered. Despite all her parents had done to shelter her, raising her in a sweet place like Stardust, loving her with everything they had in them, the world was not a safe place. She’d forgotten that.

  Feeling lost, she raised a hand to the downy scarf. When had it become her touchstone? It was the thing that now brought her back to herself when she felt lost. She had a strange thought that as the threads of the surgeon’s suture had sewn her physical heart together, this scarf had sewn her emotional heart to Rowdy’s. It was a fanciful thought at best, but the notion felt so true, cosmic and inescapable.

  Suddenly, every part of her body that had gone numb before came tingling back to life—her toes stinging, ears ringing, heart burning at the center of her chest.

  “Do you have proof?” she whispered.

  “Nothing other than my word.”

  “That’s why you agreed to write your autobiography in the first place. To tell the world who Dugan Potts really is.”

  His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Yeah.”

  “Do you mind if I record this? Just in case you change your mind about not putting it in the book.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  “Just for my reference. In case you do. Change your mind.”

  He nodded tersely.

  She slipped the recorder from her purse, clipped to the left side of her waistband, and switched it on. “Rowdy Blanton. Interview Number Twenty-six.”

  He slid a glance over at her. She could find nothing in his eyes of the carefree Rowdy she knew so well, but she was no longer unsettled by this new face he showed her. In fact, it calmed her. He trusted her enough to let her see all sides of him.

  “That’s why Potts picked up Zach, isn’t it? To have something he could hold over your head, and to keep you from mentioning him in your book. He knew you weren’t scared of litigation, so he grabbed for the only bargaining chip on the table. Your brother. That’s why you tried to quit the book. Why every time I bring up Potts you shift the topic to your fun-loving lifestyle.”

  Rowdy pulled a palm down his face. “I’ve changed my mind, Breeanne. Please turn the recorder off.”

  She wanted to protest, but the seriousness in his voice kept her from arguing. “All right,” she said and switched off the recorder.

  “To answer your question, yes,” he said.

  “Wow. Potts is incredibly Machiavellian.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” His voice came out hard and rough.

  “You have Potts running scared, so he hit you where you were vulnerable. Family.”

  “He’s got a knack for knowing where to kick.”

  “So why did Potts hire someone to beat you up? If he hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have agreed to write the book, right?”

  “He did it to get back at me because I wouldn’t play ball.”

  Confused, Breeanne kneaded her forehead. This was going to take some doing to wrap her head around. “With what?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this right now.” Rowdy clamped his jaw shut.

  Just when they were getting somewhere, he clammed up on her. Breeanne leaned her head back against the seat, allowed several minutes to go by before she dug in again.

  “Why did Potts really let Price Richards go? While Price’s stats had slipped, he was still a strong second baseman. Most everyone in baseball was wondering the same thing. It was certainly no reason to let him go, especially for the player they substituted in his place.”

  They passed the sign telling them the exit to Stardust lay ahead. They were almost home.

  “You want something to eat?” Rowdy asked. “I’m hungry.”

  “I could eat.” She had to tiptoe lightly here, or he was going to turn off completely and she feared she’d never coax him into speaking of it again.

  “We’ll stop at the drive-through at the turnoff.”

  “Okay.”

  A couple of minutes later, he took the exit ramp and pulled into line at a burger joint. He stopped at the order speaker, studying the posted menu for a long time, the glow from the sign casting his face in an eerie orange light.

  Without turning to look at her, he said, “Price’s contract was up for renegotiation.”

  “And he wanted too much money?”

  “No,” Rowdy said. “Being out of contract made Price a sitting duck.”

  Intrigued, she angled toward him. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you want to eat?” he asked.

  “One of the small hamburgers will do.”

  “Fries?”

  “I’ll share fries with you,” she said, “but I don’t want an order of my own.”

  “What do you want to drink?” He leaned.

  She wanted to grab him by the shoulders, pull him back in the car, and yell, I don’t give a damn about food. I want to know what happened that’s got you so screwed up.

  “Ice water.”

  He placed the order, sat back against the seat, and drove up to the window, on automatic pilot. He looked like she’d felt when he told her Potts hired someone to attack him—disconnected, disjointed, disturbed.

  They turned north toward Stardust, but instead of taking the street that would lead to his house, he drove the road that curled around Stardust Lake.

  Five minutes later, he pulled to a picnic area beside the water. The sun had set and fireworks exploded on the other side of the lake at the marina, lighting up the sky with holiday celebration.

  The SUV engine ticked as it cooled down. They sat on the cement picnic table, watching Roman candles
explode, eating burgers, and not saying a word. The food was already starting to get cold, but she didn’t much notice.

  They put their hands into the French fries container at the same time, and their fingers brushed. They stopped and looked up into each other’s eyes.

  “What I am about to tell you next is strictly off the record. This part is for your ears only. It’s never to be made public. Not for the book. Not for anything.”

  His ominous tone of voice lifted the hair on her arms. This was a big step, for him, for their relationship. He was about to tell her unsavory stuff. She could see it by the look in his eyes.

  He was going to trust her.

  The air left her body. She nodded and double checked to make sure the recorder was turned off. “All right.”

  A ghostly mist rolled over the water, punctuated by pops and flashes from the fireworks. Frogs croaked and crickets chirped.

  He got up, walked over to the Escalade, rested his butt against the grille, crossed his legs at the ankles, and folded his arms, biceps bulging at the seams of his short-sleeved shirt. In the shadows, he looked more cowboy than baseball player, his angular jaw cleanly honed and defined in the moonlight. She half expected him to dip his head and light a cigarette like the Marlboro Man.

  She approached him, walking on eggshells, afraid that if she made a quick move, or said the wrong thing, he would change his mind about talking to her and shut down.

  “Rowdy?” her voice came out small in the wide expanse of darkness and stars.

  He reached for her, drew her into the circle of his arms. Held her close. Kissed the top of her head.

  More fireworks lit the night sky and she wished the circumstances could have been as they usually were with him, light and fun, but this was serious business and she was getting near the nitty-gritty of what made Rowdy Blanton tick. So close to pulling back the veil and seeing the raw man who hid behind that bright smile.

  She wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her head to his chest, thrilled to the beat of his heart as strong as a lion, and savored being with him. Happy to be here. No expectations.

  He swayed with her in his arms, a quiet dance in time to the exploding rockets. She drank in his scent. Enjoying every nuanced smell—the cotton of his shirt, the spice of his cologne, the masculine fragrance that was all his own. Womb Wrecker, she’d named it when they’d fallen off the zipline platform together. But his aroma deserved a far more potent name than that. World Wrecker was more apt.