High Heat (Hard Hitters #1) (13 page)

“I always do.” Sarah kept her smile fixed. She couldn’t pretend this summons didn’t have something to do with Tom. She’d evaded her dad ever since the Kentucky road trip had ended, and obviously he’d had enough. How much did her father know? She didn’t know for sure, but with luck, she could bluff her way out of this without a full-blown confrontation. “Okay for me to go in?”

“Go right ahead. He and your brother are waiting for you.” Carole’s look made it clear that Sarah wasn’t in for a good time.

Crap. He’d invited her brother, too? Tracy hadn’t told her that when she’d mentioned the summons. This wasn’t good.

She rapped on the door and entered at her father’s command. She’d loved his office ever since she was a little girl. Photos of teams past and memorabilia covered the walls. Pictures of himself with three different Plainview mayors hung in a row over his desk. Framed autographs of big leaguers who had come up through the Thrashers organization were interspersed with family photos. All of the family pictures had Mom in them.

After she died, no one had ever had a family portrait done.

Her father sat behind his old walnut desk, with Paul in a chair before it. Their quiet conversation broke off as she entered, and she knew they’d been talking about her.

“Dad, Paul. How are you?”

“Hey, little sis.” Paul gave her a lopsided grin, and she smiled back. At least he was trying to make this easier for her.

“How was the road trip in Kentucky?” Her father gestured for her to sit.

She took the chair opposite Paul. “Good. We went 6–4 on the trip, as you know, and got a lot of interview requests.” She took a deep breath. “Mostly for Tom. I’m sure you saw his press conference. It lit up Twitter and got a lot of new followers for the team’s account.” No point in avoiding bringing up Tom’s name. Obviously he was the elephant in the room. Better to face it head on.

“I did see his press conference. Cocky son of a gun, isn’t he?”

It wasn’t praise, not coming from her dad, but she pretended it was. She smiled. “That he is. I’m sure Paul could tell you all about that.”

“I’d rather you tell me all about it.”

Her smiled faded. “What do you mean?”

“Did you enjoy your ride on the team bus?” Her father’s mouth was a tight, unsmiling line. Clearly they’d arrived at the reason for this little visit.

She took a deep breath. Managing her father was a fine art. She couldn’t let him intimidate her, but she had to remain respectful. Easier said than done. “It wasn’t a matter of enjoying it. The wives-and-kids bus had a breakdown and I had an event I needed to be at on time. It was the most logical choice.”

“You and our star pitcher made a scene in front of the entire team instead of you simply driving your car.” He leaned back in his swivel chair, fixing her in his high-beam stare.

“True, I could have taken my car, but it didn’t have enough gas for the trip.” He scoffed, but she continued, ignoring the pounding of her heart. “Frankly, I didn’t think it mattered. We charter a team bus for a reason: so that we can all work and travel together as a team on road trips. If we wanted, we could all make the players and coaches drive their own cars to the road games, but we don’t. We’re a team, and that’s the way we play. It’s the way we travel too.”

“It’s not the same thing, and you know it. The guys who ride on the team bus are players and coaches. Not marketing staff.”

“What about Paul?” She shot a look at her brother. “When he accompanies the team on a road trip, where does he ride?”

“On the team bus, as I think you know,” Paul answered. “Let’s get to the point, okay, and stop pretending. Dad’s objections to you riding the team bus stem from the fact that you’re a woman.”

“No kidding.”

“Apparently you’ve decided you know better for this team than I do,” her father said. “Ballplayers are a rough lot, Sarah. They’re trash-talking, foulmouthed. That Cord in particular.” His eyes narrowed, and he looked at her for a long time, as if weighing his words. “I don’t mean to shock you, Sarah, but I understand he’s quite promiscuous. He may have—” He stopped and cleared his throat, looking out the window onto the parking lot. Incredulous, Sarah watched as his cheeks reddened. “He may have designs on you.”

Oh, God. “Designs
.
” She bit the inside of her cheek hard. Paul shifted, propping his chin in one hand in what looked suspiciously like an effort to hide a smile.

“Of course I know you’d have nothing to do with Tom,” her father continued. “He’s not your style at all, and I know you already have a boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?” Huh? “Oh, you mean Rich!” Her father saw Rich as her boyfriend? Whatever Dad thought, he obviously didn’t yet realize she was involved with Tom. Relief made her so giddy, she nearly laughed.

“Of course I mean Rich.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re still seeing him, right?”

“Ah, we were never really serious.” Learning that he valued beef bourguignonne more than her had been the nail in the coffin of their already tepid “relationship,” for lack of a better word. She’d called him after the night of the All-Star party to tell him she only wanted to be friends, and he’d been surprisingly blasé about it, to her relief. She may not want to date him, but she didn’t want to hurt him either.

“Hmmm. That’s too bad. He comes from a nice family. Good character, that boy.”

And that pretty much summed up everything wrong with Rich. Even though he was thirty, no one balked at calling him a boy. Unlike Tom, who wasn’t much older, but could never be mistaken for anything other than a man.

She rose to her feet, not looking at Paul. “Dad, I can assure you, you’ve got nothing to worry about between me and Tom Cord.”

“See to it that I don’t.”

Outside of her father’s office, Paul put a hand on her arm. “Kinda surprised you didn’t get struck with a lightning bolt in there.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re lying and I know it.”

“I said Dad had nothing to worry about. Neither do you. It’s true. It’s none of your business.”

Paul shook his head. If he’d gotten angry, or raged, or told her what to do, she could have fought back. Instead, he just looked sad. Funnily enough, that got to her more than anything he could have said.

“I think that might have been the best yet,” Tom groaned, the pillow on Sarah’s bed muffling his speech.

“My skills are improving.” Sarah squeezed a little more baby oil into her hand and dug deep into the strong muscles of his shoulders, earning a bone-deep sigh from him.

Living in two halves of a duplex had turned out to be extremely conducive to carrying on a clandestine affair. She had a ready-made excuse as to why his rental car was outside her place, and he could sneak across the porch to her door under cover of darkness. All she had to do was remember to set the alarm and make sure he left before dawn, a parting that somehow seemed to be getting more difficult every day. Tom often lingered in her bed until the last possible moment, brushing kisses on her face and caressing her until her skin went up in flames. Unwise, maybe, but she couldn’t bring herself to chase him away.

Today, an off-day, he’d spent hours lifting in the Thrashers weight room. He’d come home sore and exhausted—not surprising after the punishing workout he’d put himself through—but Sarah couldn’t help wondering if it was all simple fatigue or if his elbow was still giving him trouble.

She wouldn’t ask, though. She would
not
ask. They were a temporary thing, not a relationship, and he’d made it clear he didn’t want to hear her opinion on the topic.

She shook off the thought and concentrated on giving him relief the only way she could, with her strong fingers. It was hardly a one-sided pleasure. She loved running her hands down the breadth of his broad back, feeling the smoothness of his skin, tracing over every swell of muscle and the knots of his spine. Leaning in, she put all her weight into easing the tightness of his lower back.

“Oh, God. That feels good.”

“It’s supposed to, silly.” Her lips curved. His phone chimed from where he’d put it on the bedside table with his keys, and instantly the large muscles in his back tensed up.

“Mind checking the readout for me?” He didn’t have to explain why. It might be The Call. The one from the White Sox front office. The one she’d secretly come to dread with all her heart.

No getting around it. He was going to leave her very lonely when he left.

“Sure.” It was hard to talk around her dry mouth. She wiped her hands on a towel and spun the phone to get a good look at the readout. A breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding escaped her. “It says it’s your mom.”

He rose onto his elbows and reached for the phone. “Yeah?” He pushed himself up to a sitting position and she stepped out of the room to give him privacy. In the kitchen, she got a chilled bottle of seltzer water out of the fridge and took a drink. She leaned against the counter, waiting for him to finish his conversation.

If they were a real couple, she wouldn’t have to leave the room when his mom called. If they were the real thing, she’d linger and maybe listen in, laughing as he rolled his eyes at something crazy his mom said.

But they weren’t a real couple, so she had to beat a diplomatic retreat, all the while wondering what was going on in there. Except for the time he’d reluctantly mentioned that he’d moved around a lot as a kid and wound up in Tampa, he’d told her nothing about his family or background before he’d attended college on a baseball scholarship.

After a few minutes, he came out of the bedroom, no longer on the phone, his glorious chest all covered up with a Thrashers T-shirt, dammit. “Everything okay?” She tried not to sound curious.

“Yep.”

Apparently he wanted things to continue this way, but
why
? She’d spilled the beans on her mother’s death and her father’s reaction, but he’d told her almost nothing about himself.

Had she made a fool of herself, pouring her heart out to him when he kept everything close to his vest?

“Do you talk to your mother a lot?”

“Sometimes.” He wandered to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water.

Okay. His stone wall remained firmly in place. Well, why not? Just because you were screwing some woman didn’t mean you had to tell her your whole life story, right? She’d known what she was getting into by sleeping with Tom, and she’d decided it hadn’t mattered. She needed to remember that.

Maybe cool detachment was the right way to go when you were having an affair. She didn’t know. She’d never had one. But dammit all, she wanted to know more about him, whether it was smart or not. What made him tick? What drove that endless competition machine he’d become? “You have any brothers or sisters?”

He looked at her a long time, like he wondered where all these questions were coming from, but finally he looked down, his expression shuttered. “Nope.”

Would she have to drag it out of him or what? The more close-lipped he became, the more she yearned to understand him. “What about your dad?”

“What about him?”

She bit back a sigh. Yes, apparently she would have to drag it out of him. “Do you have one?”

“Of course I have one. Everybody has one. You think I was hatched?”

“I’m beginning to wonder, actually. Is he still married to your mom?”

“Nope.”

“Divorced?” She wouldn’t give up until she’d gotten at least some kind of personal information about him, something more to help her understand him. Everybody knew he was a great pitcher who lived to win. Everybody knew he liked to party and chase girls.

She wanted to know more.

“Yeah.”

She crossed her arms and looked at him expectantly.

“When I was seven,” he added.
Finally.
He’d volunteered a fragment of information that she hadn’t had to pry out of him. Now they were getting somewhere.

“You mentioned you moved around a lot when you were young.”

“After my parents divorced, yeah. It was just my mom and me.”

Huh. They’d both been raised by a single parent. Interesting. At least she’d had her brother to lean on. Tom must have been lonely, especially if they’d been wanderers. “You get along with your mom all right?”

“Sure.” Putting his soda down, he moved behind her and slid his arms around her waist. The heat of his body enveloped her, and she caught a whiff of balsam. Her eyes drifted shut and she leaned against him, taking a deep breath to inhale him. Not the smell of his aftershave or soap, but him. The heat of his body, the feel of his body, his ineffable presence.

“I think you’re trying to distract me,” she murmured as his hand slid under her shirt to caress the soft skin of her belly.

“Is it working?” He pushed her hair aside and put his warm mouth against the side of her neck. Her body rose to attention, but she pulled away slightly and swatted his hand.

“No. I’d like to know more about you. Not the stuff everybody reads on Deadspin and TMZ. I mean the real you.”

He stiffened and straightened, his mouth set in a moody curve.

“Do you still see your dad?”

“No.”

“Can you answer in anything more than one-syllable words?”

“Yes.”

She scowled and crossed her arms. “So help me, Tom, if you don’t open up and tell me something about yourself, it’s over. I don’t like sleeping with a stranger.” He pulled away with a sigh.

The ultimatum hung in silence in the kitchen. She hadn’t planned on taking a hard line, but his stonewalling pushed her over the edge. She waited. What would his answer be? Maybe he’d have no answer at all. Obviously he hated talking about this stuff. Why should he make himself vulnerable for a girl he was only sleeping with for a couple of weeks? She bit her lip.

He leaned against the counter, sipping his water and looking down. What was so damn fascinating about her kitchen floor?

“My dad wasn’t what you’d call a family man,” he began, and the knot in her stomach eased a fraction. “He should have never gotten married or had a kid, basically. He got my mom pregnant her senior year of high school and they got married right after graduation. He was a couple years older.”

She waited, unwilling to interrupt his tentative confidence.

“I asked my mom once after the divorce if Dad would start dating again. A lot of my friends had stepmoms, and I wondered if I would get one too. She said, ‘It’s not like he ever stopped.’” He laughed, a dry rasp of a sound. “Like father, like son, I guess. It’s one reason I’ll never marry. I’ve seen the damage a guy leaves behind when he tries to be something he’s not.”

His eyes didn’t waver.

She swallowed the knot in her throat, but she didn’t need the warning. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t told herself every day since their affair began. She knew what he was and what she was to him—a diversion while he waited for The Call. For her, he was a walk on the wild side—an escape from the stultifying life she’d been living before he arrived. Nothing more.

If it sometimes seemed like more than that, maybe that was her problem. “Go on.”

“Anyway, a couple years after the divorce, Mom decided we needed a fresh start. She was big on the idea, like we could move away from our troubles. She never did figure out that troubles follow you around.”

“They have a way of doing that, don’t they?”

“That they do. We ended up in Tampa, which is a good place for a baseball player.”

“It’s a baseball hotbed.”

“Yeah, and there are a lot of coaches and pitching instructors down there because of it. I was a freshman in high school by that point and turning into a major league prospect.”

“When did you stop being in touch with your dad?”

“After Mom started moving us around. Before that, he missed his scheduled visits half the time and wasn’t much for paying child support, so I guess she figured, what the hell. Might as well do what she wanted to do and screw him. I can’t say he ever minded.”

“Did you?”

Tom stared at the clock on the kitchen wall, but she knew he wasn’t really seeing it. “I minded not having the kind of dad some of my friends had. I didn’t miss him personally.”

“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.