Stopping Short: A Hot Baseball Romance

by Mindy Klasky

  Chip was already reaching for another client file before she got out the door. At least she knew he’d be putting in the same hours she would. Not in the office, of course—he’d spend the weekend out at the Hamptons, as usual. But he’d miss the planned cookouts, just like he missed his kids’ track meets, or their choir concerts, or their school plays. Just like he’d skip the book group he’d promised his wife he’d attend, or he’d celebrate his mother’s birthday by phoning her in between calls back to the office.

  That was the life she was working toward. That was the life she’d poured herself into, with all the energy and enthusiasm that Kevin had given to extreme sports.

  That Drew had given to baseball.

  She jerked away from that thought as soon as it boiled up in her mind. Like a cat owner spraying a willful tabby with a water bottle, she forced her thoughts back from Florida, from the Linda Vista, from the Beach Shack, from Drew.

  Back in her office, she took a healthy swallow from her oversize mug, ignoring the fact that her coffee had gone cold. She needed the caffeine. She had a long day ahead of her. A long night. And a weekend as well.

  She wished she could slip into sweatpants and a T-shirt as she settled in to work. But image was everything. And image meant a tailored suit, a silk blouse, and closed-toe pumps with two and a half inch heels. Nevertheless, she kicked her shoes off behind the modesty panel that fronted her desk. No one would ever see. No one would ever know. She was such a rebel, always breaking the rules.

  ~~~

  Drew parked his car on the street, hoping his hubcaps would still be there when he got back. He paused at the corner, looking up at the cinderblock building. The windows looked like they’d been painted over years ago, along with rusty iron bars that kept anyone from breaking in.

  His hand itched inside his cast. He wanted to find something to shove down there to scratch, a fork or a butter knife maybe. Not that he’d trust anything from Mickey’s. Whoever the hell Mickey was.

  He squared his shoulders and opened the door.

  The place was as much a dump inside as out. The air smelled like stale beer and piss. One old guy sat at the far end of the bar, peering into the dregs of his cloudy mug. The bartender didn’t look up as Drew approached; instead, she spoke to the cracked taps, “What’ll it be?”

  “What do you have in a bottle, Susan?”

  That got her attention. She squinted at him, but she didn’t say his name out loud. Instead, she reached into the bin and pulled out a Bud. The cap flipped onto the floor, but she ignored it as she passed him the cool brown glass. He nodded and carried it to the far end of the bar. It took five minutes for curiosity to overcome her fear. Or maybe it was greed that did the heavy lifting.

  “What?” she asked, like they’d been carrying on a conversation for hours.

  “Hello, son,” he prompted in a mocking tone. “Great to see you. What brings you all this way?”

  “What did you do to your hand?”

  “Broke it playing ball.”

  She made a disgusted sound. “So you’re out of the game.”

  He shrugged. “For a while.”

  “So, what? I don’t get paid this month?”

  He couldn’t tell if the prospect made her angry or frightened or sad. Instead of trying to figure her out, he asked, “Why didn’t you ever try to stop him?”

  She acted like she’d just remembered there were health inspectors around, producing a filthy rag from somewhere beneath the bar and starting to scrub at a round ring of crud. The task took all of her attention.

  “Susan,” he said. “Why?”

  “He’d have killed me,” she said.

  “I was just a kid!”

  She flinched and looked at the guy at the far end of the bar. He stared back for a minute before he slipped off his stool and wandered out the door.

  Drew dug his fingernails into the palm of his good hand. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t yell. He knew it wouldn’t do any good. Oh well. He lied to himself all the time anyway.

  “I did what I could,” Susan said, once the door was closed. “I moved us when I had to. Gave you a chance to meet new people, to make new friends. I got you into Boys and Girls Club every place we lived.”

  He heard the pride in her voice. She stood straighter as she talked, and she raised her chin. She actually thought that dragging the family back and forth across the Carolinas was a good thing.

  Why didn’t you go to the cops? Why didn’t you tell someone at school? Why didn’t you tell me, give me permission, once I was big enough to kick his ass?

  But there wasn’t any reason to ask her. She hadn’t helped her son, not against her husband. She couldn’t have helped him. And she sure as hell didn’t have the heart or the brains or something to realize she had broken him, bit by bit, as thoroughly as if she’d beaten him with her own brass belt buckle.

  He’d come here because he’d thought he might learn something. He’d thought she might unlock something inside him, might make him understand what he’d done wrong, why he’d made Bobby so angry, how he’d broken everything so many, many times.

  But there wasn’t anything to understand. He pushed himself back from the bar. “Goodbye, Susan.”

  Panic scurried across her face. “What about my check?”

  You don’t deserve a check. You let your monster of a husband beat the crap out of a little boy. You dragged your teenage son from hellhole to hellhole, and you didn’t give a damn when he almost fucked up his life worse than yours.

  But what good would it do to say that now? She was his mother. She’d given birth to him. She’d done the best she could. She’d gotten him into baseball.

  He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. In the past month he’d gotten pretty good at doing things with one hand—a skill he hoped he’d never use again, after this break was healed. He flipped the leather open and plucked out a check, setting it on the bar between them.

  She looked from the blue paper to his face, suspicion carving deeper lines around her eyes. Shit. He wasn’t going to snatch it back from her. He sighed and shoved it across the bar.

  She scooped it up and tucked it into her bra in a quick motion she’d obviously practiced too many times.

  His chest felt empty as he crossed to the door. It had been a mistake to come here. A mistake to think there was some secret in his past, something she could tell him, something that would make him understand. He stopped with his hand on the door, turning back to see her staring at him with eyes that were the same gold-brown as his own.

  “Why’d you talk to Parker, Susan? Why’d you tell him about everything Bobby did?”

  For a second, he thought she wouldn’t answer. But then she shrugged and said, “He told me he was going to make you famous. I thought there might be money in it for you. And that would mean money for me, too.”

  He shook his head and walked out the door, but not before he saw her sweep his untouched beer off the bar and lean her head back, drinking like the devil himself was going to take it away.

  ~~~

  It was four in the morning by the time Drew pulled into the driveway. He should have pulled over hours before, but he’d stopped for coffee at midnight and driven the last hundred miles with the windows down, taking great gulps of cool night air. He could smell the ocean long before he arrived at the beach house.

  He was exhausted, but the caffeine still jangled in his blood. He shuffled to the kitchen and took down a bottle of rye. He had a tumbler in his hand before he decided that was a bad idea.

  He kicked the wooden rod out of the slider instead. The storm covering over the door raised smoothly, the metal slats folding against each other as the protective shade slipped into its trough. Wrestling the tarp off the swing was a little more difficult, with only one hand. But the ocean view was worth it.

  The ocean view, and the memory of sitting here with Jessica.

  Not the last night, the time he’d come here after breaking his ha
nd. Her first visit to the cottage. The first time he’d let anyone else through that front door.

  He leaned his head back and imagined she was sitting beside him.

  For the first hundred miles after Spartanburg, he’d thought his trip had been a waste of time. Susan wanted his money. That was all she’d ever wanted, all he’d ever been good for.

  After that, though, he realized the trip had bought him something more: It wasn’t his fault.

  Once the thought came to him, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. It wasn’t his fault that Bobby had beaten the crap out of him. It wasn’t his fault they’d dragged him around hell. It wasn’t his fault that he’d walked away on his eighteenth birthday, that he’d paid Bobby to stay away from him and Susan, paid Susan to keep her safe.

  He’d done what he could with what he had.

  And it wasn’t his fault—none of it, nothing about the monsters who were his parents. Other people had said it. Jessica had said it. But it wasn’t until today, wasn’t until he’d seen Susan standing there, broken, lost forever, that he’d really, truly understood. He wasn’t responsible for the nightmare of his childhood.

  But he was responsible for other things. He was responsible for deleting Jessica’s file, for lying about it, for screwing up her job. He should have talked to her. Should have trusted her—no matter how hard it was for him to trust anyone—because she was different. She was good in a way no other person ever had been in his life. In a way he didn’t deserve.

  He loved her.

  And she’d never forgive him. She’d risked too much, and he’d let her down, cost her the job that meant everything to her.

  More than that—she’d trusted him after burying her husband. She’d let him into her bed, into her body. Now, breathing the clean ocean air, watching the waves crash in the moonlight, Drew knew it was time to apologize.

  He took out his phone. It was almost five in the morning. If he woke her out of sleep now, she’d think something terrible had happened, that somebody had died. That somebody else had died.

  He screwed around on the Internet until he found Image Master’s website. It was easy enough to get her phone number from their directory. The line rang, distant and tinny, four times before her voice answered. He followed the directions, leaving a message after the beep. “Jessica,” he said. “I’m sorry. Call me when you can, so we can… Just call me, okay?”

  He leaned back in the swing and decided to watch the sun rise before he stumbled off to bed.

  ~~~

  Jessica glanced in her office as she hurried down to the conference room. Good. There wasn’t a red light flashing on her phone. A tendril of tension eased from her shoulders when she saw she didn’t have any messages.

  That’s not the way she used to feel. She used to love seeing that blinking light, greeting her like a chatty friend every morning. She used to anticipate what new client challenges awaited her, what impossible problems she’d solve before noon. But that was before her job started weighing around her neck like an iron weight on a baseball bat.

  That was before Drew had left his message.

  Guilt twinged through her belly. She’d let him down a dozen different ways. She’d told Parker about Susan, knowing full well the reporter would dig up the story about Drew’s abuse. She’d walked away from the beach house, returned to New York. She’d failed to achieve Image Masters’ number one goal, the one their client—Mark Williamson—had demanded, because Drew hadn’t made the Rockets’ team. Instead, he’d been put on the sixty-day disabled list, the DL, placed on medical leave while Rafael Ordonez played the coveted shortstop spot.

  Chip had assigned other Image Masters associates to work on Drew’s case once she got back to New York. Jessica’s colleagues were handling the fallout from the news stories as Bobby Trueblood’s gambling business was investigated, as Drew’s connections to the bookie were explored. They were fielding the countless articles about Drew’s broken engagement, about how his fiancée had walked away from him in Florida, how Jessica had abandoned him on the same day that he’d landed on the DL. She’d walked without an exit strategy, but Image Masters was doing its best to backfill.

  No matter what Image Masters did, Jessica had failed—professionally and personally. And so she hadn’t called Drew back. Not when she couldn’t begin to figure out what to say. Not when she hadn’t had time—hadn’t made time to think about it, with Donald Bender’s Wall Street crisis soaking up every second.

  Even that morning, she’d planned on getting to the office early so she could prepare to report on Bender for the Monday Status Meeting, organizing the stacks of paper she’d generated over the past week. But that was before there’d been a fire on the subway tracks, before every downtown bus had been too crowded to shove her way on, before every single taxi in the entire city was taken.

  Well, she was here, and that had to count for something. And she’d deal with Drew later. Just as she’d promised every day for the past week.

  She slipped into her seat at the mahogany table, automatically tugging at the back of her jacket, sitting on the hem so the tailored shoulders lay properly on her frame. She ran her fingers through her hair and glanced down to make sure her blouse was perfectly tucked into the waistband of her skirt. She’d just crossed her feet at her ankles when the rest of the team arrived.

  “Good morning,” Chip said, and she recognized the approval in his eyes. Somehow, though, it didn’t give her quite the same charge it always had before. This wasn’t a good morning. It hadn’t been a good morning since she’d rolled out of bed on four hours of sleep, already panicked that she’d forget some vital detail in her presentation.

  “Do you ever go home?” quipped Caden as he slipped into a seat across from her.

  “Of course she does,” Marnie responded. “She’s wearing a different suit.”

  “No reason she can’t have the dry cleaner deliver her clothes here,” Rebecca said.

  Any other day, Jessica would have been amused by their speculation. She might even have dropped off a jacket or two that afternoon, arranged to have the cleaner in the next block deliver them to the office, very publicly. That would be a good strategy, good proof of dedication. This morning, though, it just sounded like another round in the never-ending game of office one-upsmanship.

  Chip tapped his pen against the table, immediately cutting off any further banter. “We don’t have any new clients this week. Let’s start off with reports on current matters. Jessica? Where do we stand with Mr. Bender?”

  She hadn’t expected to go first, but that didn’t matter. She knew her numbers cold. After reaching across the table to flip the switch that projected an image onto the whiteboard at the front of the room, she crossed to the display in half a dozen tight, controlled steps. She used one of the dry-erase markers to point to the crucial numbers.

  “We got the results from our telephone survey on Saturday morning. The pool of respondents wasn’t perfect—you never get a fair representation when you’re polling people who answer landlines on a Friday night during the dinner hour—but that was the only expedited slot we could book with the survey company.” Everyone nodded. They all knew the hazards of Friday night calls.

  She uncapped her pen and turned to the board, drawing arrows to emphasize the points she began to make. “You can see that Mr. Bender’s Sympathy Index is actually passable with men and women, age eighteen to twenty-five. The numbers dip for the twenty-five to thirty-five cohort, with women reading far more negatively. It’s here, though, that we have our real problem.” She underscored a number three times and took a breath to explain her media strategy to counter the catastrophic drop-off among women age forty-five to fifty-five.

  Before she could begin to present her triple-tier attack, though, beginning with traditional print magazines available primarily at point-of-sale in the grocery quadrant, the conference room door crashed open. Jessica gaped with everyone else as Chip’s secretary shouldered her way into the room, barely forc
ing her way past a man in a suit.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Patterson,” Dorothy announced. “He didn’t have an appointment, and Reception said he’d have to wait until the Status Meeting was over, but he refused to take a seat in the lobby.”

  He. Drew Marshall.

  Drew Marshall as she’d never seen him before—clean-shaven, hair combed, wearing a suit perfectly tailored to his broad shoulders and trim waist. Drew Marshall, carrying a bouquet of bachelor’s buttons, the cornflower blue blazing against the grey of his suit. Drew Marshall, glaring defiantly at the secretary, at Chip, at the entire room.

  Until his eyes fell on her.

  His gaze softened the instant he saw her. The blur of his anger melted away, leaving behind a single-minded depth that shot straight through to her knees. She lowered her hand to the metal tray at the bottom of the whiteboard, the one that held the array of markers she’d planned to use for her presentation about…

  Her mind skipped a beat. She couldn’t remember what client she was talking about. She wasn’t sure what numbers she was presenting.

  It seemed like an eternity had passed with her standing there, staring at Drew, feeling him stare at her, but it could only have been a few seconds, because Chip was just now saying, “Thank you, Dorothy.”

  “Would you like me to call security?”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  After years of working for her very particular boss, Dorothy clearly knew when she was being dismissed. She pulled the door closed behind her with perfect speed and efficiency.

  “Mr. Marshall,” Chip said. “We were going to review your matter later in the hour, but I’m happy to rearrange our schedule. Let me get Mr. Williamson on the phone, and we can update both of you at the same time.”

  Drew glanced at Chip, but he spoke to Jessica. “There’s no need to call Williamson.”

  Chip let an edge of annoyance slice into his response. “Technically, there is a need to call your agent, because he’s our actual client.”