Center Stage: A Hot Baseball Romance (Diamond Brides Book 8)

by Mindy Klasky

  This time he didn’t bother with a shower. But his hand was a piss-poor substitute for the woman who was driving him insane.

  ~~~

  Lindsey took a deep breath as the door opened to the photography studio. “Jamie,” she said to the woman waiting with a camera. “I really appreciate your making time for me on such short notice.”

  “The Rockets have been wonderful to me,” Jamie Martin said. “When Anna Benson calls asking for a favor, I never say no.”

  Lindsey grinned with more confidence than she felt. It had taken a lot for her to reach out to her brother’s fiancée. Calling the team owner felt like she was giving up a bit of her independence, like she was relying too much on Zach. Nevertheless, her need was great enough that she’d been willing to place the call. Now she just had to make the most out of the resulting photo shoot. “Then this is my lucky day,” she said.

  “Tell me what you’re looking for.”

  That was the real question, wasn’t it? Lindsey took a steadying breath. “I’m an actor. I have been, for about five years, at Children’s Repertory Theater. You know the type of show—big and bright and full of energy.”

  Jamie nodded, her eyes narrowing as she paid attention.

  Lindsey said, “I’m ready for something different. Something … more.” As she said the words out loud, she realized just how true they were. That’s why she’d taken the risk, going to Ryan’s home. That’s why she’d forced herself to rethink how she made love, to ask for what she wanted. That’s why she was wearing her lacy red bra and panties beneath her outfit. “And that’s why I need new headshots. I need directors to look at me in a different way, to see me as someone older. More confident. More mature. I need them to see me as a woman, instead of as a girl.”

  Jamie stared at her shrewdly. “I understand,” she said. “It’s a lot to ask for, just shooting from the neck up, but we can tell that story.”

  And those words convinced Lindsey she was in the right place. Because she was telling a story. She was writing out her own tale, composing it as she went along. For the first time in years, she knew the ending she wanted to reach, the way she was going to carve out her very own “happily ever after.”

  She reached for her purse, for the slim silver tube in the side pocket. “And here’s part of the new me,” she said to Jamie. “I want to wear this lipstick for the shoot.”

  Jamie smiled. “Let me hand you over to my assistant, Robert. He’ll do your makeup, and then we’ll see what I can do on my end of things.”

  “That sounds perfect,” Lindsey said. And it did. She’d known she needed new headshots for years. But this was the first time she’d felt comfortable building a new image of herself for all the world to see.

  ~~~

  If it was Tuesday, it must be Toronto.

  Most of the the guys loved being in Canada—different money to flash around town, great restaurants, beautiful parks for pre-game runs, friendly people who rounded out the vowel sound in “out” and “about” and really did end their sentences with “eh.”

  Ryan would have been just as happy, though, to be back in North Carolina. He wanted to be with Lindsey. He wanted to make her pay for all her teasing, for the photos she sent when he was least prepared, for the sexy messages she left when she knew he couldn’t answer his phone.

  He still hadn’t said anything to Ormond. “Hey, buddy, just wanted to let you know I’m banging your little sister. And wow, is she one hot piece of ass when it comes to phone sex.”

  Right. Like he’d ever walk away from that conversation with his jaw intact.

  It would be better to wait until they were home, done with this killer road-trip. Everything would be easier when they weren’t strung out on strange beds and crappy hotel food and yet another charter flight.

  At least Dad was thriving in Chester Beach. Maybe not at the ballpark—the Satellites were still right at .500. But when Ryan had called the day before, he’d heard hammering in the background. “What’s going on there?” Ryan had asked.

  “I’ve got some guys working on the house,” Dad said. “It was time to replace the deck. Might as well do it over the summer, so I can grill outside before it gets too cold.”

  Dad. Grilling outside. Taking an interest in anything besides old baseball tapes. It was an improvement, even if he never got his job as hitting coach up to speed.

  As if summoned by Ryan’s thoughts, the phone buzzed. Eleven o’clock in the morning. Just like Dad, keeping to a perfect schedule. “Hey,” Ryan answered.

  “How’s the Great White North?” his father shouted over a circular saw shrieking in the background.

  “Not so white, in the middle of June. Every time I come to Toronto, it’s hotter than hell.”

  “Can’t compare to down here, son.” Hammers pounded behind Dad’s words.

  “What the hell are those guys doing? It sounds like they’re building that deck right inside the house!”

  His father laughed. “The deck crew is outside. You’re hearing the guys in the dining room.”

  “The dining room?”

  “Yeah,” his father said. “I started thinking. I’m not going to have anyone over for a fancy sit-down dinner any time soon. So why not knock out the wall between the living room and the dining room? Then, there’ll be plenty of room to put in a treadmill, an elliptical, a set of free weights in the corner.”

  “You’re turning the dining room into a gym?” Jesus. Mom would have skinned Dad alive, for even suggesting the idea.

  But that was the point, wasn’t it? Mom wasn’t around any more. She was long past having any say in what happened to the scratched old table, to the banged-up chairs that could seat eight at a pinch. And his father had wanted a gym for about as long as Ryan could remember.

  “What do you think, son? Should I spring for one of those recumbent bikes?”

  Ryan had created a monster.

  Dad wasn’t a monster, though. He was a lonely guy who’d finally figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He was an old baseball hand, excited about the prospect of work for the first time in years. Ryan finally got off the phone on the third try, but only when he said he had to go, or he’d be late reporting to the ballpark.

  “Keep your shoulder in when you go after Reist’s curveballs,” Dad said.

  “I always keep my shoulder in.”

  “Not when you see the curve. It’s instinct—you try to get to it by opening up. Shoulder in, and power off your back foot.”

  It was all stuff he knew. All stuff he’d absorbed in Little League, in college ball, in his climb up through the minors. But it helped Dad to say it. And it couldn’t hurt for Ryan to hear it out loud. Even if he had to hustle to meet the team in the lobby.

  ~~~

  Lindsey’s heart pounded as she sat on the couch, pulling her knees up to her chin. She’d spent the past three hours waiting to phone Ryan, watching the game as it wandered into extra innings. It took almost four hours for the Rockets to win by a single precious run.

  Half a dozen times, she’d considered giving up and going to bed. She could just text him a picture—she had half a dozen that would drive him crazy in his Toronto hotel room. There was the one with her looking over her shoulder in that little black skirt. The one with stockings and garters. The one with her arms crossed over her naked chest, a tiny black bra hanging from her fingertips.

  Of course Ryan expected her to send something like that. She’d teased him every night he’d been on the road. It had been exciting for her—posing for him, thinking of his reaction as she sent the photos, listening to the tension in his voice when they finally talked, imagining the look on his face as his voice grew deeper, as his words came slower, as he abandoned words altogether and she just heard him breathing, hard, into the phone…

  The photos and the flirting, the game-playing… It was fun—a hell of a lot more fun than she’d had with any other guy she’d ever dated. But she wanted something more. Something deeper. And tonight sh
e was going to tell him so. Because that’s who he inspired her to be.

  She’d thought it was so simple that first night, when he followed her out to the farmhouse. She was tired of being the good girl, tired of a role that had never made her happy. But now things were a lot more complicated than “good” and “bad.” She wanted more than the thrill of being naughty, of snapping pictures of herself, of touching herself when Ryan told her to, of holding her breath as he provided his own release, half a continent away.

  She braced herself and counted to ten. She could do this, even though it took more courage than wrapping a couple of magnolia trees in toilet paper or keeping a race car under control on the open highway. She’d faced down a policeman under the pier in Chester Beach. She’d stripped naked on a man’s front porch.

  She pressed the button on her phone.

  “Hey, Killer. I thought you’d forgotten me,” Ryan said. She could hardly make out his words above her pounding heart.

  “No,” she said.

  She considered a few jokes. I was tied up here—let him imagine her with bonds around her wrists and ankles. How could I have lost track of time—delivered with a pretty pout and just enough of a leer that he could imagine how she’d passed the hours. It was so hard to wait till the end of the game—he’d have no problem parsing that one.

  But she didn’t want to joke. She didn’t want to play.

  And the perfect thing about Ryan was that he understood. Whether it was her delay in calling, or her one-word answer, or the heart-rending pause as she fought for the words she needed, he immediately grasped that something was wrong.

  “Hey,” he said, and his voice was soft as velvet. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she answered right away. But that only left her with the hard part to put together. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Uh-huh.” Another quiet sound, just enough to let her know he was there.

  “At first I thought this was a just a sex thing,” she finally said. “Fun and games. A fling to get me over Will. Something to keep you busy during the season.”

  This time, he didn’t say anything at all. But she could feel him waiting.

  And so she had to go on. “I know I should be happy with that. I mean, it’s not like my ‘deep and meaningful’ relationships got me anywhere. Not past the altar, anyway.”

  His silence almost stole away her words. But she needed to finish what she’d started. She needed to say the rest of what she was thinking, what she’d rehearsed all evening long.

  “Things are different with you, Ryan. I don’t have to be the baby of my family. I don’t have to make it up to everyone, get them past all the ways that Beth screwed up, all the bad things that happened, with Daddy and Mamma dying, with… everything. With you, I can say what I want and do what I want, and I can trust you to understand that whatever those things are, they’re me—all part of me, all part of who I am and what I want to be.”

  “You can, Lindsey.” He spoke without hesitation, and the fact that he used her name, that he wasn’t hiding behind Killer, behind the games they’d played, sent bubbles fizzing through her blood. “You can always do that. I want you to do that.”

  “This just happened so quickly. I mean, I was ready to marry another man just a couple of weeks ago.”

  “But you didn’t marry him,” Ryan said. And he was right, of course. Now, less than a month after she was supposed to be basking in happily wedded bliss with Will, she couldn’t imagine ever talking to the man again. She’d dodged a bullet, and she felt nothing but relief about that entire misguided relationship.

  Still, she shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve spent a lifetime listening to Zach, hearing him say he’d kill any of his friends who so much as looked at me, and now…”

  A pause, but then he said, “Zach doesn’t know everything.”

  “But you guys have been friends for years, right? It just feels strange. He knows everything about you, your family, your past. But I sometimes feel like you and I are strangers. Like we’ve barely met.”

  “What do you want to know?” He answered without hesitation, without even a hint of guile.

  And that was the core, right there. She already knew a bunch of facts; she’d looked them up or listened as they came up in normal conversation. She knew his batting average, and where he’d gone to junior college, how he’d grown up in Chester Beach, how he’d lost his mother a year ago. She’d found a dozen websites where fans talked about his favorites—color (green) and food (steak) and vacation spot (Hawaii) and God knows how many other details.

  She knew he was a leg man; he’d made that perfectly clear. And she knew he was partial to leather. And she knew he was a generous lover, meeting her needs before his own. She knew the sound his breath made as it caught in his throat, just before he came.

  But none of that was enough. None of it really mattered.

  Zach was still on her mind, hovering over this conversation like a broad-shouldered ghost. Thank God Ryan had taken the bull by the horns, had told Zach what was going on between them. She didn’t think she ever would have had the nerve. She worried about her big brother, but she loved him, loved all her siblings, and so she asked, “What was it like, growing up without any brothers or sisters? What effect did that have on who you are today?”

  He snorted, just a little laugh. “I feel like I’m filling out some job application.” But that didn’t keep him from going on. “In some ways, I totally lucked out. Mom thought I was perfect, at least until I learned to walk. Dad tried to make me understand I had to work for what I wanted, that I couldn’t just screw around for my entire life. They supported me even when I drove them crazy, probably because they didn’t have any option, any other kids who were doing the right thing, who were being good. I don’t know how you did it, one of six kids. It’d be like World War III half the time.”

  “Not really. Not most of the time. Well, only with Beth and me. And not always then.” Just talking to him was relaxing her, easing the tension she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Sometimes I rely too much on all of them. I don’t make my own decisions.”

  “That’s one good thing about being an only. You get that independence thing down fast.”

  “I can be independent!” And she told him about the time she decided to make breakfast for the entire family, when she was only seven years old, and she wasn’t supposed to turn on the burners on the gas stove, so she kept the flame really high, trying to cook everything as fast as possible. Maybe that was why she couldn’t make a meal today—she’d been scarred for life by the charcoal French toast and the carbon-coated eggs she’d served up to an unappreciative crowd.

  He matched her story with one of his own, about running away from home when his fourth-grade teacher sent him home with a disciplinary note. They talked about school—about how she’d always felt it was a playground, a place for her to make friends and learn new things and spread her wings. About how he’d thought every class was pretty much a waste of time, a boring hurdle to get over so he could play on the baseball team, on the football team, whatever.

  At some point during the conversation, she stretched out on the couch. She reached for the old afghan blanket her mother had crocheted and snuggled deep against the cushions. She shifted her phone to a better angle, and then she asked him about the pets he’d had, about his favorite field trips from school, and she traded stories from her own past.

  They talked until she had to bite back the yawns that threatened to dislocate her jaw. Her eyes were gritty, and she rubbed them hard before she gave up and kept them closed. Her voice grew hoarse, but that didn’t keep her from telling him longer stories, when she spun out more words.

  She was half asleep when she murmured, “What do you want to do with your life? What will you do when you can’t play ball any more?”

  Silence. At first, she thought he might have finally fallen asleep. But then he spoke, and his voice was steady and even, as calm as when he’d first answered thi
s insane phone call. “I don’t like thinking about a time when I can’t play. But I imagine I’ll try to be like Dad, working with a farm team, trying to give back after everything I’ve taken.” He sighed. “I’m not a complicated man, Lindsey. I don’t have any hidden agenda. I know I love the game. And I love talking to you like this. That’s what I want, right now, and I don’t see any reason I won’t want it forever.”

  She didn’t know that was the answer she’d been hoping for until she let out a shuddering breath. But she was smiling as she said, “Me, too. Not the baseball part. And not the stuff about your dad. And I don’t think I could help out any farm team in the league. But I’m having a damn good time, Ryan. I really am, even if you think I’m a crazy woman with this phone call.”

  “If this is the closest you get to crazy, I think we’ll do just fine.”

  And that was it. She’d survived the nightmare. She’d told him her greatest fears, asked him her most difficult questions, and she’d survived. They’d survived. They’d done more than that—she felt closer to him than she’d ever imagined she could. “Thank you,” she said, and the hoarse words were scarcely more than a whisper. “I can’t wait till you’re home.”

  “Six more days, babe.”

  The endearment curled her lips, drifting over her, even softer than the afghan. “You’ve got to be exhausted,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

  “You too. Let’s talk tomorrow.” And those three words were a promise that she hadn’t scared him off, that her questions had pulled them closer, rather than driven him away. She drifted off to sleep feeling better than she had in weeks, months, years. Maybe in forever.

  CHAPTER 8

  Lindsey had learned a long time ago that it didn’t make sense to wait for a Rockets charter in the main airport terminal. She’d met Zach often enough after a road series, ready to drive him to some family event, sometimes just wanting to see the brother who spent so much time on the road. She knew the guys’ flight wouldn’t show up on the airport’s sleek Arrivals screens. There wouldn’t be an entry down by the Baggage Claim carousels, telling where their suitcases would be brought.