Pitch Perfect: Boys of Summer, Book 1

by Sierra Dean

  Her eyelids fluttered shut, and his did the same as his lips grazed hers. Emmy sighed, opening her mouth to him and bracing one palm against his chest. He held her head with one hand and brought his other to her face, rubbing his thumb over her cheekbone. Her lips tasted faintly of beer and lime, a flavor so uniquely summer it made him think of hot baseball stadiums and roaring crowds.

  He gave himself over to the kiss, pushing his body against hers and curving his back so he wasn’t stooped over her. Emmy’s hands scooted under his jacket, fingernails running over the thin linen of his shirt. Everywhere he touched her body was like a pulse of heat, warming him and flooding him with life.

  Her mouth opened, and he brushed his tongue over her swollen lower lip. She made a small purring noise that made him flush, getting him hard with almost no effort on her part. The heat of her lower body radiated against him, chasing away any lingering chill of the evening. Backing her against the wooden railing on the small porch, he deepened this kiss, needing more from it but not knowing what. When his tongue stroked hers, Emmy went rigid, and her hands were suddenly gone from his back, forcing him away instead.

  Tucker let her push him off, stepping backwards in a lust-filled haze, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong. His cock throbbed, not satisfied with the unexpected turn of events.

  “We can’t,” she said breathlessly, smoothing her hair and straightening her jacket. “I’m so sorry, Tucker. I shouldn’t have…”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled in return.

  “No, it was my fault.” The keys in her hand jangled as she tried to get a hold of them properly and unlock her door. “I didn’t… I mean…we work together, and…”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I have a boyfriend,” she admitted, her gaze dropping to the floor, unable to look directly at him. “It’s… I… I’m really sorry.”

  Tucker shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, trying to think about church sermons from his youth, or his grandmother’s ingrown toenails. Anything to distract him from the pink glow in her cheeks and the fullness of her lips from their kiss.

  “Friends?” she suggested.

  “Sure.” He offered her a halfhearted smile and was already backing away. Tomorrow he’d think about how humiliating her rejection was. Right now he needed to make a clean getaway and take matters into his own hands. “Friends.”

  Tucker didn’t have a lot of female friends, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t wise to be buddies with a woman who could give him a raging hard-on from just a French kiss.

  Yeah. They could totally be friends.

  Chapter Eight

  Home Opener, Chicago at San Francisco, Record 0-0

  April in San Francisco was the optimal time to play baseball.

  Unlike most of the country still shaking off the dregs of winter and fighting against early spring showers, San Fran was mild and dry, the perfect weather for outdoor baseball on the Bay.

  Emmy had spent much of the week after spring training getting her office into shape and prepping her team for the upcoming season. There were several players with injuries to attend to before the season opening game, giving her little time to dwell on Tucker.

  They’d been polite to each other at best. Talking to him had been unavoidable—half her job seemed to be babysitting his arm—but there hadn’t been any friendly chitchat or flirting. Definitely no flirting.

  It hadn’t mattered much. Try as she might, Emmy couldn’t keep from feeling excited-schoolgirl tingles whenever she touched Tucker, and touching him was a necessary evil of her job. And those tingles turned to naughty-schoolgirl tingles when he touched her back.

  The memory of their kiss haunted her during the weeks they’d spent in Florida, and it hadn’t stayed in the Sunshine State when they left. Everywhere she went in the Bay Area she was assaulted with Tucker Lloyd. Street vendors sold knockoff jerseys with his number 13, and his face smiled out at her from storefront windows.

  The little bodega down the street from her apartment building had a full-sized Tucker Lloyd cardboard cutout next to their cashier’s counter. He smiled brightly at her whenever she bought Oreos and cheap wine.

  Apparently she was going to have a long season of pretending she wasn’t dying to make out with Tucker Lloyd again. Part of her wanted to steal the cardboard cutout and keep it in her apartment.

  Emmy left her staff in the locker room, grabbed her Felons windbreaker and jogged up the hall and out into the crisp open air of the dugout. The team had just taken the field for batting practice, and she wanted to make sure no one ran into any trouble before the game began. The sun was bright and cheery, no sign of the fog that typically blanketed the city.

  Tying her hair back into a low ponytail, Emmy stopped in the dugout and leaned against the fence to watch the batters line up and take hits off the small-boned batting coach. Around the bleachers of the old art deco field, eager fans waited for fly balls to come their way. Some had arrived two hours early when the gates opened so they could see the guys warm up.

  Orange T-shirts were like hunting vests, milling through the aisles and into the concession areas. People wore black-and-white-striped jumpsuits in honor of the Felons mascot, Al Catraz, a giant cat dressed in prison gear.

  “I love opening day,” a voice cut in from behind her.

  Hiding the leap in her pulse by not jumping out of her skin, Emmy peered over her shoulder and gave Tucker a half smile. “Nothing quite like it, is there?” she said.

  “It’s all the hope, you know?” He came and stood next to her at the fence, dropping his long arms over the top and watching Alex smash a ball into shallow right field. “Opening day is the only time in the season you’re guaranteed to have a perfect record.”

  Emmy grinned. “My dad used to say something like that. He said day one is the last time you’re sure to have a zero in the losses column.”

  “Well, let’s hope we keep it a zero a little longer.” He gave her a wink, and a familiar warmth bloomed in her chest.

  It should be illegal for a man to be that beautiful when he smiled. His one blue eye looked astonishingly bright in contrast to the chocolate brown of the other.

  “How’s the arm feeling?” Keep it professional, Em.

  Tucker rotated his shoulders loosely without moving his arms off the fence. “Feels good. Ready. Guess we’ll have to see, won’t we?”

  Across the field in the bullpen, a collection of relief pitchers was tossing balls around with minimal focus, just getting their joints limber rather than worrying too much about accuracy.

  “Are you excited?”

  “I guess nerves counts as a form of excitement.”

  Emmy knew better than to jinx a pitcher by telling him he’d have a good game. She shouldn’t even be talking to Tucker without knowing what his game-day superstitions were like. Every pitcher she’d ever met had a different way of dealing with their starting games. Some refused to speak to anyone; others needed a set routine. Tucker had initiated the conversation with her, so he obviously didn’t have any communication quirks.

  “Do you need…anything?” She was trying to egg him into confessing whatever his brand of pitcher weirdness was.

  He gave her a sidelong look then parted his lips and showed her a wad of purple gum between two rows of perfectly white teeth. Popping it back into his mouth, he winked. “Grape bubble gum. Always grape bubble gum.”

  Emmy snorted. “Is it brand specific, or will any gum do?”

  Tucker snapped a bubble at her. “I prefer Bubblicious, but in a pinch I’ll take what’s handy. So long as it smells like artificial fruit and tastes like Kool-Aid, we’re in good shape.”

  “Noted.”

  “Does that fall into the purview of an athletic trainer?”

  “Anything that keeps you boys operational is all a part of the job description.”

  “Anything?” He smiled again, and Emmy noted his blue eye had more of a devilish glint to it than the brown one.

  Like clockwork
the three outfielders and shortstop jogged up the stairs from the clubhouse, and Chet gave her a warm smile, bobbing his head in greeting. Jasper followed behind them, his Felons jacket undone and flapping as he ran.

  “Duty calls,” she said, balking on Tucker’s comment. “Hamstrings won’t stretch themselves.”

  “They certainly won’t.”

  Tucker was having a hell of a time concentrating.

  In the top of the fifth inning, his finger slipped while he was throwing, and he managed to bean the leadoff batter in the shoulder. Bad enough he’d hit someone, but it had to be one of the star batters in the whole damn league and a guy he personally knew would hold a grudge.

  Tucker wasn’t a believer in intentionally hitting batters. There was an old-school opinion that said some guys had it coming, but it felt wrong somehow. You couldn’t teach a guy a lesson by hurling a 100 mph fastball at him. All that did was make someone angry, and the cycle never ended.

  He knew old-timers from the Felons roster who still talked about nasty beanball hits they’d taken in their days, and half-joking that they’d love to give those pitchers what for even decades later.

  When he’d been a younger man, before the surgery, Tucker had thrown a mean fastball, one of the hardest to hit in all of baseball. As his elbow started to wear down he found it harder and harder to maintain the velocity, so he switched it up and started using a knuckleball.

  Knuckleballs were nasty because they were deceptively slow and wobbled like a son of a bitch. It was impossible for batters to track them, making them a pain to hit. A lot of opposing players considered them a cheat pitch, but only because of how nasty they were to hit.

  Tucker threw a strong knuckleball, but it hadn’t become his signature pitch until his later years. He’d switched to it shortly before the doctor determined he needed the elbow surgery. Now that he was supposedly back in top condition, he was at odds with himself. The new, strong version of his arm wanted him to go back to throwing the fastballs and sliders he’d used most of his career.

  His wary mind told him not to be showy and stick with the safer pitch.

  Poor Alex, crouched behind home plate, didn’t know what to make of Tucker’s decisions. Whenever the catcher would suggest a different play, Tucker would shake him off with a quick side-to-side of his jaw. Alex would cycle through suggestions until Tucker accepted one and only one. The knuckleball.

  After hitting the pitcher, though, Alex had plainly had enough of Tucker shaking him off and called a time-out. The shorter man prowled up to the mound, and Tucker instinctively placed a glove over his own mouth. Alex didn’t follow suit but turned sideways to avoid being seen by the opposing base coaches. As far as Tucker knew, no one in baseball was a trained lip-reader, yet it was a long-standing tradition to protect your secrets even when no one cared to know them.

  “What’s the deal?” Alex asked.

  “No deal.”

  “You sure, because it sure seems like you’re pussying out on throwing anything I offer you.”

  Tucker stared at the dugout. The pitching coach looked ready to come out at any second, and Chuck Calvin was about to gnaw a hole through his cheek. The big man had clearly chosen the wrong season to give up on his beloved chewing tobacco. Beside them both was Emmy, watching him with stoic concern. She smiled faintly, like she wasn’t sure if it would help him or make things worse.

  He didn’t know either.

  “Let’s try something a little different this time, okay? Maybe something other than a knuckleball?”

  Grimly, Tucker nodded his consent. “Okay.”

  Alex jogged back to the plate and squatted behind the next batter. He gave the signal for a slider, and Tucker’s first instinct was to shake it off, but he nodded instead.

  Okay, Tucker. Here’s where you prove you’ve still got it.

  He was only somewhat aware of the roar from the crowd when he adjusted his fingers on the ball and pulled his leg into position. The scream of the fans was like white noise, calming him, dulling the uncertainty.

  You’ve got this.

  But he didn’t.

  He walked the next two batters and was pulled from the game in favor of a tried-and-true reliever. On the way back to the dugout the crowd clapped politely, but he could tell there was no passion behind the gesture.

  Whatever magic Tucker Lloyd had once had, it had apparently abandoned him.

  Chapter Nine

  Emmy knew Simon Howell would be around—they’d been playing the White Sox after all—but the last thing she expected was to find him waiting in her office when she returned to the clubhouse.

  The game had taken a nasty turn after Tucker left. The relief pitcher gave up a bad-luck home run, sending everyone on base in and giving the Sox a four-run lead.

  By the time the top of the ninth rolled around, Emmy didn’t need to see more. She left the players in Jasper’s capable hands and went to fill out her report for the higher-ups. There was nothing terribly serious to report, but the paperwork still needed to get done. The designated hitter seemed to be favoring his right leg, which would have to be checked out, and their center fielder, Barrett, had taken a beating on a diving catch in the sixth. He’d bounce back, but it was her job to make sure everyone up the chain of command knew what shape the players were in.

  She walked through the training room and into her small office—a glorified closet—then let out a shocked yelp.

  “Nice to see you too,” Simon greeted, rising from his chair.

  She crossed the small space, her heart hammering from the surprise of seeing him. “Simon.”

  He grasped her elbow and kissed her. Considering they hadn’t seen each other in almost two months, the kiss was friendly at best.

  “You look good,” he said. “Orange suits you.”

  Emmy looked down at her jacket and smiled. “It’s a bit different than the old black-and-white, isn’t it?” Self-conscious of the bright color, she took the jacket off and hung it on the back of her door. The training room was stifling hot anyway, and her office felt like a sauna with more than one person in it.

  “Tough game.” He sat back down.

  Simon was tall but bulkier than most of the men she spent her days with. He had played football in college and often claimed his torn ACL was the only thing that kept him from advancing to the NFL. While Emmy appreciated how devastating an ACL tear could be for professional careers, she’d also seen old video of Simon playing.

  The ACL hadn’t been what kept him from the pros. He lacked passion in his game, and no one could get anywhere in professional sports without passion. It was as much a sports truth as “you can’t win ’em all.”

  He ran a hand through his short blond hair and gave her the grin he’d perfected. It was that smile that had made her knees turn to Jell-O when she’d first met him, and even now her stomach wobbled to see it.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said, realizing she hadn’t said it yet.

  “I’m going to take you out.”

  “Oh.” Her gaze darted to her laptop, then back to his hooded green eyes. “I have to—”

  “Em, I know the drill, believe me. You do your paperwork. I have my own job to do here.” He patted the front of his blazer, where she knew he kept a compact digital recorder. “But this is San Francisco, not some small minor league town. I’m sure we can find a place willing to make us food after eleven.”

  Emmy nodded, not sure why she was so hesitant to be alone with her boyfriend. Surely it was just shyness from being apart for such a long time. She was worried they didn’t know each other the same way anymore. It had absolutely nothing to do with—

  Tucker Lloyd knocked on her door.

  Emmy’s pulse tripped as she looked from the pitcher to the reporter across from her desk. The two men gave each other polite nods of acknowledgment then turned to her for the appropriate introductions.

  “Simon, this is Tucker.”

  Simon clambered up from his chair, reaching to
close the distance, and gave Tucker a firm handshake. They were both big men in different ways, and Emmy marveled at how Tucker towered over Simon, but Simon made Tucker appear much thinner by comparison.

  “Tucker, this is Simon Howell. Simon’s a sports reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times. He’s here covering the Sox.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Simon said. “Big admirer, of course. Great to see you back this season.”

  “Thanks.” They pulled free of the handshake before it went to awkward lengths, then Tucker looked at Emmy and their gazes locked. “Chicago, you said?”

  “Yes,” Simon confirmed.

  “You knew Emmy before she was a Felon.”

  Emmy and Tucker continued to stare at each other, in spite of the pitcher directing his questions at Simon.

  “Simon is my… Simon’s my boyfriend.” The word boyfriend sounded stupid to her in this context. It was such a youthful word, and at thirty-two she hardly felt young enough to be using it. There were two grown men in her office, and she was describing one of them in high school terms. Maybe she should call Tucker her crush to balance it out.

  For once her cheeks didn’t flare up at the wrong moment, and she was grateful for small favors.

  “Of course,” Tucker said, finally looking back at Simon. “Emmy told me about you.”

  After she let me kiss her, Emmy finished his sentence in her head.

  “If you have a few minutes, I’d love to ask you some questions. Before the rest of the press gets to you.” There was the Simon Emmy knew so well. Using any advantage to get the scoop. He was smooth, she had to give him that. All smiles and flattery.

  It helped he didn’t tend to rip players apart in print. There was no reason for Tucker not to talk to Simon. Simon’s mission wasn’t to write a gossipy tell-all, he just wanted something to fill up the sports section.

  “Sure,” Tucker said. “Maybe you can give me some insight into Emmy while we’re at it.”