Fielder's Choice (22 page)

“That’s Parker’s brother,” Alana said in a sleepy morning voice, motioning from the bed.

He didn’t ask about the other photo, the photo of locking lips. One did not lock lips like that with a cousin.

She had her choice of men—he’d known that from the start. The reality just hadn’t sunk in. He looked back at the guy in the photo. The man looked happy. She probably summoned the best in all her lovers.

“Sophie gave me the drawing,” she said as she sat up in the bed. “After we put the hummingbird mint in the garden. It’s sweet, isn’t it?”

It was more than sweet. It was a drawing of a child’s hope.

The tightness ratcheting in his chest told him he was in way too deep. Another mistake.

There was a theme here. Whenever he made decisions involving Alana, he made the wrong ones. He should’ve stopped when it would’ve been easier, before the event, before last night. And he had to stop now. Before Sophie got caught in the crossfire. Hell, before he did.

But he wouldn’t have given up what he’d felt making love with Alana for anything. To know such power, such ball-rocking, world-shaking, mind-blowing passion, if even only for two nights, was worth any price.

Maybe that’s what worried him most.

He sat on the edge of the mattress.

“We need to talk,” he said.

She slid to the side of the bed and stretched a hand to his tux trousers. “Only if you take these off,” she said with what should’ve been a resistible smile. The sheet fell away from her, revealing the lush curves of her breasts.

He let her undo his trousers.

He shouldn’t have.

For so many reasons he should have simply walked away. Not least was that they didn’t have that talk. And then he was late to the ballpark.

Though he fought traffic and drove like a madman, he nearly missed batting practice. He totally missed the stretching workout. But after a night and a morning in bed with Alana Tavonesi, he didn’t need to stretch. But he did need another stiff cup of coffee. That and a new brain. The one he had obviously wasn’t paying any heed to him.

He’d never gotten around to telling Alana that they should cool it. He should. He
would
. He admitted that breaking it off before they got even more involved would be the best play.

What he didn’t want to admit was that he wanted to win her so that his would be the only photo gracing her dresser.

His name the only one on her lips and in her mind.

His hands and body the only ones touching hers.

Chapter 17

Jackie had thought of everything to make the day on the water fun for the kids. They’d sailed over to Pier 39 on the
Mermaid
, an eighty-two-foot schooner rigged like the old-style tall ships.

The wildlife docent came aboard, and before long even the youngest of the ranch campers could tell the difference between sea lions and harbor seals.

They’d had smooth sailing to the lighthouse at Point Bonita. Only Alana knew how Jackie must’ve prayed for calm seas. She might be a seafaring marine-mammal vet, but if the water was even slightly rough, Jackie spent most of the time seasick and retching over the rail of the boat.

Alana was lucky—nothing about the sea affected her adversely. She loved everything about it—the salty spray, the pelicans that soared overhead casting their prehistoric shadows over the boat and especially the ever-changing color of the water.

When they’d left that morning, the water had carried a steely blue sheen. The color of Matt’s eyes. He had amazing eyes. Sometimes she thought he could see to the heart of her. Sometimes she thought he maybe even liked what he saw. It mattered to her, his respect and admiration, even if they didn’t have a future. But they did have a now. And it was a breathtaking one. She shivered just thinking about him, thinking about how he made her feel. She couldn’t wait to be with him again. It seemed like more than twenty-eight hours since she’d seen him. She laughed to herself. Her sense of time was just one aspect of her senses he’d messed with.

“Alana? Alana! Anybody home?” Jackie’s voice had the sound of alarm. “Watch out for the boom.”

Alana ducked under the boom and joined Jackie and the campers along the midsection rail. The captain turned them north and headed back to the harbor.

“Time to feed these little beasts,” Jackie said with a smile. “Lunch on the beach when we dock. You staying?”

“I was planning to.”

The boat entered the little bay that held the marina. Alana watched the sparkle of light on the water, suddenly prompted to go for a swim. She couldn’t resist and didn’t want to—the water was calm and the sun was hot and high in the sky. She pulled off her life vest, yanked her T-shirt over her head and dove over the side of the boat.

She hit the water and felt the bliss of being enveloped by the sea. She opened her eyes and swam deeper. The blue-green of the Bay was a color matched by no other.

A disturbance near her bolted her to the surface.

“Alana! Alana!” Sophie thrashed toward Alana with flailing arms. Alana reached her with a couple of swift strokes and took her in her arms.

“Alana.” Sophie sobbed against her, gulping for air.

“Shhhh... let’s get you back into the boat and get you dry.” She shoved down her alarm and swam as fast as she could with Sophie clutched under one arm.

When they got back on board, Alana wrapped a heavy towel around the still-sobbing Sophie.

“I thought you were going to drown,” Sophie said, making a heroic effort to control her tears. “I thought you were going to
die
. Like Mom.”

If a person could feel stupid and angry at the same time, Alana was that person.

She hadn’t thought. She’d just jumped in, looking to enjoy the water, the sun, the day. She hadn’t given any consideration to the fact that there were kids on board. Kids she was nominally responsible for. Kids who’d be looking to her as an example. And she’d never considered the trauma Sophie must’ve suffered after losing her mother in a hellfire plane crash. She just hadn’t thought.

Worse, Matt was storming toward them, taking long, angry strides down the dock. Evidently he’d seen the whole thing play out. For once she wished he didn’t have ballplayer-sharp eyes.

In a flash, what she’d tried to ignore hit home hard.

Signing up for Matt meant signing up for motherhood. Step or otherwise, it all came out the same: responsibility.

Having a relationship with him meant that she couldn’t make decisions just for herself anymore. When she’d let the affair go forward, she’d known there’d be compromises involved. But she hadn’t considered that following through on the feelings he’d awakened, that by becoming involved with him in any significant way, meant being responsible for a child’s
life
.

From the furious look on Matt’s face, she’d just made it pretty damned clear that she wasn’t cut out for anything even close to that level of responsibility.

Sophie stiffened when she saw her dad.

“He’s going to be mad at me,” she said, burrowing into Alana’s body.

“I think he’ll be madder at me.” She stroked Sophie’s dripping hair.

“That’s worse,” Sophie said. “
Way
worse.”

“It’s okay, honey. We’ll just tell him what happened.”

Sure.

She’d just explain that she jumped into the bay on a lark, without thought, and terrified his six-year-old daughter, who then risked her own life trying to avoid another disaster in her life.

When they stepped onto the dock, Matt gave her no chance to say anything. He scooped Sophie up and stomped down the dock without a word to anyone. But Sophie kicked loose and made him set her on her feet. She turned and hurried back to Alana.

“
We
have a day off of baseball. Dad told me last week. He said maybe you could come for a hike with us.”

Matt walked up and tried to scoop her up again. “I’m sure Alana has loads of things to do on that day.”

His voice had the edge of barely restrained anger. He couldn’t have said
it’s over
in a more effective way. Alana got the message.

“But maybe not. Maybe she doesn’t,” Sophie said, looking hopefully up at Alana and ignoring the discord between her and Matt. “You
said
, Dad.”

“He’s right,” Alana said. “I do have loads of things to do that day.” She tucked Sophie’s towel around her little shoulders, pushing her hair gently under the edge. “I’m sorry, honey.”

She wasn’t sure which hurt worse, the icy look in Matt’s eyes as he lifted Sophie and turned away or the desolate look in Sophie’s as he carried her down the dock.

The summer camps would be over at the end of the next week. She’d just have to suck up the hurt and steer clear of the two of them until then.

And though she wanted to curse the day she’d met him, the emerging force within her wouldn’t let her.

She returned to the boat and grabbed the life jacket and her T-shirt from where she’d dropped them on the schooner’s deck. She pulled the T-shirt over her head and then tossed the life jacket into the big blue equipment bin on the dock.

She’d need more than a life jacket to navigate the storm of feelings that Matt had unleashed.

Chapter 18

I think I’ll walk to Mr. Hartman’s,” Alana announced as she sailed into Peg’s office the next morning.

She’d wanted to postpone her meeting with Mr. Hartman, but Peg had reminded her that she’d already postponed seeing him twice. The staff was impatient to get the windmill running before harvest season and, according to them, growly old Mr. Hartman was the key to pushing the permit through.

Peg slanted her a look of doubt. “It’s more than two miles to his ranch house.”

Alana shrugged.

“And the trails are overgrown.”

“Then I’m taking the ranch Jeep.” Alana fished the keys out of the bowl just inside the office door. Her tricked-out Range Rover might make a bad first impression on Mr. Hartman.

“The permit meeting’s in ten days.” Peg crossed her arms and sat back in her chair.

At the staff meeting earlier that morning, Alana had questioned why having the windmill running was so important. They had electricity, all they needed. Jed Thomasson, the ranch engineer, had explained that the windmill and the green energy it would generate were part of a piece, part of the overall plan to create a sustainable operation on the land. From the staff’s reaction, she’d have thought that just asking the question was blasphemy. Peg’s rigid posture told Alana that she’d yet to be forgiven.

The road to the Hartman ranch was pitted with potholes. In her days wandering her grandmother’s ranch as a child, Alana had rarely dared to cross over onto the neighboring property. She and her cousins and brothers made up stories about the neighbor and his wife, and before long they started to believe their own tall tales. It was a wonder they hadn’t named him a fire-breathing dragon.

She wasn’t feeling at her best game. The previous day’s trauma with Matt and Sophie was still fresh. The look on Matt’s face had skewered her. It wasn’t as though he’d judged her, though he may have. What she saw in his expression was far worse than that. It was the simple fact that he acknowledged she was unsuitable in every way to be in his life. Well, except for one. And she hadn’t known until the miserable moment on the dock how much she wished it weren’t true. She shuddered as she remembered Sophie’s distress when Matt carried her down the dock. The firm set of Matt’s jaw and the hard glare in his eyes had started the business of breaking her heart, and Sophie’s sad gaze had finished the job.

The Jeep lurched as Alana turned onto a stone bridge crossing a stream. The bridge looked like it’d been there for a hundred years, maybe more. There wasn’t much that was old in California, not like in Paris, where buildings could range back nearly a thousand years. Post-Gold-Rush California was about as far back as structures went in Sonoma, not even two hundred years. From the look of the stone walls leading up to his ranch, Mr. Hartman’s place had been built during those raucous, pioneering days.

She pulled up in front of the house and hopped out of the Jeep. There was no one about, and it was eerily quiet.

The house had the appearance of an old adobe structure but had been modified with modern light fixtures and double-paned windows. The heavy wood doors at the front had hand-forged hinges and antique ironwork. A paper tacked to the door flapped in the breeze. She stepped closer. It was a scrawled note to her, and it was attached to the door with a knife. The knife struck her as overkill, but maybe the old man really was as crazy as people said. She ripped the note from under the blade and stared at the knife. She couldn’t believe she was considering pocketing it, just in case. Just in case of what? She wouldn’t know what to do with a knife if she was faced with a pack of howling hyenas.

She followed the instructions on the note and walked around to the back of the house. She hadn’t expected to find several acres of beautifully tended gardens. A fountain bubbled at the center of a cobbled patio, and covered walkways flanked the gardens bordering the two wings of the house. It was a place out of time. An exquisitely beautiful place from a more gracious time.

“You’re late,” said a voice from behind a hedge of manzanita.

She glanced at her watch.

“Four and a half minutes,” she said, irritated. In the country people gave each other a twenty-minute leeway. Evidently Mr. Hartman was even more crotchety than people had reported.

A head appeared above the hedge.
Way
above the hedge. Mr. Hartman must have been close to six and a half feet tall. And no one had bothered to mention that he was handsome, in a rugged sort of way.

“I’ll let it slide,” he said without cracking anything resembling a smile. He walked around the hedge and motioned to a table near the arched back entrance to the house. “I understand you prefer tea. Never touch the stuff myself.”

She stopped, and he must’ve caught the wariness in her face.

“Your grandmother told me you prefer tea.”