Second Thoughts: A Hot Baseball Romance

by Mindy Klasky

  Taking a steadying breath, she typed, “You never did tell me your idea of a perfect first date.”

  There was a pause before another chime told her he’d responded. “There’s no such thing as a perfect first date. We’re always too aware of the potential. Too afraid we’ll fail.”

  “That’s a cop-out!”

  “Dinner,” he wrote, so quickly that she laughed out loud. He followed up with, “We’ll skip dessert and find a place with live music, not to dance, but to listen. And after listening…”

  He trailed off, but she had no problem completing the thought in her own mind. After listening, he’d ask her back to his place. She’d refuse, of course, because she had a babysitter waiting.

  She tried again. After listening, they’d head to his car, where they’d make out like a pair of hormone-crazed teenagers.

  Not a lot better. All right, then… After listening, she’d invite him back here.

  But Olivia would be here. Olivia, who’d never met one of the men she’d dated—not a huge sacrifice on Jamie’s part, because not one of those dates had progressed to a second or third or, God-forbid, fourth night out, but still…

  “How am I doing so far?” RoadWarrior wrote.

  She shook her head. She was going to lose him if she couldn’t even concentrate long enough to respond to his message. “Not bad,” she said. “Maybe we could start at a museum before dinner. Or an art gallery.”

  A pause, and she wondered if she’d blown it. He clearly was waiting for her to come up with some sexy after-dinner fun. Hell, she wanted to come up with some sexy after-dinner fun, even if she blushed just thinking about typing the words. He finally responded, “I don’t know anything about art. But you could teach me. And after listening…”

  She laughed. “You’re incorrigible!”

  “Pretty much,” he typed.

  Once again, though, she deflected. “What are you doing up at this hour?”

  “Clearing through the backlog of things I didn’t get to because of that work trip. You were at the top of the list.”

  He could be lying through his teeth. “I bet you type that to all the girls.”

  “Only the ones who kept me distracted the whole time I was traveling. I’m going to find out about that favorite body part, you know. That favorite position, too.”

  Type! she told herself. Something flirty. Something funny. She stared at the blinking cursor on her screen. Absolutely nothing came to mind.

  After an eternity, where she imagined him signing off, pictured him creating an entirely new profile so she’d never be able to track him down, saw him leaving TrueLove behind forever because she was such a loser, he wrote, “Then again, I could just be polite. Why are you up so late?”

  Her rush of gratitude was nearly as disturbing as the sexual stirrings he’d awakened in her restless body. “Long day today,” she typed. She couldn’t tell him about Nick, though. No guy wanted to hear about an ex. She improvised. “I had a dispute with a…” she hesitated before she chose an innocuous word. “…colleague. He wants access to some of my work, and I don’t trust him with it. I agreed, but now I’m having doubts.”

  “You have to go with your instincts,” he wrote back immediately.

  “I know, but it’s complicated.”

  “Your instincts take the complications into account.”

  Wow. His words were so simple, so straightforward. Just reading them made her feel more powerful. Her instincts had always been good where Olivia was concerned. She’d agreed to let Nick see their daughter because she knew that ultimately the meeting was best for Olivia. She could own that decision. She should own it.

  “Thanks,” she typed. “Just reading your words makes me feel better.”

  “That was my goal,” he wrote. “Now about that body part…”

  “Right now?” she typed. “Right now, I’m liking my fingers. Because they’re letting me talk to you.”

  “Huh,” he said. “I can think of better things for your fingers to be doing.”

  She blushed hard. She’d fallen into that one, completely unexpectedly.

  “Too soon?” he typed after a painful minute.

  “Too late,” she clarified. And when she caught a yawn against the back of her throat, she realized she wasn’t even lying. “I’ve got to be up in three hours.”

  “Note my restraint in not commenting about my being up,” he typed.

  “But you’re thinking about restraints,” she fired off.

  “Now I am.”

  “Good night,” she typed, hitting Return firmly.

  “Yeah,” he typed. “It has been. A lot better than I thought it would be when I logged on. Sweet dreams.”

  “Why be sweet?” she typed. “Dreams are the best place to be bad.”

  “You are determined to keep me from sleeping tonight, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure out something. Maybe a little … exercise before you hit the hay.”

  “Is that an offer?”

  “Good night,” she typed again, and this time she logged off, because she knew exactly how tempted she was to continue playing his game. A few more words back and forth, a couple of wicked suggestions… She slipped one exploring hand beneath her robe.

  No. It was time to get to bed. Olivia would be awake far too soon. But Jamie wasn’t even surprised by the delicious temptations served up by her dreams.

  ~~~

  Wednesday afternoon, Jamie was back at the ballpark. Josh Cantor, the team’s charismatic third baseman, looked a little bit like a modern-day pirate as he posed for his pictures. He’d broken his nose in high school, and the resulting imperfection gave him a dangerous look.

  The Rockets were using the off season to update restaurants at the park. After getting by for years with a swarm of fast-food offerings, they’d decided to add something high-end. Construction was already pretty far along, but with unfinished walls and dangling electrical wires, the space looked primal, savage.

  And that was perfect for Josh’s calendar shoot. Jamie had him pose against a raw hole, a gaping section where gypsum board had been torn to shreds. The reflectors were positioned to make the setting eerie and ominous.

  A stiff breeze whipped through the site, and Jamie’s fingers were chilled. She worried a little about Olivia, who had been rescued from school and was sitting in a sheltered corner. The little girl seemed oblivious to the cold as she completed her Language Arts homework, circling correct answers and using a box of sixty-four crayons to color in the worksheet.

  Jamie returned her attention to the handsome third baseman. “Josh,” she said. “Keep your chin down.”

  He followed her direction for about thirty seconds before his attention strayed back to the construction site. He shook his head, just as Jamie fired off a rapid quartet of shots. Oh well. At least she was only wasting time, not film.

  But she wasn’t getting the photos she needed, the ones her client deserved. “Um, Josh?” She tried again.

  He shrugged his broad shoulders and looked sheepish. “I’m sorry. I can’t help looking at what they’re doing here. I’m trying to get some pointers for my own place.”

  Jamie seized on the conversation, hoping she could get the guy to relax enough that she could take some decent shots. “You own a restaurant?”

  “Nor yet. But I’m going to. Sort of an investment thing, if I ever pull the financing together.”

  Jamie made sympathetic noises as she moved to a better angle. “Okay,” she said, “chin down. Forehead toward me.” She actually got half a dozen good ones before the third baseman sighed and looked away again.

  Jamie bit her tongue in frustration, but her chiding remonstrance was cut short by another gust of wind. It did more than chill her. It made Josh’s hair stand on end. A Dennis the Menace tuft stuck up as if he were some sort of plastic toy.

  “Robert?” Jamie called in despair.

  “I’m on it,” he said, rushing in with two different cans of hair-c
are products.

  As Jamie stepped back in exasperation, she heard a cheerful voice call out, “Hey there, Red!”

  Nick. She knew his voice without turning around.

  Olivia’s face brightened when she looked up from her homework but she sounded very matter-of-fact when she told Nick, “My Grandpa calls me that.”

  Jamie stiffened. Of course her father called Olivia “Red”. He’d used the name for Nick the instant they’d met, that freshman fall when she’d dragged her first serious boyfriend home for Thanksgiving. For the past six years, when her father had referred to Olivia by the nickname, Jamie had laughed. Now, she felt like her father had betrayed her, had forced her into acknowledging a relationship she wasn’t ready to proclaim publicly.

  Silently, pleadingly, she looked across the construction zone. Nick met her eyes for a heartbeat before he said to their daughter, “Your Grandpa is a very smart man.”

  Olivia giggled. “You don’t even know him!”

  Jamie’s belly clenched. She waited for Nick to tell her secret, waited for her entire world to come crashing down.

  Nick shrugged. “Anyone who would call you Red is smart in my book. People call me that all the time. You can call me that. People with red hair need to stick together.”

  Olivia wrinkled her nose. “My hair isn’t really red. It’s orange.” She illustrated her point by selecting two specific crayons from her box.

  Nick nodded seriously. He might have been considering the issue for the very first time. “I guess people say ‘red’ in case they want to write a poem about us.”

  “A poem?” Olivia cocked her head at an inquiring angle.

  “You can rhyme a lot of things with ‘red’. But what would you say after, ‘Olivia’s a lovely girl; her hair is bright, bright orange?’”

  She laughed. “That can’t be a poem! Nothing rhymes with orange!”

  “One word does.”

  “Nuh-uh. Ms. Robertson says orange doesn’t have any rhyme in the dictionary.”

  Nick shook his head like he’d just been told the saddest story in the world. “Your teacher doesn’t know about ‘florange’ then.”

  “Florange?”

  “It rhymes with orange.”

  “But what does it mean?” Olivia’s eyebrows drew together in distrust.

  Nick drew himself up very straight, and he folded his hands behind his back like an old-fashioned student at a spelling bee. “To hit somebody over the head with a pillow.”

  Olivia giggled. “That’s not a real word!”

  “It is,” Nick said seriously. “I florange. You florange. He, she, it floranges.”

  “Mommy!” Olivia called. “Is florange a real word?”

  Jamie couldn’t say when she’d started grinning. An actual laugh tickled at the back of her throat as she saw Nick’s earnest appeal. “I don’t know, sweetheart. If Mr. Durban says it’s a word, then it must be one. Mr. Durban reads a lot of books, and he knows a lot of words. That’s why they call him the Professor.”

  “What’s a professor?” Olivia addressed her question to Nick.

  “It’s like a teacher. For people in college.”

  Olivia nodded, obviously accepting that Nick was a genius. “If you’re a professor, then what’s the hardest word you know how to spell?”

  Nick considered the question with complete seriousness. He stroked his chin, running his fingers over a few days of scruff. The gesture tweaked a cord deep inside Jamie. Her fingers curled, and she wanted to be the one running her hands over his cheeks, feeling the harsh velvet of his new beard.

  “Hardest word,” Nick said, obviously unaware of the effect his studious look was having on Jamie. “Diamond.”

  “Diamond! I can spell that!” Olivia was bursting with pride.

  “Do you know why it’s the hardest?”

  The little girl shook her head.

  “Because diamonds are the hardest thing in the world. The only thing hard enough to cut a diamond is another diamond.”

  Olivia laughed. “I didn’t mean the hardest thing. I meant the hardest word to spell. ‘Turquoise’ is a lot harder. It has a Q-U, even though it sounds like K.”

  Nick nodded, looking impressed that she knew the word. Before Jamie could hear his response, though, Robert cleared his throat behind her. “Jamie? We’re ready.”

  And by the tone in his voice, he and Josh had been ready for quite some time. Apologizing, Jamie turned back to the matter at hand—to capturing the Rockets’ third baseman for the calendar.

  She got in a few dozen pictures before another gust of wind cut them short. This time, the stiff breeze caught a flap of plastic, tearing loose the impromptu tarp.

  “Holy sh—“ Josh caught himself before he completed his exclamation. “Crap,” he amended, with an apologetic glance toward Olivia.

  Jamie followed his gaze. Nick had reacted to the windblown debris before the rest of them. He’d sprung in front of Olivia, spreading his arms around her and stiffening his back, as if to keep her safe from a massive cave-in. The little girl chattered on obliviously, something about her fall choir concert, about a solo she had in a song about acorns.

  Jamie watched Nick relax as he realized the threat was past, that nothing was going to harm Olivia. His voice sounded perfectly normal as he asked some question about the synonyms Olivia had circled in blue.

  “Okay,” Jamie said, fighting to keep her nerves from her voice. “We’ve done as much as we can for today. Let me take a look at these shots back in my office, Josh. If we need more, we can come back on a day when the weather’s more cooperative.”

  The ballplayer gave her an easy smile. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Just let me know. I’ll be around. Nothing else to do in the off season.”

  She grinned back. He might be distractible, and that broken nose might make him look like a tough guy, but he was a sweetie at heart.

  As Josh headed out the door, Robert started scurrying around, collecting the photographic equipment with his usual efficiency. Jamie thumbed through several dozen pictures on her camera. Nothing was perfect. Nothing was exactly what she wanted. But maybe with some cropping here… Or some serious retouching there…

  She was deep in thought considering the best of the options when she heard a loud greeting: “Professor!”

  Jamie looked up in time to see a guy in work boots and a hardhat cross the site. He held out a beefy hand toward Nick. “Jerry Strothers,” he said by way of introduction. “I’m the contractor on the restaurant job here. Just stopping by to see how far my guys got this morning.”

  Nick shook hands easily, slipping into casual baseball talk—what he was working on in the off season, how the team was going to rebuild before spring. Olivia followed the conversation with eagle eyes, as serious as if she were a seasoned baseball scout.

  Strothers finally noticed the peanut gallery. With a broad smile, he asked, “Is that your daughter, Nick?”

  ~~~

  Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw Jamie freeze.

  It would be so easy to say, “Yes.” He could make everything public. He could force her hand, get them all past this silly game-playing.

  But he couldn’t do that to her. Not if he wanted to rebuild anything that resembled a normal, healthy relationship between the two of them. He’d said he would wait, and he’d keep that promise. For a while longer, at least.

  He forced an easy smile and said, “She belongs to Jamie Martin, the photographer over there.” He nodded toward Jamie and her assistant, who were picking up their equipment. When Strothers looked skeptical, Nick said, “Olivia and I are friends because we have the same orange hair.”

  As he’d planned, the little girl laughed. And Nick was able to shift the contractor’s attention. “So, we’re finally going to have a real restaurant here, huh?”

  “So they say. Some big shot chef from New York, cooks French food. His people call a dozen times a day. He’s a real pain in the—” The guy noticed Olivia’s curious gaze, a
nd he trailed off uncomfortably. “Real pain,” he said, as if that made perfect sense. He muttered a couple more things about the project and then went off to take some measurements along the far wall.

  Nick turned his full attention back to Olivia. “Okay, Red. Pack up your homework. It looks like your mother’s getting ready to leave.”

  He watched the earnest attention she paid to her papers, making sure that each one was nestled in her backpack without getting creased. She added her crayons with the same care, and she bit the tip of her tongue as she eased the zipper closed with expert precision. Only when she’d finished did she look back at Nick, blinking those green-on-green eyes that he saw every time he looked in his own mirror.

  “You should talk to my mommy,” she said.

  “About what?” He kept his voice as light as possible.

  “You can be my new Lauren.”

  “Your what?” He wondered if he’d mis-heard.

  “My Lauren. My babysitter. The real Lauren got hurt in a car crash, but it wasn’t her fault. Nobody meant to do anything wrong.”

  “Sometimes accidents happen,” he agreed solemnly.

  “You’re fun,” Olivia said. “You’d be a good Lauren.”

  “Thank you,” he said, telling himself he was an idiot for feeling so pleased. “But I don’t think your mom wants me to take Lauren’s place.”

  He got the tone right. At least Olivia didn’t react like he’d said anything out of the ordinary. Instead, she picked up her backpack and slipped the straps over both her shoulders. “Bye, Red!” she said, and then she ran across the construction space.

  Jamie looked up as she caught Olivia’s exuberant hug. Even across the restaurant, with the wind whipping through and the afternoon light slipping toward sunset, he could read the expression on her face. There was gratitude there, a quiet thank you for the way he’d handled Strothers. There was amusement, too; she was pleased that Olivia had enjoyed herself.