Center Stage: A Hot Baseball Romance (Diamond Brides Book 8) (17 page)

“Ryan?” she asked. When he didn’t raise his eyes, panic folded shadowy fingers around her throat, making it hard for her to breathe. “Ryan!” she said, and this time he looked at her, but only for a moment. Only long enough for her to see misery in his eyes.

She whirled back to her brother. “Tell him,” she ordered. “Tell him he doesn’t have to make a choice.”

Zach shook his head. “Sorry, Linds. He’s not good enough for you.”

In that moment, she hated her brother—hated him for controlling her, hated him for ruining the one good thing that had happened to her in the last two years. But even through the crimson curtain of her rage, she knew he was telling her the truth. Zach was the only man she knew who had never lied to her.

“Ryan,” she said, and now she forgot to use her actor skills. She didn’t care if her voice grew sharp, if her words rasped against the tears that flooded her throat. “Tell him the truth.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice thready and weak. He looked up then, finally. But he didn’t meet Lindsey’s eyes. Instead, he looked at his father, at that neat pinstripe suit, at the perfect haircut and the fresh-trimmed mustache and the man who’d been born again out of the wreckage in that Chester Beach house.

“Son,” Mr. Green said. “I never meant—”

“This isn’t your fault, Dad,” Ryan said.

So. Ryan could speak one sentence of truth. None of this was Mr. Green’s fault. But that didn’t change the rage that tore through Lindsey’s heart. It didn’t keep her from turning away, from wrapping her trembling arms around her belly and concentrating with every last ounce of her energy to keep from being sick on her knees, there in the frozen tiled lobby.

She couldn’t push a button and wait for an elevator like nothing had happened. She couldn’t pretend that her heart hadn’t just shattered into a million jagged pieces. Instead, she slammed both hands against the door that led to the stairway, and she hurtled down the steps, digging out her keys as she raced to her car.

~~~

Ryan squinted toward the dugout, picking up the signals flashing from the defensive coach. The guy wanted him to move deeper into center field. There must be a scouting report on the batter at the plate, a history of his hitting the ball deep. Sure. Fine. Whatever.

He wiped his sleeve across his forehead as he took up his new position. Jesus, it was hot out here. The air felt stale, like it had run out of oxygen a lifetime ago.

He watched the batter at the plate, saw him hit a fastball foul down the first base line. Strike one.

God, Ryan could hardly catch his breath. That’s what he got, trying to play a game after a night of tossing and turning without sleep. He kept playing that goddamn scene at the airport over and over again in his mind. Zach there. His father. Lindsey, looking like he’d gutted her. Well, he had. He’d lied to her for weeks, letting her think he’d made things good with Zach.

The batter took a massive swing at a change up, missed it by a mile. Strike two.

The thing was, he’d had to do it. Sitting there in that living room in Chester Beach, with the pizza boxes, and the TV, and the piles of ancient box scores. It had cut his heart out, seeing Dad like that.

Mom had known it would happen. That’s why she’d made Ryan promise. That’s why she’d said it was so important for him to get Dad involved, to keep him from dying his own slow, aching death. Ryan had agreed, because that’s what Mom had needed. Because that’s what a good son did. Because he couldn’t keep her alive, and a promise was the most he could offer.

Crack
.

The ball streaked off the bat, combining a hundred miles an hour of fastball heat with a killer swing. The scouting reports were wrong, though. The ball didn’t arc toward the warning track. It was a line drive, sailing over the shortstop’s head, plummeting toward the no-man’s land in the great grassy expanse of center field.

Ryan sprinted for it. He pounded out three full strides. He pushed off with his right leg, leaping, stretching, and that’s when he felt the muscle pop. Even as his mouth stretched, even as his lungs emptied around an agonized cry, he knew it was his hamstring, the same strain from the start of the season, but a thousand times worse.

The ball rolled past him, finding its way into Sartain’s glove, into the infield and the cut-off man who wasn’t able to hold the runner at second. Ryan rolled onto his back, pounding the grass with his fist. He couldn’t straighten his leg; he knew without trying that he couldn’t put weight on it. The pain twisted around his stomach, filled his mouth with acid that scorched all the way down as he forced himself to swallow.

It took a lifetime for the trainer to trot out there. Longer for Sartain and Norton to get their shoulders under his arms, to carry him back to the dugout in an improvised three-legged race. He heard the crowd applaud, knew the clapping meant they had his back, they appreciated his effort.

But he didn’t need an MRI to tell him he was going on the disabled list. And this time, he’d be lucky if he played before the end of the season.

~~~

Lindsey was astonished to discover how many hours there were in a day. It seemed like she’d been racing for months, always darting from one thing to another, always frantic, desperate to cram ten more things into her waking hours.

First, there’d been the wedding, with all the energy that had taken. Sure, she’d planned on something small and intimate, but even the simplest of weddings required the bride to think, to act, to do. And now, with the raw perspective she’d gained from being jilted, she could admit to herself that she’d hidden behind too many of those decisions so she didn’t need to question her true feelings for Will.

Then, there’d been the flurry of hooking up with Ryan. She’d fallen hard for him. She’d let him take over her mind, her memory. Those shopping expeditions for surprise lingerie, long drawn-out phone conversations, hours spent in his bed (okay, not enough of those, or that’s what she’d thought when she believed what they had was real…)

But now she had all the time in the world.

She picked up a job at one of the downtown hotels, catering. She might as well pad her bank account while she could. Who knew if she’d ever be on stage again?

She actually considered going back to Children’s Repertory Theater. Oh, they wouldn’t have any roles for her, they’d made that perfectly clear. But there was always work to do in the front office. She could make fundraising calls. Stuff envelopes for the theater’s mailings. It was easy, familiar.

Boring as wallpaper paste. But safe. And it filled up time.

Now, on a Tuesday morning with July heat already beating through the windows of her home, her phone chirped an alarm at her. She deleted the notice, barely reading it.

She’d scheduled the audition weeks before. It wouldn’t be right to pretend like it didn’t exist at all. And maybe, just maybe, something would be different this time. There might be some way she could prove to the director that she was competent. That she was just the person he needed to make his dream production come true.

With a substantial part of her mind still wondering why she bothered, she sifted through the papers on her kitchen counter, digging deep until she found the manila envelope Jamie Martin had sent her days before. She was still astonished by the image the photographer had captured—a grown woman who stared out at her in black and white. The familiar curve of her cheekbones became something mysterious above dark lipstick; the smile in her eyes hinted at longer stories, more complex tales than she’d ever told before.

And those were exactly the tales she was supposed to tell Dominic Reed, when she read for his new production in less than an hour.

She certainly hadn’t prepared for the audition the way she would have earlier in her career. Instead, she’d relied on an old acting class from college, on a scene she’d prepared for Theater Arts 301. At the time, she couldn’t imagine ever being the actual age to play the role, every taking on the real emotion in the scene. But now it matched her mood perfectly.

She was ready to play
Medea
.

She couldn’t remember when she’d first read the tragedy. The heroine was driven mad by her husband’s infidelity. In a blind rage, she committed an unspeakable sin, killing her own children. Every word of the Greek classic was pure rage, uncut fury.

Of course, Lindsey didn’t have any children in danger of murder. But when she thought of what she’d been through in the past two years, when she remembered standing in those churches, waiting for Doug, waiting for Will, she understood a little of what the mad Greek queen must have felt. The men who had jilted Lindsey had betrayed her, had been unfaithful.

And Ryan had too. He’d lied to her, made promises he hadn’t kept. When she pictured Ryan standing in the elevator lobby, ashamed, defeated, unwilling even to meet her eyes, she felt the mad queen’s rage.

A perky assistant greeted her at the theater. “Lindsey Ormond?” she asked. “We’re ready for you now.”

As Lindsey handed over her headshot, she took a deep breath, pouring steel through her entire body as she walked to the stage. She stared out into the audience, toward the shadows that she knew were the producer, the director, and the stage manager.

“Lindsey, love,” called out Dominic, in that Yorkshire accent she’d come to know so well when he’d guest-directed
The Spiky Porcupine
at CRT. “I must admit, I’m a bit surprised to see you here. Euripides isn’t really your type of playwright, is he? Classical Greek drama?”

She was ready for this. She knew she had to convince Dominic, had to change his mind. “I think you’ll be surprised,” she said.

“Very well, then,” Dominic said, but doubt darkened his words. “Go ahead, then. Show us what you have.”

Lindsey took a deep breath, and then she became the ancient, wounded queen.

~~~

Ryan reached for one of his crutches but his angle was off, and the rubber-tipped metal crashed to the floor. “God
damn
it!” he shouted.

His father looked up from the laundry he was folding. “What do you need, son?”

“Nothing,” Ryan growled. He used the tip of the other crutch to snag the fallen one, painstakingly dragging it back across the floor. “What?” he finally snapped. “What are you waiting for?”

“I was wondering if you planned on spending the rest of the afternoon sitting on your ass,” his father said with an even tone.

“What the hell else am I supposed to do?”

“You could get in some weight work. There’s nothing wrong with your upper body. Core either.”

Ryan bit back the response he wanted to snarl. His father was right—he
should
stay on top of his training. He’d be off the crutches in a day or two. Work out with a trainer for a week after that. Get cleared for a rehab assignment by the middle of the month. Maybe even see Rockets Field by August, if he was lucky.

Shit.
Luck
wasn’t his strong suit these days.

He leaned his head back against the arm of the couch, wondering if he could convince his father he’d slipped into an afternoon nap. Fat chance. The old man just tugged the laundry basket over to his duct-taped recliner, fishing out a handful of unmatched socks.

“I’ve been thinking,” Dad said slowly. “I’ve been pressed for time a lot lately. There’s too much to do around this place—laundry and grocery shopping and three meals a day don’t cook themselves.” He sighed, but the long exhale didn’t quite manage to sound like he was exhausted. “It used to be easy to juggle it all, when I didn’t have to hold down a day job. I can’t keep up. I’m going to call the team. Give my notice.”

Ryan leaned his head back against the couch, praying for patience. “That’s not going to happen, Dad.”

 
“Of course it will.” His father rolled two socks into a neat bundle. “I’ll give them a month if they need it, but then I’ll have things back the way I want them.”

“What? So you can sit here in your greasy sweatpants, watching games you should have forgotten decades ago?”

His father shrugged and matched another pair. “I might find something else. I hear they’re hiring down at O’Malley’s.”

“Right. You’re going to tend bar.”

“It’ll keep me busy,” he said over yet more socks. “Keep me from thinking about the past. From things I can’t change.”

Ryan knew when a sermon was starting up. He cut it off with, “You’d be fired in a week. When was the last time you mixed a martini?”

“O’Malley’s is a beach shack! They don’t serve martinis.”

“Welcome to the twenty-first century, Dad.” But the bitterness in his words cut through to something deeper. “Aw, shit,” he said. “You aren’t giving up the Satellites, just because of me.”

“You shouldn’t give up a woman, just because your old man needs a job.”

“You’re not the problem,” Ryan said. And that was the truth. He hadn’t lost Lindsey because Dad was working for the Satellites. He’d lost Lindsey because he’d lied to her. Lied to her and to Ormond. He should have manned up when he had the chance, faced his old teammate’s anger and said he wasn’t backing down.

He leaned his crutches against the couch. “I fucked up, Dad.”

His father nodded, just a little too quickly for Ryan’s tattered ego. But then, that’s what fathers did. They figured out the score way before their sons ever did. Dad looked him in the eye and said, “What are you going to do about it?”

Ryan
knew
what to do in the batter’s box. He knew he had to dig in, plant his feet and keep them steady. He had to close up his stance, keep his shoulder in, keep his weight back. He had to take his best guess at the pitch he was about to receive, commit to it, never vary from the choice he’d made.

Everything that made him a great hitter made him a shitty guy in a relationship.

“I need to tell her I was wrong. That I’m sorry. But if I do that, if I go after her, it’s going to cost you your job.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m an old man. Besides, I’m building my own record here. Zach Ormond won’t can me as long as I’m winning games for him. The Sats have been turning things around the last couple of weeks.”