Wade said nothing, but he counted in his head. His mother. His father.
Sam.
Not that he’d say so.
“She deserves better,” Gage said.
Wade looked at Pace. “You think so, too?”
“She deserves to be more than the pretend girlfriend, I’ll give you that. Because it’s Sam, you know?”
Yeah. He knew. Sam, who they all cared about. Sam, who gave so much of herself to the team. Sam, who’d just given herself to him, and he had a feeling it was far more than she’d intended.
As it had been for him.
He sat there with a headache brewing and the certainty that he’d already f**ked it up without even knowing exactly how. “Well, this has been fun, but I’ve got to go.” He pushed away from the table and strode through the reception one more time, but he was certain.
Sam wasn’t here.
He headed inside the main lobby and headed straight for the elevators, punching the button, suddenly afraid he was already too late.
The elevator didn’t come. He hit the button again, swore, then headed for the stairs. He made it to their eighth floor suite three minutes later, running on adrenaline as he burst into their room. “Sam.”
But he knew even before he called her name that she was gone. The note on the bathroom mirror confirmed it.
Take the limo back, I grabbed a cab.
Yep. He’d been ditched. “Well, hell,” he said out loud, pulling the note down. As he did, something on the counter grabbed his attention.
Her bathroom bag.
It was stuffed with makeup and brushes and bottles of stuff—the mysteries of a woman.
It smelled like her.
And just next to the bag lay her mother’s antique pearl pin.
“You were in a hurry,” he murmured, and suddenly he didn’t feel quite as bad. She hadn’t run out on him because she was done with the pretense.
Nope.
She’d run because that pretense had turned into a few moments of . . . real.
Something neither of them had intended.
It’d been so real it’d scared her.
“Chicken,” he said softly, surprised at this unexpected chink in her armor, while being equally surprised at something else.
He was afraid, too. Which meant it was a good thing she’d gone, a really good thing. And palming the pin, gently running his thumb over it, he willed himself to get over it before he saw her again, before she saw that she wasn’t the only one with a chink in her armor.
Chapter 11
Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything.
—Toby Harrah
Wade got back to Santa Barbara late, and hit the sack. He woke in his own bed, which was infinitely better than the couch had been in the hotel but somehow it was not nearly as much fun.
He got dressed and wondered what his pretend girlfriend was doing. Certainly notreturning any of his calls . . .
Telling himself he was ready for the opening game of season four against the Padres, he drove to the Heat’s facilities with the music cranking, walked into the clubhouse and felt adrenaline kick in. Adrenaline was good. It meant he wasn’t thinking about Sam, or how she’d felt with her legs wrapped around his waist as he’d plunged into her.
Much.
The clubhouse was filled and noisy. Most MLB baseball clubhouses gravitated toward a specific identity. The Yankees were corporate. The Rockies were religious. The Heat? Rollicking.
Today was no different. The air was excited and jubilant, just the way Wade liked it. They had an unusually tight, close-knit team, and almost everyone arrived within minutes of each other.
Food was set out, and they ate together: Wade, Pace, Joe Pickler, the Heat’s second baseman, Henry Weston, their left-fielder-turned-shortstop, who was sporting a black eye from his fender bender two days ago, and Mason Rictor. Mason was their first baseman who was currently battling knee problems from a spring training incident involving not a ball but a woman, a stolen night, and her husband coming home early, which had forced Mason out a third-story window.
Gage was still barely speaking to him.
As they sat around inhaling a pile of sandwiches, Mike, their third baseman, and Kyle, their right-fielder, joined them. “Heard you had quite the weekend,” Kyle said to Wade, and tossed down a stack of newspapers to the table.
Wade opened one up and stared at the picture of himself and Sam at the reception. They were locked together on the dance floor. Her arms were around his neck. He had one hand in her hair, the other on her ass.
“Looks like mission accomplished on the tame-Wade thing,” Kyle said, heavy on the irony. “So was this before or after the quickie in the bathroom?”
Wade slid a death-glare at Pace.
Pace lifted his hands. “Hey, I didn’t tell.”
Henry choked on his drink. “You mean it’s true? You and Sam had a quickie in the bathroom? Our Sam?”
All eyes swiveled to Wade.
“We’re boyfriend and girlfriend,” he said.
“Pretend boyfriend and girlfriend,” Mike reminded him.
“Yeah,” Wade said. “Right. Pretend.”
“Wait.” Mike took a closer look at Wade, then glanced at everyone else. “Am I the only one who heard that?” he demanded to know.
“Heard what?” Wade asked.
“Nope,” Kyle said. “I heard it, too.”
“Heard what?” Wade repeated through his teeth.
“That you don’t want it to be pretend,” Kyle told him.
Wade stared at him. “Shut up.”
“You should tell her,” Kyle said, unperturbed. “She’s always telling us that she needs to know everything, and this is definitely need-to-know.”
“Christ! Don’t tell her,” Mike said. “Are you kidding? She’ll kill you. You can’t get dead now, it’s opening day.”
“Maybe she likes me alive,” Wade said, frowning when everyone laughed. Okay, so his and Sam’s tension was legendary. Whatever. They’d gotten past it now.
Or so he hoped.
Gage walked in and as always, the room quieted. He was their age and yet his demeanor was such that everyone deferred to him as . . . well, God. He grabbed a soda and then slowly took each of them in and narrowed his gaze. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Wade said, and gathered all the papers and threw them in the recycling bin next to the trash can.
“Hey, good job on those, by the way,” Gage said, proving that nothing got past him, ever. “Our sponsors are happy.”
“Good for them.” Not wanting to hear more about how the ruse was working, Wade took off, moving toward the locker area to change for field practice. And yeah, maybe he was also keeping his eyes peeled for a glimpse of Sam . . .
The Heat’s facilities were now four years old, with everything in it being the best of the best, including the clubhouse around him. Back before the economy had taken a nosedive, the Santa Barbara taxpayers had been ecstatic to put money into a new MLB expansion team. The Heat had returned the love. Last season they’d worked their asses off, and even with bad odds, rough press, and unfair disadvantages—they’d lost a good bull pen pitcher and a great pitching coach midseason—they’d gone to the playoffs.
This season, they wanted to go even further, all the way to the World Series. For a guy who’d been born in the gutter and then survived his childhood to scrape his way through college, Wade had been lucky enough to be drafted straight to an MLB contract. After a few years in Denver, the Heat had signed him, giving him a lucrative deal he’d been more than happy to accept. He’d moved to Santa Barbara, bought himself a big, new house on the beach, and he’d never been more content.
He pulled off his shirt and shoved it into his locker as the others made their way in to change as well. As was typical, he spent more time in these rooms with the team than he did anywhere else, and it’d been designed for comfort. Right here within reach was just about anything anyone could ever want: food, flat-screen TVs, video games, workout equipment, massages, whirlpools, anything. He took in the guys all around, guys that were like his brothers as they talked, laughed, dressed, played, hung out, and he had to face one fact—the one thing he wanted hadn’t showed up.
It was unlike Sam not to be around pre-game, especially today. She liked to be involved in everything, hustling reporters in and out of the area, putting her nose in, bossing them all around with a sweet smile that barely covered the unbendable sheer steel will just beneath the surface.
He looked at his cell phone, registering that she still hadn’t returned a single one of his five phone calls. Shaking his head at her, at himself, he pulled on his uniform, nodding at Pace, who’d come up next to him and was doing the same.
The usual adrenaline was beginning to pound through his system as he dressed. Henry was on his other side now, pulling out his trusty headband, the same one he wore to every game. Mike pulled out his St. Christopher’s Cross and kissed it, just as he did every time he jogged out to third base.
Superstitions.
The caveat of the game, and a habit that had actually brought Pace and Holly together. Wade turned his head and watched as Holly came into the clubhouse, heading straight for her fiancée with a secret smile on her face.
Pace’s expression went just a little goofy. Taking Holly’s hand, he pulled her into the shower room, where Wade knew—hell, everyone knew—that Pace would press her back against the tile wall of the showers and kiss her stupid.
That was Pace’s superstition. If he kissed Holly, he’d pitch well.
They’d win.
Hell, even if it only worked in Pace’s mind, it worked for Wade. He wanted to win today, wanted that badly. So badly he had to wonder if he wasn’t putting some of his frustrations into the wrong avenue.
And then he felt it, the prickle of awareness on the back of his neck, and he turned to the door as Samantha McNead walked in.
She wore one of her power suits, red, snug in the jacket, short in the skirt. She and her mile-long legs strode through like she owned her world.
She’d sure as hell rocked his.
She smiled at Gage, who slipped an arm around her, soft with Sam where he was never soft with his players. He murmured something into her ear, and though her easy smile never wavered, her eyes flickered as if a painful memory had presented itself, but it vanished so fast he couldn’t be sure.
She hugged Gage, nodded as if reassuring him of something, and moved on. She smiled at Mason, bumped fists with Joe, and nodded at some of the other players nearby.
And then she glanced Wade’s way, telling him that she was as aware of him as he was of her. Just a quick peek, nothing more, but it was enough.
She wanted to be cool, calm, and collected, and she needed distance to accomplish that.
So did he.
Desperately. He wasn’t planning on pushing for anything more. That wasn’t him. He never pushed. He’d never had to. Luckily for him, most of the women in his life had fallen for his easy charm with little to no effort on his part. And when this month was over, he’d go right back to that.
Pace and Holly reappeared from the shower rooms. Holly’s lip gloss had been eaten off and she had a glow about her.
Pace had the predictable satisfied grin plastered on him.
Wade shook his head, then ignored everything he’d just told himself and came up behind Sam, who’d made her way to the table of drinks and was choosing between two different brands of iced tea. “Hey,” he said. “How are you?”
“Hey, yourself. I’m fine, thanks.”
“You left in a hurry yesterday.”
“Things to do,” she said.
Uh-huh. Like regroup.He leaned in. “Maybe we should come up with a ritual before each game, like Pace and Holly. There might be something to their superstition.”
“Pace isn’t superstitious,” she said. “You know it’s everyone else who thinks that their kisses work. Pace and Holly only go along with it because . . . well, because they’re in love.”
Wade looked into her eyes, searching for the warm, soft, sweet woman who’d been wrapped around him like a pretzel only yesterday afternoon, wrapped around him and panted his name like a mantra as he’d thrust into her welcoming body. But that woman was nowhere to be found.
“Okay,” he said quietly, turning her to fully face him. “Let’s try this again. Hi. How are you really?”
She blew out a breath, and for a moment let herself lean into him. “I’m sorry I ran out on you.”
“It’s okay. I was tempted to do the same,” he admitted, waiting until she looked up in surprise. He smiled ruefully. “Got a little too real there, didn’t it?”
“Yeah.” She sighed again. “Probably the whole losing our clothes thing was a real bad idea. We need to watch that.”
“That’s my favorite part.”
She smiled but it faded quick. “I don’t mind the pretend-relationship thing, Wade. But the getting na**d thing is really hard for me to do so casually.”
Yeah. He got that. He also had nothing to say in response, which was just as well since she was already gone.
Pace came up beside him. “Want some advice?”
“No.”
“Yeah, didn’t think so.” He slung an arm around Wade. “Too bad I’m going to give it to you anyway. Remember when you told me to go get myself a life outside of MLB, a life with Holly?”
“I have plenty of life outside of it. And a good part of that is with you and the parks we’re building for kids, or have you forgotten that big fat check I just wrote you? Or the two days we spent last week coaching spring camps for those kids?”