by Sierra Dean
Alex split his fingers into a peace sign, and the bartender brought two bottles of Stella, placing each on a coaster in front of them and removing the empty glasses and bottles they’d finished with. Once the bar was clear, Emmy felt far less like a burgeoning alcoholic.
“Right?” Alex egged, reminding her where they’d left off.
“Yes, okay. Yes.”
“Why?”
“Whatdya mean?”
“Why? Why were you going there to break up with him?”
“Because I think I’m in love with Tucker.” As soon as the words burbled out Emmy realized what she’d said. Her eyes widened with terror, and she shook her head at Alex as if she could convince him he’d misheard.
The catcher’s own eyes widened, but instead of horror, the quirk of a grin played on his lips. “I knew it.”
“No.”
“You can’t tell me I didn’t know something when I did. I knew you were nuts for him.”
“But I barely talk to him. I avoid him.”
“Spending hours privately coaching him in the bullpen is your idea of avoidance? All those early PT calls?” he said, referencing Tucker’s morning physical therapy sessions.
“Those are a requirement for someone in his condition.”
“The coaching sessions aren’t. I’ve seen plenty of dudes come back from Tommy John who don’t get nearly the same kind of attention you give Tucker.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m the one who got this job and they aren’t working for the Felons,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“I’m not arguing you’re good at your job, Emmy. Don’t get your panties in a twist.” He pulled out his cellphone and typed something before slipping it back into his jacket pocket. “I don’t even know why you’re getting defensive with me. You just told me outright you love him.”
“I said might.”
“You want to quibble semantics here?”
“Your vocabulary is astonishing when you drink,” Emmy pointed out.
“My vocabulary is always astonishing,” he replied. “The difference is I talk more when I drink.”
“You talk plenty when you’re sober.”
Alex winked at her, then pulled out his phone again.
“Am I interrupting something?” Emmy asked, her annoyance evident from her tone. Cellphones were a big sore point with her. Simon had always spent half of their evenings together replying to text messages or emails, so it tended to get her riled up when people overused technology in her company. She had a phone, she loved her phone, but she knew how to use it appropriately.
Alex had apparently missed the memo.
“Nope,” he said, and pocketed it again. “I’m all ears.” The fact that Alex’s ears stuck out slightly from the side of his head made this statement all the more hilarious to Emmy, who couldn’t hide the snort of laughter before it escaped her.
Alex, clearly no stranger to being teased about his ears, gave her a dirty look. “Real cute.”
“Sorry.”
“Finish your damn story.”
“What was I talking about?”
He sipped his beer. “About being in love with my best friend.”
“Oh.”
“You were telling me why you were going to dump the cheating ex.”
“We don’t know he was cheating.”
“We do know he was cheating.”
“You said yourself, I didn’t catch him in the act.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. Please, let’s continue to give him the benefit of the doubt. It obviously matters now.”
Emmy stuck out her tongue at him. “You’re terrible at being a good girlfriend,” she scolded.
“Are you saying one of your female friends wouldn’t be all, Girl, he’s a dog, you’re better off without his sorry cheating ass.” He snapped his fingers a few times and tossed his imaginary long hair. That time Emmy didn’t bother hiding her laugh.
“Well done.”
“I’m here all week.”
“I didn’t love him anymore,” she admitted.
“Because of Tucker?”
Her cheeks flushed with warmth at the mention of Tucker’s name. A familiar swell of happiness filled her belly and spread out through her, making her extremities tingle and causing her to smile uncontrollably.
“You got it bad,” Alex informed her.
Raising the cold, wet beer bottle to her face, Emmy tried to reduce the telltale redness from her skin, but with all the alcohol she’d had there was no point. She’d be ruddy all night.
“It’s not just Tucker. I think I’d been hanging on to things too long because I was afraid of change.”
Alex hummed the first bar of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide”, and Emmy punched him in the shoulder.
“Ow. Christ you pack a wallop for a girl.”
“Maybe the problem is you can’t take a hit like a man,” she snapped back, sick and tired of the phrase for a girl.
“Let’s not be mean.” Alex laughed, clearly no worse for wear from their banter. “I like you too much to be mean.”
“You have a weird way of showing it.”
“That’s how I love. Abrasive and cruel.”
“No wonder you’re single.”
He held a hand to his chest, feigning injury. “Harsh.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll live.”
“Good, because someone needs to pay the tab.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Emmy came to with her head begging for mercy and her eyes resisting their natural inclination to open.
Don’t do it, they seemed to be saying. You’ll regret it.
She forced one eye open, and as promised, regretted the move instantly. Sharp pain shot through her head as the bright, unrelenting light of morning filled her vision. Everything went white from the shock of daylight, and she couldn’t see anything. Maybe it was for the best she shut her eyes again.
Swinging her legs off the bed, she shuffled forward blindly, searching for the robe she left on her closet door. Instead her hip crashed into a hard surface, causing the pain to redirect from her skull down to her leg.
“Ow,” she bellowed, rubbing the newly bruised flesh.
As she had evidently forgotten the layout of her bedroom, it seemed she had no choice but to brave the daylight and open her eyes. The first thing she noticed was the dresser she’d walked into. Finely polished cherry wood.
She didn’t own a dresser that nice. Hers was from IKEA, and she’d put it together wrong so the drawers were crooked and didn’t come out the whole way.
This one was expensive.
She blinked several times, chasing away the spots of light clouding her vision, and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand to wipe the traces of sleep sticking to her lashes. When she opened them again, the truth was obvious.
Emmy wasn’t in her bedroom.
The floor-to-ceiling windows running the entire length of one wall showed an incredible view of the Bay, which was glimmering with the rare reflection of sunlight. The Bay Bridge, an unimpressive gray color in daylight, still managed to look magnificent from above, spanning the length of the water, connecting San Francisco to Oakland. Cars moved back and forth along the two levels, completely unaware she was watching.
She moved closer to look down, and below her was the path along the waterfront. There were almost no buildings between her and the Bay. Wherever she was, these digs weren’t cheap. Real estate this close to the water would set someone back millions. Literal millions.
Emmy took a visual inventory of the room, the furnishings and décor backing up the notion she was in the bedroom of someone who made a healthy amount of money. The white duvet on the bed radiated the word expensive, and the Egyptian cotton sheets should have been a dead giveaway she hadn’t woken in her own bed. Bed, Bath and Beyond didn’t sell sheets that felt like cashmere.
The room was sparsely decorated, only a few masculine pieces. She wasn’t brave enough to rifle throug
h the drawers, but on the dresser was a photo in a simple wood frame.
When she picked up the frame, her stomach fell out her ass, and she fought the urge to vomit. The photo showed two men smiling wearing filthy baseball uniforms while they were sprayed down with champagne.
Tucker Lloyd and Alex Ross.
Since she hadn’t seen Tucker at all the night before, and had spent the better part of the evening getting wasted with Alex, it didn’t take a genius to do the math.
But she was still fully clothed. That had to mean something good, right? Unless they’d had the worlds sloppiest, most rushed one-night stand ever and kept their clothes on the whole time.
That seemed unlikely.
Still, she’d woken up in a strange bed, in an unknown apartment, and all signs pointed to her going home with the catcher of the team she worked for. As much as she wanted to believe nothing had happened—and her clothes were a blessing in that sense—she didn’t remember much about the night, and anything was possible.
“Fuck,” she grumbled, putting the frame back on the dresser.
What a bonehead move. She’d broken up with Simon to smooth the path for whatever was going on with her and Tucker, and what was the first thing she did?
Slept with Tucker’s best friend.
Or at least she’d slept in his bed. Either way it didn’t look good, and it wouldn’t be easy to explain. Would Alex be any help at all? If it was as innocent as it seemed, would he let it go, or would he use it to tease her mercilessly and make things that much worse?
Her stomach churned, and she fought back the bile rising in her throat. She couldn’t decide if her nausea had more to do with her situation or all the beer and whiskey she’d filled herself with at the bar. Probably equal parts of both.
Emmy had to give herself credit. She was a master of getting into the most fucked-up situations when it came to her personal life.
Since she hadn’t woken up next to Alex, signs pointed to him being somewhere else in the condo. She might as well bite the bullet and face him so they could figure out how to handle things. She was hoping he’d let her slink home quietly with her tail between her legs and a massive headache as punishment.
If she got lucky in that sense, she would never ask for another favor from God as long as she lived. Even though she wasn’t Catholic, she made the sign of the cross to demonstrate her sincerity. Then, having lollygagged as long as she could without feeling stupid, she eased open the bedroom door and went searching for Alex.
The bathroom and kitchen lights were both dimmed, and the guest bedroom was empty. Why had she been in the master if there was a perfectly good guestroom? The queasy feeling renewed in her tummy.
Beyond the guestroom was a large open-concept living room/dining room, each sharing the same big glass wall as the master with its stunning view of the Bay. She wished she could remember seeing that view at night because it must have been something extraordinary.
A big-screen TV fixed to one wall was set to mute but had SportsCenter on, the previous night’s box scores scrolling along the bottom while a highlight reel of the best clips from the games showed on screen. She smiled to herself when they recapped Tucker’s stellar pitching efforts.
A muffled snore from the large leather sectional drew her attention back, and she edged forward until her thighs were against the sofa and she was staring down at the man sleeping there.
It took a moment for her brain to process what she was seeing. Unless Alex had grown six inches overnight and had traded his small paunch for lean muscle, she was not in Alex Ross’s condo.
The man sleeping below her rolled and cracked an eyelid, showing a big brown eye. A smile crept onto his lips, and he opened the other eyelid, this one a beautiful blue so crisp it rivaled the sky outside.
“You’re up,” he mumbled.
“You’re Tucker,” she replied.
Tucker wasn’t too sure what to make of Emmy’s announcement. Of course he was Tucker, who else would he be?
Emmy—who usually looked put together even with a ponytail—was mussed, her hair a tangled mess and her mascara smudged under her eyes.
She was still beautiful to him.
He groaned as he stretched, his body reminding him no man over six feet tall and thirty years of age should sleep on a couch no matter how comfortable it seemed at the time. He was stiff and his shoulder had wedged into the cushions, making it cramp up when he tried to lift it over his head.
The couch hadn’t been his intended sleeping spot when he’d put Emmy to sleep in his room the night before. He meant to sleep in the guestroom and leave her his bed, but he’d stayed up too late looking at the footage of other games and dozed off on the couch.
At least he was wearing more than he usually would have at home. He’d had the good sense to throw on a pair of flannel pajama bottoms so he wasn’t at risk of flashing Little Tucker to Emmy when he shucked off the blanket he’d tangled himself in and got to his feet. All the same her cheeks flushed as if he were stark naked.
He inspected himself to confirm he was, in fact, dressed. Her blush wasn’t the result of any accidental nudity on his part—he wasn’t even sporting morning wood. Yet her gaze was transfixed on his abdomen. If he could reduce a woman to stunned silence with his abs, there might be something to say for regular visits to the ballpark gym.
“Um…” She stared down at her feet, playing with the hem of her shirt to avoid meeting his gaze. “I’m not sure how to, um…”
“How much of last night do you remember?” He padded by her and into the large kitchen where he had a Felons warm-up hoodie tossed on the back of one of the barstools. To keep her from blushing to death he put it on, and she raised her eyes, looking at him shyly through her lashes. For a woman who was so confident and spirited in her day-to-day life, it was endearing to see her out of sorts. He played with the idea of making her think something had happened between them to see how flustered she could get, but before he could say, You said I did things to you no man ever had, she spoke first.
“I think the last thing I remember was drinking with Alex. After I broke up with Simon.”
Tucker knew that part already, having received a dozen or more texts from Alex over the course of the evening beseeching the pitcher to come to the bar and be Emmy’s immediate rebound guy. So the news she had terminated her relationship wasn’t actually news, but hearing it from her made him respond in a way he hadn’t expected.
Happiness. Pure, unadulterated, buoyant glee.
He’d been pumped when Alex told him Emmy was one of the single again and insisted this was the ideal opportunity for Tucker to make his move. Alex wasn’t forthcoming with his reasons for thinking Tucker couldn’t fail, but Tucker suspected Emmy must have said something in her boozy state. Whatever it was, he didn’t know, but he meant to find out.
“Oh. You broke up with Simon?” There was no limit to the number of times he could hear those words.
“It was time.”
He nodded, unable to say anything that wouldn’t sound self-serving. Inside his head he trumpeted a loud, Yahooooooo!
“So you remember drinking with Alex?”
“Yeah, and not much else,” she admitted, embarrassment evident in her tone and the way she refused to look right at him.
“You thought this was Alex’s condo, didn’t you?”
Emmy found the nearest barstool and sat on it, her knees pointing towards him but her gaze focused on the refrigerator.
“Yeah.”
Tucker leaned against the countertop, stealthily turning on the coffeemaker with a nudge of his elbow, and crossed his arms over his chest, intent on getting her to look at him if it killed them both.
“Are you disappointed it’s not?”
Emmy’s head snapped up, and she stared at him slack-jawed. “Of course not!”
When she saw his wry grin, she realized she’d been had, but he was grateful she didn’t glance away again. The brewer on the counter burbled to life, and
the coffee began to pour into the pot, filling the kitchen with the rich fragrance of good San Francisco coffee. Chicago could keep its pizza. The City by the Bay would have his love forever because of the coffee. Funny how he hadn’t loved San Fran coffee until Emmy told him how much she had.
Her stomach growled, and he chuckled in response.
“Do you think you could handle some food?”
She made a face and started shaking her head, but her stomach protested, gurgling loudly.
“That’s humiliating,” she said, crestfallen.
“Nah. You should hear mine after a full day of training. You’d think there was a family of angry bears in it.” He filled a cup of coffee for her before the pot was done brewing and passed her the steaming mug. “No sugar or milk. Black is best for what’s going on in there.” He tapped her forehead and smiled. “Trust me.”
“You’re an expert on dealing with hangovers?”
“I’ve had one or two in my time. Champagne is the worst, but beer and shots aren’t a cakewalk by any means. I’ve been on the receiving end of an Alex-sponsored drink-a-thon before. I know what you’re going through.” A wink, not unlike the one he’d given her during the previous evening’s game, showed he wasn’t judging her for getting her drink on.
Sometimes you just had to do it, and if Emmy had felt like finding some solace at the bottom of a bottle with Tucker’s best friend by her side, well, she wouldn’t be the only person in this room who had done it.
Emmy accepted him at his word and drank back a big mouthful of coffee. She winced at the bitterness—he tended to use a darker roast espresso—but took another sip as soon as it was done. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Now let’s get some food in you.”
“And maybe you can tell me how I ended up here?”
“Maybe.” Tucker went to the fridge and pulled out eggs, cheese and butter, then grabbed a loaf of rye bread from the pantry and set about making breakfast as if the woman of his dreams wasn’t six feet away watching his every move.
He used a glass to cut holes out of the middle of each slice of bread, then buttered the slice and threw it in a hot pan. While the butter sizzled, he cracked one egg into each of the bread holes, and once he’d flipped it, sprinkled the shredded cheddar cheese over each piece. The kitchen smelled warmer when he was done, like toast and pizza. He presented Emmy a clean white plate with two slices, then put the remaining three on his own plate.
