Team Player: A Sports Romance Anthology

by Adriana Locke

  “What in the hell are you talking about? I’m so much like who?” Ren demanded, his eyes full of hurt.

  “I hate this fucking sport! That’s what I’m talking about. How could I ever be the woman for you when I hate baseball, Ren? It ruined my family, my mother. It ruined everything!”

  “ERICA!”

  I stood there, stunned, as my father’s voice snapped me back into the room full of watchful eyes. I had the attention of every person in the room, but I kept my eyes on Alice, who had just walked in with the purse I had left in her Jeep. She nodded in encouragement as she watched me cower at the sound of authority behind me.

  I turned to face the great Lucas Wild. A Hall of Fame inductee and career sportsman. A man who put baseball above everything, especially his wife, his sons, and his daughter.

  My mother was a martyr to the sport I loathed.

  She’d sacrificed her life to it, for only stolen moments when my dad felt like throwing her a bone and treating her like a stray dog afterward.

  Full of contempt, I stared into the eyes of my father while his jaw ticked. I was the first to speak.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was invited,” he said sternly as he eyed Ren behind me. “Good to see you, Ren.”

  “I invited him,” Ren said behind me.

  “Hey, Lucas.”

  I laughed without humor and looked back to Ren. “Of course you invited him. You two were thicker than thieves when we dated. I’m guessing the end of us wasn’t the end of everything,” I said, looking between them.

  “You two have a lot in common,” I said with a shaky voice, the exhaustion taking over. “So much more now, don’t you think, Ren?” I asked as the first tears fell down my cheeks.

  “I mean you idolized him for being a ball player and a family man. You couldn’t wait to live a life like the great Lucas Wild.” I shook my head and swallowed a threatening sob. “Little did you know, the life you’ve lived the last two years are more his style.”

  “Erica,” my father said with bite as he glared at me with contempt.

  “Sorry, Dad. Not this time. I won’t keep quiet.”

  Ren looked stunned as he took a step forward. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Erica, you need to go collect yourself,” my father snapped as I stared on at the love of my life.

  Ren’s eyes were filled with confusion, and I was done being the source of it.

  “I couldn’t make you choose,” I confessed with a broken voice. “I loved you too much. But I couldn’t get over it, Ren. I couldn’t make peace with the game. Not even for you. I was terrified of becoming like her, like my mother. I tried so hard to get over it. But I watched it go on for years and years. I watched him use her and discard her like she was nothing. And she loved him just as much as I loved you.”

  “Damn it, Erica!” My father finally lost his composure, his tall frame going taught in his dressed to impress Armani suit.

  He looked around the room, fuming and humiliated, his olive complexion turning beet red. I’d never been so satisfied as I was at that moment, seeing the look on his face. We had a small audience, but the audience we had was enough.

  Ren’s opinion of him mattered. It mattered a lot. When I introduced Ren to my father, I could see it in his eyes. My dad was excited about having another player to mentor, and I quickly realized that Ren idolized my dad.

  I never had the heart to tell Ren that the man he looked up to was a completely different man off the field and out of the press. He wasn’t the family man he portrayed himself to be. At all.

  When it came to having a father, I was a baseball orphan. And I shared that burden with my brothers.

  Lucas Wild was drunk when he was home and verbally abusive to my mother. Baseball had consumed him, body, mind, and soul. Even his precious induction into the Hall of Fame hadn’t satiated anything for him. His unhealthy obsession with the sport had cost him everything, including the admiration of his sons and the respect of his daughter.

  I looked at Ren, who was lost to me. Not because I had left, but because I never showed him my fear. I’d named it. I told him countless times I didn’t want to have to compete with the sport for his affection, and though he gave me assurances, he never quite got it. I’d spent years playing along with my father’s charade that we look like the perfect family, and it cost me the confidence I needed to be with Ren. I didn’t believe in happily ever after with baseball. My father’s example was far too prominent to pay attention to other examples like Rafe and Alice or Andy and April. And to be honest, I had never seen that growing up. I had always seen my father’s teammates behaving like idiots among other things no kid should ever see. I’d been surrounded by good-looking liars all my life. My father included.

  And when he left for another season, it was me who had to deal with my mother when she withdrew. He ruined her with his absence and half-assed love. I wouldn’t, couldn’t let myself deal with the same fate.

  I was just another girl with daddy issues. But those issues were enough to make me run away from a life with Ren.

  And though I knew deep down Ren was different, I still couldn’t subject myself to a life filled with baseball, dedicated to a sport I felt had robbed me. At least that’s what I thought when I walked out.

  Ren deserved a cheerleader. Someone who could be a decent club wife and give him all the support he needed.

  “I could never make you choose,” I said as one tear traced another down my cheeks. “So, I chose for you.”

  Ren swallowed as I turned to face my fear.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” I sniffed as I glared at him. “I wasn’t invited, and I’m not staying.”

  I looked over to Alice and gave her a pleading look. “Please get me the hell out of here.”

  Chapter 15

  REN

  “I don’t even have to ask if it’s all true,” I spoke to his back before he had a chance to get to her hotel door.

  Lucas Wild turned to me, and I cringed at the way I’d put him on a pedestal for so many years. A legend, a player I’d looked up to since I was a child.

  The woman I loved had his eyes and his skin tone, but that was where it ended. I’d credited him for far too much. It all made sense and began to click as I watched him sink into his guilt.

  He was the reason why Erica didn’t want to date a ballplayer. Lucas was the reason Erica never wanted to go home for the holidays when we were together, despite her mother’s desperate invitations.

  Even when I’d managed to talk her into going home, she’d been reserved around everyone, especially her father. I’d let my excitement in my budding friendship with Lucas dull the intuition that something was off.

  But it had always been there, and it didn’t help that Erica’s mother had done just as good of a job of covering up the truth. Erica had been raised to lie, to cover for him to keep his reputation.

  Lucas Wild was not who he made himself out to be. Had never been.

  The man was a living lie. And she’d swallowed her pride and loved me enough to clean up my mistakes and do the same for me.

  It was like a punch in the gut, and suddenly I was furious at my inability to look past my own dreams to see her fears. I’d been so goddamned blind.

  “Ren, this is personal,” Lucas said with a quick excuse.

  “Goddamn right, it is,” I said, stepping in front of him and blocking the door.

  “You’re going to have to excuse us, I need a word with her,” he said, as he attempted to push past me.

  “I don’t think so,” I said adamantly as anger radiated from me.

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “She’s my future.”

  “You’re overstepping, Makavoy.”

  “No, I’m protecting her. A job you never did.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s exaggerating,” he said nonchalantly.

  “Oh?” I said, taking another step forward. “So, tell me about your da
ughter.”

  His mouth clamped shut.

  “Come on, give me anything. Tell me one thing about her.”

  “You need to step back from that door,” he said in warning.

  “You don’t know anything about her, do you? God, I can’t believe I looked up to you. Treated you as a friend, and she was hiding it from me, to protect you.”

  “Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped.

  Even as he tried to defend himself, his eyes were full of guilt and regret. That was something, but not nearly fucking enough.

  “No, I believe I do know what I’ve been talking about. You see, I’ve been listening, something I wasn’t good at before. I know that now, and I’m working on it.” I took a menacing step forward. “What I know is there’s a beautiful woman on the other side of that door capable of more than she knows, who thinks she’ll never be more loved than a damn game of baseball. That’s on you, asshole.”

  I pointed to the door behind me. “I lost her once because of it. I’m not losing her again. So, you need to do whatever you have to do to get the hell out of here. Because you’re no longer invited. It was your fucked-up priorities, your choices that came between us. It’s not happening again.”

  Lucas’s eyes sharpened as he ground out his words. “And you think you’re the man she deserves? You’re so fucking perfect, Ren? You think I haven’t seen your tornado of shit in the media the last few years?”

  “I’ve fucked up, too, but there’s a difference between you and me.”

  “And what’s that?” he asked crossly.

  “She hasn’t given up on me.”

  Chapter 16

  ERICA

  A knock on my hotel door brought me out of my haze. I had Alice take me back to the hotel so I could pack. I needed to get away from everything before the season began.

  I wouldn’t break my word to Ren to be there, but with training ending in a few days, I could get back to New York and try to get my head on straight. My emotions were putting everything in jeopardy.

  I took a deep breath and opened the door to see Ren with his hands in his jeans, his eyes burning a hole through me.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yeah,” I said, leaving the door open for him and doing quick work of resuming my packing.

  “I know this looks bad, okay. But I’ll be back for opening day. I’m not quitting on you, Ren. I just need to take a break.” I brought my eyes to his.

  “I’m not leaving you. Not professionally.”

  “What about personally?”

  “I’m just full of so much shit I’ve never dealt with. I’m just dragging you down, and you don’t need this. Not at the height of your career. I didn’t mean those awful things I said. I’m so sorry. I never regretted us. Never. And I was jealous and hurt, and I can’t seem to stop being anything but jealous and hurt.”

  I sat on the edge of my bed and looked up at the ceiling.

  “I’ve lost my shit one too many times since I’ve been here, Ren, and in public, this isn’t good for you or for me.”

  “I’ll decide what’s good for me. Last time you made that decision you tore me apart.”

  I tamped down the tears that threatened. “I’ll always regret it. You didn’t deserve it.”

  “Well, you didn’t deserve to see what a mess I made of myself, either.”

  “Did you . . .” I swallowed, afraid to ask. “Did you make a spectacle of yourself so I would see?”

  He wiped his hand down his face. “I would never intentionally hurt you. But after the first headline broke, I think I was too numb to care. You cut me so deep, I bled everywhere.” He lifted his cap and ran a hand through his hair.

  “Once you wrecked my heart, I couldn’t stop trying to wreck everything else. I thank God daily for Andy and Rafe, or I might have succeeded. I never thought I would be that guy, to lose so much control over a woman. But you—” he sighed “—you were everything to me.”

  I folded a pair of jeans and stuffed them in my suitcase. “I wanted to come back, but after I saw those pictures, I couldn’t. I didn’t know if you would take me.”

  “I would have taken anything you gave me.”

  I nodded as I zipped my suitcase. “I wish I would have handled it differently.” I let out an ironic tear-filled laugh.

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about him?” he asked, stepping in front of me and stilling my hands.

  “I didn’t want you to look at him the way I did. You were so animated around him, just so happy to know him. And all that talk you did about family. I knew how important it was to you.”

  He pushed the hair away from my forehead. “Tell me now.”

  “He was a total bastard at home. Demanding, judgmental, as if we couldn’t do enough to please him. It was disgusting. My mother worshiped him, and he was all too happy to offer his feet to her. I honestly thought that was just the way things were until I got old enough to figure it out. He was undeserving.”

  “And you thought I was undeserving, too?” he asked in a thick voice.

  “You know that’s not true. I loved you with everything in me, but I didn’t want to. Ren, the day we met, I was divorcing baseball and washing my hands of my dad. He demanded I pick my last tuition check from the ballpark, I guess to keep up appearances or boast he had raised a college graduate. Who the hell knows what his agenda was, but I was there to collect my paycheck from being that bastard’s daughter. And I was done.”

  “You never loved ball?”

  “God, yes, I did. I loved it more than anything until I was old enough to know what it was doing to my family. I mean, I know it was him, but I guess it was just easier to say I hate baseball than to say I hate my father. I wanted no part of the life for myself. I saw what misery it could bring, and then you blew my plans all to shit.”

  “But you kept them,” he reminded as he stood towering over me, his eyes inquisitive as his gentle hands cupped the sides of my face.

  “I would have married you in a heartbeat if it didn’t chain me to baseball.”

  “You think marrying some lawyer who works eighty-hour weeks would make you happier?”

  “It was the game, Ren, and your devotion to it. It reminded me so much of him. And, Jesus Christ, look at you.”

  “That doesn’t matter, I was always faithful.”

  “I know you were. But I felt like I was up against too much. So, what I think is that I was twenty-two years old and out of my mind in love and too afraid to make the same mistake, become and do exactly like my mother no matter how you treated me.” I paused my next words as the fear set in they would only divide us further. Looking at him, loving him, there was no way I could hold back the truth any longer.

  “Because while baseball is your life, in a sense it took both my parents away. And if it changed us, you and me, I knew it would break me just as much as it broke her. That’s the mindset of the twenty-two-year-old me.”

  Heart heavy with the memory of walking out of our apartment two years ago, I pressed on. “I couldn’t look at you without folding, Ren. I was so far gone, there was no way I could walk away with you there. I took the coward’s way out because I saw it as the only way.”

  “I believe that you believe that,” he said in a whisper. “But do you remember what I said to you the day we met?”

  I closed my eyes and nodded.

  “What did I say, Erica?”

  “So, this is where you come in,” I said as a tear trailed down my cheek before he caught it with his thumb.

  “And I meant it. I knew it was you the moment I met you. If I can love you for the last three years and only had you for one of them, don’t you think I could love you for three more? And the three after that?”

  “You still love me?” I asked, searching his eyes as he stared down at me.

  “You know I do.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “I know.”

  �
�Is there anything you don’t know?” I asked with a slight eye roll.

  “I don’t know how this plays out. And I’m fucking terrified you’ll walk away again, but I don’t have a choice because I can’t stop loving you no matter what happens.”

  “I couldn’t move on. I missed you too much. Even though . . .” I swallowed, “Even though I saw you with all those women, I couldn’t stop wanting you. And I never will.”

  Ren traced my lips with his thumb before he leaned in on a whisper.

  “Don’t go.”

  “I don’t want to. If you don’t want me to, this time I won’t.”

  “I missed you so fucking much.”

  “I love you, Ren. I’m so sorry. I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

  “I’ll forgive you for anything,” he said, brushing his thumb over my lips again and again as he held me in his hands. “But we have two years to makeup for.”

  The butterflies churned in my stomach as he leaned in and brushed our lips together. My clit pulsed as the jolt of our electricity hit me.

  “Ren,” I whispered as he closed his eyes and brought his forehead to mine.

  His voice was gravel. “I need to know right now what you want.”

  “I want you to let me back in.”

  He brushed his lips against mine again. “Saying yes to me means saying yes to baseball. You get that, right?”

  “I do. I want whatever life that is. Just please don’t—”

  “You will never have to worry about your place with me. Ever. You come first, always.”

  He paused a moment before his lips met mine. “How’s your head?”

  “Better,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Good, because we’re about to have the best fucking make-up sex in history.” He gave me a smirk, and I returned it.

  I raised a brow and trailed my hand down to his rock-hard cock. “What are you waiting for?”

  “Fuuuck,” he hissed as he captured my lips with his and then darted his tongue out before sweeping my mouth before he dove in deep. I gasped at the feeling as my body lit up and my flesh burned.