Stopping Short: A Hot Baseball Romance (14 page)

He leaned back in the swing and decided to watch the sun rise before he stumbled off to bed.

~~~

Jessica glanced in her office as she hurried down to the conference room. Good. There wasn’t a red light flashing on her phone. A tendril of tension eased from her shoulders when she saw she didn’t have any messages.

That’s not the way she used to feel. She used to love seeing that blinking light, greeting her like a chatty friend every morning. She used to anticipate what new client challenges awaited her, what impossible problems she’d solve before noon. But that was before her job started weighing around her neck like an iron weight on a baseball bat.

That was before Drew had left his message.

Guilt twinged through her belly. She’d let him down a dozen different ways. She’d told Parker about Susan, knowing full well the reporter would dig up the story about Drew’s abuse. She’d walked away from the beach house, returned to New York. She’d failed to achieve Image Masters’ number one goal, the one their client—Mark Williamson—had demanded, because Drew hadn’t made the Rockets’ team. Instead, he’d been put on the sixty-day disabled list, the DL, placed on medical leave while Rafael Ordonez played the coveted shortstop spot.

Chip had assigned other Image Masters associates to work on Drew’s case once she got back to New York. Jessica’s colleagues were handling the fallout from the news stories as Bobby Trueblood’s gambling business was investigated, as Drew’s connections to the bookie were explored. They were fielding the countless articles about Drew’s broken engagement, about how his fiancée had walked away from him in Florida, how Jessica had abandoned him on the same day that he’d landed on the DL. She’d walked without an exit strategy, but Image Masters was doing its best to backfill.

No matter what Image Masters did, Jessica had failed—professionally and personally. And so she hadn’t called Drew back. Not when she couldn’t begin to figure out what to say. Not when she hadn’t had time—hadn’t
made
time to think about it, with Donald Bender’s Wall Street crisis soaking up every second.

Even that morning, she’d planned on getting to the office early so she could prepare to report on Bender for the Monday Status Meeting, organizing the stacks of paper she’d generated over the past week. But that was before there’d been a fire on the subway tracks, before every downtown bus had been too crowded to shove her way on, before every single taxi in the entire city was taken.

Well, she was here, and that had to count for something. And she’d deal with Drew later. Just as she’d promised every day for the past week.

She slipped into her seat at the mahogany table, automatically tugging at the back of her jacket, sitting on the hem so the tailored shoulders lay properly on her frame. She ran her fingers through her hair and glanced down to make sure her blouse was perfectly tucked into the waistband of her skirt. She’d just crossed her feet at her ankles when the rest of the team arrived.

“Good morning,” Chip said, and she recognized the approval in his eyes. Somehow, though, it didn’t give her quite the same charge it always had before. This wasn’t a good morning. It hadn’t been a good morning since she’d rolled out of bed on four hours of sleep, already panicked that she’d forget some vital detail in her presentation.

“Do you
ever
go home?” quipped Caden as he slipped into a seat across from her.

“Of course she does,” Marnie responded. “She’s wearing a different suit.”

“No reason she can’t have the dry cleaner deliver her clothes here,” Rebecca said.

Any other day, Jessica would have been amused by their speculation. She might even have dropped off a jacket or two that afternoon, arranged to have the cleaner in the next block deliver them to the office, very publicly. That would be a good strategy, good proof of dedication. This morning, though, it just sounded like another round in the never-ending game of office one-upsmanship.

Chip tapped his pen against the table, immediately cutting off any further banter. “We don’t have any new clients this week. Let’s start off with reports on current matters. Jessica? Where do we stand with Mr. Bender?”

She hadn’t expected to go first, but that didn’t matter. She knew her numbers cold. After reaching across the table to flip the switch that projected an image onto the whiteboard at the front of the room, she crossed to the display in half a dozen tight, controlled steps. She used one of the dry-erase markers to point to the crucial numbers.

“We got the results from our telephone survey on Saturday morning. The pool of respondents wasn’t perfect—you never get a fair representation when you’re polling people who answer landlines on a Friday night during the dinner hour—but that was the only expedited slot we could book with the survey company.” Everyone nodded. They all knew the hazards of Friday night calls.

She uncapped her pen and turned to the board, drawing arrows to emphasize the points she began to make. “You can see that Mr. Bender’s Sympathy Index is actually passable with men and women, age eighteen to twenty-five. The numbers dip for the twenty-five to thirty-five cohort, with women reading far more negatively. It’s here, though, that we have our real problem.” She underscored a number three times and took a breath to explain her media strategy to counter the catastrophic drop-off among women age forty-five to fifty-five.

Before she could begin to present her triple-tier attack, though, beginning with traditional print magazines available primarily at point-of-sale in the grocery quadrant, the conference room door crashed open. Jessica gaped with everyone else as Chip’s secretary shouldered her way into the room, barely forcing her way past a man in a suit.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Patterson,” Dorothy announced. “He didn’t have an appointment, and Reception said he’d have to wait until the Status Meeting was over, but he refused to take a seat in the lobby.”

He
. Drew Marshall.

Drew Marshall as she’d never seen him before—clean-shaven, hair combed, wearing a suit perfectly tailored to his broad shoulders and trim waist. Drew Marshall, carrying a bouquet of bachelor’s buttons, the cornflower blue blazing against the grey of his suit. Drew Marshall, glaring defiantly at the secretary, at Chip, at the entire room.

Until his eyes fell on her.

His gaze softened the instant he saw her. The blur of his anger melted away, leaving behind a single-minded depth that shot straight through to her knees. She lowered her hand to the metal tray at the bottom of the whiteboard, the one that held the array of markers she’d planned to use for her presentation about…

Her mind skipped a beat. She couldn’t remember what client she was talking about. She wasn’t sure what numbers she was presenting.

It seemed like an eternity had passed with her standing there, staring at Drew, feeling him stare at her, but it could only have been a few seconds, because Chip was just now saying, “Thank you, Dorothy.”

“Would you like me to call security?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

After years of working for her very particular boss, Dorothy clearly knew when she was being dismissed. She pulled the door closed behind her with perfect speed and efficiency.

“Mr. Marshall,” Chip said. “We were going to review your matter later in the hour, but I’m happy to rearrange our schedule. Let me get Mr. Williamson on the phone, and we can update both of you at the same time.”

Drew glanced at Chip, but he spoke to Jessica. “There’s no need to call Williamson.”

Chip let an edge of annoyance slice into his response. “Technically, there
is
a need to call your agent, because he’s our actual client.”

“I’m not here on business,” Drew said.

Jessica’s belly swooped to her toes as he moved around the table. When he stood in front of her, she could see a faint sheen of sweat on his upper lip. “You didn’t return my call,” he said.

Her cheeks burned, and she wanted to look away. But he deserved more than that. He’d come all the way to New York, he’d dressed like a Wall Street banker, he’d muscled his way into this room to talk to her. She owed him some response.

But Chip wasn’t hanging her out to dry. Her boss said, “Mr. Marshall, if you’re dissatisfied with my team’s responsiveness, we can address—”

“I’m not
dissatisfied
with anything about your team,” Drew said, cutting him off. No one ever cut off Chip Patterson. But Drew had no way of knowing that. Or Drew didn’t care.

He reached out and took the marker from her yielding fingers, setting it on the metal tray that she still clutched with her left hand like it was the only thing that kept her on her feet. He handed her the flowers, and she had to give up her metal security blanket then. She folded her hands around the stems, and Drew added his palms on top of hers, pouring in a solid foundation of strength and certainty that stopped the wobbling in her knees.

“I was wrong,” he said, and she knew everyone in the room could hear him, but it didn’t matter because he was only speaking to her. “I was wrong to violate your privacy. I was wrong to delete the file. I was wrong not to trust you. Everything you did in Florida, you did to help me. Your statistics and your strategies and your Indexes, all of it. You never took a wrong step, and I should have had some faith.”

His words melted something inside her, healing bruises she hadn’t known she had. They spread like a balm over raw aches that had become so familiar she’d forgotten she was injured.

“I was wrong, too,” she said. “I never should have told Parker about Susan. I had no right.”

“You were working my case—”

No. It was important he understand. He had to know the truth, even though it cut her up inside to say it. She took her hands from his and set the flowers on the edge of the conference table. Only then could she force herself to say, “I said it was about work—that’s what I told myself. But I wanted to hurt you too. I wanted you to feel as horrible as I felt.” She blinked, and found to her horror that tears were rolling down her cheeks.

He reached out with his free hand and wiped them away. “Don’t cry,” he said.

And that was the worst thing he
could
have said. The dam broke. All the frustration of five weeks in the city, all the tension of work, work, endless days of work, all the uncertainty of whether Chip would take her back, of whether she would ever make partner, if she would have a job at all if she didn’t live up to the impossible, unbearable standards. Everything shattered, came crashing down around her, and she sobbed like a little girl, like a bereft woman.

His arms closed around her. His body sheltered her, feeding her warmth, lending her balance. His hands stroked her back, soothing even through the confining fabric of her jacket. His lips brushed her temple, soft, sweet, offering a silent promise.

Finally, she pulled away enough to laugh unsteadily. She pressed her fingers beneath her eyes and focused on his shoes, because the alternative was to accept that her breakdown was being witnessed by a dozen people, a dozen competitors who were probably churning with joy at watching her fall. “I’m an idiot,” she said.

“Never,” was Drew’s immediate response.

And only then, when he brushed her hair behind her ear, when he cupped her chin in his palm did she realize what she should have seen the second he walked into the room. “Your hand!”

“Good as new,” he said, easing back just enough to flex his fingers. “Or almost. The cast came off yesterday.”

Good as new
. But nothing was good. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She couldn’t admit her failure. Despite his Sympathy Index, his Competence Index, his Charisma Index, all the metrics she’d bolstered and manipulated for weeks, all the work she’d poured in, that her colleagues had done since she’d fled Florida—no model guaranteed he’d make the team. There’d been too many negatives, too many scandals. The only saving grace had been that Drew was parked on the disabled list—the team could ignore him while the social media firestorm burned itself out.

“So now the team has to make a decision?”

“They will, after I rehab. They’re actually under a lot of pressure to take me back. Some of that’s due to what you guys are doing here. But a lot of it is because the union’s involved—and pushing hard. There’s no paper trail beyond my sending money to Bobby. I didn’t know anything about his gambling; there’s no connection between me and any bets, anywhere. Not even Ross Parker has been able to dig up a shred of evidence that I knew what was going on.”

And if Parker couldn’t find it, then it wasn’t there to be found.
He didn’t say that. They both knew it.

But she had to say, “Bobby isn’t your only problem.” He wasn’t.
She
was a problem, too—maybe not as bad as gambling, maybe not as dark a blot on his record. But from the team’s perspective, Drew’s fiancée had lost faith in him; she’d walked away. And that had to make the Rockets question whether Drew Marshall was the man they wanted at shortstop.

He waved vaguely at the other people in the room, at the Image Masters associates who were gaping like they were watching a summer blockbuster movie. “They’ll work their magic. My Sympathy Index is high—you made sure of that by getting Susan’s story out there. I’ll be rebuilding my Competence Index as soon as I get to extended spring training in Florida; everyone will see that I can still hit, and it’ll only take me a couple of weeks to get back to where I was with fielding. That leaves my Charisma Index.”

She couldn’t help but smile. “And you’ve become such an expert on all this?”

“I’ve had a lot of time to study up. And the one thing that would blow my Charisma Index out of the water is if my fiancée came back to Florida with me. If she stayed down there while I rehabbed. If she stood by me, despite the injury, despite Bobby and Susan, despite everything.” His fingers twined with hers. “I’ll be staying at the beach house, Jessica. Come with me.”

She caught her breath. She could have a view of the ocean instead of asphalt and concrete and stifling high-rise buildings. She could listen to waves instead of honking taxis and cursing crowds. She could smell brine instead of diesel and garbage. All she had to do was say yes.