by Alexis Anne
He gave me a look. “Loves the game? Carrie is obsessed. I think she left ‘love’ behind a long, long time ago.”
Yeah, but she’d calmed down after our talk. “Did you know she played softball? Was being recruited by the Gators? How crazy would that have been?” I played four seasons on their baseball team with Roman. We were so close to meeting all those years ago.
More than once we’d found a weird connection like that. I was starting to think we were destined to meet, it was just a matter of the stars aligning.
“No shit,” he said. “What happened?”
“The same old story. Injury.” It took the game from so many of us before we were ready.
Samuel shook his head. “That sucks. She’s one of the rare ones to find another career that keeps her close, though.”
And Roman had done the same in becoming an agent after his injury. But me? I didn’t see baseball in my future if I injured-out. I think it would hurt too much. Retired, maybe. But even then? My side businesses weren’t baseball related at all. What would I do? I’d be a terrible coach. Working in an office made me gag. Sports casting? That would blend my current internet brand with the game I loved. So that was a possibility, but not one I particularly liked.
Every time they interviewed me I wanted to crawl off the set like a ninja. Unfortunately that was never a possibility.
“So I guess this means you’re really going to leave us all behind after this season, huh?” He asked, yanking on his shoes.
“Why do you say that?”
“Don’t play dumb. Everyone knows you’ve been gunning for this trade to the Mantas for the last two seasons. Your old batting coach is there, two of your Gator teammates, Roman, and now your wife? C’mon.”
It was true. As much as I loved the Waves, my life was in Tampa, not Jacksonville. “Baseball doesn’t work that way.” I shrugged. “Even if I got the trade it might not last. The next season I could be in San Francisco. Or Seattle.” Both teams made it clear they were interested.
“True. If you stayed with us you’d be set for years. The city loves you. The coaches love you. You’re set here.”
Also a decently valid point. At least Jacksonville and Tampa were in the same state. I was comfortable here. Maybe I was playing with fire pushing for this trade.
“Allen!”
My balls jumped up into my body. Coach did not sound happy. “Yes sir?”
“My office. Now.”
Samuel shot me a look. “Do you think he was listening?”
I shrugged. “Beats me.” Then I followed Coach Steinbeck back to his office.
“Sit.” He slammed the door, which didn’t mean anything because Coach always slammed his door. But I was still on edge based on the tone of his voice.
“How can I help you, Coach?”
He eyeballed me as he rounded his large desk. “You could get your head out of your ass.”
I sat up straighter. “Sir?”
“Look, I’m happy for you. Really I am. You married a gorgeous woman who actually seems to like you. But you used to be my hardest worker. You showed up early, stayed late, coached the new guys and now . . . ”
“Now I’m late, missing, and lazy.”
“I’d never call you lazy.”
Nope. That would be my pop. In fact, he’d called the other night just to give me a dressing down on keeping my head in the game.
“I’m sorry. I’m back. I swear I am.” The game yesterday was bad. I’d had two errors and couldn’t seem to get my feet under me, but today I’d been awesome. I felt awesome.
Maybe having Carrie cheer me on was the difference.
“You’re sure? Your head isn’t in the Manta’s locker room?”
“No.”
He finally sat and leaned back, studying me. “I don’t blame you for wanting the trade but the season isn’t over. I need a promise from you that this little hiccup with your work ethic is a thing of the past. I need you here with us through the playoffs.”
“You have me. For as long as we can hang in there.” Which, with any luck, would be to the World Series. We were the underdogs for sure, but our team was gelling in a very special way as we reached the end of the season.
There was hope.
“All right. That’s all I wanted. Go home to your wife and tell her I appreciate her enthusiasm.”
I grinned. At least someone appreciated how lucky I was. “Thanks Coach. I will. And,” I stood up and shook his hand. “I’ll do you proud from here on out.”
“WAS I REALLY THAT BAD?” Carried asked.
It had been a week since the game where she got a little out of control with the umpire. Which meant she’d been thinking about it all this time.
Sometimes I was truly baffled by her mind.
“Yes and no.” I popped a fry into my mouth and eyeballed how I was going to attack the massive hamburger on my plate. We were at June, Roman, and Zoe’s house on Davis Islands. Jake and Eve were here too with their daughters. “You were getting out of hand but you reeled it in.”
She pushed the grilled veggies around her plate, chewing on her cheek. She only did that when she was deep in thought. “And how did you feel about that?”
I got the impression this answer was actually a huge deal. So I approached the hot zone carefully. “I loved it.”
She froze, her hand wrapped tight around the fork. “Really?”
“Really.” I reached over and grabbed the end of her curl, running it between my fingers. “I even told the guys they should all be jealous my woman loves the game more than theirs.”
She cocked an eyebrow and sighed. “Woman? Really?”
“You don’t love it? C’mon, you know you do.” She reacted strangely to some of my comments but never this one. So I explained. “You are my lady. My woman. My partner. I say it with pride. Do you take it that way?”
She squirmed a little then, “Honestly, I usually do. It’s the way you say it.”
Well now this was interesting. “What do you mean? The way I say it matters?”
“It could very easily be demeaning. Controlling.”
As in, she was my property? Oh hell no. “Well I’m glad you catch my meaning from the way I say it. I only mean it playfully and because I’m so fucking happy we’re married.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I mean it. No other man gets you but me.”
“And we’re back to sketchy territory.”
Whatever. Women were weird. I grabbed her chair and pulled her right up to mine, going nose to nose with her. “I love you and I don’t want anyone or anything to come between us. Not because I own you but because you chose me to spend your life with.”
“Chose? We were drunk.”
Ouch. Talk about cold water. “That’s a load of bullshit and you know it. We wanted this, we were just both too scared and stubborn to make the leap without the help of a weekend away.”
“With alcohol.”
For fucks sake. Why was she pushing this? “Yes. There was alcohol. You were drunk and I was desperate.”
Her eyes widened. “What? Desperate?”
I cupped her face, completely forgetting where we were and who was around us. “You broke up with me and I went mad, okay? I was desperate to get you back.”
Instead of melting into me like I wished she would, she went rigid. “Wes. What are you saying? That you weren’t drunk?”
Oh shit. A five alarm fire ignited in my head as I tried to backtrack. “No. I was drunk.” But I also knew exactly what I was doing.
Her eyes narrowed and I knew I was done for. “You’re lying to me,” she whispered.
I felt her slipping away from me even as I held her in my hands. “I’m not lying. We were both drunk.”
“And you were desperate. What does that mean, Wes?”
“That I was a selfish asshole.”
She pushed away. “Don’t touch me.”
“I love you, Carrie. And I knew you loved me too. We were having such a good
night. Do you remember? Do you remember what you said to me?”
She threw a pillow at me and started for the door. “Don’t follow me.”
“You do, don’t you?” I yelled after. “You remember. You just want to hate me. You’ve been looking for an excuse to run and now you have it. And you know what? It’s bullshit!”
She stopped at the door and spun around. “You just admitted to manipulating me into marrying you, Wes. How did you think this was going to go?” she shouted back.
I realized everyone was watching us. Jake, Eve, June, Roman, and Zoe. All standing off to the side staring as Carrie and I screamed through the house.
This was bad.
“I thought you’d realize you knew what you were doing that night. That you love me as much as I love you. That we’re good together.” I stepped toward her. “That you’ve never been happier.”
She opened the door and ran.
Ran.
No comment, rebuttal, or screaming. Instead she got as far away from me as she could. I watched, frozen in horror as June ran out after her and disappeared into the passenger seat a split second before Carrie drove off.
“Shit.” Should I have gone after her? I was too worried that chasing her down the street would be bad. I didn’t want her driving off any more frantically than she already did.
At least she had June to talk to.
“What was that about?” Roman asked.
I kicked the chair over. “I’m an asshole.”
He didn’t move toward me, instead it was Zoe who took her life in her hands. “She figured it out, didn’t she?”
I should have known the writer would know. “Yep.”
“Know what?” Roman and Jake both asked at the same time.
I laughed at my own immense stupidity. “That it was my idea we get married in Vegas. I kind of talked her into it.” I picked up the chair and returned it to the table. “And even worse, she realized that I knew what I was doing the entire time.”
“Oh Wes. You didn’t,” Zoe sighed.
“Oh I did. But here’s the thing. She was so happy. I’ve never seen her so happy and carefree. It was beautiful and I didn’t want it to end. Not ever.” But it was still wrong to talk her into a wedding when she wasn’t in full control of her faculties.
I was a Grade A asshole.
A jerk.
The finest of the worst.
“Were you drunk too?” Eve asked, concern written all over her face.
“A little but I knew what I was doing. It was wrong.” Even if we were really happy for a little while. I dragged my hands down my face. “When will I stop being a jerk?”
I left the pity party and went to sit outside by the pool for a while. I kept refreshing my phone hoping for an update, even if it was a picture of all my shit on fire.
But I got nothing.
Not until June returned. Alone. She sat beside me. “I got her home. She’s fine.”
How could she be fine? But I didn’t say that. “Good. Thank you.”
“She’s really upset.”
My chest ached. “I never meant to hurt her. I wanted the opposite. I wanted to make her happy. Forever.”
I kind of expected June to rip off my balls and feed them to me but she didn’t. Instead she sighed. “I love Carrie to pieces but she has some pretty deep issues. It makes it hard for her to let people in. To trust them.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” I tried so hard. And for a little while I thought I was in.
“She loves you, Wes.”
“Pretty sure the way she just ran away from me like I was the devil is proof otherwise.” The terror in her eyes . . . yeah. I wasn’t going to forget that look for a long, long time.
“Actually, it’s proof of how much she loves you.”
That brought me up short. “What? You’re speaking in riddles.”
“You’re one to talk,” she laughed. “I realized pretty quickly how much she felt for you Wes, so when she bolted I got worried. I’m glad I went with her because it confirmed my suspicions.”
“What suspicions are those?” I was starting to feel hope again, and I couldn’t afford hope these days. It was too damned expensive.
“That she’s happy with you. She ran because she’s happy and it scares the piss out of her.”
“That makes no sense.” If she were happy she’d be here with me.
“Normally I’d agree, but this is Carrie. Did you know her parents wanted her to get married at eighteen?”
“What?” Carrie?
“Yep. They don’t like that she’s a surgeon. They really don’t like that she works with male athletes. They think she should be married, have kids, and be happy at home.”
I about fell out of my chair. “Carrie? My Carrie? She’d lose her damn mind from boredom.”
“Exactly.”
All those pieces I’d been collecting since Vegas, the little bits of information that made sense but didn’t all at the same time, suddenly started to click together. I laughed at my own stupidity. “She’s not afraid of me. She’s afraid of that life they wanted for her. Of it being real.”
“Now you’re getting it. She doesn’t hate marriage. Far from it. She actually holds it as one of the highest and most sacred things a man and woman can experience. She loves you. But she’s also one of those people who can’t be contained. The very idea of it terrifies her.”
There was that word again. I’d seen it in her eyes as she ran and I assumed it was me that put that look there. “Thank fuck.” It wasn’t me. Not really. I’d never contain her. That would destroy the very thing I loved about her most.
“So you see, you have to win her back. I mean, give her a second to cool off, but then . . . you win her back, Wes. She needs you every bit as much as you need her. She knows it and now you need to show her your love is real.”
I shot up off the chair. “Pixie!” I yelled toward the house. When she didn’t immediately appear at my beck and call I began to march to the porch. She met me there.
“Yes?” There was a pretty amused look on her face that I ignored.
“Pixie. I need your help after all.” I had a woman I needed to assure and I needed a romance expert to help me.
She grinned. “I have the perfect plan.”
15
Carrie, six weeks earlier
I should have left an hour ago and yet . . .
And yet . . .
I couldn’t quite seem to bring myself to go. Maybe it was the soft breeze blowing through Wes’s bedroom, or the freakishly soft sheets he kept on his bed. Maybe it was because I was so thoroughly satisfied my body didn’t give a fuck about moving.
It could be any one of those things but I knew—even if I was deeply in denial—that it was something else.
“Where did you grow up?” he asked. I was naked, a sheet draped haphazardly around our bodies, lying down on my back. Wes was sprawled across the king sized bed on his stomach, tracing the lines of my leg. He’d been doing it for nearly ten minutes at this point. Up, down, back, over. One finger, sometimes his thumb, tracing and, I think, studying.
“South Carolina.”
His finger stilled somewhere around my ankle. “Really? You don’t have an accent.”
I focused on my words for a few seconds before replying. All it took was some concentration and my drawl came back. “Give me fifteen minutes around my family and you’d think differently.”
His jaw dropped open in surprise. “Well now. I didn’t expect that deep southern stretch of the vowels to come out of a mouth that moves as fast as yours.”
I shrugged. “I never had as deep of an accent as my father. Mom’s from up north originally so she barely has any accent at all. I guess when I moved to Florida it just,” I spread my hands, “disappeared.” Not that I was complaining. I liked being anonymous. I could be from anywhere and occasionally found it fun to make up a story.
“Do you go home often?” He restarted his tracing.
�
��Almost never.”
This time I only saw his surprise in his eyes, not his reaction. “Not very close?”
“Just different.” It was weird to be discussing my family with Wes. I never spoke about my past or my upbringing with anyone. And if I didn’t make the time to share that shit with my friends there was definitely an even slimmer chance I’d take the time to share it with a guy.
And yet, here I was, telling him I never went home, ditched my accent, and wasn’t close to my folks. What was coming next? My fifth grade diary?
Time to deflect. “What about you? How often do you go home to Mom and Dad?”
His hand faltered and he appeared to go a little off balance, using my shin to steady himself. From this angle I could see the way his muscles tensed and his eyes darted away. “Just Dad,” he finally said.
And I was an idiot. I knew his mom died. I knew it. This is why I didn’t talk about personal things. Now what was I supposed to do? People said things when someone mentioned death, but I didn’t know what those things were, or why I had this really weird pain my chest.
Or why I had an uncontrollable urge to reach out and touch him.
His eyes locked onto mine and a slow smile curled his lips. “You have good instincts, Carrie. When in doubt, follow those.”
“Excuse me?”
His blue eyes danced like he knew something I didn’t. “That’s how you usually operate, isn’t it? You trust your gut. You said that’s how you operate—a combination of practice, skill, and instinct, right?”
I nodded slowly, trying to understand how we’d gone from fumbling through parental uncomfortableness, to my operating style.
“Well,” he curled onto his side and slid a hand behind my knee, bending it, “it’s a damn good instinct. I’d go with it all the time, if I were you.”
I watched, almost as if I were detached from my own body, as Wes kissed my knee. “When don’t I follow my gut?”
He kissed down my calf, then back up to my kneecap. “Right now. You tense up when I ask you questions and when I reminded you it was just me and Pop, you turned white. You didn’t know what to say. And that? That is not the Carrie Anne Walker I’ve come to know.” He met my eyes again, daring me to follow through this time, to take his advice and jump into the deep end of feeling things. “What was your instinct when you thought about my mom?”
