by Joanne Rock
Frowning, she studied him while the wind whipped his baseball jacket, the gusts driving the pelting rain on his back. She held the door open wide enough that the elements blew around the magazines and papers on a coffee table just behind her, but she seemed oblivious to the tempest. She appeared more concerned with how to tell him off while he stood before her—a wet hat literally in hand—ready to talk.
And more.
“C’mon, Naomi,” he urged, miserable from the inside out. “I already struck out once tonight. You can’t ring me up a second time.”
Just remembering the fight with the ump and the ensuing dress down from his manager torqued him off all over again. But the mention of his latest outburst drew a lopsided grin from his former girlfriend.
Damn, but she was hot. Not manicured, groomed perfection. But real-woman sexy. Her fiery-red hair and take-no-crap attitude had turned his head at a young age and set the standard for what he would find appealing in a woman for the rest of his life. Still, though they’d dated on and off in high school, they hadn’t really gotten serious until last year when he’d been on a farm team close to town.
“I can pretty much guarantee you won’t be scoring in this house, Slugger,” she drawled, standing aside to let him enter. “But I’ve got ten minutes if you’d like to dry off before I send you back down the highway to Boston in that jaunty little sports car.”
Amen.
She could pick on his ride all she wanted. She didn’t know he’d already scored a victory tonight. Just stepping into Naomi Benoit’s house was like coming home. A unique feeling for a scrappy kid whose teenage parents had passed him around to every relative they could scrounge in an effort to abdicate his upbringing.
Finding Naomi tonight had been his overriding goal from the moment he’d walked out of the Aces’ clubhouse in the wake of the great meltdown. He wanted her back. And he’d been waiting for her to be free for the past six months. Lucky for Brody, he still had enough friends in town to keep tabs on her so he could jump into the fray the moment he’d heard she had split with her boyfriend. He wasn’t taking any chances she’d find someone new after she broke up with the latest guy.
“Thank you.” He stood on the front mat and took the door out of her hands since she didn’t seem inclined to close it. Shutting it behind him, he absorbed the sights and sounds of Naomi and her world. “Great place you’ve got here.”
He knew she couldn’t abide small talk, but it was his first reaction that was safe to utter since he couldn’t possibly tell her she looked good enough to devour.
When they’d broken up, she’d been house shopping. Her apartment had been tiny and they’d both been ready for more room, but he hadn’t been around to help her make the move. But his eye was taken by her and not the digs. She was a gorgeous redhead whose tomboy ways were masked beneath eclectic clothes with girly touches. Even tonight, roaming her living room in navy-striped pajama pants and a Boston Aces T-shirt, she sported a jeweled double headband that kept her wavy auburn hair off her face. The headband had a purple butterfly perched over one ear.
She clutched a mug in one hand and her house smelled like scented candles and flavored tea. Something cinnamony. Something sexy. Of course, sex had never been far from his mind when Naomi was around, one of many reasons he’d thought they should take a break a year ago. He’d wanted to focus on his career.
“Oh, please.” Naomi set down the mug and disappeared into a back room for a second before returning with a blue bath towel. She threw it at him before plunking into a green paisley wingback across from a fireplace with a single burning log. “You’re living in something that looks like the Playboy mansion and you think this place is nice?” She shook her head. “I’m not buying it. Why don’t you have a seat and tell me what you really came here for.”
Scrubbing the towel across his short hair, Brody finished drying off and slipped out of his shoes before leaving the front mat. He dropped the towel next to his loafers, thinking how much the whitewashed New England cottage stuffed with quirky furnishings suited her.
“My house is 6,500 square feet of vacant floor space and baseball memorabilia. It’s about as welcoming as a sporting good store.” Not ready to spill his real reason for seeking her out yet, he hoped to distract her. “Any chance of snagging some tea, or is that pushing my luck?”
He flexed his sore hands, thinking it might help to wrap them around a mug. His trainer had told him to ice the knuckles he’d scraped up after putting his fist through his locker, but Brody couldn’t stand the idea of being any colder.
“The water’s hot.” She nodded toward a tiny galley kitchen with a stove that looked like it came from the 1930s and a bright red teapot on the white tile countertop beside it. “Help your—What happened to your hands?”
She set her cup down on the coffee table made of a lacquered tree stump just as he stood up. Darting past her, he snatched the teapot and rummaged around her cabinets until he found a second cup.
“It’s not a big deal.” Of course, it was a big deal to let his temper get the best of him for the umpteenth time this season, but the cuts on his hands were the least of his worries.
She snatched up his right arm before he could grab a mug. He hadn’t been prepared for how her touch would affect him. Purple-painted fingernails barely grazed his skin, the pinkies graced with tiny daisies. A silver Celtic bangle wound around her wrist, a gift from her parents on her sixteenth birthday. He vaguely remembered her friend hosting a big bonfire party to mark the date.
Now, the fruity scent of her shampoo tempted him to lean closer, and he realized she’d just showered. A few damp strands of hair remained darker than the rest and her skin had been scrubbed clean of any makeup. A shot of pure longing jolted his insides as he remembered showers together. Whole days spent in bed…
“Please tell me you used the fist on an inanimate object?” Her chin tipped up as she met his gaze and she let go of his hand in a hurry.
Had his carnal thoughts been that obvious?
“Of course.” He poured hot water in his mug while she slid him a tea bag. “You know me better than that.”
“I thought I did until you went after Javier Velasquez the last time you played Chicago.” She shot him an assessing look for a moment before she reached into the freezer for a package of frozen vegetables and passed it to him. “You should hold that on your hand.”
“It was a tense game and he was talking smack.” Still, he’d never lost it like that before. His world had been falling apart ever since his breakup with Naomi and he didn’t know why. He’d thought it would be a good idea to focus on his career. But lately everything he touched went up in flames. “And you should know that Velasquez was cool about it afterward. He plays the way I do, you know? He doesn’t leave anything on the field. It’s the media that blew it out of proportion.”
Taking the tea and the green beans, he stalked out of the kitchen to take a seat on her couch.
“I never thought you would piss away your shot at the majors.” She followed more slowly, studying him over the rim of her mug. “I couldn’t believe you were ripping into that ump on national TV after you’ve been warned to keep a rein on your tendency to, shall we say, speak your mind?”
He knew he shouldn’t be flattered she’d kept tabs on his career. She’d been a baseball enthusiast, and particularly an Aces fan, since long before they’d dated. Still, it pleased him to know she hadn’t carried a big enough grudge against him to make her root for New York.
“Did you see that strike-three call?”
The Aces had been down by a run in the eighth when he’d come up to bat. There were two outs with runners on second and third and Brody had two legitimate strikes on him for multiple balls he’d fouled off trying to work the count. As a catcher, he’d sat behind home plate all game and he knew the ump’s strike zone. The guy had been calling the outside corner all day for both pitchers, squeezing them hard. But it had started to rain sometime in the seventh and maybe
the guy didn’t want to stick around for extra innings with bad weather on the way. When the next pitch came, it was low and outside, same as a hundred other balls that afternoon.
Brody had let that one past him, confident as hell about the placement, yet the home plate ump had given the strike-three sign and ended the game.
“Yes. And it was a bad call. But you and I both know that’s not the first one and it won’t be the last. There’s no instant replay in baseball. The umps call the game like they see it.”
He chugged the tea, hoping to ingest some calm even if he scalded his tongue in the process. Fortunately, just sitting in Naomi’s living room brought his blood pressure down a few notches. Funny how she could tell him the same damn thing his manager had three hours ago and it didn’t make him want to put his fist through anything.
“Sometimes arguing convinces the ump to make the next call in your team’s favor,” he insisted, knowing for a fact that was true. “We’ve seen that happen.”
“Right. But this isn’t stickball in the backyard with Shayla’s big brother umping the game. This is the big leagues and the manager decides what to dispute. He doesn’t get paid a million per year to let you do his job for him—and a sloppy one at that.”
Every word she said made total sense. He’d known all of it before he’d showed up here. But somehow hearing her say it helped. She’d always had a practical fairness that appealed to him. She could cut through his B.S. faster than any female he’d ever met and some perverse part of him had wondered if she still held that power.
Sure enough, the woman was still more potent than the homemade rotgut his granddad once brewed on a falling-down farm not ten miles up the road from Naomi’s cottage.
“You’re right,” he acknowledged, polishing off the tea and setting aside the frozen veggies.
“You can’t honestly expect me to believe you drove here in a thunderstorm after we haven’t spoken in a year because you wanted my input on a bad call.” She punched a button on the remote to turn off the television just as a highlight from his earlier argument flashed on the screen.
She hadn’t moved fast enough to erase that unflattering image of himself—red faced and tense—from his head.
“No.” Jolting to his feet, he roamed around the small living area in his socks, restless with too much tension. “It’s complicated.”
Her silver bracelet clanked against her mug as she gripped it more tightly. Thunder rolled outside, the rain pummeling the roof.
“I’m a smart woman. Try me.”
“Nothing’s been the same since you—since we—” He didn’t know where to begin. “I always felt more grounded when I lived up here. When we were dating.”
Frowning, she set the remote on the coffee table and remained silent. Waiting.
“That much is fact. What I don’t understand is why or what variable in my life I need to adjust to fix it.” It was like trying to iron out a hitch in your swing. You went back to basics to sort out the trouble.
“And you think I could be a variable?” Her nose wrinkled with confusion or maybe distaste.
“I need to figure out why I can’t settle down in the box. Why I can’t sit still in a hotel room when we’re on the road for games. Why I’m restless as hell all the time, even when I’m knocking the ball out of the park.” He’d circled her floor multiple times and forced himself to stop.
To face her.
“I’m confused.” She shook her head, clearly having no idea where he was going with this.
“Maybe I lost some mojo when we broke up.” It sounded stupid. It was stupid. But after telling himself that was the dumbest thing he’d ever come up with and having the damn idea persist, he figured he owed it to himself to test the theory.
He was better with her than without her and the time had come to reclaim the woman who’d become a part of him.
“Brody.” She straightened in her chair. “You made it through the ranks of the minors and into the majors. You’ve got a multi-million-dollar contract. You’ve dated the chicks in the SI swimsuit issue. Trust me, your mojo is formidable.”
“Yeah?” He stalked across the living room and dropped down to sit on her coffee table inches from where she sat. “I think I never got over you.”
Her blue eyes widened. A slight flush crawled across her skin. He was close enough to see her pulse throb at the base of her throat.
“You can’t be suggesting—”
His hand on her knee halted whatever she’d been about to say and he remembered every single time he’d ever touched her. Every single time they’d taken their attraction to a heart-pounding, mind-numbing conclusion.
“Give me another chance, Naomi.”
2
“YOU’RE CERTIFIABLE.”
Naomi’s heart fluttered like she was sixteen again and she cursed the breathlessness he inspired. He’d been the one to leave her behind while he chased his superstar dreams. She’d coped by becoming a serial dater, making sure she never stuck around long enough to get her heart broken again. The method hadn’t helped her find true love, but she was managing to have some fun in the process.
There was no way he could coerce her into—what? Sex? A relationship? Because he’d lost his mojo.
“Tell me something I don’t know.” He stared at her with heart-melting gray eyes, his good looks sharper and more defined since high school. He’d filled out in the last six years, his body honed into a slugging machine. He had the upper body strength of a power hitter and rock-hard catcher’s thighs. Not that she was ogling him now, but she might have ogled a time or two on television.
In fact, there were probably an embarrassing number of interviews with him recorded on her DVR, although they were strictly used for the sake of the inspirational videos she put together for the youth baseball team she coached. Surreptitiously, she hid the remote control between the seat cushions.
“So you don’t care that you’re barking mad?” She reached to tuck a stray hair into her headband and realized her fingers felt a little trembly.
Heaven help her, Brody Davis was getting under her skin again and he’d been back in her life for all of ten minutes. And that ticked her off.
“When have I ever cared what anyone else thinks?” he asked in all seriousness, his chiseled features set in stark lines.
She spied a darkness in his gaze that he’d never revealed in any of his interviews.
“You’re serious.” It wasn’t until that moment that the full import of why he’d shown up really hit her.
He’d honestly come here to get back together with her.
Or maybe just to spend a night in her bed.
And he wasn’t here so she could be some notch on an already-impressive bedpost—her notch had been left a long time ago. He really thought sleeping with her would straighten out whatever problems were chasing around his head tonight.
“Like a heart attack.” His words whispered over her with deafening softness, uttered by a man she’d let get too close.
In more ways than one.
“No way—”
He flexed his fingers against her pj-clad knee, reminding her that he’d been touching her that whole time and she hadn’t done jack to stop him. That big, broad, powerful palm that halted hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs day in and day out, now touched her with infinite gentleness. Heat.
“Naomi.” The word was a plea. Or maybe a chastisement. She couldn’t tell because she was too caught up in the feel of his touch and the intoxication of having him this close.
She tried hard to call up the way it had felt when he’d broken up with her long distance and followed it up with a rambling e-mail at one in the morning to explain they’d both be “better off.”
A little of the anger came back—slowly. She let it build, knowing her righteous indignation was tempered by the subtle stroke of his thumb on the underside of her knee as the rain thundered against the windows, sealing them in this moment.
“You hurt me too much to deser
ve that opportunity,” she admitted finally, needing to say the words out loud so her hormones got the message.
“So you can hurt me in return,” he suggested, sliding forward on the coffee table so that his knees bracketed hers and his hand glided up her thigh three breath-stealing inches. “Tomorrow, you can kick me out and send me back to Boston a spurned man. But consider just this one night…”
She wanted to flip his hand off her leg—the touch was nervy for a man who hadn’t seen her in months. In fact, she wanted to flip him off, period. But no matter how much she tried to tell herself otherwise, she’d never fully excised Brody Davis from her heart. Besides, the dark, haunted look in his eyes gave her pause.
She could still read his moods like an old farmer read the weather. She’d known he’d tell off that ump tonight the second she’d seen his jaw clench. And she knew right now that he wasn’t spinning some lover-boy nonsense to get in her bed. He was as intense in a relationship as he was on the field. The man was far from shallow.
He had to be genuinely worried about losing his career because of his outbursts and he’d come to her for—what? To help keep him grounded? To level out one of his legendary moods?
“Sleeping with me won’t fix whatever you think has gone wrong for you.” Her gaze tracked over his face, searching for more clues to this confusing and complex man who’d charmed her from the moment he’d whispered an answer to her in Spanish class.
Not that she’d needed help, sitting in an accelerated program with kids one and two years ahead of her. But Brody had wanted to talk to her and found a way, even though the answer he’d given her had been wrong.
“If you’re right, then I’ll be the one who has to deal with it.” He didn’t appear overly concerned.
Of course, he’d had total confidence in his incorrect Spanish answer, too. Naomi had always admired his ability to ignore obstacles and plow ahead in life. Right or wrong, he’d achieved so much simply by brazening his way through the world.