Team Player

by Julianna Keyes

  “Ah,” she sighed, linking her fingers over her stomach as she settled in her seat. “Victory.”

  Ty’s head thunked against the wall behind him. “It’s rigged. The game is rigged.”

  “Everyone knows you have to park behind the knitting club,” Gwen said. “Your research should have told you that.”

  “I didn’t research—” he started, breaking off when she looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “I just did some light reading.”

  She laughed, and it was impossible not to see how her lashes cast spiky shadows over her cheeks, the way her lower lip dipped in the middle, making it look plush and soft. And welcoming.

  Her eyes flickered up and locked on his, an invisible current shooting between them, pulling them inexorably closer when there was so little distance to begin with.

  Suddenly the game beeped, jarring them apart. DO YOU WANT TO PLAY? it asked in large red letters.

  “Um,” Ty said, struggling to get enough air into his lungs. “Do you—”

  “We should—” Gwen said at the same time, then neither finished their sentence. “Let’s play something else,” she said finally. “Something with more...air.”

  “Right. Sure. Air. Yes. Of course.”

  Ty’s body groaned as he unfolded himself from the too-small space, rolling his shoulders and plucking his T-shirt away from his chest. The arcade was air conditioned, but he was pretty sure it would be hours before he started to cool down.

  Gwen got out too, and then they were faced with three pool tables, each more promising than the last.

  “Pool?” Ty suggested.

  “Mini golf,” Gwen blurted.

  “Huh?”

  “Outside. Mini golf. Fresh air and...dinosaurs.”

  Ty frowned and turned to peer out the tinted windows. He’d seen the mini golf signs but hadn’t paid much attention to the course, which did indeed appear to have a prehistoric theme.

  “Dinosaurs it is,” he said, as they returned to the front to get clubs and balls.

  They walked out into the bright sun and the sweltering heat, and suddenly the cheesy course, with its Jurassic-sized fake trees and boulders and dinosaurs with their scales peeling away, looked much more appealing for all the shade the oversized props provided.

  It was still and quiet behind the building, no one visible on the course as far as they could see, which wasn’t much, considering the fake landscape. The only sound beyond their flip-flops on the scuffed green turf was a half-hearted water feature, the weakly bubbling creek disappearing into the undergrowth ahead of them.

  They slipped into the shade and Ty gestured for Gwen to take the first shot, scribbling their names on the tiny scorecard with an even tinier pencil. He caught her smiling as she watched his big fingers struggle with the pencil, then tried not to ogle her ass when she bent down to position her ball on the scraped spot where the turf met the gravel pathway.

  “Hole in one,” she predicted, squinting at the hole eight feet away, its only obstacle a large, chipped dinosaur egg.

  She took her shot, the ball bouncing off the edge of the wooden border, ricocheting gently off the side of the egg and...rolling past the hole, missing by half an inch.

  “Ooh,” Ty said. “You missed.”

  Gwen cut her eyes at him. “The course is uneven.”

  He tried not to laugh as he set up his own shot. “I see.” He peered at the hole and positioned his feet.

  “I know you went to the hospital,” Gwen said.

  Ty’s hands jerked, he swung too hard, and the ball sailed over the wooden frame and into the base of a giant hosta, its massive leaves hugging its newest possession. Ty glared at Gwen in disbelief.

  “Oh,” she said, batting her eyes. “Sorry. Bad timing?”

  He walked over and snatched up his ball. “If you want to play dirty, we can.”

  “I don’t need to play dirty,” she said, nodding back toward the arcade. “I win fair and square.”

  “Those games are fake,” Ty said, repositioning his ball. “Mere simulations. This is the real world.”

  Gwen snorted out a laugh and he tried to hide his as an unseen dinosaur roared somewhere down the course.

  “So real,” she agreed.

  This time she let him take his shot in peace, and as payback, his ball bumped neatly against the far wall and rolled back for a hole in one.

  “That’s three,” Gwen pointed out as she strolled down to tap her ball. “You have two penalty points for hitting the ball out of bounds.”

  “You cheated—”

  “And an extra penalty shot for arguing.”

  He coughed out a laugh. “That’s not how this works.”

  Ty had argued with people before. Players, coaches, umpires, fans—and never before had he known he was going to lose so badly. But he didn’t mind. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone out with a woman where it wasn’t about fancy clubs and pricey gifts and a chance to see their search engine rankings soar even higher.

  “Tell me about the hospital,” Gwen prompted as they collected their balls and slipped deeper into the fake jungle to find the second hole. An angry raptor straddled the turf, plastic teeth bared.

  Ty placed his ball. “What about it?”

  “Why’d you go?”

  “To be nice.”

  “You told me you wouldn’t.”

  Ty took a practice swing. “So you wouldn’t send photographers.”

  “You could have just said, ‘I’ll go, but don’t send photographers.’”

  “I’m not sure you know how your job works. And how do you even know I went?”

  “Because the hospital called to thank me for helping make a young man’s dream come true.”

  Ty hit the ball. It bounced off the raptor’s foot and rolled into the corner. “What’d you tell them?”

  “That I was happy to help.”

  Ty smiled as she lined up her shot. “Maybe you do know how your job works,” he said.

  Gwen hit the ball, then watched as it bounced off the same foot and rolled into the same corner. She joined him there, a fake palm tree at their backs, the stream trickling along at the base. “Why don’t you want your picture taken?” she asked. “Your face is already plastered all over Charleston.”

  Ty used his club to nudge the ball away from the wall. “Because it wasn’t about me,” he said. “And sometimes the PR team forgets that.” He tapped the ball gently, and it rolled past the hole into the opposite corner. He muttered a curse and crossed over to knock it in. “And maybe I’m tired of seeing my face everywhere.”

  “Since when?”

  She was asking in jest, but he was serious. “Since October,” he replied. “Since Connor...left. Since I realized there was more to life than baseball and money and being famous.”

  Gwen looked at him in surprise. “What’s the more?” Now she was the one being serious. He had it all, after all. What more could he want?

  He shrugged, though he was starting to see the answer. How after months of solitude at his cabin, he’d thought that was the solution, but now that he was back on the team, around his friends, around people, he was finally figuring out that more might be something he couldn’t buy.

  “Guess I’ll know it when I see it,” he said, watching her.

  She held his stare for a moment, processing, then bit her lip and took her shot. The ball dropped neatly into the hole.

  “Well,” she said. “It was nice of you to visit the hospital.”

  “You’ve probably noticed that I’m a very nice person.”

  Gwen laughed. “You’re all right.”

  They bumped elbows as they walked to the next hole, but either the path was too narrow for them to move apart or nobody moved, and their upper arms brushed, too, followed by the glance of a hip, a leg.

  Ty had never experienced foreplay in the presence of a stegosaurus missing one eye and two of its plates, but that wasn’t the only thing that was different. He felt different. He didn�
�t feel like Tyler Ashe, Thrashers shortstop, underwear model, watch vendor, sunglasses hawker, and coconut water spokesperson. For the first time in months he felt...normal.

  “We should bet something,” he said as Gwen arranged her ball on the chipped turf.

  She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll bet five dollars. On the whole game.”

  “It doesn’t have to be money.”

  Now she raised her other eyebrow. “Oh?”

  Her mouth quirked, and he could almost see her brain waging the battle between common sense and whatever this was between them. Her gaze flicked past his shoulder, then somewhere else in the brush, then a third spot, her brow furrowing. Ty turned to see whatever she was seeing, but there was nothing there except a swarm of oversized plastic wasps dangling from a palm leaf.

  “What—” he started to ask, then stopped himself as the answer dawned. She wasn’t looking for other golfers; she was looking for anyone ready to jump out of the bushes and thrust a nondisclosure agreement in her face. “They’re not here,” he said.

  She refocused on him. “Who’s not?”

  “My lawyers. They’re not here. I canceled that part of the, uh, agreement.”

  “The nondisclosure stalker guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  Ty exhaled. The day she’d yelled at him hadn’t exactly been his finest moment, but at least he’d gotten something out of it. He’d realized that five years earlier he might not have cared if someone was offended by the NDA. Now he did care. Now he wanted someone who would care. “Because I know you won’t tell,” he said finally.

  She blinked. “You know—?”

  “Well. I’m hoping.”

  They both knew he wasn’t hoping she wouldn’t tell. He was hoping she’d be interested in doing something they then wouldn’t tell anyone else about.

  Now she was definitely blushing, and his face was hot, too. He’d skipped all the awkward teenage dating years, focusing solely on baseball, on getting out of foster care, on making something of himself, for himself. There’d been girls who were interested when he started getting popular in high school, but he’d only kissed a couple, too worried about doing anything that might jeopardize his career. It was only when he’d signed a major league contract that he’d started to relax a little—breathe a little—when Connor had told him to enjoy his life a little—that he’d dared lower his guard enough to seriously start to consider the opposite sex. Turns out, they’d been considering him for quite a while, and the floodgates opened. He’d never really had to try that hard to find someone to spend time with. Never asked them to go mini golfing or watched a baking show or lost at Taxi-Kart—twice. Never wanted to.

  “Anyway,” he said, clearing his throat awkwardly. “It’s your shot. And it looks like the stegosaurus’s tail is blocking the—”

  Gwen rose onto her toes and kissed him. Pressed those too-soft lips to his and just left them there, no tongue, no groping hands, no filthy promises. Just a kiss. Until he couldn’t take it anymore and he opened his mouth, just a tiny bit, and she made a sound, and the next thing he knew there were tongues and groping hands, and perhaps a few unspoken filthy promises.

  Maybe it was the way she smelled, or the way her breasts pressed against his chest, or how her fingers gripped his biceps or her breath fluttered past his ear or how she stepped on his toe when he pulled her closer. Maybe it was all those things and a million more things he couldn’t name that made this the best kiss of his life. Or maybe it was the fact that this was a dinosaur golf course and they kept bumping their knees with the clubs they still held, the reminder that they were in public and he was famous and neither one of them could afford to be caught buck-ass naked out there that made everything feel heightened, surreal and too real at the same time.

  They broke apart as the sound of high-pitched laughter filtered through the plastic jungle. The next golfers were too far to see them, for which they were lucky. Even fully clothed their lust was on full display. Gwen’s chest rose and fell, her skin flushed, eyes glassy. Ty turned his back to adjust himself in his shorts, combing his fingers through his hair where Gwen’s hands had left it messy. When he faced her again she was touching her lips, and she looked so tempting he was willing to run deeper into the jungle to do it all over again.

  “Why does that keep happening?” she asked, the words sounding like a wheeze.

  Ty could relate. His own chest felt too tight to speak. Like any time they touched the world ignited and everything around them burned away, leaving them the hottest, brightest part of the flame.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  He caught the fleeting look of surprise on her face, like she’d expected him to say it was always like that for him, that everyone he kissed felt that way. But that wasn’t the case. Whatever happened between them was...rare.

  “I shouldn’t—” she started. “I can’t—”

  “I know,” Ty said. “I know what’s at stake for you. And for what it’s worth, I’d sign every NDA in the world if it meant we could do that again.”

  “I—”

  “Because whatever came next would blow my mind, Gwen.”

  Her mouth, now open, clicked shut. Then she closed her eyes. “I know,” she said softly.

  “And I haven’t done that since October,” Ty added. “So I’d really like to.”

  Her eyes flew open. “What? You—”

  He shrugged. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  He could practically see the wheels turning in her brain, knew that there were so many parts of this idea that were terrible, and so many parts that could be incredible. But they were at an arcade, and then they were staying at the hotel with the entire team, any one of whom would recognize Gwen coming and going from Ty’s room.

  “Tomorrow night,” he said, pushing his luck just a little bit more. If she said no, he’d move on, forget her, forget this. If that were even possible.

  Her mouth formed a perfect O of surprise.

  “We fly home tomorrow evening,” he said. “Then we’re off the next day. Come over and we’ll see.”

  The O transformed into a thin line, but it wasn’t a displeased line, it was contemplative. Thoughtful. Weighing the pros and cons. The options. He wanted so badly to be one of her options.

  “I have to think about it,” she said.

  The answer made everything inside him grow tight and hot, somehow better than a yes. Like sex wasn’t a foregone conclusion, not a guarantee. That maybe he’d have to work for this a little. Earn it.

  He was always up for a challenge.

  CHAPTER 11

  OF ALL THE DAYS TO have a front row seat.

  Not quite twenty-four hours after Tyler Ashe had propositioned her, Gwen was sitting in the front row, third-base side, at Tropicana Field, doing her best not to squirm in her chair as Ty jogged back to the dugout. Even with sunglasses shielding his eyes, she could feel his stare, the question simmering in the air between them. Will you?

  His mouth quirked as he ducked into the dugout, and Gwen sipped her warm lemonade like there was anything on the planet that could possibly cool her raging hormones. And raging they were, furious that she hadn’t accepted Ty’s offer on the spot, stripped off her clothes and demanded that he take her right there on the golf course, next to the velociraptor nest. It was the dream she’d had for most of her adult life, minus the nest.

  But that, if she thought about it, was exactly the problem. This was a dream. One from which she could very easily wake and find herself fired. Fraternizing with players was strictly against the rules, and there was a reason so few non-field staff had access to the clubhouse. She’d been trusted with her role—or rather, it had been thrust upon her because there was no one else willing to take it—and abusing her privilege would be abusing Allison’s trust. And somehow over the past months she’d sort of grown to like her job.

  But not taking up Ty on his offer would be a crime against humanity.

  She really, rea
lly wanted him.

  He strolled into the on-deck circle and took a few practice swings as he watched Reed at the plate. The view from behind was almost better than the front. His shoulders stretched his uniform, his last name splayed across his back over the number eight, the same number Gwen had worn during her one ill-fated summer playing softball. She’d been ten years old and completely unathletic, but it was Marge’s cursing from the stands that had gotten them “excused” from the league. Gwen hadn’t really minded. She was a baseball fan, not a baseball player. But the memory made her smile, and she was still smiling when Ty glanced at her before striding to the plate, making her smile expand stupidly wide as she watched him.

  It was just a dream, she reminded herself.

  But when was the last time she’d had a dream like this?

  GWEN PACED IN FRONT of the empty visiting manager’s office, waiting for Strip so she could give him the talking points. She had to return to the hotel, grab her things, and get to the airport in time for her flight back to Charleston. Her stomach was roiling, her head was spinning, and she couldn’t blame her flushed skin on the Florida heat.

  Because so much of her life had been spent talking baseball with Marge, writing the talking points had never been a challenge. She always had something to say. But today her mind had remained stubbornly blank, an embarrassing amount of brain space dedicated to one man and his straight-forward offer. Come over and we’ll see.

  But the thing that got to her even more than the fact that Tyler Ashe had invited her to his place to “see” was the way he’d asked. The way his cheeks had flushed and his eyes had skirted away nervously, how he’d looked shy but brave at the same time. As someone whose job often involved putting a spin on things, she’d appreciated his directness. All the parts of her body appreciated it very much, and wanted to appreciate it even more.