by Linda Morris
“Did your mom remarry?” When Sarah had been younger, she’d lived half in hope, half in dread of a stepmother coming into her life. She needn’t have worried. Her dad had been married to the team right up until he let Paul take over the presidency and day-to-day operations. Even now, she doubted he’d ever marry Phyllis.
“No, thank God. Her taste in men never got any better. One loser after another. We got by, though. Mom waited tables and tended bar. When I was old enough, I took whatever jobs I could around baseball. We worked it out together. Mowing the field for the local Single-A team, working concession stands, whatever. Anything I could do to get closer to guys who played baseball for a living, even if it was in the podunk leagues. I got a college scholarship for baseball and had to quit work. We knew big money was coming, but it wasn’t there yet.”
“But it came eventually.”
“I dropped out of college and was drafted in June. In August, I signed a four-year deal for twelve point one million. I bought my mom a new house the next week.” His pride was unmistakable.
“You took care of her, like a good son.”
“I did.” His look of satisfaction faded. “My dad called me for the first time in ten years the week after that.”
“Oh, Tom.” Deadbeat dads crawling out of the woodwork after an athlete hit it big were an unfortunate fact of life in pro sports. “Did he want … anything?”
“He wanted money, and I told him to go screw himself. Haven’t talked to him since. Last I heard, he was shopping a book deal on how to raise a star athlete. Like he’d have any fucking idea.”
“I’m so sorry.” She wanted to reach out to him, hold him, tell him it would be okay, but he’d hate to be pitied. “Thank you for telling me. I didn’t like being the only one who’d poured out my life story.” The only one who was vulnerable.
He shrugged, a gesture that she’d used to think meant he didn’t give a damn. She knew better now.
Damn it all. Ignoring her better judgment, she took him into her arms. If he wanted to get pissy about it, let him.
Surprising her, he enfolded her in his embrace, tucking her head into the notch under his chin. His warm breath stirred her hair, and she closed her eyes, savoring the warm curve of his chest against her cheek.
“I’ve never told anybody that.”
“Really?” She pulled back in surprise, giving him a questioning look.
“Really. Nobody ever asked before.”
She snuggled back into his chest, at peace. “That’s because you meet all your girlfriends on reality shows.”
“Not true. One was a Hooters hostess.”
She punched him lightly in the ribs. “Dear God, what have I gotten myself into?”
“No need for you to be jealous, though. It was just physical.”
“No kidding.” Whatever Tom saw in Sarah, at least it wasn’t her ability to double as a server in a breastaurant. She ought to be annoyed at the reminder of his playboy lifestyle, but instead, she kept remembering what he’d said. He’d never told any woman about his history before. The realization made her weirdly happy.
“You have anything to eat? I’m starved.”
She pulled away. “I haven’t had a chance to go to the grocery since we got back from Kentucky, no.” The Thrashers were playing well enough to have a shot at the playoffs and, with Tom on the roster, attendance was booming. She’d been kept busy with PR events every day.
He nodded. “I’m starving. Mind if I order a pizza then? My treat.”
“Sure.” She sipped her water while he phoned the local delivery place and placed his order: a large pizza with pepperoni, sausage, and bacon. “Get me a salad too, would you?”
“Rabbit food,” he mocked, but he passed along her order.
“Not everyone is a carnivore like you, Cord,” she said, then frowned as he hung up. “I should have ordered the pizza.”
He looked at her blankly.
“You ordered it, and from your phone, but you asked for it to be delivered here,” she explained.
“So?”
Did she have to spell it out for him? Apparently so. “People are going to know you’re here.”
“Is that such a big deal?” His look was a challenge that she couldn’t meet. She let her eyes drop as she tossed her empty water bottle in the recycle bin under the counter.
“Be sure to let me answer the door when it comes, okay?” Her dad wouldn’t actually fire her for dating Tom. She didn’t think he would, anyway. Damn straight he’d be unhappy, though. She suspected her dad of harboring some fond hopes that she might still be a virgin. Given the pool of available men in Plainview, it wasn’t totally unreasonable.
Finding out that she was dating Tom Cord would certainly dash those dreams.
“I don’t think it’s going to come as a shock to that many people that we’re together,” Tom said. “People have seen us together. Rumors got started after I told Reedy to let you on the bus.”
“It’s one thing for people to suspect, but it’s another to give the confirmation. We don’t want to do that.”
For the first time, his eyes dropped.
“What?” The hairs on the back of her neck stood at attention. “Is something going on that I should know about?”
“Coco Jackson knows.”
“Knows what?” He gave her a look, and she blinked hard. “He knows we’re sleeping together? How does he know that?”
“I don’t know.” He waved a hand. “Like I said, people saw us together. Rumors get started.”
“He confronted you about it?”
“I don’t know if ‘confronted’ is the right word, but he said something, yeah.” He picked up his water and took a long drink.
“So you denied it, of course.” He stared hard at his bottle, and her mouth fell open. “You didn’t deny it?”
“There didn’t seem to be much point in lying. He already knew.”
“He couldn’t have already known! He just suspected. Gah! Why did you have to go and tell him?” She paced from one side of the kitchen to another, mind racing.
“Coco’s cool. He won’t tell anyone.”
“If he was cool, he would have kept his suspicions to himself and not said anything! You know how he is. Athletes are bigger gossips than hair stylists.” Damn. What if he blabbed to her dad?
“He wanted to give me a warning. I’m telling you, he’s cool.”
“A warning?” She stopped in her tracks. “Did he threaten you?”
“Hell, no, he didn’t threaten me. I think he wanted to warn me that us getting involved could hurt you. He knows your dad won’t like it.”
“Oh.” Her anxiety eased a fraction. That did not sound like a man who would intentionally out her to her dad. Still, she didn’t like the idea that someone out there knew for sure that she and Tom were involved. “Okay, well, you can’t unring a bell, but if anyone else asks, deny everything. I will too. Maybe we’d better let a few days go by without seeing each other.” She stood in front of the kitchen sink and looked out the window. The weather had been dry and the grass was browning. She watched a honeybee buzzing among the gladiolus. “Paul asked me too, but I wouldn’t answer him for sure.”
“Paul knows?”
“No, Paul suspects. I told him it was none of his business, though.” Like you should have done with Coco.
“True, but it seems like nobody in this town minds their own business.”
“Now you’re starting to know Plainview.” She rubbed a tense spot between her eyebrows. “So far my dad doesn’t suspect anything, but if rumors are flying, he will soon. Maybe it’s better if I meet with him and get it over with.”
“Get what over with?”
“The denial, of course.” She bit her lip. “I’m a terrible liar. He’s always been able to see right through me. Still, if he has no evidence, he can’t do anything.”
“If your dad fires you for such a stupid reason, who cares? This isn’t the only baseball job in the world. Hell,
a lot of teams would let you have more of an operations role than he has.”
She turned and faced him. He didn’t get it. “This team is everything to me, and my family. It’s been the Dudley legacy for three generations. I can’t work anywhere else. It would be a betrayal. Would George Steinbrenner’s kid go work for the Mets? No, he’s a Yankee through and through!” Why couldn’t he understand that? “Besides, my dad would never actually fire me.”
“Then why deny anything? Tell him we’re seeing each other.”
“What?” He stepped closer and she turned once again to look out the window, her breath coming swiftly. “Are you crazy?”
He moved behind her, slipping his arms around her waist and brushing her hair to one side. “Why deny anything? If your dad isn’t going to fire you, who cares? You’re an adult.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know my father. If I prove I can’t be trusted around the players—” She caught her breath as his lips brushed a particularly sensitive spot on the side of her neck.
“How long have you been working for the team?”
“Since I graduated college. I—I started out at an entry-level marketing job and worked my way up.” He certainly made it hard for a girl to carry on a conversation when he did that with his tongue.
“That’s what, four, five years?”
She closed her eyes and thought hard, trying to tune out the delicious sensations he’d stirred to life. “Five as of last month.”
“And how many players have you dated in that time?” He pressed his pelvis against her behind, pinning her to the counter next to the sink. Her fingers curled, tightening on the edge of the counter.
“One.”
One of his big hands crept up to cup her breast, a thumb toying with the nipple through her bra. “One including me, or one before me?”
“Only you,” she gasped, eyes drifting shut.
“I see. So this isn’t something you make a habit of.” Was she crazy, or did he sound satisfied at her answer?
“No,” she said after a long moment of trying to remember how to speak.
“He has no reason to think you would do it again anytime soon, right?”
Screw it, talking was too hard. She shook her head.
“There you go, then. No big deal. Tell him the truth and let him deal with it.” Before she could answer, he slid his hand down, massaging the softness between her legs through her yoga pants.
“Oh, God.” She went boneless, but he caught her, pinning her lower body with his pelvis and cradling her upper body in his arms.
What were they talking about? Something important, but reason kept slipping from her, driven away by the relentless rhythm of his fingers. Against the curve of her rear, his hardness flared. She reached behind her in a halfhearted grab for him, but he swatted her arm away.
“Don’t stop doing that,” she whispered.
“I won’t,” he whispered in her ear. He paused for a minute, but before she could complain, he slipped his hand inside her underwear, moving his fingers to the sweet secret at the apex of her thighs. His fingers moved easily through the dampness there, making her hands claw the counter’s edge until her knuckles whitened.
“Tom, oh, Tom. God. That feels so—” her voice wavered into nothingness as she hung on, savoring her body’s climb to pleasure.
“I’ve got you. Just let go. Let it go.” As he spoke, he slipped two fingers inside her, detonating a hard climax. Waves of pleasure pulsed through her, and she didn’t try to silence her response. He took one earlobe between his teeth, nipping her as she settled back into his embrace with a sigh.
After a few moments of hanging limp and loose, a ridiculous smile on her face, she felt the tension in every muscle of his frame. She reached back to cup him through his shorts, but he pulled away. Her eyes widened, but he only pulled his shorts down and donned a condom, and then pulled her yoga pants and underwear down with a jerk.
Sliding a hand under her shirt, he moved his hand along her spine, tipping her forward slightly as he entered her from behind. The alignment was tricky, but after a couple of false starts, he slid deep inside, wresting a sigh from her.
“Do you know your neighbors here?” He started a steady rhythm of thrusting that stirred the embers of desire to life deep inside her.
“What?” Surely that question had a point, but she couldn’t think of it right now.
“Your neighbors. Any nice little old ladies who would be shocked if they looked over right now through your kitchen window?”
“Umm, probably. Mrs. Petersend lives next door. Oh, God.” He took some new angle that startled an exclamation out of her.
“What would you do if Mrs. Petersend looked over here, as she was watering her roses, and saw me here with you? Me, hotshot athlete, ruining the town’s good girl?”
“She doesn’t have roses,” she muttered, knowing she was missing Tom’s point but not caring. She didn’t think Mrs. Petersend would look over here, but even if she did, she had long since ceased to care. He’d pleasured her so thoroughly moments ago, but all she could think about was getting there again, feeling the hypnotic release that only he seemed to know how to unleash in her.
“Whatever. She’s got something, and she’ll be out there, puttering around in her garden, probably wondering what that nice Sarah Dudley is doing on her evening off.” His voice, taut and breathless, hummed low in her ear, sending a shiver down her spine. “She’ll look over, maybe wondering if you’re grilling out, or on the patio, having a glass of wine, and she’ll see this.” He punctuated that last word with a particularly wicked shove, and she let out a cry, bracing one hand against the nearest cabinet.
“What would you do if you knew she was watching?” His thrusts slowed, nearly stopping. She stirred her hips, turning her head restively, trying to get him to resume, but he only chuckled and tightened his arms around her. “Would you tell me to stop?”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
“All you have to do is say so. I’ll go back to my side of the apartment and no one will ever know. I don’t have to come back if you don’t want me to. Nobody will tell your dad. You won’t have to worry. Is that what you want?”
“No,” she said immediately. She barely knew her own name at the moment, but she knew she didn’t want him to stop. Ever. The prospect of Tom leaving her body and leaving her apartment made her feel unbearably empty. “I don’t want you to go. I want you here.”
There. Let him take that as he wanted. Here in her body. Here in her apartment. Here in Plainview. Any of those things would be true.
He made a low sound and took up a steady rhythm. Before long, he had her on the cusp of ecstasy again. He slid his hands around to splay across the soft skin at the base of her belly, and she tumbled over the edge with a cry. He followed moments later with a groan.
His harsh breath rasped in the silence of the room. She let her head slump against his shoulder, waiting for her body to cool and her heart to stop pounding. Lassitude crept through her veins, fine and mellow. They stood like that for some time, his arms loosely around her hips, in the deepening dark of twilight.
He pushed the heavy fall of her hair to the side and lowered his lips to her ear. “I want to take you on a date.”
“A date?” The languor seeping through her body didn’t allow for logic.
“Yeah, you know. A date. Pick you up at eight. Don’t be late. That kind of thing. Where do the local guys take their girls in Plainview?”
Their girls? Was she his girl? Her heart pulsed. “I don’t think we want to go to the movies and Village Pizza afterward.”
“Why not? Sounds like fun.”
“I don’t think we’d get a lot of privacy.” She felt the tension creep back into his body.
“I thought we were done being secretive.” He pulled free, and she felt the loss of his heat like an injury.
“I don’t mean I want to be secretive, but this is a small town, and you’re the biggest thing in
it in a long time. If you show up at the local movie theater with you on my arm, we’ll be stared at like freaks in the carnival.”
“We went to the All-Star party together.”
“That was different. Everyone there was team personnel.”
“So?”
“So, they knew us, and they knew we weren’t a couple. Trust me, if we go out in Plainview together, we’ll be a curiosity.”
“Ah, I see.” He relaxed against her back. His hands rubbed her shoulders in a motion that made her want to melt into him completely. “What could we do? Something public, but not too much in the spotlight.”
She should say no. They were doing fine, meeting after dark in her half of the duplex, texting each other in stolen moments. She couldn’t deny it felt sordid at times, though, and not in a sexy-secret kind of a way.
After a moment, she nodded. “Let me think about it. I can come up with something.”
His arms tightened around her. “That’s the right answer,” he whispered.
She clasped her hands over his. She hoped so.
Chapter Fifteen
Leaning into the mirror with her eyes wide, Sarah put on another coat of mascara. Her eyes flickered to the clock on the bathroom wall. Tom should be here any minute. She’d made the plans, not telling him a thing other than to dress casually.
“Like what, shorts and a T-shirt?” They were in bed one night, sleepy and satisfied, her head cushioned on the swell of his hard pec.
“Well, maybe, but like nice shorts and a nice shirt. Not something you wear to go jogging.”
“Nice shorts? What are those?”
God, men were so hopeless sometimes. “Like the kind with a zipper, not the kind with elastic.”
“Oh. I can do that.”
Good thing he was hot. She snuggled closer into his side.
“The shirt shouldn’t have any dirty sayings on it. Preferably no sayings, actually.”
“Give me enough credit for that at least.” He’d rolled over on top of her then, and she’d quit thinking about how clueless guys could be sometimes.
She dusted some loose powder over her nose. Tracy had sewed her a lovely floral sundress from materials she’d bought at the local craft store. Once again, her assistant had refused any money for the work. “It’s what friends do for each other,” she’d said.