Stopping Short: A Hot Baseball Romance (8 page)

Jessica stared out at the steady afternoon rain as she waited for someone to pick up the phone in Spartanburg, South Carolina. It had taken hours for the Image Masters librarian to scare up a number for Mickey’s—something about the bar being registered under a different name and all the employees being paid under the table.

She was about to hang up and try again when a wheezy voice finally answered: “Mickey’s.”

“May I please speak with Sarah Weston?”

“Who’s asking?”

Suspicion dripped down the phone line. Jessica had no doubt that she was speaking to Drew’s mother. “My name is Madison Winthrop. I’m calling from the Mutual Insurance Corporation to tell Ms. Weston about an annuity we’re holding in her name.”

The aliases came easily; Jessica had used them before. She caught her breath, hoping greed would tip the balance in her favor. Lightning flashed in the distance and thunder was rolling ominously before Susan finally said, “I’m Sarah Weston. What type of annuity?”

“Our policy-holder is a Mr. A. Marshall. He’s designated you as the beneficiary of a fund that pays out an annual sum of sixty thousand dollars.”

Another endless pause. Another flash of lightning. Another grumble of thunder, long and low and angry.

Jessica had chosen her number carefully. It had to be high enough for Susan to risk talking about her son, but it couldn’t sound impossible, like a con. How much could Drew be sending her now? One thousand a month? Two? Not enough to keep her from working a crappy job at a crappy bar. Five thousand a month must sound like gold at the end of a rainbow.

“Ma’am?” Jessica prompted. “I just need you to certify some basic information so we can confirm your blood relationship to our policy holder. What is Mr. Marshall’s birth date?”

“I don’t know any Andrew Marshall.”

Bingo
. Now she pitched her voice low, speaking fast to close the deal before she spooked Susan completely. “Ma’am, I think you do. I never mentioned that my policy holder’s first name is Andrew. Ms. Weston,
Susan
, I need you to answer some questions. Drew needs you to tell me the truth so I can help him out of a terrible situation.”

“I don’t have anything to tell you!”

“Don’t hang up!” Jessica shouted. “Susan, if you hang up that phone, you’ll never see a penny of the sixty thousand dollars.”

Silence. The other woman hadn’t cut the line. But she wasn’t volunteering so much as a breath.

“Susan, I need to know what happened when Drew was in middle school. I have to understand why you moved around so much. I have to know why he started getting into trouble with the law. Please, Susan. You’re the only one who can help me. The only one who can help your son.”

“I don’t know any Drew. And my name’s not Susan. If you phone here again, I’ll report you to the cops.”

Once Jessica’s ear had stopped ringing from the crash on the other end of the line, she ran an assessment of her progress. She knew Drew was holding out on her about
something
that involved his mother. But she was pretty sure Ross Parker wouldn’t learn about it either. Sixty thousand dollars was a lot more than the reporter could offer—and he’d have to follow through with payment if he put Susan’s words in the paper.

Jessica sighed and plucked at her sweatpants, pinching the fleece fabric between her finger and thumb before she smoothed it over her knee. She hated going behind Drew’s back like this. She hated digging for dirt that she didn’t want to find.

But if she was going to build a defense that would keep him safe from Parker… If she was going to keep his Sympathy Index where it needed to be, continue boosting his Charisma Index, all by the roster decisions in twelve days…

She didn’t have a choice. She either poked into every dark corner, or she forfeited the project. She admitted that her career at Image Masters was finished, that she’d lost something vital when she took her leave of absence. Her job would be toast, and so would Drew’s. That’s why she hadn’t slept last night—worrying about the consequences of her possible failure.

Who was she kidding? She hadn’t slept last night because she’d been thinking about what had happened at the beach house.

She wasn’t ashamed, not exactly. She’d decided what she’d wanted, and she’d given herself permission to go for it. That’s what Kevin would have done. That’s what Kevin
had
done, every day of their marriage.

He’d never screwed around on her; she knew that. But he’d also never thought twice about whether he should take some risk, whether he should flood his system with yet another dose of adrenaline. Skydiving, hang gliding, the black diamond run that had killed him…

She’d never asked him to stop. Because that’s who Kevin
was
, that was the boy she’d fallen in love with freshman year, the man she’d married a week after graduation.

She missed him. A part of her always would. She wore his watch to remember him, to remember all the inhuman tasks he’d measured with it. He’d thrived on doing the impossible every day, and he’d given her the confidence that she could do the same.

But a part of her could never forgive him for bringing his death on himself. He could have skipped that last run of the day—he had to know that the slopes were icing up, that he didn’t have enough light to complete the entire run. He’d lived—and died—by his own risky choices.

In any case…
She forced herself back from the brink she’d been circling all day. She wasn’t ashamed of kissing Drew. She wasn’t ashamed of anything they’d done. Of anything she’d wanted to do, before Chip interrupted.

But she’d pushed down all her emotions on the drive back to Coral Crest. She’d texted Drew to let him know she’d gotten back safe—she hadn’t been ready to talk to him.

And then she’d gotten to work. Ross Parker thought his Sunday article would set the world on fire. He believed he had a scoop, and he was going to exploit it until every newspaper in the country got caught up in the conflagration.

The only solution was for her to build a fire break.

Jessica had to sear a path through Drew’s past. She had to root out the bad news herself and light a series of controlled fires. She had four days to release the information, to present everything in the best possible light, shading all meanings, controlling every interpretation. If she did her job right, Drew had a chance of coming out of this alive.

But the strategy was dangerous. If they didn’t air
every
piece of dirty laundry, if one bad story came out after they made their complete confession, then Drew would lose all credibility. There’d be nothing Image Masters could do to save him. He’d be finished.

Jessica had already written the easy pieces, the ones she’d been thinking about for weeks, since she first heard about Drew Marshall in that Monday Status Meeting. She’d already sent Chip rebuttals about Kaley Armistead, dismissals of drunken parties, explanations of late night noise complaints. She’d crafted one beautiful, heartfelt piece, detailing how she’d accepted her fiancé’s checkered past, how she took comfort in the knowledge that he’d never looked at another woman—not once—when he’d been with her.

And that was true. Drew hadn’t.

Once she had Chip’s approval, she’d plant the stories with friendly journalists. She’d built the fort around Drew, protecting him from the worst that Parker could dish out.

Her computer chimed, announcing the arrival of another file from the Image Masters library. She’d asked for a Level Three report—everything they could find on Drew from public databases, subscription databases, and the extensive private files the company had built, year after painstaking year.

She blinked hard. There were over five hundred pages there. Five hundred pages to read, analyze, and write about.

She leaned back in her chair, letting her head loll as she massaged the bridge of her nose. She had a headache, probably because she hadn’t slept last night. Another roll of thunder echoed in the room—rain was
still
pelting the palm trees.

Suddenly, she longed for the shower she’d skipped that morning. It would be refreshing. She could read the new files and write more articles, get in another three or four hours of work before Drew came home from his late afternoon game.

As she stepped under the spray in the bathroom, she promised herself she’d talk to Drew that night. She’d explain her entire business strategy. And she’d tell him they needed to put everything else on hold until after Sunday—the physical stuff, the things she’d started out at the beach house. She needed to give her complete concentration to the business task at hand.

He’d understand. He had to. Everything she was doing was to save both of them.

~~~

Drew heard the shower running the moment he opened the door to the hotel room. Good—she was here. They’d finally have a chance to talk. It had taken every ounce of his self-restraint not to phone Jessica last night, after he got her text. He’d thought about picking up the phone that morning, too, but he didn’t want to push her. He had to let her set the pace. So he’d stayed at the beach house until it was time to drive to the park.

Now, he ran his fingers through his hair, shaking off rainwater. February weather wasn’t usually too bad down here, nothing like Florida’s summer storms. But this one had been strong—the rain had started at noon, but it was two o’clock before the forecasters finally admitted there was no end in sight. They called the game, and here he was, feeling like he’d just been let out early from school.

And he had to admit, it felt almost as good coming home to surprise Jessica as it had felt to get on his bike when he was a kid, to pump hard up the long hill in front of the house, to put as much distance as possible between himself and chores and responsibilities and punishments.

Not everyone had taken the day off, though. Jessica must have worked straight through the night. Her computer was open, and handwritten notes were scattered all over the desk. He dropped his gym bag by the dresser and crossed to see what she’d put together.

Juvenile Record
said one piece of paper, at the top of three stacks of scribbled notes. And beneath those two damning words, underlined twice, she’d written
PURGED
.

A hell of a lot of good that did him.

There was another paper that said
High School
, with three stacks beneath it—had to be one for each high school he’d attended. Another said
Middle School
—four piles there. He caught a quick glimpse of his report cards, the computer generated forms that spit out a mix of Bs and Cs. Mostly Cs. But his grades weren’t the only thing Jessica had tracked down.

He paged through the papers, picking out letters from school counselors to his parents.
In the absence of any clinical diagnosis explaining Andrew’s repeated behavioral problems, we continue to recommend that your son enroll in some outside activity to expend some of the energy that consistently gets him into trouble in class.

Yeah. There’d never been a clinical diagnosis for what caused Andrew’s problems. Susan never took him anywhere near a doctor who might clinically diagnose
Father beats the crap out of Son
.

Bobby had terrified her, said he’d kill her if anyone ever found out. Whenever Drew took a beating too bad to hide—and it happened about once a year—she just pulled him out of school, kept him home for a few weeks, a month, the whole summer if that’s what it took to heal up. Then the whole family moved, and he’d start at a new school in a new town. No one ever knew.

And Drew sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone about it now. He wasn’t going to explain why he hadn’t stood up for himself, why he hadn’t fought back. Because “I don’t want to be like Bobby” just sounded stupid.

But if all Jessica had were letters from school counselors, then Drew’s real secret was safe. There were no medical records, no police records, nothing official anywhere. He turned to her computer, just to make sure. He scrolled through all the documents open on the screen, glancing at Jessica’s careful highlights. She knew something was suspicious, but she hadn’t put all the pieces together. She couldn’t. No one could.

There were a lot of files she hadn’t gotten to yet, and he clicked on them like he was drugged. He didn’t want to read them, didn’t want to see his past splashed all over the computer screen. But he had to. The words were as hypnotic as a fastball spinning toward the plate. He opened another document, some sort of bank account, a bunch of numbers and columns and a name: Robert Trueblood.

Fuck
.

Trueblood had been Bobby’s idea of a joke—true blood, get it? Drew had gotten it. He’d gotten it from the day he signed his first contract, when he’d sent Bobby a stack of cash and told him to stay the hell away from Susan.

He knew Bobby broke the law with the money. Bobby was a bookie, took bets on anything with odds. He had to cover baseball games, no reason not to take money on the Rockets.

But Drew hadn’t talked to Bobby in six years. He just sent the money on a regular basis, no note, no communication. It was dangerous. He’d be massacred if the league ever found out, if anyone knew he associated with someone who made his living betting on ball games. But it was a hell of a lot better than finding out Susan’d been killed.

Because as much as he never wanted to be like Bobby, he didn’t want to be like Susan either, staying silent, doing nothing.

Now, he wiped his palms against his jeans. His heart thudded in his chest, like it was happening all over again. He could hear Bobby hollering. He could smell the stink of his own sweat, the fear that soaked his pits and pooled in the small of his back. He could taste the snot at the back of his throat after he started crying, because Bobby never stopped until he saw tears.

But Drew wasn’t in some fleabag apartment. Bobby wasn’t towering over him. Susan wasn’t crouched in the corner.

He was in Coral Crest. He was in a luxury hotel room, with a view of rain-slashed palm trees out the window. He realized the shower had stopped in the bathroom. Jessica would be out here any moment.