by Pippa Grant
I stare at him a beat. Is he hinting at something? Does he know? All I’ve ever said to my teammates who get too curious—and few do—is that I don’t date during the season.
Cooper’s grin is turning into a smirk. “You do. C’mon, Elliott. Spill. What can we help you with? What gets your bat swinging?”
“Nothing I can talk about without cursing myself.”
“Jarvis says the same thing, but I got eyes. And I’ve got his back. You need help with anything, say the word. That’s what teammates are for.”
I will not be asking Cooper Rock for help with my virginity.
Keeping it or losing it.
He glances at his bare wrist, where a normal person would keep a watch. “Whoa, gotta run. Have to ask Coach something. Thanks for taking Beck a donut, Mac. You’re a peach.”
He turns and jogs off like we didn’t already do three miles on the sand.
And now it’s just me and Mackenzie.
And my hard-on.
And the near-certainty that I’ve been set up. Maybe Rock’s a good wingman after all.
She brushes her ponytail out of her face as a gust of wind picks up. “Play good today.”
“You busy after the game?”
Smooth? No.
But then, neither is she, and I like that about her.
She’s real.
It’s not like I’m going to take advantage of her and push myself on her if she’s not interested. Annoying as it was that she interrupted me and Ash—Ainsley last night, even I can admit that doing it by humming “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” was freaking hilarious.
I like hilarious.
Gonna need a lot of hilarious to survive this year.
She’s not answering. Just squinting at me, even though the sun’s more behind her, lighting her up like she’s the all-star baseball god and I’m an awkward geek trying to score with a woman out of my league.
Let’s be honest here.
If it weren’t for my bat, she would be out of my league. Pretty? Check. Friends with actual stars? Check. In possession of two delicious breasts and one most likely smokin’ hot pussy? I’m gonna go out on a limb and check that box too.
Her silence has me clearing my throat uncomfortably as I realize she doesn’t want to have to turn me down on an offer to hang out. “Right. You’re hanging out with your friend. I—”
“I’m free. But I don’t know—aah!”
She suddenly dives out of the way as a frisbee whizzes past inches from her ear. The donut bag goes flying, and she lands on her shoulder in the sand. I spin around as a group of guys in their early twenties come hustling our way. “Hey! Watch out, numb nuts.”
“Cranky-ass,” one of them mutters as he darts past me.
“Go get laid,” a second says.
Mackenzie squeaks, and I leap into action, squatting beside her and reaching out to help. “You okay?”
Our sandy palms connect, then our gazes lock.
Apparently I’m a sucker for blue eyes, because I can’t look away. Hers are bright as the sky on an early afternoon game in mid-July, when the heat’s on to keep our place in the standings, and while she’s jittery, there’s unabashed belief in the intensity of her silent plea. You can do it. You can do it for my team.
It’s the theme of the day.
We can do it. The team can do it.
I don’t want to be the asshole holding everyone back. But after this many seasons in the big leagues, and my entire adolescence before that indoctrinating me in the ways of the game, it’s hard not to be jaded, and it’s hard not to believe in curses, and it’s hard to have to help a team other than the team I was supposed to retire from in another five or ten years.
And it’s hard to keep—well, being hard with no relief aside from my own fist in sight.
Her hair whips around into her face again. I reach for it the same time she does, making our fingers connect and sand tumble off both of us.
“Here.” I hold her ponytail back from her face in one hand while I pull her to her feet with my other.
Her eyes go round. “The donuts!”
We both turn. I instinctively start toward the bag before she grabs me, and we scramble back.
An angry horde of seagulls is attacking the white bakery bag, ripping it to shreds and fighting over the donuts inside.
One squawks at us. Mackenzie scurries back another three feet, right into one of the guys playing frisbee.
“Watch it, lady,” he snaps.
I step toward him, but Mackenzie yanks on my hand and squares up to the jerk with lightning flashing in her eyes. “I hope a seagull poops on your head.”
He blinks.
She cocks a hip. “What? You’ve never heard of karma? You don’t own this beach. So quit acting like it. Your mother would be horrified, and if you have no respect for your mother, I hope the crabs on the beach aren’t the only ones you encounter today.”
I’m grinning as she starts marching away, our hands still connected, leaving me to follow her or make one of us trip on the beach again.
She has sand all up and down one side of her outfit, and I realize with a jolt that she’s wearing a Cooper Rock jersey.
Oh, hell.
It makes sense now. Rock wasn’t giving me a chance to talk to Mackenzie on my own. He’s probably lurking around the corner laughing his ass off watching me try to flirt with a woman he knows I don’t have a chance with.
I freeze and glare at her back. “You want to date Cooper.”
She turns on me. “What? No. No times a million. I can’t date a god.”
My eye twitches. “Cooper Rock is not a god.”
She gasps and snatches her hand out of mine. “How dare you.”
“What? He’s not.”
She closes the distance between us and pokes me in the chest with a pink-tipped finger. “Do. Not. Insult. Cooper. Rock.”
This anger building inside me is probably irrational, but irrationality isn’t enough of a reason for me to tamp it down. “You do. You want to date him.”
She sucks in a breath like she’s about to let me have it, because who the hell am I to have an opinion about who she dates?
I was trying to screw another woman while she was in my closet yesterday. She has no idea I’m even interested, and why should she?
As soon as she opens her mouth, though, she abruptly clamps it shut again. Two big nose-inhales and exhales later, she stops staring at my chest and lifts her gaze to mine.
Christ, those eyes.
They’re hypnotizing me.
Or maybe I should’ve gotten laid years ago. They’re just two eyeballs. Every human has them.
Hers are more like soul-sucking windows to another universe where I want to live, rather than simple eyes.
Wow.
I don’t know if I have issues, or if my issues have issues, but that was fucking sappy.
“Play good today.” She spins and walks away.
“That’s it? You’re not going to verbally eviscerate me? Not going to defend Cooper the God? You want his phone number?”
She doesn’t stop. Not until she reaches the edge of the parking lot, where she bends and picks up a pair of custom Chucks with the Fireballs logo on them, and then keeps stalking to a small coupe.
Something niggles at the back of my brain, something that I can’t quite identify, but something definitely suggesting I probably shouldn’t get involved with the Fireballs’ most obsessed, superstitious fan ever.
But I can’t stop watching her.
Who is she?
What does she do when she’s not at the ball field?
Is she here for all of spring training?
Does she live in Copper Valley? She must, if she’s the team’s biggest fan, right?
Is she independently wealthy, or does she have a day job? Does she have nutty siblings like I do? What does she do for the holidays?
I’ve met a lot of people in my career. A lot of obsessed fans. A lot of superstitious fans.
Hell, I’m a special level of obsessed and superstitious too.
I’ve never met anyone exactly like Mackenzie.
Or maybe that’s my dick talking. He’s not usually turned on by the uber-fanatical, yet here we are, both of us wanting to get closer to her.
As I start to head back to the compound, I feel something land in my hair.
A seagull squawks overhead, and all the guys playing frisbee crack up.
“Hey, asshole, my bird shit in your hair!” one of them calls.
I grit my teeth and start walking again.
I’ve gotten cock-blocked two days in a row, and now pissed off a woman I’m inexplicably attracted to. I’m playing for a record-setting team with more losses than practically any other professional club in all of sports history. I’m not where I wanted to be in my career or personal life now.
But you know what I do have?
I have training to do and a game to play.
I have a fucking job.
So that’s where I’m going.
I’m going to channel all of this frustration and go do my damn job.
9
Brooks
I’m so screwed.
It’s been ten days, and the Fireballs are mediocre, which might as well mean they still suck, and while I’m not exactly in a slump—I’ve been on base in more games than not, even if it took me a few games to get there after the party incident—I’m also not getting laid.
Not winning. Not scoring. Not banging.
With catching up on all the team photos and videos and promo spots that need to be filmed for between-inning entertainment, plus having one-on-ones with the coaching staff—all the things that are normally done before the games start in spring training—I haven’t had the kind of free time we usually get in the build-up to the season.
Then there are all the media calls.
So damn many media calls, because the Fireballs is the team everyone is watching this year, thanks to management’s massive, unrelenting public relations campaign, which is also eating into the free time that usually comes with spring training. And in all of my interviews, I put on my happy face and talk about opportunities and playing good ball and not believing in curses, because that’s what the job requires.
Baseball’s been a job for a lot of years now, but this year, it’s wearing on me.
It’s wearing on me so bad, the two nights I could’ve gone out to a real club, I crashed early instead and jacked off while thinking about blond hair and blue eyes and pink lips.
Don’t ask about the nights I went back to the other club.
So far, that’s not doing anything for the team either.
It’s spring training, Rock keeps saying to anyone who’ll listen.
Any other year, I’d agree with him. Spring training is when the coaches open the doors to guys from the minors to show what they’ve got and try to score a spot in the show. It’s when we test up-and-coming talent, and it’s when it’s normal to blow out one team one day, and then get blown out yourself the next.
But it’s the Fireballs.
The worst team in baseball.
Even with all the changes in the off-season, we’ve only won three of the last ten games.
It’s keeping me up at night—along with my lack of interest in sex with a woman at the moment, which is the one thing I should be able to go out and enjoy right now, for fuck’s sake, and I don’t like it.
But tonight, I’m putting it all behind me.
All of it.
Tonight, I’m on my way to the beach house that Tripp Wilson and Lila Valentine, team co-owners and soon-to-be husband and wife, have rented for the season. They’re hosting a cookout and the air outside their little villa is filled with the scent of grilling meat and the sounds of laughter.
Family’s invited, and some of mine arrived in town today. They beat me to the cookout, because they didn’t have to have a heart-to-heart with half the coaching staff after the game to discuss why I’m not hitting the ball better.
Long before Lila got involved with the Fireballs, she was friends with my sister and brother-in-law, Parker and Knox. She was at their wedding. All of my brothers hit on her, naturally, because she’s a redheaded bombshell. I keep texting to ask Parker if she’s here more for Lila than she is for me, which keeps getting me hilarious autocorrected messages that are probably meant to question everything from my manhood to my family loyalty, but actually suggest Parker’s incubating a family of turtle-squirrels in her ear.
Life would be dull without Parker’s phone.
Also in town from my family?
Trouble.
Of the best kind.
My brother Rhett’s a former SEAL. He hung up his night vision goggles to marry Parker’s friend Eloise, who’s a tatted-up punk chipmunk crossed with a nymphomaniac. The two of them made a side-trip to Copper Valley on the way down, since they’re both sort of self-employed these days and could juggle their calendars to find me an apartment up in Virginia for the regular season.
Both Parker and Eloise are pregnant, much to my mother’s utter joy, though I have my doubts about how thrilled she’ll be once Rhett’s kid starts talking like Eloise.
But Eloise isn’t the first person I hear when I reach the crowded tropical veranda.
No, that’s a voice that niggles at the deepest recesses of my mind and makes me stop short, because I know that voice. Swear I do. And not from pulling her out of my closet and getting yelled at by her on a beach ten days ago.
That voice sets my nerves on fire and makes my pulse buzz, and I shoot a look at Cooper Rock, who’s hovering near her.
Fucking Cooper Rock.
Guy gets more action off the field than half the rest of the team put together.
“You need to remove that echidna from voting right now.” Mackenzie’s voice is stronger than I’ve ever heard it, and I wonder if she talks to all baseball owners like this. She’s definitely not shy with an audience of players now, which makes my blood pressure spike as I wonder if she’s one of the women Cooper’s been banging in his off-hours, and how much she’s been around the team for all the progress she’s made.
“Right now?” Lila asks with a smile. She’s clearly undisturbed, but then, since she hit the team like a hurricane a few months back, ticket sales and press coverage are way up.
“How is a thing with a four-headed penis family-friendly?” Mackenzie’s in a vintage Fireballs T-shirt with Fiery the Dragon plastered to her chest. She points to the muscled beast on her breasts, even though she could point to the buttons on both her hat and her shirt now, and hello, cock twitch. “Fiery’s family-friendly. He doesn’t even have a penis because he’s not real. But this echidna? A four-headed penis. This is the sort of thing you research before you declare it a finalist in a mascot contest.”
“Wait, a four-headed penis?” Ah, there’s my sister-in-law. Eloise naturally has the voice of a six-pack-a-day smoker. She leaps into the conversation as she normally does, which is to say with all the energy of a squirrel on a five-hour energy shot. “Can a person get surgery to get a four-headed penis? Don’t get me wrong, Rhett’s thunder stick is my favorite toy, and it puts mortal willies to shame, but a four-headed dick? Dude. Wow.”
I catch sight of Parker, my awkward strawberry blond sister, squeezing her eyes shut and muttering something to herself. Knox is wincing beside her, and there’s Rhett with them too, smiling proudly under the military buzz cut he’s kept despite being officially done with SEAL life.
Mackenzie points at my sister-in-law while she turns a triumphant look to Lila. “See? That’s what people will be talking about all season if you insist on keeping that awful mascot option.”
Only Tripp Wilson appears horrified.
Poor guy’s obviously never had the Eloise experience before.
“You’re the drummer,” he mutters to her, which cracks me up as I approach their group. Parker and Eloise are half of a girl band that plays the juice bar scene in New York, and apparen
tly Eloise’s reputation precedes her.
“I bang a lot,” she confirms. “A. Lot. Wanna watch? Your brother did.”
“Eloise. He did not.” Parker gives Rhett a glare that’s either demanding he shut his wife up, or at least quit enjoying listening to her talk about banging so much. “Also, children are present.”
Eloise points to her stomach, where her baby bump isn’t showing as much as Parker’s is yet. “Duh.”
“I mean children of normal parents who would prefer not to have their kids’ vocabulary full of the world’s worst innuendos and euphemisms before they head to kindergarten.”
Eloise frowns like Parker’s words don’t compute. She has short spiky hair, more tattoos than the Fireballs team combined, and more piercings every time I see her.
She’s also a top-notch hacker who can do some crazy-scary things, but practices her skills exclusively in the name of social justice and only does illegal shit when it’s for a good cause.
She fits Rhett.
I’m happy for him, and also insanely jealous that he’s getting some every night.
And some freaky some at that.
“We’re not canceling the mascot contest,” Lila says to Mackenzie. “Those videos Meaty keeps sending of his adventures after running away are solid gold.”
Mackenzie frowns.
“And the work of someone unhinged,” Tripp chimes in. “We should’ve called the police.”
Now Mackenzie’s eyeballing him with something dawning, and not something good, but Lila waves away his concern. “Replacing that costume is worth every penny. No publicity is bad publicity, and Meaty’s up in the standings since he disappeared. I’m thinking the duck needs to go next. You think echidna penises are bad? Google duck penis sometime.”
Tripp chokes on his drink, and the two owners share a secret look.
Dammit.
I want a secret look-sharer. Is that too much to ask?
“I know about duck penises. That’s why I’m wearing this.” Eloise rips her shirt open.
“Not in front of the children.” I avert my eyes, because she’s flashed me one too many times. Usually on purpose.
Rhett shoves me in the arm. “She’s dressed, dumbass. Also, good to see you, baby brother.”