Catching Hell: A Hot Contemporary Romance Page 5

  Emily shook her head. “You’re impossible. Fine. Come over to my house Saturday afternoon. I’ve got half a dozen dresses you can try on—something will work. And I’ll do your hair and makeup myself.”

  “Yay,” Anna said, still mocking. “It’ll be just like we’re five years old and playing dress-up! Can I be a princess, with a sparkly pink tiara?”

  Before Emily could retort, the guy at the counter called out, “Anna! Emily!” Both women stood to collect their breakfasts. Before Anna could weave her way through the crowd, though, she heard another name: “Zach!”

  It couldn’t be. Half the guys in Raleigh were named Zach. But Anna glanced at the counter and swore, even as she turned back to the table. “Em, get mine, will you?”

  “Absolutely not,” Emily shot back. From the gleam in her eyes, she definitely recognized the Rockets’ catcher as he stepped up to the counter. In fact, she took a few awkward steps to her left, guaranteeing that Anna would stand directly in Zach’s path as he collected his breakfast and tried to find his way out the door.

  Anna barely managed to wipe the grimace off her face before Zach looked up. “Hey,” she said.

  “Good morning.” Zach’s reply showed considerably more pleasure than she’d expected, given that the last time she’d been talking about him, she’d been figuring out ways to have his contract manipulated against his will.

  Emily whirled around as if she were astonished to see someone talking to her best friend. “Hello!” she said. “I’m Emily Holt.” Her hand jutted out like the arm of an electric chair.

  “Zach Ormond.” He shook Emily’s hand perfunctorily.

  As Anna tried to plot her escape back to the table, Emily launched into High Interference Gear. “Oh no!” she exclaimed to the poor guy behind the counter. “I’m so sorry! I need my order to go!”

  “Emily!” Anna warned, as the clerk started to box up the tofu scramble and soy bacon.

  “Lucky for you,” Emily said to Zach with a smile so warm Anna was probably the only person in the coffee shop who knew it was fake. “Running into us here. Every table in this place is taken, but you’re welcome to take my seat. Okay, Anna,” she said after she took her now-boxed breakfast from the unfazed Club Joe employee. “Saturday. Three o’clock.” She frowned for just a split second. “Actually, better make that two. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Anna considered sticking out her tongue, but she settled for gathering up her lightly toasted bagel with a side order of bacon. A quick glance confirmed that Emily had been telling the truth. There wasn’t another table free in the entire place.

  Great. Just the way she wanted to spend the morning. Wincing through conversation with the man who had seen her totally lose it three nights before. The man she’d agreed to trade to Texas, even though she had every reason to believe he had no desire to modify his contract.

  Well, she’d never ducked away from ugly reality before. No reason to start now.

  “You might as well come on,” she said, looking at Zach’s waffle.

  “With an invitation like that…” he said drily.

  As she led the way back to her table, she thought about every name she wanted to call her best friend. Make that former best friend. How dare Emily interfere this way?

  Once she and Zach were seated, they occupied themselves with the trivia of preparing to eat. He spread whipped butter over his waffle before helping himself generously from the pitcher of maple syrup. She crafted the perfect balance of butter and marmalade, taking care to paint her bagel precisely. When that task was complete, she resorted to turning the plate that held her bacon, lining the strips up with the edge of the table. That left her reaching for her soda. Poking the ice with her straw. Dredging her brain for something—anything—to say that didn’t have to do with Texas or crying or Kleenex or making an idiot out of herself at the hospital.

  “Look,” she finally said. “I don’t usually fall apart like I did Saturday night.”

  “You were under a lot of stress.”

  “Everyone was. But I don’t recall anyone else crying like a little girl.”

  “You never know what the rest of the team did, in the privacy of their own homes.”

  Somehow, his teasing smile put her at ease. He wasn’t treating her like she was fragile, like she was some delicate creature that might collapse into a puddle of tears right there at the breakfast table. And that made it all okay that she’d cried before. She took a deep breath and vowed to put her mortifying reaction behind her.

  “So,” she said after diverting herself with an entire slice of bacon. “How does the line go? Of all the coffee shops in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine?”

  He snorted. “A man’s not allowed to get breakfast in the building where he lives?”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. But then she realized he was telling the truth. “Really? You live in the Whitmore too?”

  “Too? I’m in Unit 1401.”

  “1911, in the North Tower,” she said, automatically mapping out the building in her head. “Wait! You’re in the South Tower. On the street side. You have a view of downtown!”

  “I had an in with the real estate agent, when the building went condo.”

  Of course he did, Anna realized. That real estate agent had worked for Gramps. Marty Benson had owned the Whitmore; he’d converted it from apartments to condos when he needed to raise some serious money for the team, about fifteen years ago. Right when Zach Ormond came to town. Gramps had held onto half a dozen units, using them as executive suites for his best players. Anna had been squatting in hers for the three years she’d been home from Michigan.

  “But why haven’t I seen you here before?” she asked. “I’m in here every day.”

  He shrugged. “I spend as little time in the city as possible. I only stayed here last night because I have an early meeting with…” He trailed off. “A business meeting.”

  A bite of bagel crumbled to dust in her mouth. She wasn’t an idiot, though. And she never backed down from a fight. “About the no-trade clause.”

  He nodded. “The one I negotiated hard for. The one I’m not giving back.”

  “Until we find the right motivation.”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “Of course there is. Money motivates everyone.”

  “Not me. Not on this.” From his pursed lips, he might have poured pure lemon juice over his waffle, instead of a stream of maple syrup.

  This was hardly turning out to be a breakfast worthy of Emily’s conniving exit. At this point, Anna would prefer to be discussing shades of nail polish with her girlfriend, and whether she needed some product in her hair on Saturday night.

  “Look,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “The Rockets need a new bat, and Tyler Brock is the one player most likely to get us into the postseason. I won’t lie to you. My grandfather put me in charge of this matter. I’m the one ultimately responsible for making it work. And I’m going to do whatever it takes to prove to him I’m up for the job.”

  “So you want to trade me.”

  I don’t want to trade you. That’s what she wanted to say. But she wasn’t about to put those cards on the table.

  Instead, she said, “You know as well as I do that Gregory Small handles all player acquisitions, all trades. If I rein him in now, I injure the team and show that I don’t have what it takes.”

  “If you rein him in now,” Zach pounced on her words. “That means you’ve considered it?”

  Of course I’ve considered it! Another one of those cards she wasn’t going to play. Instead, she focused on ignoring the flutter beneath her ribcage. Dammit. That wasn’t her ribcage. The flutter was affecting a distinctly lower part of her anatomy.

  She forced herself to look at Zach instead of her bagel, her bacon, her soft drink, and every other distraction in the known universe. And then she did it, displaying the card she’d vowed to keep secret. “Yes,” she finally said. And even though it felt like she was
peeling back her own flesh to make the admission, she confirmed, “I’ve considered it.”

  “Well, thank God for that. I didn’t want to think I’d forced my walking papers, just because of what happened at the hospital.”

  “Nothing happened at the hospital.”

  “You’re right,” he agreed, snagging her with his forest gaze. The entire café around them faded away as he said, “But somewhere between Tucker’s second IV bag and his third, I thought about making a lot of things happen. I think you did too. And you might have acted on those thoughts if the circumstances had been just a little bit different.”

  She thought about blushing, about looking away and changing the topic. But that really wasn’t her style. “Why, Mr. Ormond,” she said instead, “I do believe you’re flirting with me.”

  “Why, Miss Benson,” he said immediately. “When I’m flirting with you, you’ll know.”

  Zap. His words snapped a cord deep inside her. And he was right. She did know.

  Refusing to give in to the urge to throw herself across the table—maple syrup, coffee, and other breakfast debris be damned—she held his gaze as she played out another conversational gambit. “So, if you don’t usually stay at the Whitmore, where do you stay? When you’re not getting ready for early business meetings?”

  “Is this the conversation you really want to have?”

  No. But she forced herself to say, “It’s the one we are having.”

  For a moment, she thought he would refuse. She thought he was going back to circumstances and what had happened at the hospital, and—most tantalizing of all—what hadn’t happened.

  She wanted him to pick up that line of conversation. She was terrified he would.

  His smile was lazy, though, and he shook his head with the patience he was famous for exercising behind the plate. When he swallowed, she watched his throat bob, and when he picked up his coffee cup, she remembered what those fingers had felt like against the base of her neck. He saluted her with the mug before inclining his head in acquiescence.

  “I have a little farmhouse about forty-five minutes outside of town. It belonged to my daddy, to his family going back four, five generations. It’s my real home.”

  Daddy. It was easy to forget Zach was a native of North Carolina. His drawl was almost non-existent, bleached out of his voice after years of traveling around the country. But some things—kin and homestead—never completely faded away.

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  And he did. He told her about chasing after clouds of lightning bugs, barefoot on a summer night, about ganging up with his brothers to torment his sisters with leeches collected from the pond that lay across the back of the property. He told her about rebuilding the front porch after a late-season hurricane tore the rotten timbers loose. He told her about hiring a man to do the planting now that he was on the road so much with the team, about resting the soil strategically and introducing organic crops.

  As he talked, his hands emphasized his speech. His strong fingers carved out the meaning of his words, and his forearms flexed, underscoring the power of living closer to the earth than she had ever imagined, here in downtown Raleigh.

  His life had been so different from hers—surrounded by half a dozen siblings, the sheer physicality of life on a farm, the connectedness to seasons and animals and plants that she only knew from storybooks. She heard the love in his voice—for his parents, his brothers and sisters, but most of all for his home.

  North Carolina, born and bred. The expression was made for a man like Zach Ormond.

  “Enough!” he said, finally looking away. “I sound like I’m paid by the state tourist board.”

  “You sound like a man who loves where he lives,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He looked at his watch. “I have to get going.”

  “That meeting?” she asked, even though she knew she shouldn’t. Even though she was certain she did not want to talk to Zach Ormond about the Rockets’ contract demands.

  “Yes,” he said. The single word was naked, completely absent of any emotional weight.

  She chose to accept his decision, to separate the conversation they’d just had from whatever business wrangling lay in their future. “I’ll keep an eye out for you at the Whitmore,” she said, pushing back her chair and standing. “Even if we use different elevator banks.”

  “It’s not like we need a passport to go from tower to tower. Maybe I’ll stop by sometime, now that I know we’re neighbors and all. You know. Borrow a cup of sugar.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it these days?” she said archly. That caught him by surprise, and she was delighted. His eyebrows rose, and his lips curled into an amused smirk. She realized she wanted to make him smile like that another thousand times. But she made herself retreat a step, intrigued to see how he’d respond to a cold splash of truth. “Only if you bring your own cup. And your own sugar, too. I’m not really the domestic type.”

  He laughed. “I sort of got that idea. Next time, you’re going to tell me about what it was like for you, growing up with Marty Benson as your grandfather.”

  Next time. “I’d like that,” she said. “Not the Marty Benson part. But the ‘next time.’”

  He insisted on bussing their dishes, and he held the door for her as they left Club Joe. They were spared the uncertainty of how to say goodbye when his phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket with a sigh, obviously recognizing the ringtone. “I have to take this,” he said. She nodded, and he walked away, staying in earshot just long enough for her to make out, “I’m on my way, Ep. I just got held up a few minutes.”

  Jeremy Epson. His agent.

  Well, what else had she expected? She wasn’t flirting with some poli sci major in the student union. This was the big time. This contract thing between Zach and the team wasn’t going to disappear, no matter how much she wanted it to.

  She stared after Zach until he got to the corner, but he never turned back to look at her.

  * * *

  Zach looked around the hotel suite, whistling long and low at the view of the Raleigh skyline. “I don’t know, Ep,” he said. “If you can afford this, I’m paying you too much.”

  The agent didn’t bother laughing. Instead, he pushed a sheaf of papers across the table. “The team’s not fucking around.”

  Zach set his jaw as he picked up the documents. They were memos, printed on official team stationery, with the logo blazing in red and blue. The first one was labeled “Locker Assignment.” The second said, “Player Parking Lot.” The third was “Equipment Maintenance,” and it ran on for half a dozen pages. Each was addressed to him. Each had been initialed GS.

  Gregory Small.

  “What the—” He skimmed through the first page. “This memorandum is to inform you that your locker has been reassigned. You will now maintain all of your personal belongings in Locker C-27.”

  “That’s a corner locker, Ep. They put rookies in the corner.”

  “They’re putting you there now. Read the rest of them.”

  He did. His parking space had been switched. The team was no longer responsible for cleaning his cleats or his batting helmet. He’d be charged for all laundry generated in the locker room, with invoices to be paid weekly.

  “This is bullshit.”

  Epson shot his cuffs. “Of course it is. And it’s just the opening round. They want to give you a taste of what will happen if you don’t fall in line.”

  “Change my goddamn parking space?”

  “I’ll bet you a c-note right now, the new one is under a leaky pipe. Or a bird’s nest, if they could find someone to wrangle the fucking pigeons.”

  “Penny ante bullshit. So? What do we do about it?”

  Epson shrugged. “You don’t have a lot of room to maneuver here. But there is one thing I can suggest.”

  “What?”

  “This Friday, drop the appeal on your suspension. Take the five days the league gave you. With the team heading out
for a tough road trip, they’ll want you behind the plate in New York. So deny them that. Stay home and take your punishment and let them fall flat on their asses.”

  Zach narrowed his eyes. It was a risky strategy. If he wasn’t catching and the team won, then he’d just be proving how useless he really was.

  But New York was leading the division. And the teams were meeting up in a four-game series, on enemy ground. The Rockets would have to feel the loss of Zach’s experience, his calling the pitches, his threading the needle for a string of desperately needed victories.

  “I’ll do it,” he said, even though it went against everything he’d ever done as a Raleigh player, everything he’d ever done for his team.

  Epson nodded once, and then he held out his hands for the papers. “I’m heading over to talk to Small in person. To tell him officially that you aren’t waiving the clause. But you know, it’s not too late for you to reconsider. We can use the suspension to fly out to Texas—”

  “It’s not going to happen,” Zach cut him off. “And if you suggest it again, I’ll fire you.” He kept his voice mild, but there was no mistaking the bedrock beneath his words.

  Epson shrugged. “I’d suggest you get ready, then. The Rockets are about to make your life a hell of a lot more uncomfortable.”

  “Let them try,” Zach said, rolling his shoulders. “Let them give it a goddamn try.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Anna resisted the urge to tug at the front of her dress. It was Rockets red, which should have been a comfort, but she couldn’t help but feel like the floor-length gown was a blinking sign, commanding attention from every corner of the crowded ballroom.

  It didn’t help that she was trapped on the dais with Gramps. Her grandfather had been holding court all evening, accepting the greetings of various Raleigh luminaries. Half the conversations were light-hearted speculation on the Rockets’ chances for the season. The other half, though, were more pointed. The other half were directed to raising desperately needed funds for Raleigh Against Drunk Driving.