Stopping Short: A Hot Baseball Romance (13 page)

Jessica’s teeth grated as a nasal baritone voice brayed from the speakerphone. “You have to understand. I’m taking a beating in the press. But I negotiated for that golden parachute fair and square, and I deserve every penny of my payout.”

Fifty-seven million dollars. That was a lot of pennies. Especially for a guy who’d basically driven an investment bank into the ground, disrupting its business so badly that half a dozen federal agencies were looking into what went wrong, along with every financial journalist in the business.

Chip’s response was a lot more soothing than Jessica could have managed. “Of course you do, Don. I’ll tell you what. We’ll put together a plan over the weekend. Print, television, social media, the whole nine yards. You go on up to Vermont and don’t spend another minute worrying about it. We can sit down Monday afternoon and go over everything.”

As Jessica listened to the familiar pitch, the cajoling she’d heard a hundred times before, she looked out the broad window behind Chip’s desk. He had a view of Central Park, of the controlled greenery that passed for wilderness for most New York residents. From here, it all looked perfectly manicured, precisely sculpted, like some model railroad fanatic had laid out an antiseptic master plan. She couldn’t imagine a storm whipping through, couldn’t imagine a single branch or leaf daring to fall out of line.

“This is going to cost me an arm and a leg, isn’t it?” their would-be client complained.

Jessica swallowed the urge to laugh out loud. Of course it was going to cost him. It was going to cost him because he was stealing Wall Street blind—legitimately, with the blessing of an ironclad contract, but he was walking away with more money from being fired than most people saw in a lifetime. In a dozen lifetimes.

Chip said, “Image Masters is the best, Don. You get what you pay for.”

The investment banker grumbled for a few more minutes, and Jessica let herself study the photograph on Chip’s desk, the family portrait that was anchored off to the side. Chip stood at the back, smiling and relaxed beside his pretty, lacquered wife. Their three sons sat in front of them in varying stages of teen awkwardness. Jessica remembered that the youngest still played Little League. She wondered when Chip had last attended a game.

Her boss snapped off the telephone connection, jerking her back to the matter at hand. “So,” he said, nodding toward the speaker to indicate their newest client. “You can get a prospectus to me regarding Mr. Bender by the end of the day?”

“Of course,” she said.

Her heart should be leaping. A prospectus was the plan of attack for their entire campaign, the scaffold for everything else they would do. Chip’s trusting her to draft the prospectus was a sign that she was back in his good graces. Her meek acceptance of entry-level work for the past month had paid off. Entry-level work, and working every weekend. Working till midnight most nights, too.

She was forgiven.

But it was hard for her to muster the excitement she knew Chip expected. Maybe that was because she was exhausted. She was burned out.

She shook her head and forced herself to smile. “Thank you,” she said, and she actually sounded sincere. Not at all like she was ready to fall asleep on her feet. And definitely not like she resented another weekend donated to Image Masters, another exhausting forty-eight hours, fleshing out the prospectus he’d approve that afternoon, then getting a complete presentation ready for the Monday Status Meeting.

At least she wouldn’t have to fight the crowds as she tried to get uptown after work—the hundreds of people constricting every crosswalk, the rivers of bodies flowing to the subway, the forests of sharp-elbowed commuters angling for a seat on the bus. When she finally finished up at one or two or three in the morning, she’d call a car service. Charge it to Donald Bender, the Wall Street executive.

Chip was already reaching for another client file before she got out the door. At least she knew he’d be putting in the same hours she would. Not in the office, of course—he’d spend the weekend out at the Hamptons, as usual. But he’d miss the planned cookouts, just like he missed his kids’ track meets, or their choir concerts, or their school plays. Just like he’d skip the book group he’d promised his wife he’d attend, or he’d celebrate his mother’s birthday by phoning her in between calls back to the office.

That was the life she was working toward. That was the life she’d poured herself into, with all the energy and enthusiasm that Kevin had given to extreme sports.

That Drew had given to baseball.

She jerked away from that thought as soon as it boiled up in her mind. Like a cat owner spraying a willful tabby with a water bottle, she forced her thoughts back from Florida, from the Linda Vista, from the Beach Shack, from
Drew
.

Back in her office, she took a healthy swallow from her oversize mug, ignoring the fact that her coffee had gone cold. She needed the caffeine. She had a long day ahead of her. A long night. And a weekend as well.

She wished she could slip into sweatpants and a T-shirt as she settled in to work. But image was everything. And image meant a tailored suit, a silk blouse, and closed-toe pumps with two and a half inch heels. Nevertheless, she kicked her shoes off behind the modesty panel that fronted her desk. No one would ever see. No one would ever know. She was such a rebel, always breaking the rules.

~~~

Drew parked his car on the street, hoping his hubcaps would still be there when he got back. He paused at the corner, looking up at the cinderblock building. The windows looked like they’d been painted over years ago, along with rusty iron bars that kept anyone from breaking in.

His hand itched inside his cast. He wanted to find something to shove down there to scratch, a fork or a butter knife maybe. Not that he’d trust anything from Mickey’s. Whoever the hell Mickey was.

He squared his shoulders and opened the door.

The place was as much a dump inside as out. The air smelled like stale beer and piss. One old guy sat at the far end of the bar, peering into the dregs of his cloudy mug. The bartender didn’t look up as Drew approached; instead, she spoke to the cracked taps, “What’ll it be?”

“What do you have in a bottle, Susan?”

That
got her attention. She squinted at him, but she didn’t say his name out loud. Instead, she reached into the bin and pulled out a Bud. The cap flipped onto the floor, but she ignored it as she passed him the cool brown glass. He nodded and carried it to the far end of the bar. It took five minutes for curiosity to overcome her fear. Or maybe it was greed that did the heavy lifting.

“What?” she asked, like they’d been carrying on a conversation for hours.

“Hello, son,” he prompted in a mocking tone. “Great to see you. What brings you all this way?”

“What did you do to your hand?”

“Broke it playing ball.”

She made a disgusted sound. “So you’re out of the game.”

He shrugged. “For a while.”

“So, what? I don’t get paid this month?”

He couldn’t tell if the prospect made her angry or frightened or sad. Instead of trying to figure her out, he asked, “Why didn’t you ever try to stop him?”

She acted like she’d just remembered there were health inspectors around, producing a filthy rag from somewhere beneath the bar and starting to scrub at a round ring of crud. The task took all of her attention.

“Susan,” he said. “Why?”

“He’d have killed me,” she said.

“I was just a kid!”

She flinched and looked at the guy at the far end of the bar. He stared back for a minute before he slipped off his stool and wandered out the door.

Drew dug his fingernails into the palm of his good hand. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t yell. He knew it wouldn’t do any good. Oh well. He lied to himself all the time anyway.

“I did what I could,” Susan said, once the door was closed. “I moved us when I had to. Gave you a chance to meet new people, to make new friends. I got you into Boys and Girls Club every place we lived.”

He heard the pride in her voice. She stood straighter as she talked, and she raised her chin. She actually thought that dragging the family back and forth across the Carolinas was a good thing.

Why didn’t you go to the cops? Why didn’t you tell someone at school? Why didn’t you tell
me
, give me permission, once I was big enough to kick his ass?

But there wasn’t any reason to ask her. She hadn’t helped her son, not against her husband. She couldn’t have helped him. And she sure as hell didn’t have the heart or the brains or
something
to realize she had broken him, bit by bit, as thoroughly as if she’d beaten him with her own brass belt buckle.

He’d come here because he’d thought he might learn something. He’d thought she might unlock something inside him, might make him understand what he’d done wrong, why he’d made Bobby so angry, how he’d broken everything so many, many times.

But there wasn’t anything to understand. He pushed himself back from the bar. “Goodbye, Susan.”

Panic scurried across her face. “What about my check?”

You don’t deserve a check. You let your monster of a husband beat the crap out of a little boy. You dragged your teenage son from hellhole to hellhole, and you didn’t give a damn when he almost fucked up his life worse than yours.

But what good would it do to say that now? She was his mother. She’d given birth to him. She’d done the best she could. She’d gotten him into baseball.

He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. In the past month he’d gotten pretty good at doing things with one hand—a skill he hoped he’d never use again, after this break was healed. He flipped the leather open and plucked out a check, setting it on the bar between them.

She looked from the blue paper to his face, suspicion carving deeper lines around her eyes. Shit. He wasn’t going to snatch it back from her. He sighed and shoved it across the bar.

She scooped it up and tucked it into her bra in a quick motion she’d obviously practiced too many times.

His chest felt empty as he crossed to the door. It had been a mistake to come here. A mistake to think there was some secret in his past, something she could tell him, something that would make him understand. He stopped with his hand on the door, turning back to see her staring at him with eyes that were the same gold-brown as his own.

“Why’d you talk to Parker, Susan? Why’d you tell him about everything Bobby did?”

For a second, he thought she wouldn’t answer. But then she shrugged and said, “He told me he was going to make you famous. I thought there might be money in it for you. And that would mean money for me, too.”

He shook his head and walked out the door, but not before he saw her sweep his untouched beer off the bar and lean her head back, drinking like the devil himself was going to take it away.

~~~

It was four in the morning by the time Drew pulled into the driveway. He should have pulled over hours before, but he’d stopped for coffee at midnight and driven the last hundred miles with the windows down, taking great gulps of cool night air. He could smell the ocean long before he arrived at the beach house.

He was exhausted, but the caffeine still jangled in his blood. He shuffled to the kitchen and took down a bottle of rye. He had a tumbler in his hand before he decided that was a bad idea.

He kicked the wooden rod out of the slider instead. The storm covering over the door raised smoothly, the metal slats folding against each other as the protective shade slipped into its trough. Wrestling the tarp off the swing was a little more difficult, with only one hand. But the ocean view was worth it.

The ocean view, and the memory of sitting here with Jessica.

Not the last night, the time he’d come here after breaking his hand. Her first visit to the cottage. The first time he’d let anyone else through that front door.

He leaned his head back and imagined she was sitting beside him.

For the first hundred miles after Spartanburg, he’d thought his trip had been a waste of time. Susan wanted his money. That was all she’d ever wanted, all he’d ever been good for.

After that, though, he realized the trip had bought him something more:
It wasn’t his fault
.

Once the thought came to him, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. It wasn’t his fault that Bobby had beaten the crap out of him. It wasn’t his fault they’d dragged him around hell. It wasn’t his fault that he’d walked away on his eighteenth birthday, that he’d paid Bobby to stay away from him and Susan, paid Susan to keep her safe.

He’d done what he could with what he had.

And it wasn’t his fault—none of it, nothing about the monsters who were his parents. Other people had said it.
Jessica
had said it. But it wasn’t until today, wasn’t until he’d seen Susan standing there, broken, lost forever, that he’d really, truly understood. He wasn’t responsible for the nightmare of his childhood.

But he was responsible for other things. He was responsible for deleting Jessica’s file, for lying about it, for screwing up her job. He should have talked to her. Should have trusted her—no matter how hard it was for him to trust anyone—because she was different. She was
good
in a way no other person ever had been in his life. In a way he didn’t deserve.

He loved her.

And she’d never forgive him. She’d risked too much, and he’d let her down, cost her the job that meant everything to her.

More than that—she’d trusted him after burying her husband. She’d let him into her bed, into her body. Now, breathing the clean ocean air, watching the waves crash in the moonlight, Drew knew it was time to apologize.

He took out his phone. It was almost five in the morning. If he woke her out of sleep now, she’d think something terrible had happened, that somebody had died. That somebody
else
had died.

He screwed around on the Internet until he found Image Master’s website. It was easy enough to get her phone number from their directory. The line rang, distant and tinny, four times before her voice answered. He followed the directions, leaving a message after the beep. “Jessica,” he said. “I’m sorry. Call me when you can, so we can… Just call me, okay?”