by Mindy Klasky
She stood straighter, steadied by the familiar calculations of baseball management. Zach’s suspension was inevitable. The only question was how many games he’d get. At least he’d pulled his punch when he realized the ump was standing right in front of him. He’d get five games. Maybe ten, if they were intent on making an example of him.
Numbers. Neat, uncomplicated numbers. She could handle that.
She watched him measure her response, saw the moment he accepted that she was capable of lasting out the night. “You ready for this?” he asked, nodding back toward Cody’s room.
She took a sip of Coke and squared her shoulders. “Let’s do it.”
Once again, she was conscious of him walking behind her, all the way down the corridor. But as much as she wanted to feel his hand brush against her, his chest crowd against her back, his fingers on her neck one last time, he took care to keep a perfect, respectful, professional distance between them.
She shoved down her disappointment and focused on being the face of Rockets ownership for the rest of the long night.
CHAPTER 2
Anna huddled in the back of the coffee shop, slouching low in her seat and watching the door. Every time another patron entered Club Joe, she jerked to attention. Each time she realized she didn’t know the newcomer, she settled unhappily, eyeing the cooling latte that sat across from her.
She sipped from her own soda, sniffing a little when the ice-chilled bubbles tickled her nose. The Coca-Cola burned down her throat, and she wondered if she’d broken her own record. This was, what? The third Coke she’d had since midnight, and it wasn’t nine o’clock yet. She shook her head, forbidding herself to think about how tired she was.
The door opened, and Anna repeated her ritual. This time, her vigilance was rewarded. Emily Holt stepped over the threshold, blinking as she made her own quick survey of the tables. Her face brightened as she located Anna, and she actually laughed when she saw the thick-foamed latte on the table.
“Thank you,” Emily said as she collapsed into the empty seat. “A million times, thank you!” She lifted the cup in both hands, breathing in the coffee scent as if it were a life-saving serum. She savored a single sip before she returned the cup to its saucer and leveled a concerned gaze on Anna. “Okay. I’m here. In record time, I might add—for you, I got ready in fifteen minutes. Now, will you tell me what’s going on? I’ve been imagining the worst, since I got your call.”
“It is the worst,” Anna said grimly.
Emily swallowed hard. “Who exactly are we talking about here? All you said was he on the phone.”
Anna could not hold her friend’s intense gaze. Instead, she slipped her fingers down the sides of her glass, collecting the droplets of water that were condensing there. There’d been moisture on the can of soda Zach had handed her the night before, pooling into drops where his fingers had touched the metal…
“Anna!” Emily prompted, sliding a knife’s edge of concern into her voice.
“Zach Ormond.” Anna could barely say his name out loud. Even as she whispered, her belly tightened. The night before, she’d had hours to study the catcher, to memorize every line of his face. They’d sat together until the sun rose outside the narrow window in Cody’s room, until the young player had roused from his drugged sleep, confused and in pain.
Zach had been the one to calm Cody, to remind him where he was, to reassure him that everything possible was being done to help him. The catcher had answered every one of his teammate’s questions, truthfully saying they didn’t have a prognosis yet. And Zach had repeated himself, carefully, patiently, every time Cody made the same demands, slipping in and out of his morphine daze.
“Oh. My. God,” Emily said, her enthusiasm jarring against Anna’s somber memories. “You finally did it!”
“Did what?”
“Told Zach how you feel about him. At least I assume you told him.” Emily’s eyes widened as she set her cup on her saucer. “You didn’t tell him? You just decided it was finally time to jump his bones? Get him into bed first and worry about confessing your lifelong crush in the morning? But you said it was the worst. What happened? Was it too fast? It couldn’t be too fast. He’s thirty-seven years old. Oh my God, Anna. Was he not able to get it up? Did he—?”
“I didn’t get him into bed!” Anna protested, finally cutting off her friend’s torrent of questions.
Emily regrouped quickly. “But you did it somewhere else, right? Maybe on your couch?”
“I didn’t sleep with Zach Ormond!” Anna’s protest was sharper than she intended. A quick glance at the tables on either side of them confirmed that the other Club Joe patrons were fascinated by the shape of their coffee mugs, or absolutely captivated by nearby sugar dispensers.
“If you didn’t sleep with him, then what exactly are we talking about here? What’s the Coffee Crisis that was worth my getting out of bed at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning?”
“It wasn’t the crack of dawn,” Anna said sourly.
“Don’t try to change the topic now. What exactly did you do with Zach Ormond?”
“I cried all over him!” Anna’s embarrassment made her voice climb an octave.
Emily’s laugh sounded like a seal. She barely turned her exclamation into a question. “You what?”
“It’s not funny,” Anna insisted. “I cried all over him. I soaked his shirt.” When Emily only shrugged to indicate confusion, Anna stifled a sigh. She rushed through an explanation of the game, Cody’s injury, the resulting chaos that Anna had handled just fine, like the mature, professional adult her grandfather had raised her to be. And then, she’d ruined it all by sobbing like a little girl.
Emily looked fascinated. “Do you realize what this means?” she asked when Anna finally finished her confession. “I’ve know you for what? Eight years? Since Freshman Week. And in all that time, I have not once seen you cry. Not when you sprained your ankle falling on the ice. Not when you failed out of French I and had to change your language requirement. Not when you couldn’t get into that upperclass seminar on The Cultural History of Baseball in Asia.”
Anna rolled her eyes. Rather than respond to Emily’s absurd comments, she took a long pull from her Coke. The ice cubes had melted, turning the carbonated soft drink into lukewarm sugar-water.
But Emily was on a roll now. “Now you come to me, and you tell me you finally found the nerve to reach out to the one man you’ve been crushing on since you were what? Ten years old? And you let him get an actual glimpse of the real Anna Elizabeth Benson? And he didn’t run away screaming in terror, but instead he bought you a soft drink and spent the rest of the night with you? And that’s the worst thing that ever could have happened?”
“What am I supposed to say to him now?” Anna asked miserably.
“Good morning? Thanks for listening to me last night? I really appreciate your being there when I needed you?”
Anna glared. “Right. Like I want to remind him what an idiot I was.”
“You are acting like you just had the most disgusting, drunken one-night stand in the history of disastrous relationships.”
“I’ve had one-night stands that didn’t make me feel this bad.” Anna winced. She’d had one one-night stand. And she’d vowed never to subject herself to that sort of embarrassed morning after, ever again.
Emily shook her head. “Mountain,” she said, indicating a height far above her latte. “Molehill.” She pointed at Anna. “Really. So the guy knows you aren’t perfect. That’s not the end of the world. It might even be the beginning. Come on. What’s this really all about?”
Anna shook her head, searching for words to describe her feelings. She hadn’t needed to fight for any words in the long hours before dawn. She’d been perfectly comfortable, sitting in silence with Zach.
But she had awakened Emily at the very first opportunity, dragged her down to Club Joe like they were still on a college campus, still able to hang out in the student union, nursing hangovers and t
rying to make sense of disastrous dates from the night before. The least she could do now was explain herself. “All these years, I’ve had a crush on him. First, it was like he was some sort of superhero—Baseball Man to the rescue! When I was in high school, I actually wondered what it would be like to date him. And in college… You know how I felt about him then. But all those years, every time I’ve seen him, he’s looked at me the same way. He thinks of me like I’m a child. Like I’m still the ten-year-old brat coloring in maps of the United States for my social studies class. And losing it the way I did last night? He’s never, ever going to stop thinking of me as a little girl now. He’ll never, ever think of me as a grown woman.”
Emily shook her head slowly. “Grown women cry, Anna. Trust me. I’m an expert on that.”
Of course she was. Emily was a social worker. She’d already spent three years helping senior citizens arrange support systems so they could continue living in their beloved homes. She’d had ample opportunities to see grown women break down.
Anna reached for her best friend’s hand. “Okay,” she conceded. “Maybe I’m making too much of this. But I still don’t understand how I lost it so completely.”
“Yeah,” Emily said, squeezing Anna’s fingers. “It’s not like you were under any pressure or anything.”
Anna laughed at the sarcastic tone. “Thanks. I knew I could count on you for support.” She drained the last of her syrupy water, and then she glanced at the cuckoo clock on the wall. “Oh! I have to get going. I’m meeting Gregory Small in fifteen minutes.”
Emily sat back in her chair. “I’m so glad I could be of assistance.”
“You were,” Anna reassured her. “I feel like I can face Zach now.”
“Just don’t let him know about that fantasy date you planned so long ago. Where was it? An isolated mountain cabin, with rose petals strewn across your pillow…”
“I never should have told you that! You pinky-swore never to mention it again!”
Emily laughed. “Whoops.”
Anna glanced at the clock again. “I’m sorry. I really have to—”
“Go. Go. But you just might want to buy me a lemon blueberry scone, so that my mouth is too full for me to tell anyone else about those champagne flutes in your fantasy.… And the wild strawberries…And—”
“Here!” Anna tossed a ten-dollar bill onto the table. “Get yourself a scone. Get two. Get a sandwich for lunch, too!” But she was laughing as she hurried out the door.
* * *
Zach blinked as he walked out of the hospital doors. The sunlight was a lot brighter than he’d expected. It was hard to believe there was a whole world out here—a family laughing beneath a giant bouquet of balloons, an old man clutching a bouquet of sweetheart roses, a young mother shifting her fussy infant from one shoulder to the other.
Of course, Cody Tucker’s family had just run a similar gauntlet, coming into the hospital. They’d arrived at the room about half an hour earlier. Zach had caught them up on what he knew—the doctors hadn’t delivered any news when they made rounds at seven, but they hoped to have more information by the middle of the afternoon. The kid’s mother had been especially grateful, thanking him over and over again, as if he’d actually done anything. The father had just shook his hand, looking away when a film of tears rose in bloodshot eyes that had probably not slept at all the night before.
But watching them, husband and wife, staring at the worst disaster they could imagine for their child, Zach’s heart was warmed. They’d get through this. Get through it together.
Just as he and Anna had done the night before.
It was the damnedest thing. He and Anna had barely exchanged a dozen words after they’d gone back to Tucker’s room. They’d both been intent on letting the kid rest, letting him sleep through the worst of the pain.
But it had been a real comfort having her there. He’d been able to look across the hospital bed at her quiet face, try to figure out what she was thinking. It made him wonder how many other times they’d been in rooms together. Every single time he’d reported to Old Man Benson. The handful of times he’d watched games from the owner’s box. Random visits to Coach’s office, some of the pressers when there was a particular management issue in play.
He’d seen her hundreds of times, maybe thousands. The same age as his youngest sister, she’d had that same tomboy look—blue jeans and scuffed tennis shoes, shirts that never stayed tucked in. She’d kept her hair pulled back in a ferocious braid, and he’d heard her tell Old Man Benson that it just got in her way if she let it down.
Her hair had been down last night, though. It had felt soft against his fingers as he’d smoothed it back from her face.
He sighed and folded his hands into fists, wincing a little at the pull of bruised flesh across his left knuckles. He’d almost made a fool out of himself, standing there in that hospital waiting room. He’d only meant to offer her a bit of comfort, to tell her everything was going to be all right.
His dick had meant something else, though. Something else entirely. His entire goddamn body had acted like he was sitting in the back row of a movie theater, watching some tearjerk movie with his high-school sweetheart.
Screw that. He hadn’t been thinking of Anna Benson like a high-school anything. He’d been thinking of her as a woman. A woman who had been in total, complete control of an absolute disaster. And he felt like a total shit, making her lose that control, breaking her composure with his smartass question. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
But of course, she hadn’t. She hadn’t been able to solve the real problem—the kid lying down the hall, wondering if he was ever going to play ball again. And Zach just had to find the perfect pressure point, to push her over the goddamn edge.
And his cock hadn’t known the difference between honest regret—trying to fix the problem he’d made with his own idiot question—and raging teenage lust. He’d regressed twenty-five years in a heartbeat.
At least now that he was a grown man, he’d had the presence of mind to lead the distraught Anna to one of those waiting room chairs. He’d forced some distance between them. Occupied himself by passing her Kleenex after Kleenex until he could be sure his stupid cock remembered the rules.
Shit. Maybe it was like those stories he’d heard—about people who narrowly escaped death in a car crash, or a natural disaster. They went at it like rabbits, trying to affirm the supreme beauty of life or some crap like that.
Sure. That’s all it was. He’d watched Tucker’s career collapse in one bad play. He’d seen one woman bring order and logic out of the chaos. And his dick had wanted to affirm the supreme beauty of…
Yeah. Right.
The trick would be figuring out what he’d say to Anna the next time he saw her. Sure, they’d managed to joke around in the hospital waiting room, even after he’d made an ass out of himself. They’d talked about suspension. They’d made sure Tucker was comfortable.
But the next time they talked? He’d be stuck thinking about his hard-on, and she’d be thinking about… What would she be thinking about? If he was lucky, she’d think about the quiet hours, the way they’d shifted the kid’s hands on top of his blankets, curving his fingers to a more comfortable angle. The way they’d worked in tandem, him holding a Styrofoam cup of water while she raised a soaked sponge to the kid’s dry lips.
Any of that, all of that was a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
Dammit. This was all the worst parts of being a teenager, with none of the advantages. His knees still hurt, from the long sleepless hours. His back was still tight.
Maybe all this thinking and crap was because he was exhausted. He glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock. Not enough time to get out to the farm, catch a nap, and still make it back to the park for the late afternoon game.
Well, that’s why he’d bought the condo. It was convenient, even if it never felt like home. He headed toward the hospital garage, already fumbling for his keys. A
nap, a meal, and batting practice. And maybe by the time he next saw Anna Benson, he’d be ready to act his age.
* * *
Anna took her time reading through the stack of papers. The package had been prepared with Gregory Small’s usual thoroughness. Anyone who had just dropped into the morning meeting would assume that the general manager had taken weeks to analyze the situation, massaging data and manipulating printouts until every last detail was perfect. They’d have no idea that the entire discussion had begun after midnight the night before.
But for the first time ever, Anna could see the tiniest hint of strain in Small’s demeanor. His scalp was shaved, and his goatee was meticulously trimmed—the man clearly kept a razor in his office. But his lips were rough, as if he’d spent the night licking them to soothe a case of nerves. And a tiny speck of blue ink stained the right cuff of his immaculately pressed dress shirt.
The real Gregory Small, the man who hadn’t been awake for more than thirty hours straight, would never have tolerated such sloppiness.
“All right,” Anna said, tapping the pages into a single neat pile. “Let me make sure we’re all on the same page here.” She looked around the table. Small sat at the opposite end of the table. Between them sat Jimmy Conway, the Rockets’ long-time manager. He’d brought along his hitting coach and a pair of his most-trusted scouts. Opposite Jimmy sat Boyd Larson, the Vice President of Finance. He’d brought a nervous kid whose primary function seemed to be swapping out pencils so that Larson was never without a deadly-sharp graphite tip.
Each of the seven men looked like he was braced for a battle. The table was already littered with coffee cups, and a tray of breakfast pastries had been reduced to crumbs. Jimmy was fiddling with a cigarette, turning it end over end, and Anna could only imagine how much smoke would have filled the room back in the Good Old Days.