Always Right Page 4

  “What are you doing here?” One hand slipped inside her purse, and she groped around for something.

  He held up his hands, trying to look innocent. The last thing he needed was an eye-wash of pepper spray. “I thought we should talk.”

  “How did you find me?”

  He shrugged. “You do your research. I do mine.” Actually, he’d asked the team’s public relations office track her down. It had taken about two minutes for them to text him Amanda’s address and phone number.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you want?”

  Before he could answer, the elevator doors slid open, and four women boiled into the lobby. He barely glanced at their tight skirts and sky-high heels, but he couldn’t ignore their helium chatter as they talked about some club they were heading to. One more place in Raleigh he’d be happy to avoid forever.

  He waited until the women had passed onto the city street before he said, “Don’t you think we should find some place a bit more private to talk?”

  “If you think I’m asking you upstairs, you’re crazy.”

  I could have waited for you in Apartment 314. He almost said it out loud. Not that it was true—he didn’t actually know how to pick a lock. But he could have lurked in the hallway, could have scared the hell out of her as she stepped off the elevator. He’d purposely stayed in the public lobby, for all the good that did.

  He took his car keys out of his pocket. “Fine. Let’s go somewhere else.”

  She snorted. “I’m not getting in a car with you either.” But she put the envelopes in her tote and resettled the heavy bag on her shoulder. “Come on. There’s a bar on the corner. It’s not trendy, but it’ll do.”

  The last thing he wanted to do was sit in a bar. But he was pretty sure he wouldn’t get anywhere by insisting that Amanda give in on this. And despite everything, despite the checks he’d written out last night, despite the craziness of waiting for her all night here, he needed her to agree to his next request. “Lead the way,” he said. As she walked past him, he gestured toward her bag of books. “Let me carry those.”

  “Yeah, right. Like you’re walking me home from school.”

  “Something like that.” He watched her fight her instincts, but he could tell the bag was heavy. She winced a little as she eased it off her shoulder. He took it easily, making sure it didn’t seem like he was doing her any big favor.

  She shook her head, but she headed out the door, not saying a word as they walked the half block to The Shamrock. She was right—the dump wasn’t trendy. But there were a dozen guys sitting at the bar, watching the late game from San Francisco. And there were four or five booths on the back wall, dark enough to make people think they could talk in private. There was even a tired cocktail waitress who took their orders—vodka rocks for Amanda. Tonic water with lime for him.

  “What do you want?” she asked again, after the waitress had brought their glasses.

  He sipped his bitter drink before he answered. “I paid up,” he said. “Now I want my money’s worth.”

  As he expected, her eyes went wary. He wanted her to think bad things. He wanted her to be relieved when he told her all he really wanted. “Go on,” she said. Those two spare words reminded him of something he’d read years ago. Good lawyers never asked a question they didn’t already know the answer to. They didn’t volunteer a word of information, either.

  Well, he wasn’t a lawyer, good or bad. All he could do was put his cards on the table. “Look,” he said. “I want to make today a regular thing. Every day game we play at home—you in the stands, with the glasses. Drop them down to me during BP.”

  She nodded once, not betraying a shred of emotion. She took a sip of her vodka and set her glass down very precisely in the wet circle it had already made on the table. “So, what’s the deal?” she finally asked. “Is it something sexual for you?”

  He laughed. Of all the things he thought she’d say—all the protests, all the refusals, all the statements that he was plain old batshit crazy—he hadn’t expected her to go straight to sex. But just looking at the even expression on her face made him hard as a maple bat. He shifted his feet, easing the seams of his jeans, and he told himself not to look at her lips, not to watch her tongue dart out, not to see her teeth catch her lower lip.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not sex.”

  “What then?”

  He looked her right in the eye and said, “I told you before. Superstition. I need you there so I can hit.”

  “Correlation is not causation.” He must have looked confused at that, because she shrugged and said, “Why do you need me, anyway? You’ve got the glasses. Wear ’em all you want.”

  He shook his head. He knew he sounded crazy, but he also knew how superstitions worked. Across baseball, the first baseman caught a ball thrown from the dugout every single time he jogged in at the end of an inning. It wasn’t enough that he’d caught one the inning before, the game before, any other time. The magic needed to be recharged. The ritual had to be completed.

  He fought to find words to wipe the skeptical frown off her face. “You dropped your glasses to me at a day game. That’s the catch. That’s what makes them work.”

  “Maybe they ‘worked’ because it was a Sunday game, not Saturday, like today. Maybe they ‘worked’ because Harvey was standing beside me. Maybe they ‘worked’ because the breeze was blowing in from the north, or the temperature was exactly eighty-seven degrees, or a butterfly was flapping its wings somewhere in the Caribbean.” With every outraged example, she mocked the idea of “working” by curving her fingers into air quotes. Her sarcasm burned as she said, “You took a real risk today, Norton. You could have broken the magic by getting me back in the park.”

  “Nothing broke,” he said, leaning forward to make her understand how important this was to him. “My streak continued today. And it’s going to keep going on, as long as you help me out.”

  He knew he sounded stupid. But superstitions were the foundation of baseball. Half the guys he knew wouldn’t step on the chalked line between home plate and first. Pitchers wore power necklaces and wrote magic words in the dirt behind the mound. Hitters pointed their bats toward specific points in the park. All of it worked in some crazy way. All of it made the game come together.

  She had downed half her drink. Now she looked at him with real challenge in her eyes. “So, what? Now you want me there every Saturday?”

  “Every day game. For the rest of the season.”

  “What?” Her shout was loud enough that some of the guys at the bar looked up. She lowered her voice and said, “That’s insane! I don’t have time to attend every day game. And what am I supposed to do when you guys hit the road? Follow you to every park in the country?”

  “No,” he said, purposely pitching his voice low, making his words soothing. “Just the home ones. That’s all I’m asking.”

  ~~~

  “That’s all!” She heard the strangled note of disbelief in her own words.

  “Come on, Amanda,” he urged. “Say you’ll come to the park.” When she only shook her head, he leaned back on his bench in the booth, tracing his finger around the rim of his glass. He looked up at her through eyelashes that were thicker than any man deserved. “Or I might have to tell the authorities about your offer of representation,” he drawled. “About your little retainer fee.”

  Dammit! He had her trapped. She’d deposited his checks after the game, dropped them into an ATM on her way back to the office. Even if she argued that his money was payment for legitimate legal services, she’d be hard pressed to explain to the North Carolina bar why she’d placed client funds into her own bank account.

  This was ridiculous. It was absurd, the trap she’d sprung on herself when she’d made her stupid threat to expose his past. She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been furious with him, with his living the life of Riley while she watched her own career crumble around her. She’d lashed out without beginning to calculate the co
st of her actions.

  This was why she preferred numbers to words. This was why she avoided emotion. Anger, frustration, rage—they all led to mistakes.

  It was too late to apply cold, hard logic to the situation. Too late to grab a cocktail napkin and dig a pen out of her purse, to pull out her phone and look up some statistics, to write down all the equations that proved he was far more likely than not to have broken out of his hitting slump after twenty-seven games, with or without her.

  She’d blackmailed him, and she’d deposited his money into her account. Her position in the partnership was now secure. She owed him. So what could it hurt, if she gave him what he wanted? What possible harm could there be in playing out his little game?

  She took a gulp of vodka, sucking in air after the clean, cold burn down her throat. “All right,” she said.

  ~~~

  “All right?” He’d been certain that she’d refuse, that she’d call his bluff about exposing her blackmail. Because he really couldn’t imagine going to the authorities. Not when he needed her at the ballpark. Not when she seemed so flustered that she’d ever asked for his money, that she’d ever demanded his checks. Relief felt like a hot shower, water pouring over his head, melting the tension out of every muscle in his body. “You’ll do it?”

  She pursed her lips. “It’s crazy, Mr. Norton. But yeah. I’ll do it.”

  “Kyle.” At her confused look, he said, “My name’s Kyle. I think we know each other well enough now to use our first names.”

  “Kyle,” she said, and they shook on it. But he didn’t take her hand to seal the deal. He took her hand because he wanted to touch her fingers. He wanted to feel the warmth of her palm, to see if he could feel her heartbeat matching the pulse that raced through him. He couldn’t, but not for lack of wishing.

  After that, there wasn’t any reason to stay in The Shamrock, and there were about a hundred good reasons to leave, each one glistening in a partially-filled bottle behind the bar. He slipped out of the booth and pulled his wallet out of his pants. He dropped a couple of bills on the table before he picked up her tote bag from the bench where he’d been sitting.

  “What have you got in here? Are you planning on opening a bookstore?”

  She actually laughed as they slipped into the hot summer night, and he wanted to make another joke so he could hear the sound again. “That’s my light bedtime reading.”

  And just like that, he pictured her in bed again. He was imagining what she looked like beneath that T-shirt, what her tits would taste like when he had her naked and needy beneath him.

  He managed to say something normal, but he couldn’t have repeated it, not if she’d offered him his hundred thousand dollars back. At least she laughed again, and her steps stayed easy beside him, relaxed, just like he wasn’t thinking about tearing off every stitch of her clothing, starting with those goddamn sweatpants.

  But when they got back to her apartment building, she stopped. She looked at him, actually caught his gaze before she started twisting her fingers into knots. She glanced back toward the bar, sad and guilty at the same time.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I told you. I need my hitting—”

  “No, why are you trusting me? I’m the one who… I ordered records, you know. Proof about Spring Valley.”

  What records were those? And what the hell difference did it make? He’d already paid her hush money.

  He’d paid because Spring Valley terrified him. But she was scared too. He’d seen it in her face, heard it in her voice, in the very fact that she was questioning him here, now. She wasn’t some hard woman, used to trapping guys into making stupid mistakes.

  Oh, she was good. She’d found out about Spring Valley when no one else had, not any of the reporters that flocked around the game like starving pigeons, crapping out stories day after day after day.

  She was good. But she was also desperate. She’d needed his money, enough that she’d terrified herself into asking for it. And something about her vulnerability, about her silent cry for help touched a tender spot deep inside him.

  And here he was again, acting before he thought out what he was doing. He put her book bag on the ground beside them and slipped his hands over her arms, closing the distance between them. He lowered his mouth to hers, raising one hand to tangle in her hair, to ease her head to a better angle so he could deepen the kiss.

  For just a heartbeat, she stiffened. He felt the wires tighten inside her; he sensed her instinct to run away. He started to let go of her hair, started to make himself step back, even though that was the last thing on earth he wanted to do.

  But then, she leaned into him. Her mouth opened, and he could taste mint, just a breath of it like she’d been chewing on LifeSavers before he’d dragged her off to the bar. Her arms closed around him, pulling him closer. Her hips shifted, steadying her as she leaned into him, and the heat of her tongue chased his.

  “Get a room!” The cry came from the street, kids in a rusty Ford, windows down, engine already roaring as it tore away into the night. Amanda jumped back, hissing like a scalded cat. He reached for her automatically, but dropped his hand back to his side when he heard her nervous laugh, when she ran her fingers through her hair.

  God, he ached to have those fingers somewhere else. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight. Not if the look of panic on Amanda’s face told him anything.

  So he reached down and retrieved the canvas straps of her book bag. He held it out for her, trying not to notice that she avoided his hand completely, that she didn’t even let her fingers brush against his. He watched her swallow hard, and he resisted the urge to run his fingertips down her throat, to feel the rise and fall as she swallowed again.

  “Good night, Amanda,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets.

  “Good night, Kyle.” She matched his tone, almost succeeding in making her words into a joke.

  He couldn’t step away. Not yet.

  She turned toward the door, but she stopped just before she edged inside. “Hey,” she said. “When’s the next day game?”

  “Next Saturday,” he said. “We have the national broadcast tomorrow night, so no Sunday day game this week.”

  She nodded, like she couldn’t think of any words to say out loud.

  “I’ll get a list of them to you,” he said. “And tickets.” And then there wasn’t anything else to say, so he settled for “Thank you.”

  It might have been his imagination, but it seemed like she clutched her purse closer to her side. He wondered if she’d already deposited his checks. He wanted to ask her why she needed them. He wanted to know what made her so afraid.

  Instead, he watched as she passed beyond the glass door. But he stood out on the sidewalk, looking in, until she disappeared into the elevator, heading up to Apartment 314.

  CHAPTER 3

  Amanda went to next Saturday’s game. And the Sunday game following. Both times, there was a box waiting for her on the seat, with her sunglasses neatly wrapped in tissue paper. Both times, she stepped to the railing and waited for Kyle to toss her a ball. Both times, she delivered her lines perfectly, like an actress born to the stage. And both times, Kyle continued his hitting streak in the game.

  Amanda didn’t have time to waste at the ballpark. She needed to be back at the office drafting new letters to Dr. Phillips, trying to get the scientist to commit to specific dates when she could take his testimony in a deposition, get his expert opinion on the record even if he couldn’t make it back from Africa for the actual trial. She was supposed to be writing briefs, arguing legal points, fighting for UPA every single step of the way. With less than two months to go, she didn’t have a spare moment to waste. Her client’s continued existence depended on it.

  But the days were gorgeous—clear blue skies and almost no humidity, even in the middle of a North Carolina summer. She couldn’t pull herself away from the Sunday game, especially when it be
came clear that the Rockets were going to win.

  At the top of the ninth inning, an usher made his way to her seat. “Ms. Carter?” he asked. When Amanda nodded, he said, “I’m supposed to deliver this message to you.” He handed over a slip of paper.

  Amanda opened it cautiously. “Dinner tomorrow.” The words were written in the same broad scrawl she recognized from the checks. “Artie’s. 7:00.”

  Her first thought was to refuse. She’d just spent half the weekend at the ballpark. She couldn’t give up more time to this crazy game, to whatever match she was playing with Kyle Norton.

  Her second thought was to panic. She should get the hell out of Rockets Field, leave Raleigh altogether. If she showed up at the restaurant, Kyle could have police there, ready to arrest her. He could have copies of the checks he’d written, statements showing that she’d cashed them. She could be carted off in handcuffs.

  Her third thought was to realize Kyle could have done that long ago. If he wanted to turn her in, he’d had almost two weeks to do so. There was no reason to drag her out to a steakhouse to get his revenge. And even if she’d blown off the better part of two uninterrupted days of weekend work, she’d still have to eat some time on Monday. Why not enjoy a real restaurant? It wasn’t like Artie’s fit into her meager budget.

  The usher hadn’t waited around to carry back a response.

  She could look up Kyle’s phone number—it had to be there, in the collection of documents she’d pulled when she did the research that led her to Spring Valley. But she hadn’t called him before, and it felt slimy to use her ill-gotten documentation to accept a dinner invitation.

  Slimier than blackmailing him? Yeah. She wasn’t going to answer that one.

  In the end, she waited until the Rockets got the third out at the top of the ninth. The ball was a high fly to the dead-man’s land between center and right. Kyle darted over, backing up the center fielder, but the other guy, Ryan Green, ended up making the catch. As the crowd roared its approval, the two ballplayers high-fived each other. Green headed toward the celebration that was boiling over onto the pitcher’s mound, but Kyle took a moment to turn around, to look at the stands.