Stopping Short: A Hot Baseball Romance Read online

  And not a minute too soon. When he returned to the main room, she was pushing her chair back from the desk. “Where did I leave my phone?” she asked, sounding like they were in the middle of a conversation.

  “You can find it after breakfast.”

  “Let’s order room service. I have to call Chip.”

  “Room service will bring us soggy toast and cold eggs. I’m taking you out for a real meal. You can tell me the bad news over crab cakes and hollandaise.”

  That caught her attention, but she still shook her head. “It isn’t bad news, not really. Parker’s article is rough, but we knew it would be. The really amazing thing is how quickly the rest of the story’s spreading. I thought we’d have to wait until Monday round-ups at least, to see a kicker to your Charisma Index, but the line’s already starting to move.”

  He crossed to the dresser and pulled out clean underwear and socks. “I’ll take your word. Maybe I’ll even understand what you’re saying after coffee. But we aren’t going to get that far, if you don’t cover up a lot more than that shirt lets you hide.”

  She looked down like she was surprised to see she wasn’t wearing a suit of armor. “You’d get turned on by granny panties and a latex girdle.”

  “If you were wearing them, yeah. I would.”

  He loved that he could make her blush. And he wanted to prove to her that he was right. But just a tiny bit more, he wanted to stock up on some breakfast, some fuel to get him through the rest of what promised to be a long day. Most of all, though, he wanted to get her out of the hotel room before she could insist on finding her phone, before she could demand that they wait while she talked to Chip.

  They’d already lost out on screwing their brains out in the morning sunshine that streamed through the tall windows. He wasn’t going to give up on mimosas and Crab Benedict too.

  A few teasing kisses made his argument. That, and the promise to pick out clothes for her himself, to dress her and throw her over his shoulder and carry her through the lobby even if she kicked and screamed the entire way. She threatened to make him do all that. But he knew she was really as hungry as he was.

  ~~~

  Two hours later, Jessica twisted her fingers around Drew’s and said, “Ready to walk the gauntlet?”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  The lobby had a lot more people in it than when they’d slipped out earlier. She scanned past the usual tourists, barely acknowledging their existence. The handful of players were worth a bit more time. Nick Durban nodded at them from across the room, interrupting his conversation with Jamie Martin. The photographer turned and broadcast her own smile. They’d both obviously read the news, at least Parker’s main article, but they were making it clear they remained on Drew’s side.

  Other guys were oblivious. They were talking together, slouching like fraternity brothers, speculating on women or baseball games or what bar had the best happy hour. Good. Jessica’s job would have been a thousand times more difficult if she had to rebuild Drew’s connections to his teammates.

  They’d almost reached the elevator when she saw the one person she most wanted to avoid. Ross Parker was sitting in one of the hotel’s oversize Queen Anne chairs; she might have missed him entirely, if he hadn’t made a big show of folding up his print newspaper.

  Of course, the rustling newsprint should have been her first cue. There weren’t a lot of people reading the News & Observer in the Vista Linda lobby. At least not in print. Who knew what anyone was skimming on an electronic screen?

  “There’s the happy couple,” he said, offering his customary half-bow, as if they were squaring off for a duel. He made a show of checking out Jessica’s ring finger. “You never did get that setting fixed?”

  “What do you want, Parker?” Drew’s voice was sharp enough to cut glass.

  “To deliver a complimentary copy of today’s News.” He tried to hand over the paper he’d been reading. “It can be so hard to find a copy down here in the Sunbelt.”

  Jessica answered before Drew could say anything. “We’ve already read it, thank you.”

  “Excellent! Any comments?”

  “Off the record?”

  “Sorry.” The reporter shook his head mournfully.

  “Then no comment,” Jessica said flatly. She broke a fingernail stabbing at the elevator’s call button.

  “Hey,” Drew said, as soon as the doors closed behind them. “I wanted to say something to that asshole.”

  “Exactly.” At least she managed a smile for him. “And no matter what else happens today, I’ve earned my pay just keeping that from happening.” She let Drew slip his keycard through the lock on the door. “Now, may I have my phone back please?”

  “If you’ve already earned your pay…” He let his voice trail off suggestively.

  The thing was, she wanted to give in to him. She wanted to hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, to throw the covers off the bed, to explore every idea Drew had put into her head as he watched her at breakfast, as his fingers flexed on his silverware, as his eyes traced the syrup-laden waffle she’d carried to her lips, all the while his leg stretching out to brush against hers.

  This was so different from her early days with Kevin. Sure, back then she’d been awash in surprise and wonder and lots and lots of sex. Just like now.

  But with Kevin there’d always been something else. Some difficult emotion that she’d never managed to name. It wasn’t fear, not exactly, although she’d worried from the day she met him that she’d lose him in some horrible accident. And it wasn’t frustration, not quite. He’d been devoted to her sexual satisfaction, even if she’d sometimes felt he was keeping score in some gigantic ledger.

  She’d loved Kevin. She had. But he wasn’t a perfect man; no one was. And with the hard-won perspective of the past year, Jessica now realized that she’d tied her own tongue too much of the time they’d been together. She’d always let Kevin be Kevin, without ever asking him to consider being something different for her. She’d always stopped short of asking for what she needed.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Drew asked gently.

  She shook her head. “I’ll need that penny, and a lot more, if I don’t call Chip now. He’ll fire me before lunch if I don’t check in.”

  Drew heaved an exaggerated sigh and marched into the bathroom. He presented her with her phone and turned his on as well. She watched as he keyed in his password, heard him suck air between his teeth. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said automatically. But he followed up with, “Six calls from Williamson. He started at seven o’clock, and he’s called every fifteen minutes.”

  “Great,” she said, glancing down at the clock on her own device. “That gives you three minutes before Mother Hen checks in again.”

  “I’ll take my call on the balcony,” he said.

  She flashed him a grateful smile. “Thanks. You’ll still be able to hear Chip from there.” She waited until Drew had closed the sliding door before she returned the one call that waited in her own voicemail. She didn’t need to listen to the message. She knew exactly what he’d said.

  Chip answered on the first ring. “Jessica.”

  “Good morning.” She tried to match his perfectly neutral tone.

  “I’m certain there’s a reason you didn’t pick up when I called.”

  “It’s been a busy morning here. I just finished meeting with Parker.”

  Okay. That made a chance encounter in the lobby sound a lot more important than it had been, but she didn’t mind leading Chip astray. At least a little.

  “How is he reacting?”

  “About as you’d expect. He’s gloating. Looking for an official comment. I don’t think he’s read our counter-stories yet. He obviously has no idea about the ones that will go out tomorrow.”

  “What did Mr. Marshall say to him?”

  “Nothing at all. I controlled the situation, Chip.”

  “Excellent. Then you’ll have no problem
getting on the 5:30 tonight. You can report at the Status Meeting tomorrow morning.”

  Even though she’d been expecting the words, her belly clenched with anxiety. She glanced out the window to the balcony. Drew’s back was to her. He was staring out at the palm trees, holding his phone to his ear.

  “I need to be here, Chip.”

  Silence. But Chip didn’t do silence. She tried to muster her next argument, tried to pull her thoughts together. Staring at Drew’s butt wasn’t helping. Damn. Looking at the bed wasn’t any better.

  “Did you hear me?” she finally asked.

  “I heard you.” Her boss’s voice was softer than she’d ever heard it. Kinder. “Jessica,” he said. “I know how hard it was for you to come back to work. I know I pushed you—probably more than I should have—to go down to Florida. I understand that you want to stay there now. It feels safe. It feels secure. But if you’re going to make partner, you have to show you can balance a full workload. Balance, Jessica. Work on more than one client matter at a time. You’re through there. And we need you up here.”

  Dammit. If he’d yelled at her, her eyes wouldn’t have welled up. If he’d told her off, she’d have stiffened her spine and counted off all the reasons he was wrong.

  But he was being nice.

  And he was being right. She did have to prove to Image Masters that she could handle a full caseload. Sure, Drew’s situation had required full time work, right up to the moment Parker published his magnum opus. But now she’d put every card on the table, shoved all her chips into the pot. The only thing left to do was watch the hand play out. And that was enough dwelling on one overextended metaphor.

  Whatever.

  She could go back to New York now, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to stay with Drew.

  She braced herself to make the most important argument of her professional career. “Thank you,” she began, pouring every drop of her true appreciation into those two words. Then, she moved on to the hard part. “But it’s not that simple. Drew has to make some statement today, following up directly on Parker’s piece. And once the balance of our work hits the papers tomorrow, he’ll need to make himself available to the press at least one more time. His Sympathy numbers are in great shape. His Competence numbers are soaring after this week’s games. It’s the Charisma we need to monitor now, and that will take some close supervision.”

  “Jessica—”

  Chip wasn’t buying it. Out on the balcony, Drew was nodding. He was finishing up his call, pressing a button. He was getting ready to walk back into the room they’d shared, into the crazy life they’d built together.

  It didn’t make sense, what they had, but it was real. And if she couldn’t convince Chip to let her stay, then she didn’t deserve a partnership at Image Masters. She turned away to block out all distraction as she began her final pitch.

  “Chip, I know this job has gone off in strange directions. I know we started working from a script we didn’t control, the instant Adam Sartain put out his own crazy version of the truth. But you’re the one who taught me we can’t have the perfect client, we can only have the one who walks through our door. Drew Marshall walked through our door. And I owe it to him, I owe it to you, I owe it to all of Image Masters to see this through. The Rockets will set their roster in one more week. Let me stay here until they do.”

  “All right,” he said at last. “One more week. But you’d better polish up your exit strategy now.”

  Exit strategy. Breaking off their fake engagement.

  Jessica hadn’t thought about her exit strategy in weeks. But Chip didn’t need to know that.

  “I will,” she lied. “And thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to prep Drew for his press conference.”

  “Be careful, Jessica.”

  She was pretty sure he was talking about media strategies. She decided to pretend that’s what he meant, anyway. “I will. And I’ll see you a week from Monday, in New York.”

  She ended the call and was surprised to realize her hands were trembling. She was grateful for the feel of Drew’s arms closing around her from behind. “Everything’s okay on your end?” she asked, leaning into him and closing her eyes.

  “Yeah. Williamson read the article and freaked a little. I talked him off the ledge.”

  “Chip wants me back in New York.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I need to be here. For at least another week.”

  Neither of them asked what happened after that. Neither of them talked about life outside of Florida, about regular season, about Monday Status Meetings. They seemed to have reached a mutual agreement to ignore the real world for a little while longer.

  “I heard you say I’m prepping for a press conference?” He pressed his lips against her hair. “Maybe we should start with my oral presentation?”

  She laughed as she led him toward the bed.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Jessica! I’m glad I caught you.”

  With three days left in spring training, Jessica had hoped she’d never need to talk to Ross Parker again. The numbers were in. The battle was over. Jessica’s firebreak strategy had worked, and Drew’s Charisma Index was off the charts. Rockets’ management were still issuing the official line: They weren’t making a decision about who would play shortstop until the first game of the season.

  But rumor said Drew had the job.

  Not that Ross Parker gave a damn about rumor. He dealt in fact. “What is it?” Jessica snapped. “I’m late getting to the park.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” the reporter said. And like a villain in a fairy tale, he extended his hand, offering his own peculiar brand of poison.

  “What’s that?” Jessica asked, exasperated but too intrigued by the sheaf of papers to walk away.

  “A printout of the article I just filed. It’ll be online this afternoon, and in tomorrow’s print edition.” Parker’s smile was smug. “I considered sending you a courtesy copy earlier, but I didn’t want to give you a chance to spread more defensive lies.”

  “Nothing we distributed was a lie,” Jessica said automatically, but she was already skimming Parker’s words.

  The reporter knew better than to undermine his own prose. “Happy reading,” he said, and he offered up that familiar half-bow, that cocky salute that made him look like he was a gentleman in some historical drama.

  But Ross Parker was no gentleman. At least he didn’t pull his punches like a chivalrous man might.

  Jessica looked up as she finished reading the first paragraph, blinking hard, as if she could make the words on the page shift, disappear, somehow cease to exist. Heart pounding, she looked around the lobby to see who was watching her, who could measure the disaster that she held.

  Miracle of miracles, she didn’t know any of the people loitering in the lobby. She suspected Parker was lurking somewhere, watching for her reaction, but she didn’t waste time putting on an act for him.

  Feeling like she’d just been hit by a city bus, Jessica staggered to the nearest chair and sank down to read Parker’s column in its entirety.

  There’s one crime no baseball player can ever get past: betting on the game. Gambling ruined Pete Rose, gambling brought down the 1919 Black Sox, and gambling is going to destroy Drew Marshall. The struggling would-be shortstop for the Raleigh Rockets has a history of breaking the law. From public intoxication to joyriding, from public indecency to statutory rape, Marshall has stood in a court of law more often than most lawyers. Every time, he’s walked away because he was too young to be held responsible or because a witness changed her testimony.

  Drew Marshall won’t be walking this time. Not even with the help of Jessica Barnes, a woman who might be the world’s most forgiving fiancée—or so New York spin doctor powerhouse Image Masters LLC would have us believe. We wait to see if Barnes can forgive this.

  Jessica shoved down a wave of nausea. Ordinarily, it would have been a disaster for her to become part of the story
. Given Parker’s other allegations, though, dragging in Image Masters was the least of her concerns.

  She turned the page and was confronted by a neat graphic—a copy of a bank account owned by one Robert Trueblood. Beneath it was a chart printed in five colors, a careful analysis of money received, money spent, dates, times, scores. Jessica wasn’t a baseball expert, but she understood what she was reading—this Trueblood person had received large chunks of cash, and he’d bet them on baseball games, winning more often than he lost.

  She turned another page, and suddenly the entire article made sense. There were photographs of half a dozen envelopes. Each was addressed to Robert Trueblood. Each had come from Drew. There was a lot more—no public record of Trueblood’s existence until six years ago, one day after Drew signed his first major league contract. Trueblood’s address receiving other mail for Robert Marshall. Utility accounts for Trueblood’s address paid with checks from Marshall.

  Ross Parker had cut his journalistic teeth as an investigative reporter. He’d dug out the details here, made sure every i was dotted and every t was crossed. And he’d delivered his dynamite at the worst possible time, when Jessica wouldn’t have a chance to respond before the Rockets finalized their roster.

  Drew should have told her. He’d told her about Susan, given her a chance to follow up with the bitter old woman. He’d even told her about Bobby, about the years of abuse. But he hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her the full story. He hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her about Trueblood.

  Even as her stomach felt hollowed out, she began to get angry. Image Masters should have found the data. They should have tracked down whatever Parker had gleaned. Even if Drew had felt too ashamed to share the truth, Image Masters should have protected him, should have gotten the information to her so she could do her job.

  Feeling like she was swimming through mud, Jessica made her way back to the elevator. There was no way she was going to the ballpark now. The conversation she was about to have should never take place in public.