Baseball and Other Lessons (Devil's Ranch Book 2)

by Aubrey Gross

  Go away, voice of reason.

  “I guess I’m going to have to tickle you, then.”

  Matt’s voice jerked her out of her thoughts so quickly she didn’t even think, just blurted out the answer to his original question. “Cunt. I was going to call her a cunt. But I generally hate that word so I didn’t.”

  “Y’know, with that dirty mouth you sometimes have you could fit in in a baseball clubhouse.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “All those hot baseball players barely clothed and really sweaty after a hard-won game? Nope, that wouldn’t be a good idea at all.”

  He drew his eyebrows together. “What do you mean by ‘all’?”

  “Just what it sounds like. All.”

  “Well, there goes my ego.”

  She laughed and nudged his chest with her shoulder. “As if. You’ve got enough ego for both of us.”

  His expression turned serious. “You know I’m not actually some crazed egomaniac, right?”

  The worry in his voice caused Jenn to reach up and smooth his brow. How her hand ended up running itself over his buzzed hair and cupping the back of his neck she had no idea. “I know you’re not a ‘crazed egomaniac,’ Matt. But I also know that it does take a certain amount of ego to be a team’s ace and to carry that kind of pressure and like it.”

  “Ego or craziness, one or the other.”

  Her fingers slipped under the edge of his t-shirt’s collar without her telling them it was okay to do so. “Probably a little bit of both, truth be told.” Her voice was low and husky, almost unrecognizable to her own ears.

  Matt closed his eyes and inhaled a sharp breath. “What are you doing, Jenn?”

  Her hand slipped further under the collar of his t-shirt. Her whispered response was shaky. “I don’t know.”

  His hazel eyes darkened to that lovely green shade that told her he felt whatever this was, too, but he didn’t move. “You’re vulnerable right now, sweetheart, and your hand on my neck and those green eyes looking at me like that are making it really hard not to kiss you.”

  She licked suddenly dry lips while her insides went all warm and gooey at being called “sweetheart.” Jesus, she was the easiest woman on earth right now, willing to drop her panties at the slightest endearment.

  Yeah, keep fooling yourself there, sister.

  Shut. Up.

  “So then kiss me.”

  “I don’t want you to regret this in the morning, and I don’t want us to go back to circling each other like wary cats, either.”

  “Dammit, Matt!” She rose up while bringing his head down to hers at the same time. Fine. If he wasn’t going to make the move she sure as hell would.

  She moved her lips against his, finesse flying out the window. All she knew was this sudden—okay, not so sudden—aching want that clawed at her gut and pulsed through her veins. He responded, capturing her mouth with his and she almost sighed in relief.

  Instead of letting her continue to take the lead, though, Matt slowed the kiss way down. Jenn relaxed against the arm of the couch, her hand still inside the collar of his shirt. Their tongues caressed each other, a slow dance building to a slow burn. Sparks shimmered behind her eyelids. Why hadn’t she been kissing him all along?

  Matt was a great kisser.

  Sure, he’d been a pretty damned good kisser ten years ago, but like a barrel of whiskey he’d only gotten better with age and had gone from pretty damned good to phenomenal.

  He curled his tongue around hers, stroking and gliding before pulling away and nibbling on her bottom lip. She chased, but he continued to pull away.

  Jenn whimpered—actually whimpered—when he pulled away completely. A part of her brain realized she was emotionally vulnerable right now and simply needed to feel a connection with someone. The vast majority of her brain, however, was stuck on the look in his eyes, the heat of his neck under her hand and the fact that his bottom lip was slightly plumper than the top.

  Oh, sweet baby Jesus, she had it bad.

  Matt’s smile was rueful as he tucked a curl behind her ear. “I’m not going to take advantage of you, sweetheart, and if I let this go any further that’s what I’d be doing.”

  “Is it taking advantage if it’s what I want, though?”

  “In this case, yes, and you and I both know I don’t need to spell out all the reasons for you.”

  Jenn’s hand under his collar drifted up to rub at the nape of his neck. Matt briefly closed his eyes and drew in a hard breath. “We both want this, though. You can’t lie to me and tell me you don’t.”

  He shifted and his erection brushed against her hip. “If circumstances were different, I would have you naked right now and would be buried so deep inside of you you saw stars.”

  Jenn squirmed as desire pooled low in her belly.

  Insta-wet. Right there.

  “But you’re hurting and vulnerable right now, and despite what you might have thought about me for the past ten years, I’m not that man. I want you, Jenn, but not like this, not when you might regret it in the morning and I would feel like a dick.”

  His expression was so earnest, his gaze so determined, that she was helpless against the tumbling of her heart inside of her chest. “Why can’t you be the person I thought you were?”

  “Who’s that?”

  A corner of her mouth quirked up. “An asshole.”

  Matt snorted more than laughed, but she was rewarded with a grin playing at his lips. “Well, to be fair, once upon a time I was an asshole, and if you ask certain American League batters, they’d probably tell you I’m still an asshole.” His expression grew serious again. “I really am sorry, Jenn. I’ve always regretted the way I left things back then.”

  She looked away, unable to meet his gaze as her fingers continued to play at the nape of his neck. Apparently it was time to address the remaining elephant in the room.

  Might as well just rip all the bandages off at once, right?

  “I’m not going to say ‘it’s okay,’ because it’s obviously not okay.” She brought her gaze back to his. “I wasn’t looking for forever, wasn’t under some misguided assumption that you were, either. I wasn’t looking for fancy words or lies. But I had expected respect—not only for me, but for us and our history. I can’t say friendship, because I don’t know that we were really all that great of friends. We had known each other for forever, though, which kind of makes the whole one-night stand thing a bit awkward. And I knew it was one night, Matt.”

  “I never meant to make you feel like I didn’t respect you—it was honestly the complete opposite. Still is.”

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek, memories of emotions flooding through her mind. “The funny thing is, Matt, up until the point when I woke up and you were gone without a single word, I had felt respected. Even knowing it was a one-time thing, and even with the fact that I’d never had sex like that with anyone, I knew you respected me and that I wasn’t a faceless warm body. But then you left, and I felt so, so used. It’s not a fun feeling, believe me.”

  His fingers brushed her cheek as he met her gaze—unflinching—and said, “I left without saying anything because you scared the shit out of me.”

  Jenn raised an eyebrow. “Me? I scared the big, bad Matt Roberts?”

  Yeah, right.

  The corner of his mouth ticked up in a crooked grin. “Yes, you. That night was…special. It was crazy and unrestrained and I felt freer with you than I ever had with anyone else. I had no clue where the sudden attraction had come from. I knew you were smart and funny and could be a bit of a smartass, but I hadn’t known that you tasted like heaven or that there was so much passion inside that small body.”

  Jenn’s cheeks warmed slightly at his words, and she had to fight the urge to look away. “I am not small.”

  He shrugged. “You’re tall for a woman, sure.” He smiled again. “But compared to me, you’re small.”

  An
d wasn’t that just the hell of it? In normal situations, she felt like a bit of a giant. With Matt, though, she did feel a bit like a dainty woman.

  It was kind of nice.

  “After you fell asleep, I lay there and watched you for what felt like hours. I didn’t want to leave, which was a first for me. A part of me wanted to wake you up and make love to you all over again, and another part wanted to wake you up and just talk. As much as I wanted to be inside of you again, I wanted to get to know you, too. That scared me. I was young, was just starting my second year in the majors, and falling in love was not in the plan for that time in my life. I’d had it all worked out in my head, ever since I was a teen—make it to the bigs by twenty-five, start the All-Star game by age twenty-seven, win my first Cy Young by twenty-eight. Love, marriage and babies didn’t come into the picture until I was in my late thirties, after I’d retired with a guaranteed spot in Cooperstown.”

  “I…” she didn’t know where to begin. “But I wasn’t thinking love, marriage and babies. That wasn’t even on the table.”

  “You weren’t, but I was.”

  And suddenly, things made some sort of sense to her. His running out was still not the nicest thing he could have done, nor was it the most mature, but she understood it now. Hell, if he’d told her he was thinking love, marriage and babies she probably would have been the one to sneak out in the middle of the night.

  Or run away screaming. Whichever.

  Because at twenty-two? Yeah, she hadn’t been ready for forever. At all.

  The fact that Matt had been, though, threw her for a freaking loop. The fact that Matt had been thinking about those things with her threw her right off the tracks.

  The fact that she hadn’t been ready and he had and she’d accidentally gotten pregnant and then lost the baby? Yeah, her world hadn’t just been knocked off its axis, but had been grand-slammed outside of the Milky Way.

  “Matt—“

  “You don’t have to say anything, Jenn. It was way past time I explained to you what was going through my head back then. I owed you that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this before, Matt? We’ve seen each other plenty over the past ten years, but instead of just telling me the truth, you’ve let me be an angry bitch towards you—which has been kind of difficult, considering all the questions that have been asked about it.”

  He shrugged. Looked away. Looked back at her. “Because it was easier to let you be angry. As long as you were pissed at me and keeping me at a distance, it was easy to tell myself that I’d imagined everything I’d felt that night, that I’d just been drunk or feeling some sort of home sickness.”

  She’d tried to tell herself the same thing. “But you weren’t drunk that night.”

  “It was self-preservation. Don’t you get that?”

  Of course she got that—what did he think she’d been doing for the past month? Hell, for the past ten years?

  She moved her hand back to the inside of his collar, needing to feel his solid strength. “I’m tired of fighting, Matt. I’m tired of manufacturing reasons to stay angry with you.”

  “In all fairness, you’ve done a pretty good job at that.”

  A choked laugh escaped. “Truce?”

  “Truce.”

  Even though there were still hundreds of things they needed to talk about—like the fact that he’d been thinking love, marriage and babies with her—she pushed all of those thoughts to the back of her mind and asked him the craziest, possibly the most destructive question she could ask.

  “Can you stay here tonight? I really don’t want to be alone.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Matt walked into Chase’s house just after nine the next morning to find Chase in the kitchen by himself, spooning scrambled eggs onto a plate. His younger brother looked up and raised an eyebrow before returning to his task.

  “You sure don’t look very happy for a dude who’s doing the walk of shame.”

  This was one of those rare mornings that called for coffee. Matt ambled to the Keurig, grabbed a coffee mug, popped in a pod and hit BREW. “Do men even do the walk of shame? I thought that was solely in the domain of women.”

  Chase shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”

  The coffee finished brewing and Matt picked up his now full cup. “I mean, seriously, it’s more like the walk of high fives.”

  “The stride of pride?”

  “Complete with the theme from Rocky playing in the background.” Matt sipped his coffee.

  Chase shook his head. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

  “You’re the one who accused me of doing the walk of shame.”

  Chase took a seat at the island and dragged his plate in front of him. “Fair enough. So if you weren’t out having wild sex—and I’m still not sure if I believe that or not, by the way—where were you all night?”

  Matt leaned against the kitchen counter, adopting a relaxed pose despite being anything but relaxed. There was no way in Hell he was telling Chase where he’d been all night; he was pretty sure his little brother would kick his ass five ways to Sunday if he did know.

  “I met up with Owen at April’s last night. It got late. I wanted to give you and Jo some privacy so I stayed somewhere else. End of story.”

  His brother pushed his eggs around his plate. “’Somewhere else’ sure does sound vague.”

  “Why the twenty questions?”

  “Just curious. You haven’t exactly been yourself here lately.”

  Matt looked down into his coffee cup. “Yeah, well, getting hit in the head by a line drive and having your entire future on hold tends to throw you a bit off-kilter.”

  Chase scooped up some eggs on his fork, but paused before eating them. “How is your head healing? It seems like we’ve barely talked the past week or so.”

  “In your defense, you’ve been kind of busy with Jo and I’ve tried to give you two some privacy.”

  “Thanks for that.” Chase set his fork back down.

  Matt drew his eyebrows together. “Are you gonna eat those?”

  Chase glanced at his plate and shook his head, sighed before saying, “I don’t know what’s going on. I was hungry, but as soon as I took a bite the texture was just off. I’ll find something else in a bit.”

  Matt peered at his brother, couldn’t see anything that stood out to him as being out of place, and asked, “That been happening often?”

  “Off and on, but it’s happened a few times in the past week. I guess I’m just going through a weird food phase. We all have them.”

  Except not everyone had the health issues Chase had. “When’s the last time you saw your nephrologist?”

  Chase glanced sharply at Matt. “I go in for a check up on Monday. Why?”

  “I did some reading years ago when you first got your diagnosis. Apparently some people start having issues with food textures as their kidneys get worse, but it seems to be related more to the folks who are constantly puking.”

  “Huh. I haven’t heard that one, but I guess it makes sense; if you’re throwing up all the time you probably don’t want to eat.” He got up and walked over to Winchester’s bowl, which he scraped his eggs into. “Why were you reading about kidney failure?”

  “I was curious, but I was reading more about Vesicoureteral Reflux than kidney failure—that just happened to be a related subject that I decided to read up on while I was at it.”

  Chase had been diagnosed with the disease as a child, but the doctors hadn’t figured out what was wrong until after they’d already performed six other surgeries looking for cysts and other issues. Once they’d finally gotten a proper diagnosis, they’d operated in an effort to reverse the reflux. Unfortunately, the first procedure hadn’t held and they’d had to perform a second one. Because of the multiple surgeries and the time spent undiagnosed, his kidneys had endured a lot of scarring.

  When he was in his teens his doctor had warned them all that Chase would probably one day end up in
kidney failure, which would require a transplant and possibly dialysis. Just after he’d graduated from college, Chase had found out he was in Stage 2 Chronic Kidney Disease, which meant his kidney function was definitely declining. A couple of years ago he’d been diagnosed as having Stage 3 Chronic Kidney Disease. Stage 4 basically meant he didn’t have much time before hitting End Stage Renal Failure, which meant a transplant, dialysis, or death.

  Because his kidneys would most likely fail at some point in his thirties or forties and that the stress of high-level athletics could do more harm than good, Chase had chosen not to pursue a career in baseball, even though he’d been one of the best collegiate closers Matt had ever seen.

  And he wasn’t just saying that because Chase was his little brother.

  “So how have you been feeling here lately?”

  Chase closed the door of the dishwasher. “I’ve been fine. A little tired, but I’m not getting enough sleep between work and Jo, and I’m not complaining about either.”

  Matt wasn’t getting much sleep either these days, between worrying about his career and thinking about a certain redhead he’d left curled up in bed this morning.

  “Speaking of, you’ve been looking pretty tired here lately yourself. Who’s got you tied up in knots?”

  He allowed the change in subject. “What makes you think someone’s gotten me tied up in knots?”

  Chase snorted. “Please. I know that look—I was seeing it in the mirror every day just a few weeks ago.”

  Matt shrugged, hoping he looked casual rather than guilty. Why he felt guilty he didn’t know, but the feeling was definitely one he’d gotten to know a little too well here lately. Hell, if he were totally honest with himself, he’d been feeling guilty regarding Jenn for the past ten years. “No one’s got me tied up in knots. I just have a lot on my mind.”

  “You any closer to an answer regarding your career after baseball?”

  “Not a fucking clue.”