by Sierra Dean
“I’ll bet. So what are you working on? Another game?”
He rolled his chair to one side so she could see the screen. Crudely rendered stick figures stood posed in battle in front of a background of color blocks.
“Dark Princes III,” he said. “It’s a really early version. We still don’t have the artwork hashed out, so we’re just blocking out some of the major action sequences. Rich and I wrote up the plot along with one of our other programmers. The other programmer wasn’t happy about the predominately male characters in the first two games, so we took her advice, and now Dark Princes III is about Prince Aelfwyn’s sister Aethelfried.”
“Well, that’s a nice change of pace, anyway. Those adventure games always seem so sexist.” Belatedly, Tony noticed her clipped tone.
David only grinned. “Touché. Actually, I’d always intended to move into some more gender-flexible games, but the Dark Princes plot didn’t lend itself too well to that, and games with male leads are proven to sell better.”
“Why is that?” asked Tony.
“Supposedly women don’t have a problem playing games where they’re presenting themselves as a male character, but men aren’t so happy pretending they’re a female character. A few games have bucked the standard, but with Dark Princes being a new franchise, I decided to play it safe.”
“I see.” Tony paused, evaluating her tone. Had she sounded too snippy? “I guess video games are a man’s world too.” Just like everything else. Yeah, that had sounded a little snippy. She needed to work on that.
David didn’t seem offended. He turned back toward the computer and touched a button. The stick figures came to life, moving into confrontation. “The world is what you make of it.”
Maybe for you. Tony managed to quash that thought before she voiced it aloud. Some people turned everything they touched to gold. Others turned it to mud.
She started to back out of the room, then paused, watching the little stick figures bash each other with stick-figure swords. Their movements were jerky, unrefined, but even at this stage, she could tell the choreography of the battle had been carefully thought out. They just needed clothes. And skin and muscles and, well, faces would be good too. Pictures started to form in her mind of what they might look like, pictures that made the tips of her fingers long to hold a pencil, to work it all out where she could see it.
“What got you interested in this line of work?” she heard herself asking.
He glanced back over his shoulder. “I spent a lot of time in front of video game consoles in high school and college. It seemed like a natural progression.”
“I guess you always were good at math.” Lame, Tony. She really didn’t know what developing computer games involved, though, other than the obvious programming skills.
He chuckled. Even her lamest lameness didn’t seem to faze him much. “I am that. And I can barf up C++ code with both hands tied behind my back, typing with my nose.”
It was an interesting image on numerous levels. “I’d like to see that.”
“I bet you would.” He swiveled his chair so that he faced her more directly. Her eyes caught on the line of his throat, the curve of it as it disappeared behind his collar. His heartbeat pulsed in the groove along the side of his neck, and there was a small spot just under his chin where he hadn’t shaved quite cleanly. “Anyway, I studied computer science in college, where I met Rich, and we decided to take the jump and start marketing our own games.”
“Rich programs too?”
“Yeah, and he has a better eye for art than I do, so he recruited our initial graphic artists. Now we have a department for that, and he runs it. Good artists are hard to find.” His gaze seemed to narrow on her little, as if he were trying to tell her something. She didn’t know what that might be. She certainly didn’t know anything about art for computer games. Sure, she knew her way around Photoshop, but she was going to be an accountant, so it wasn’t really relevant knowledge. Uncomfortable under his attention, she lifted the hand that held the paper.
“Thanks for the paper.”
“Any time.” His smile was warm. She wanted to get away—wanted to move closer. She could almost feel his touch again, the casual, not-quite-accidental tracery of his fingers against her thigh. God, she really needed to get out of here. His gaze weighed heavy on her as she turned and headed back to the guest room.
The bed had grown chilly in her absence, and it took a few minutes for Tony’s body heat to soak the sheets again. With the pile of paper propped in her lap—not exactly steady but steady enough for her use—she began to sketch.
She started doodling; then that mysterious something took over, and she found the lines shaping a horse, a woman on its back, dressed in war gear. She slid out of the warm bed to kneel next to the nightstand, spreading papers out under the light of the lamp. With the wider, harder surface, the picture became more intricate until she had produced something that looked more like a professionally finished product than a doodle.
She moved to another sheet and started another—a dragon in flight against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. Discussing David’s game must have triggered something in her subconscious. She hadn’t drawn a dragon in years.
Tony finished that picture and moved to another. She could lose everything in the act of drawing: tension, insecurity, insomnia. She felt alive when she drew, as if her soul found its true purpose in the point where pen met paper.
Every time she drew, she wondered why she kept pushing this need away. It made her feel so…herself. The doubts and insecurities, the fluttery tension that made her day-to-day living so twitchy at times, disappeared when she let herself draw.
The pen moved across the paper in a flat arc, then moved downward. Along the same theme as the wedding, as the dragon, she drew a man in armor, a big, two-handed sword balanced between his hands, its tip resting on the ground. It wasn’t until she had sketched in the eyes and started to outline the long, strong nose that she realized she was drawing someone who looked very much like David.
Pitch Perfect
Sierra Dean
She’d be the perfect catch if he could take his eye off the ball.
Boys of Summer, Book 1
Emmy Kasper knows exactly how lucky she is. In a sport with few opportunities for women at the pro level, she’s just landed her dream job as head athletic trainer for the San Francisco Felons baseball team. Screwing up is not an option.
She’s lost in thought as she pedals to the spring training facility, her mind abuzz with excitement as she rounds a corner—and plows head-on into two runners. The end of her career dances before her eyes when she realizes she’s almost run over the star pitcher.
As Tucker Lloyd watches the flustered Emmy escape with his bandana tied around her skinned knee, the view is a pleasant change from worrying about his flagging fastball. At thirty-six, the tail end of his career is glimmering on the horizon. If he can’t pull something extraordinary out of his ball cap, the new crop of rookies could make this season his last.
The last thing either of them needs is a distraction.
The last thing either of them expects is love.
Warning: Contains a down-on-his-luck pitcher, a good-girl athletic therapist, chemistry that’s out of the park and sexy times that’ll make them round all the bases.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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Pitch Perfect
Copyright © 2013 by Sierra Dean
ISBN: 978-1-61921-658-7
&nbs
p; Edited by Sasha Knight
Cover by Kendra Egert
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: August 2013
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