Always Right (12 page)

Because he loved her.

“Amanda,” he said, and her name turned into a laugh. “You can have the money. I’ll write you a check.”

He crossed the room to the kitchen and yanked open the drawer by the phone. There were half a dozen pens in there, menus from local restaurants, a few batteries, a charging cord for something. Toward the back, there was a plastic checkbook.

Thirty-two thousand dollars. He had enough to cover it; he didn’t even need to call his manager, tell the guy to move around funds.

Kyle
knew
he was lucky. There weren’t a lot of men who could write a check like that without wincing at the zeroes. But he’d fought hard to get where he was. He’d played good ball his entire professional career. And the payoff was that he could protect the people he cared for. He wrote Amanda’s name carefully before he dashed off his signature.

He ripped out the check and turned around.

“Here,” he said, and he crossed the room to put the piece of paper in her hand.

“I can’t—”

“I’m not going to argue.” He folded the slip of paper in half. When she still refused to take it, he slipped it into her breast pocket.

This time, she did step away from him. She folded her hands across her chest, and she refused to meet his eyes. “Kyle, there’s something else I have to tell you.”

One glance, and he knew this was the real reason she’d been on edge. Money was money. She’d taken his checks before.

She was here for another reason. She was here to kick him in the balls.

“The game on Friday,” she said. Maybe it was her voice, ratcheted so tight she no longer sounded like Amanda. Or maybe it was his ears, already prepared for what she was going to say, already recognizing the danger. But it sounded like she was screeching the words, like she was a chain saw carving out chunks of his heart. “I can’t be there.”

“You
have
—”

“I can’t!” She pulled herself to her full height then. She locked her knees and said, “I’ll be out of town, on the UPA case. I’d change things if I could, but I don’t have any flexibility. Not this time. I’m sorry.”

“This isn’t funny, Amanda.” But he knew she wasn’t joking.

“I have an expert witness, the key to my entire case. The only day we can meet is Friday. I can’t change a thing.”

He heard her explanation. Each individual word made sense. He watched her strengthen as she repeated her argument. She believed what she was saying; she didn’t think she was doing anything wrong.

He couldn’t put together the words to tell her what she was doing to him.
She
was the reason he’d started his hitting streak. She’d carried him—carried the team—to the best record they’d had in decades. Without her, he was back to holding his breath as he watched fly balls come up short, as line drives headed straight into opponents’ gloves.

“Move the meeting,” he said.

“Not this time.”

“Call in sick.”

“No one else can take this deposition.”

“Amanda!” He hated the panic in his voice, the raw fear that everything was about to slip away, the entire season, everything he’d accomplished, everything the Rockets had done. “I need you! The team needs you! This is the last chance Marty Benson is ever going to have to win a championship!”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He heard the truth then. It was right there, in two simple words. She said she was sorry. She said she didn’t want to do this to him.

But the truth was she’d never understood him. She’d never understood his need for her to be at the game. She’d never truly
gotten
the superstition that had bound them together, that had made her the perfect woman for him. She’d never believed.

“Get out of here,” he said.

“I—”

“Go on,” he said, and he pointed toward the elevator like she was some sort of servant he was dismissing, like she was some sort of dog.

“Kyle—”

He didn’t have any words. He certainly couldn’t draw up the numbers, the diagrams, the charts that fed whatever passed for her soul. He couldn’t do anything to change her mind.

And so he turned on his heel and marched into his bedroom, slamming the door as hard as he could. He pretended he didn’t hear her soft knock after almost fifteen minutes had passed. He pretended he didn’t hear the bell of the elevator arriving. He pretended he didn’t hear his heart pounding in his ears as he realized his hitting streak was over.

The playoffs were about to start, and he was doomed.

~~~

Friday evening, Amanda’s plane landed in North Carolina, half an hour late. It seemed like she’d spent her entire day in airports, hurry up and wait.

Not the entire day, though. She’d had four hours in Link Oster’s fledgling DC office. Four glorious hours with Antoine Phillips, a court reporter, and an unhappy lawyer for the other side. Now, settling onto the back seat of a Raleigh cab, she shifted her litigation bag closer to her side, protective of the documents inside, of the thumb drive that held Dr. Phillips’ testimony, the new heart and soul of her case.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked.

Amanda thought about going home. She could spread out her notes on her kitchen table, begin to work in all the new facts Dr. Phillips had given her. She could smooth over the rough edges of her case and iron out her entire opening argument right then, while everything was fresh in her mind.

Instead, she gave the address of Kyle’s condo building.

She’d caught the tail end of the game as she waited in the DC airport. The Rockets were up by one run. They wrapped things up at the top of the ninth, exploding onto the field amid fireworks and congratulations.

They’d won. Kyle had to forgive her. He had to be ready to kiss and make up, to get back to where they’d been before she’d pinned down the Phillips meeting.

She checked in at the imposing front desk of the condo building. The doorman remembered her, of course. He called upstairs and announced her, but his voice was grave as he hung up his phone. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Mr. Norton is not seeing visitors this evening.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Hand me the phone.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said again. “I’m afraid I can’t—”

Amanda cut off her curse. The guy was only doing his job. Instead, she pulled out her cell phone and slammed her finger down on the button to connect her with Kyle. Voicemail. Well, he’d taught her what to do about that, weeks ago, when she hadn’t wanted to let him in to
her
apartment. She hung up and dialed again. And again.

As she prepared to punch his number for the fourth time, the phone on the doorman’s desk rang. The man picked it up as if he was handling a live cobra. He nodded once and said, “Very good, sir.” He hung up and glared at Amanda, but he made his voice excruciatingly polite. “You may go up.”

She recognized the look in the doorman’s eyes as she stepped into the elevator. She’d overstepped her bounds. She’d made him look bad in front of one of his residents, and he resented her for it.

Well, he’d have to get over it. She was a freaking litigator. She knew how to get what she wanted. That’s why she was here, after all. She was going to make everything work out. She braced herself and stepped off the elevator into the glass and chrome luxury of Kyle’s living room.

For a heartbeat, she thought everything was all right. The room looked the way it had just three nights before. Raleigh’s skyline glinted out the window. The apartment was neat, clean, perfectly in order. Kyle stood by the kitchen counter, wearing dress pants and a white shirt with the neck stripped open, his tie nowhere to be seen. His hair rippled to his shoulders, tangled like he hadn’t bothered to run a brush through it after he showered. His lips were nearly lost inside the thicket of his beard.

“Kyle,” she said, saturating his name with warmth. “Congratulations on the win.”

But even as she said the last word, she saw it. She recognized the danger that had jangled at the back of her mind from the very second she stepped off the elevator. The green glass bottle was sweating, as if the liquid inside was icy cold. She watched Kyle’s fingers close over the bright label as he raised the bottle to his lips, as he swallowed down half the beer.

“What are you doing?” she cried. “This is the way you celebrate?”

“This is the way I say go to hell.” And he raised the bottle again, gulping down a few more swallows. She watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall, barely visible in the snarl of his beard.

“You
won
!”

“The team won. I didn’t get a fucking hit.”

He spat out the words like he was sentencing her to the electric chair. She cringed beneath the raw anger in his voice, and she didn’t dare meet the searing fury in his eyes. But she had to say, “No hitting streak lasts forever.”

“Mine could have gone one more day.” He slammed the empty bottle on the counter, hard enough that she half expected it to collapse into a pile of emerald shards. “One more goddamn day, Amanda. You could have shown up and dropped the fucking glasses. I would have gotten a hit today, and then we would have gone on the road. You wouldn’t have needed to worry about rearranging your calendar ever again.”

“You can’t blame
me
for your failure to get a hit! You set yourself up for this! You don’t have any confidence, any faith in yourself. That’s why you took the goddamn steroids in the first place, isn’t it? You didn’t think you had the strength to come back from an injury. You didn’t think you were good enough to play the game without them.”

“That was ten years ago,” he said. “You don’t know anything about who I was then.”

“I’m pretty sure you didn’t have your head in the game. Because you don’t have your head in the game now. You focus on sunglasses and crazy made-up rituals when you should be working on how to be a better ballplayer.”

“Listen to you! Now you’re an expert on baseball? What did you do, kick back on the plane this morning and memorize an encyclopedia of statistics? Pass the time with all the numbers you’d ever need to freeze your heart solid.”

“I wasn’t going to a freaking tea party!” How could he be so ridiculous? How could he be so completely, one hundred percent illogical? “I was
working
, Kyle. You know, my job? That silly little thing that pays my rent?”

“Not very well, does it?”

She sucked in a breath, astonished at how much his snide words hurt. But it wasn’t just the words. It was the fact that they were true. She
couldn’t
support herself, hadn’t done so with any crisis in the past two months. “I don’t have to justify myself to you. You know damn well what DC meant to me. With Dr. Phillips’ testimony, I can win the case for UPA.”

“I’m sure you will. I’d expect nothing less from Super Lawyer.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Whatever you want it to, sweetheart.
I
think it means you’re a cold fish. You’ve never loved anything but facts and figures. You’re terrified to take a chance on anything that requires a real commitment. Actual emotion. Real, honest-to-God feelings.”

“That’s not fair!” she said. “I’ve worked hard on this case because it’s going to change my career. I’m going to get a bonus, and the firm will recognize my contribution, and every single thing I’ve had to put up with this summer will be worthwhile.”

“Or you can walk away from it all and just find someone else to whore for.”

The words were bad enough. But the disdainful look as he scraped her with his eyes made her feel like her skin was turning inside out. “What did you just say?” she gasped.

“I said you were a whore. Isn’t that what they call it, when a girl has sex for money?”

“I never—”

“You cashed my fucking check, Amanda. Wednesday morning, thirty-two thousand. That’s all I’ve been for you—a goddamn ATM. You punched in a few numbers, showed up at a few baseball games, and you skimmed off all the cash you needed.”

“This has never been about money!”

He barked out a sound that had nothing to do with laughter. “Liar.”

She was hyperventilating. The back of her head felt like it was floating away. Her vision was going grey around the edges. “Okay,” she said, trying to sound reasonable. “You’re right. It started out about money. But not after I knew you. Not after we… talked.”

He snorted.

She had to go on, had to make him understand. “When I came here on Tuesday, that wasn’t about blackmail. I decided
not
to use Spring Valley, I told you that. I told you about my
mother
, about everything I was supposed to keep secret. I had to tell you what was really going on, after everything we’ve shared.”

“After all the times we’ve fucked,” he said, and his correction turned her stomach.

He was only saying these things because he was hurting. He’d been playing at the top of his game, accomplishing more than he’d ever done in his career. He was a competitor at heart, pushing for the win, pushing for the World Series. He wanted that,
needed
that for himself, for his team, for the old owner whose health was fading.

She knew all that. She knew all the reasons he was striking out at her, all the reasons he was tearing her heart out and ripping it to shreds in front of her.

But that didn’t keep her tongue still. That didn’t keep her from saying the most hateful thing she could think of. “You’re a child, Kyle Norton. A superstitious child. You think that a pair of sunglasses is enough to keep the bogeyman away.”

She turned on her heel and stalked to the elevator. She punched the button and the door glided open, welcoming her in, inviting her to escape. But she turned back one last time. She looked him over from head to toe, trying not to flinch at the wild tangle of his hair, trying not to remember the good-looking guy who had grinned up at her from the baseball diamond that early August day, trying not to see his clean-shaven face, his close-cropped hair.

“You’re lying to yourself,” she said. “You refuse to get a haircut. You refuse to shave your beard. You’re disgusting. And when you can’t get your bat on a ball, you blame someone else. Grow up, little boy.”