Always Right Page 14

  Adam Sartain dug in behind the plate. He took the first pitch, a strike down the middle of the plate. He didn’t move his bat for the two balls that followed. He fouled off half a dozen near misses, sending each one into the stands, raising whining cries of expectation from fans with each crack of his bat. Another ball, a curveball that missed. A fourth one, and the left fielder walked to first. The tying run was on base. The Rockets had a chance.

  Josh Cantor was up next. The third baseman swung at the first pitch, sending the ball arcing to the deepest point in the park, toward the tables of the high-end restaurant that catered to the Rockets’ wealthiest fans. The Los Angeles fielder raced back to the wall. He crouched on the warning track, timing his jump. He extended his arm over his head. And he came down with the ball, robbing Cantor of a walk-off home run. Sartain tagged up, though, and dashed to second, getting into scoring position to tie the game.

  That brought Nick Durban up to bat. He fouled off a few balls and ducked one wild pitch that almost hit his head. He swung hard at the next one, but it popped up, high enough to get lost in the glare of the stadium lights. LA’s first baseman made the easy catch. Two outs. One batter left to save the day for the Rockets.

  Kyle Norton knocked the lead practice weight off his bat as he stepped out of the on-deck circle.

  Amanda watched him take a few practice swings before he stepped into the box. She knew the ripple of those shoulders, hidden now beneath his uniform shirt. She’d watched the taut lines of his thighs, felt the hard strength of his abs. She knew the raw power in him, his wild strength.

  Kyle had the skill to knock the ball out of the park. Sure, he hit for average, not for power, but he’d managed half a dozen home runs during the season. During the regular season. His post-season numbers were terrible. They glared from the scoreboard, two hits out of forty-six at-bats. Amanda did the math without thinking. He had a .043 average.

  She watched Kyle dig in at the plate, only to step out of the batter’s box. He checked the straps on his batting gloves. He dug back in, then touched his bat to his right shoulder, tapped it lightly to his left. He tugged on the shoulder of his uniform, his fingers automatically going to the seam that was stained with red earth from the field.

  She saw him crane his neck toward the right-field stands, toward where she’d promised to wait for him. He couldn’t see if she was there. Not with the crowd on its feet. Not with forty thousand people chanting his name. Not with an entire season of devotion, of longing rolling across the playing field, breaking over him as he took a first strike fastball.

  The crowd moaned its disappointment. Kyle stepped out of the box, stepped back in, went through every step of his ritual. And he watched strike two blow by him, too high for him to have done any good, even if he had managed to get his bat on the ball.

  Amanda caught her breath. The entire stadium shook with cheers. Every red-clad fan in the house was clapping for Kyle to save the day, to hit a home run, to win the World Series.

  He worked his superstitious rituals. He stepped up to the plate. The pitcher wound up, delivering a change-up, low and outside.

  And Kyle sent the ball over the center field fence.

  The stadium exploded. Fireworks went off above the gates. Screaming fans pounded each other on the back, shouting, crying.

  In the owners’ box, everyone roared, everyone applauded. But then all eyes turned to Mr. Benson, to the old man swaddled beneath red and blue blankets in his wheelchair. Anna knelt beside him, touching her forehead to his knee, and he settled a shaking hand over her hair. The old man looked up at Anna’s fiancé, at Zach Ormond, the man who had been the team’s long-time catcher. “Thank you,” he said, and his voice trembled. “Thank you, all of you.” He looked around to include everyone in the room, but his voice broke before he could say anything more.

  After that, Amanda was caught up in the chaos. She followed the crowd to an elevator, tucked in at the back of the room. She descended to the level of the playing field and was rushed through tunnels that took her directly onto the bright green grass. She stood on the warning track, surrounded by team management, by players’ families, by laughing, crying baseball people.

  She didn’t belong here. It was too busy, too loud, too confused and confusing. People were shouting, trying to orchestrate a celebration for the television cameras. Amanda folded her arms across her belly. She shook her head and turned back toward the tunnel, toward the darkness and the peace and the quiet.

  And Kyle was waiting for her.

  He stood on the warning track, in a little circle of solitude. His short hair dripped, and his white jersey was stained orange—he’d clearly been christened with one of the many coolers that slumped against the dugout walls. His jaw worked, as if he was trying to build up the courage to say something. His hands twitched at his sides, as if he could barely restrain his entire body from surging forward, from closing the gap between them.

  He wouldn’t move, so she had to. She threw herself at him, knowing he would be there to catch her. She clutched her arms around him, felt him grab her back. Her lips found his, hot and desperate, and he wrapped his fingers in her hair. She couldn’t get enough of him, couldn’t feel enough of his flesh, couldn’t absorb enough of his body.

  It took forever for her to break the kiss. Another century for her to shift her arms, to turn her face, to rest her head against his chest. She couldn’t hear his heart beat, not above the crowd, but she heard him murmur her name, low and soft, in a tone meant for her alone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and she only clutched him tighter. “I never should have said those things. Not to you. Not to the one woman I’ve ever loved.”

  She pulled back just enough to look him in the eye. “I’m the one who should be sorry,” she said. “I should have been there for you. I should have kept my promise.”

  He glanced over her head, at the chaos behind her. “It seems to have worked out,” he said, and his crooked smile healed something deep inside of her, something she hadn’t even known was broken. “You know what I was thinking as I stood there at the plate? As I waited for that third pitch?”

  She shook her head.

  “The guy’s change-up stats. He throws change-ups for third strikes thirty-seven percent of the time. Sixty-one percent of the time against lefties. The facts were clear. I knew where the ball was going to be.”

  She shook her head, but she was laughing. Of course he knew the stats. Of course, he played the numbers. That’s what made him a professional baseball player. That’s what made him a World Series champion.

  “Mr. Norton!” That was Rory Michaels, shouting as he maneuvered through the crowd. “Can we have a minute? What did it feel like to hit the home run that won the first World Series in history for the Raleigh Rockets?”

  But Kyle wasn’t looking at the reporter. He wasn’t looking at the cameras, at the hungry red electronic eyes. Instead, he was looking at Amanda, staring at her as if there wasn’t another human being on the entire planet.

  “Go,” she whispered. “They’re waiting for you.”

  “They can wait a minute more. Because I have a question for you. This isn’t how I planned to do this. I don’t have a ring.” He dug in the pocket of his dirt-stained uniform pants. “But I have these.”

  He extended his palm, displaying her eyeglasses, the librarian ones, with the clear glass sparkling beneath the stadium lights. “Amanda Carter,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

  She took the glasses from his hand. She thought about putting them on, about turning to face the cameras and the world with her disguise firmly in place.

  But she didn’t need to do that. She didn’t need to pretend for him. He knew her—the best she could be, and the very worst. With him, things were always right.

  She palmed the glasses, and she said, “Yes, Kyle. If you’ll have me.”

  For answer, he kissed her—long enough and hard enough to boil off even a shadow of a doubt. And the cameras caught every s
econd of it, as they recorded the Raleigh Rockets’ World Series celebration.

  BATTER UP!

  Now that the Rockets have won the World Series, it’s time for something completely different! Read on, for a sneak peek at another Mindy Klasky romance, Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft!

  ~~~

  They don’t teach witchcraft in library school.

  Vermin—check. Mold and mildew—check. Difficult patrons—check. But there was no course in witchcraft, no syllabus for sorcery. If only I’d been properly prepared for my first real job.

  I was probably responsible for what happened. After all, I was the one who recited the Scottish Play as I pulled a gigantissimo non-fat half-caf half-decaf light hazelnut heavy vanilla wet cappuccino with whole milk foam and a dusting of cinnamon. “Double, double, toil, and trouble,” I said as I plunged the steel nozzle into the carafe of milk.

  “What’s that from, Jane?” asked my customer, a middle-aged woman who frequented the library on Monday afternoons. Her name was Marguerite, and she was researching something about colonial gardens. She’d had me track down endless pamphlets about propagating flowering trees.

  “Macbeth,” I said.

  See. It was my fault. Everyone knows that it’s bad luck to say the name of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play. At least for actors it is. Still, I should never have risked the curse. I probably deserved everything else that happened that day and in the weeks that followed. Every last thing, even the—Well. No need to get ahead of myself.

  I rang up Marguerite’s coffee and crossed back to my desk. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t necessary to walk by the online catalog. I didn’t need to straighten the pens; I didn’t have to set out more scratch paper. I wasn’t required to organize the newspapers.

  But all that busy work gave me an opportunity to walk by Jason Templeton’s table.

  Jason was my Imaginary Boyfriend. Oh, he was real enough. He just didn’t know that he was my boyfriend. Yet.

  Jason was an assistant professor at Mid-Atlantic University. He looked exactly like that movie star in last summer’s blockbuster—you know, the one who suavely seduced two different women while he double-crossed the Mafia and stole the Hope Diamond? Except his hair was caramel-colored. And curly. And he was on the skinny side. And I’ve never seen him in a tuxedo—he’s more of a J. Crew sort of guy.

  Okay, maybe he didn’t look exactly like a movie star, but when someone is your Imaginary Boyfriend, you give your fantasy a little breathing room….

  In fact, since fantasy was my only romantic outlet these days, I gave my dreams a lot of breathing room. After all, they were the magical cure. My dreaming about Jason was helping me to move on, to get over the near-legendary Jilting of Jane Madison.

  I knew I should be over Scott Randall by now. Any man who would choose climbing the law firm ladder at his firm’s London office over being my beloved husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse….

  Well, he wasn’t worth having. Especially when he’d hooked up with some British slut his first week on the new job. And when he had the nerve to write to me—write to me!—and ask for my engagement ring to give to her….

  But Scott Randall was the only man I’d ever loved.

  Really.

  And how sad was that? I was twenty-nine years old, and I’d only loved one man. He’d been my high school sweetheart. I’d never even dated seriously in college; Scott and I had made our long-distance thing work. College, then grad school for me (a worthless English masters focusing on Shakespeare, then practical library science!) and law school for him. We’d lived together in D.C. before he took off for London.

  He’d dumped me almost nine months ago, and it still felt like a part of me was dying every time I looked at my bare left hand.

  So, Jason Templeton was actually a great development for me. Even if I wasn’t ready to confess my attraction to him. Even if I hadn’t quite brought myself to take a risk, to move him from the “imaginary” category to “real flesh and blood.”

  At least I had convinced myself that—however unconsciously—Jason came to the Peabridge Free Library to see me. Well, to see me, and to study the relationships between husbands and wives in Georgetown during the two decades immediately following the signing of the Declaration of Independence. My best friend, Melissa, said that boded well—he had a romantic soul and a scholar’s mind.

  I was certain that one day, he would look up from the letters of George Chesterton. He’d reach for the sharpened pencil that I’d have standing ready (no ink permitted around the original letters), and I’d say something witty and sly, and he’d smile his gorgeous, distracted smile, and then we’d go out for lunch, and our scholarly discussion would turn to personal histories, and we’d take a long weekend drive to North Carolina to visit George Chesterton’s ancestral home, and we’d stay in a bed and breakfast with a king size sleigh bed and lace curtains and homemade scones, and….

  I hurried over to my desk and opened the top drawer. There, nestled safe among Post-it notes and highlighters was my personal copy of Gentlemen Farmers. Jason’s first book. University Press of Virginia had brought it out the year before, and it received great critical acclaim. Okay, it got one column inch in the alumni magazine, but they really seemed to like it.

  At Melissa’s urging, I had ordered a copy of my own; it had finally arrived in yesterday’s mail. She was the one who made me realize that a scholar needed recognition. He needed support. He needed a loving helpmate.

  Before I could carry the book over to get Jason’s autograph, the phone rang. I glanced at the Caller ID and saw that it was Gran. I could let the call go, but then my grandmother would leave her one message: “Jane Madison’s grandmother.” Answering machines had been around for decades, but Gran refused to believe that they could be trusted with substantive messages. She was eighty-one years old; who was I to try to change her?

  “Library, this is Jane,” I said, trying to sound crisp and professional.

  “Make me a promise, dear.”

  Oh no. We were back in “promise” mode. Gran went through these phases. She would read articles or watch television or listen to the radio, and she’d dwell on all the ways that people could die. As she was fond of saying, I was the only family that she had, and she wasn’t going to lose me without putting up a fight. (Not until I blessed her hearth with a great-grandchild, in any case.)

  In the past month alone, I had sworn that I would not go hang-gliding, rappel down the outside of the Empire State Building, or practice free-diving in the Caribbean. Those promises were a small price to pay, I suppose, for Gran having raised me.

  Every once in a while, though, I wondered if my actual parents would have been so insanely concerned about my safety. I mean, what were the chances that I’d ever engage in such risky behavior, promise to Gran or not? But I suspected that the car crash that took my parents’ lives started Gran on her quest for “promises.”

  “Jane,” Gran said. “Are you listening to me?” I’d waited too long to reply.

  “Of course. I was just helping a patron at the circulation desk.” I glanced across the room at Jason, smile at the ready, but he didn’t look up from his notes.

  “Make me a promise.”

  “Anything, Gran.”

  “This is serious!”

  “Of course it is. You have my best interest at heart. You always have my best interest at heart. I’m the only granddaughter you’re ever going to have.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, little miss librarian.”

  I glanced at the clock in the lower right corner of my computer screen. “Gran, I’ve got a meeting with Evelyn in five minutes. I’m going to have to run.”

  “Promise me you won’t lick any toads.”

  “What!” I was so surprised that I shouted. Jason did glance up then, and I managed a harried smile, pointing at the phone and shrugging elaborately. Great. Now he’d think I was a crazed mime.

  “Promise me you won’t
lick any toads. I read an article about South American toads—they have poison on their skin, and it makes people hallucinate, and those poor people get into car crashes, and they don’t even remember to try to get out of the wreck, and they die terrible, fiery deaths.”

  “Why would I lick a toad, Gran?” I tried to stop the chain reaction at the first link.

  “I remember that poster you had on your bedroom wall. ‘You have to kiss a lot of toads to find a prince.’”

  “That was in fifth grade, Gran. And it was frogs. You know, from fairy tales.”

  “We form our basic personalities very early,” she insisted, and I could picture her shaking her head. “People don’t change. You’ll always be that fifth grader.”

  Great. Ten years old forever. I was doomed to spend the rest of my life with braces, stick-on tattoos, and bangs. And I’d always be chosen last for the softball team.

  I sighed. Maybe Gran wasn’t so far from the truth. I did still have freckles, sprayed across my nose. And my hair still had too much red in the curls that hung halfway down my back. And my glasses continued to slip down my nose when I least expected them to, making me blink my hazel eyes like a dazed chipmunk. “Gran,” I said. “I don’t even remember the last time I saw a toad.”

  “All the more reason for me to worry.”

  What did that mean? “Fine, Gran. I promise. No toad licking for me.”

  “Thank you, dear.” I could hear the relief in her voice. “You’ll see. You’ll be grateful when the decision is staring you in the face, and you’ll know what to do because you’ve already made up your mind.”

  “I’m sure I will, Gran.” My acquiescence drifted into silence as I watched Jason stack up his notes. I knew his routine better than I knew my own; he was preparing to leave so that he could deliver his noon lecture. He was shutting down his laptop, stowing away his books, capping his pen, clasping his satchel…. And then he was gone. No autograph for Gentleman Farmers today. No blazing Templeton smile. No anything. “Oh, Gran….” I sighed.