Stopping Short: A Hot Baseball Romance (16 page)

Instead, she sat up and pulled her feet out of his range. She looked at him with real concern. “Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

And he should be, right? He had one year left on a hundred-million-dollar contract that pretty much let him do whatever he wanted to do for the rest of his life. And so what, if his shoulder ached when he got up in the morning? Why did it matter if his knees complained for the first half hour he was walking around? Why should he care if the opposing pitcher never bothered to throw over to first once he got on base, if he wasn’t a threat to steal, any time, any way?

He still loved playing the game. And his team still looked to him for guidance. Hell, he’d taken the first question at the presser that afternoon, feeding all the usual answers about how this was the strongest team the Rockets had ever seen. And he’d loved saying it, because it was the truth. This team actually had all the parts to win a championship. With their starting pitching and their lineup of hitters, half the sportswriters out there were saying they were a shoe-in for the World Series.

Every guy on the team was a little drunk with the predictions. They wanted to win rings, sure, everyone did, every year. But they wanted to do it
this
year, when Marty Benson was around to share the glory. The long-time owner had handed over the day-to-day operations to his granddaughter. He’d had a stroke at the beginning of last season, but he still watched every game the team played. As their owner and their greatest fan, Mr. Benson cheered them on, and the guys wanted to pay back that faith before it was too late.

“Adam,” Haley said, and he realized he’d let a lot of time go by without saying a word.

“Yeah,” he said, and he made himself smile. “I’m fine. But if you were waiting to hear about my wild exploits in the Sunshine State, you’re doomed to disappointment. Come on, now. Your turn. How are things with Dylan?”

She twisted her face into a frown.

Automatically, he started looking around. Nope, there were only three dogs snoring in the huge bed beneath the grand piano. “You’re still together?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No. But I decided three dogs were enough for any girl. There’s a cat around here somewhere. Probably curled up on my bed.”

“A cat!”

“Her name is Bess.”

He nodded like that made perfect sense. And it did, really. For Haley.

She adopted a new pet after each spectacular breakup with the guy she’d been convinced was The One. Darcy had been that asshole with the Jaguar, the lawyer who’d screwed around behind her back for over a year before she found out and threatened to cut off his balls. Heathcliff was that artist, the one who’d sponged off her for a year and a half before she’d given him his walking papers. Killer was… who the hell was Killer? One of the clueless jerks that Haley thought she could save, just like she thought she could save every homeless animal in Wake County.

“Let me guess,” he said. “The cat has three legs.”

She shook her head and kicked his thigh. “Nope, that’s Heathcliff.”

“Then she needed two thousand dollars worth of surgery before you brought her home.”

“You’re thinking of Darcy.”

“Then she had mange and no one would adopt her because they thought she was a chupacapra.”

“That’s Killer, and all her hair has grown back in now.”

“Then what’s wrong with the cat?”

“Nothing,” Haley said. But then she gave him a sidelong glance. “If you don’t count the fact that she only has one eye.”

“Haley!”

“What? There’s nothing wrong with her! She gets around the house just fine. And it’s not her fault she got into a fight and ended up with an infection by the time she got to Paws. We were lucky to save one eye.”

Paws for Love. Haley had built the damn thing from the ground up. She still wanted to drag home half the animals from the no-kill shelter. And she would, if she kept dating assholes who left her high and dry. “So,” he prompted. “Dylan?”

She grimaced. “Dylan had an anger-management problem from the day we met. He promised he was working on it, though. And I believed him.”

He sucked in air between his teeth, even as a flash of anger tightened his gut. “Haley,” he said, and the word came out sounding like he was pissed with her.

She set her jaw, the same way she had twenty years ago, when he’d broken her family’s dining room window, hitting the pitch she’d left up over the plate they’d marked with his T-shirt. “Yeah,” she said softly. “I always said I’d let a guy take one free punch, so I could put him on notice that things had to change. It turns out, I lied.”

“What happened?” He wished Dylan was there, so he could beat the guy’s face in. He was glad Dylan wasn’t, because he wasn’t sure he’d know when to stop.

Haley squared her shoulders. “Turns out I still have a mean right hook. I learned
something
growing up with you and my brothers.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“It would have been a madhouse. The dogs were going nuts—Killer wouldn’t let go of the cuff on his jeans, and Darcy was making a sound I’ve never heard him make before. Heathcliff was baying like he was trying to wake the dead. He never actually got a hand on me. I broke his nose, and he was bleeding all over everything.” She shook her head. “I figured we were even.”

“Shit, Haley.”

She met his eyes. “Yeah. Well…” She didn’t finish that thought. Instead, she said, “We’re a couple of winners, aren’t we? Sometimes I feel like I’m a million years old.”

“Don’t say that,” he warned. “Not when I’m six months older than you are.”

His declaration seemed to calm her. She nodded toward her feet, which still rested in his lap. “At least you still have a marketable skill. With that foot massage, someone’s sure to pick you up off the waiver wire. What am
I
going to do?”

He laughed. “Okay. That’s way too close to a pity party, and you need a girlfriend for that. Time for me to get home. Through the dark. And the cold. All the way across both yards.”

“You poor thing.” She was laughing, which had been his intention.

“Up all those stairs to my bedroom.”

“Smallest violin in the world,” she said, rubbing her fingers together.

“Where I can look forward to a cold shower in the morning.”

“Without a—What happened?”

“Damn water heater must have blown out last week, after Jason stopped by. I found it last night when I got home.” So much for having someone look in on the place while he was gone. His manager, Jason Reiter, was supposed to keep an eye on the house. Reiter had an eagle eye for details; that’s why he was in charge of all Adam’s money, his personal finances and the Sartain Foundation. It was unlike the guy to miss a leak, and even more unusual that he hadn’t responded to Adam’s texts.

Well, the damage was done. Another night of water in the basement wasn’t going to make anything worse. He’d get someone working on it tomorrow. He grimaced and looked at the clock on the TV. Later
today
. At least there were showers down at the ballpark.

He shifted Haley’s feet and pushed himself up from the couch.

“You can’t sleep over there, if your basement is full of water!”

“Why not? I’ll be upstairs.”

“What if there’s an electrical short? What if the house burns down?”

“It’s had a week to collapse. I’ll be fine.”

“That’s ridiculous! You’ll stay here tonight.”

He didn’t like being fussed over. “Haley, it’s no big deal.”

“You’re right. It isn’t. You know I’ve got two guest rooms. There are clean sheets on the bed in the boys’ room.”

“Haley, I’m not a charity case.”

“No,” she said, with something that might have been tolerance but came out sounding suspiciously like she thought he was the biggest idiot she’d ever met. “You’re a friend.” When he still didn’t respond, she said, “Jesus, Adam. I’m just being neighborly.”

And that was it, the code from their childhood. It was
neighborly
for him to mow the Thurman lawn, in exchange for the chocolate chip cookies Haley baked. It was
neighborly
for her to pick up groceries for his mother, once Mom’s arthritis had made daily errands painful. Neighbors did favors for each other in dozens of little ways.

Well, the prospect of being able to wash his face in the morning had a certain amount of charm. And it wasn’t like he’d never spent a night in this old house—he’d practically lived here when he was a kid. Besides, he knew that look of determination in her eyes. It had cost him more than one bet in the past.

“Fine,” he said. And then, because he sounded like a seven-year-old boy who’d just been tricked into going to bed on time, he added grudgingly, “Thank you.”

~~~

After Adam mentioned going to bed, Haley couldn’t keep herself from yawning. She pushed herself off the couch. “Go on upstairs. I’m just going to lock up.”

Of course, he didn’t leave her. He padded with her into the kitchen as she checked that the dogs had plenty of water in their bowls, as she tested the lock on the back door. He followed her to the front hall, watching as she checked the deadbolt and turned off the porch light.

Back in the living room, she ignored the old adage and knelt beside the sleeping dogs. She pulled gently on Heathcliff’s ears, awakening a series of snorts as the shepherd mix settled to a more comfortable position at the bottom of the canine pile. She rubbed Darcy’s belly, eliciting a series of half-hearted tail thumps against the floor as the ancient beagle sighed back to sleep. She scratched Killer from the top of her head to the tip of her tail, reminding the mutt that she didn’t need to wake up before sunrise.

She knew Adam was laughing at her. Everyone laughed at her when she talked to her dogs. But that wasn’t going to keep her from carrying on the conversation. After all, the dogs were there for her every morning and every night.

A hell of a lot more than she’d been able to say about Dylan.

Adam followed as she led the way up the stairs. They both knew to avoid the squeaky one, three steps from the top—habit now, because they didn’t have to worry about waking her parents, who were presumably sleeping soundly in their Florida condo. Adam had learned that trick the hard way—trying to sneak out with her brothers on sleep-overs, back when Mom and Dad threatened to chain the doors shut against recalcitrant boys who only found new ways to get into trouble after curfew.

Smiling at the memory of some of those rather spectacular displays of
trouble
, Haley pulled open the door to the linen closet. She’d told the truth when she said the bed was all made up—she always kept the house ready for any of the Thurman clan to stop by. She made short work of digging out a towel and a washcloth. It took her a little more effort to find a toothbrush at the back, but she managed.

“There you go,” she said.

“Thanks.”

She watched him slip into the boys’ room, gently shutting the door behind himself. She took the chance to duck into the bathroom, to brush her own teeth, to splash water across eyes that were suddenly grainy.

It was a ton of work to put on the Opening Day party. She’d cooked all weekend, getting things ready. She’d worried about the weather for twenty-four straight hours. She’d barely been able to concentrate on the afternoon game because she’d been thinking about timing, about making all the food come out in the proper order.

She rolled her neck, trying to loosen her muscles. Adam had done a killer job on her feet. She could still feel his firm, confident fingers on her calves. She should have pushed for a back rub.

She still could.

That was ridiculous, though. Adam had to be as tired as she was. More—he’d just gotten back from Florida the day before, and he’d
played
the game she’d watched with one eye. Played it, and been interviewed, and then come over and talked to everyone at the party. She should let the guy get some sleep.

Shaking her head at her own selfishness, she went into the master bedroom, the one that still felt like it belonged to her parents. Leaving the door open a crack so patrolling dogs would know she hadn’t been abducted by aliens, Haley shimmied out of her clothes. She found her nightshirt under her pillow, the oversize T that she always wore. As she slipped into bed, she pulled the blanket and comforter up close beneath her chin. This early in spring, it was cold in the old house. She’d turned off the heat, and there was a draft by the window.

The boys’ room would be cold, too. There was only a thin cotton blanket on the bed. What sort of hostess was she, inviting Adam to freeze to death?

Shaking her head at her own stupidity, she climbed back out of bed. Now, the house seemed more quiet than before. The door to the linen closet sighed as she opened it, and she sounded like a marauding bandit as she excavated a quilt from the bottom shelf.

She didn’t want to knock on Adam’s door, in case he’d actually managed to fall asleep. Instead, she twisted the doorknob with painstaking care, adding just enough pressure to ease the door open.

Moonlight washed in the pair of windows, supplementing the soft fall of light that barely made it down the hall from her own bedroom. The boys’ room wasn’t a museum. She’d replaced the bunk beds with a single queen, making a decent room for visiting adults.

Adam was lying on his back when she opened the door, but he pushed himself up on his elbows as she hovered on the threshold. The sheet and blanket slipped down his chest, making him look like some sort of silver statue. “Haley,” he said, his voice low and throaty.

She was totally unprepared for the wave of emotion that hit her. Her belly swooped down to her toes—the same toes he’d been rubbing not an hour before. No, that wasn’t her
belly
doing the swooping—it was something distinctly lower. Something that had never once been involved with a single thought about Adam Sartain. She caught her breath in surprise at her body’s reaction.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, pushing himself up further.

But that only caused more of a problem, because it made the sheet fall further, made the blanket curl across his lap. She caught herself looking at that lap, wondering if he was wearing underpants or if he’d stripped down completely for a quiet night’s sleep. She didn’t even know what type of shorts he wore. Her brothers had both switched to boxers as soon as they were able to voice a preference, so she assumed Adam had too, but maybe not. Maybe as an athlete—