Drive You Wild: A Love Between the Bases Novel (19 page)

He took a moment to calm himself, shaping the globes of her ass, stroking the smooth curves. Then he gripped her harder and levered his hips against her rear while pulling her tight against him. “Come for me again, Paige. Do it.” He drove into her with steady, powerful strokes, a hammering rhythm that made her pussy clench tight like a fist. They were perfect together, hot and slippery and wild and . . .

With a cry, she crested, her body strung taut between the saddle and his hips. He followed in a wild explosion of pleasure.

S
haking, Paige straightened, though her legs could barely hold her up. She gripped the saddle horn for support. “Okay, now I really feel like a rag doll,” she murmured.

“Well, you’re not. Believe me, I wouldn’t be feeling this way about a rag doll.”

Feeling what way? She waited for him to say more, but he clammed up. An awkward silence fell between them. As if they’d gone so deep neither knew what to say about it.

With fortunate timing, Jerome meowed loudly from the other side of the door. She turned the key and allowed him in. Tail held high, swinging his head to take in the scene with his one eye, he stalked in like some sort of hall monitor come to investigate misbehavior. “Make way for the real Ragdoll,” Paige announced, winning a smile from Trevor.

Whew. Jerome had a way of showing up at the perfect moment.

Trevor bent over to pull on his jeans. With sweat gleaming on his rippling stomach, arm muscles flexing as he tugged at the denim, it was almost impossible to look away from him. She reached for her clothes as well. The memory of how quickly she’d shed them made heat stain her cheeks. She stepped into her panties and shorts.

“Listen . . . I’m sorry about the newspaper article. I left you a few messages, then I got distracted looking for Jerome. Are you okay?”

He fastened his jeans, his expression settling back into the usual unreadable mask. “I’m fine. Shit happens.”

“Yeah, and unfortunately the Internet makes it spread so much faster.”

“Internet?” He swung his head toward her with a look of shock. The hawk on his back rippled with his movements. “I thought the article was just in the local paper.”

She bit her lip. “It got picked up by several online sports publications. I’m sorry, I assumed you knew. It wouldn’t be getting so much attention if not for the Baseball’s Hottest Outfield campaign. And then there’s the reputation of the Catfish, all the parties and brawls and pranks and so forth. Marcia’s been calling me. She’s afraid Crush is going to blame her.”

“Crush knows where to put the blame.” A muscle ticked in his jaw.

Her heart sank. Trevor and Crush must have already faced off over the article. She put a hand on his forearm. “Is there anything I can do?”

He looked down at the floor, where his bare feet glowed pale against the stained floorboards. His boots lay halfway across the room, and he went to retrieve them. “Would you like to spend the night with me?” he asked her. “Takeout and some DVD’s might hit the spot. No sports shows.”

Of all the things he could have suggested, that invitation surprised her the most. It sounded so . . . normal. “I’d like that, but I promised to help Crush tonight. He finally took my advice and asked the gorgeous mayor over for dinner. I told him I’d cook. I was in the middle of chopping vegetables when I realized Jerome was missing. Do you want to stay here and help me?”

“Trust me, Crush doesn’t want me around right now.” He shook his head and bent down to pull on his boots. The sight of his big-knuckled hands on the leather of his Timberlands made her blood hum.

“Where did you learn to do that? With the riding crop?” The question slipped out before she could help it, and she instantly flushed. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean . . . you’re just . . . I’ve never . . .” She trailed off, since she couldn’t think of any way to fix it.

“It doesn’t matter.” Trevor pulled his bootlaces tight. “That’s all in the past.”

She turned away from him. Maybe she didn’t want to know anyway. It was bad enough knowing that Hudson was now married to another woman. She didn’t need to torture herself over Trevor too. Obviously he was experienced. Expert, even. He’d pulled reactions from her body that she didn’t know were possible.

“Hey,” Trevor said gently, stopping her hand as she reached for the doorknob. “Don’t go there.”

“I’m just letting poor Jerome out.”

“Not that.” The stern, perfect lines of his face had softened, his eyes a tender, warm peridot instead of their usual crystalline shade. “Don’t think about the past. As far as I’m concerned, there wasn’t anyone before you.”

Confusion flashed through her. What was he saying? But then his phone buzzed and the moment passed, leaving her to speculate about every possible interpretation of his words.

T
REVOR TOOK OFF
shortly after that phone call. He wouldn’t say anything about it, but when she asked if there’d been any repercussions from the direction of Detroit, he reassured her that nothing like that had surfaced.

Paige went back to her dinner preps. She’d even gone to the embarrassing extent of looking up some of Nessa Brindisi’s recipes online. Say what you would about the woman, she knew how to cook.

She’d found a good chicken pot pie recipe that looked doable, but now she didn’t have time to bake anything. Thank Trevor and his talented hands, mouth, body, etcetera, for that. Every time she thought about their session in the tack room, she went hot and liquid inside. How long had they been in there, lost in that feverish dream world together? She’d completely lost track of time and everything else.

Luckily, she could blame the delay on Jerome’s disappearance.

Instead of making pot pie, she fried the chicken, added the vegetables she’d already cut up, and scattered pieces of pie crust on top of the whole thing.

“Chicken cobbler,” she told her father and Mayor
Trent when she presented it to them with a flourish. “My own recipe.”
Take that, Nessa Brindisi.

“I’ve never heard of chicken cobbler.” The mayor—who insisted Paige call her Wendy—smiled with only a tiny trace of skepticism.

Paige liked her.

Clearly, Crush did too, since he kept reaching for his root beer as if forgetting that it wasn’t alcohol. She knew her father; she’d seen him get married twice, and date dozens and dozens of women. When he actually liked someone, he got very nervous. The lack of liquor probably made it worse.

Before he even took a bite, he managed to knock his fork off the table. Jerome, filled with an unusual amount of energy since his disappearing act, raced after it. Wendy reached down for it and got a handful of fur instead. She shrieked, which frightened Jerome. The cat scrambled away from her and clawed his way to safety, which, in his one-eyed confusion, he thought would be Crush’s pants leg.

Crush huffed and shoved away from the table, lifting his leg with Jerome still clinging to it.

“I’m so sorry. I’ll take him away.” Paige rushed forward to collect her panicked cat. He didn’t even do the boneless thing, that’s how freaked out he was. “Do you need anything else, Dad?”

“No,” he said firmly. “I think we can take it from here.”

“Thank you very much, Paige.” Wendy smiled at her. She looked different without her usual helmet of hair. She’d left it soft and loose around her shoulders and looked about ten years younger. Her deep green tunic top and black slacks gave her a relaxed, sexy look. Crush appreciated the change, judging by the way he sent the silverware flying. “It’s really nice of you to make such a
lovely meal for us. Isn’t it strange that a man can reach retirement age and not know how to cook?”

“Now wait one chicken-frying second,” Crush said. “Just because I retired from baseball doesn’t mean I’m ‘retirement age.’ I’m still young and impressively vigorous.”

Wendy raised an eyebrow, as if daring him to prove it.

“Ahem.” Paige cleared her throat while backing out of the room. “I’m still here. Please don’t use words like vigorous.”

Neither one of them looked at her. Maybe Crush had chosen his vocabulary well. Energy crackled between him and Wendy.

“I’m leaving now. I’ll be upstairs if you need anything.”

Still no reaction from the two.

“I think you broke the ice,” Paige whispered in Jerome’s twitching ear. “Nice job.”

Back in her room, she settled Jerome into his cat bed, then checked her computer. She’d been monitoring the news reports all day, checking for updates on the article about Trevor. Marcia had called her first thing in the morning, asking her to do whatever damage control needed to be done on the club’s social media accounts.

Even though it had torn her away from her fund-raiser organizing, she’d spent the day answering comments and e-mails, repeating the same basic statements.
Trevor Stark’s record as a juvenile has no bearing on his performance on the baseball field today . . . The Friars organization stands behind Trevor Stark . . . No, this isn’t a reflection on Crush Taylor’s fitness to be a minor league team owner . . . No, we have not seen the newest “Can the Catfish” petition . . . The Catfish are focused on winning the Triple A National Baseball
Championship for the wonderful Kilby fans who have stuck with the team through the years.

Earlier, she’d sent an e-mail to the legal department asking why his juvenile record had been made public. Finally an answer arrived.

Looks like his records were hacked. The police department has notified us that MacPhail has some computer experience but hasn’t admitted any involvement. They don’t know how he knew to hack Wayne County, since Stark uses a different name now. But it wouldn’t be too difficult to find out, since he went through a legal name change and those records are all public.

She worried at her thumbnail, wondering how she should pursue this further without setting off any alarm bells. Was Tom MacPhail working with someone, or for someone? Had he made contact with anyone else, say, from Detroit? Was this an isolated action by a jealous boyfriend or something more sinister?

Out of curiosity, she Googled “Detroit gangs” and looked for something with a W, since that was the emblem burned onto Trevor’s back. One recent article surfaced about a shipment of pharmaceuticals that had been carjacked and stolen. The Wachowski syndicate was suspected, but no solid evidence had been uncovered. Alarms were being sounded about the security of deliveries of pharmaceuticals. A task force was being formed and a crackdown was under way.

A search for the name Wachowski found many, many references to the creators of the Matrix movies. Narrowing it down to Detroit, she found several mentions of the growing menace of this particular gang. One news story from seven years earlier mentioned that a high-ranking member of the Wachowski family, Dinar, was found in a local pharmacy with his head bashed in. He was in critical condition but expected to survive. Al
though there were no witnesses, a minor had confessed to the attack. Drug involvement was suspected.

Seeing it there on her computer screen in black and white gave her chills. The news article matched what Trevor had said. She could picture the scene, the man lying on the floor of the pharmacy, blood seeping from his head. Trevor standing over him with a baseball bat. What had happened to Dinar Wachowski? Was he still alive? How bad was his brain damage?

She did another quick search for “Dinar Wachowski,” but found no more mentions after that particular one. Did that mean he’d left the gang? Died? Lost all brain function?

Didn’t matter. He deserved whatever bad thing happened to him. She just wished there was a way to relieve Trevor of his worry about retribution.

Then again, maybe he had good reason to worry. What did she know about this sort of thing?

She put her computer to sleep and went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. The staircase led to the living room, which she would normally walk through to reach the kitchen, but Crush and Wendy were eating at the small dining area by the hearth. Instead, she circled around the long way, past the downstairs bathroom and the lower level bedrooms to reach the kitchen by the back entrance.

No use . . . she could still hear their murmuring voices when she reached the kitchen. Humming to herself in order to tune them out, she put the teakettle on a burner and turned on the flame.

Just as the water was coming to a boil, the name “Stark,” spoken in Crush’s rough tones, caught her attention. She turned off the flame and tiptoed toward the living room. As she’d explained to Crush when she was twelve, she didn’t believe in eavesdropping except when
it was very important. In that case, she’d listened in on a phone conversation between her parents about the big baseball road trip.

This was even more important.

“I’m between a rock and a hard place,” Crush was saying. “The Friars are ready to wash their hands of Stark. But I need him if I want to keep the team.”

“Why don’t the Friars just leave him here in Kilby, then? This championship talk is getting the town all revved up. It’s good for the local economy. As mayor, I approve of that. Would it help if I wrote a letter to the Friars?”

Crush laughed at that. “That would be a first. ‘Dear Friars, would you consider leaving your obscenely overpaid left fielder here in Kilby so we can improve the local economy? Oh, and please continue paying his ridiculous salary while you’re at it.’ Good thought, and I do appreciate it. But I don’t think it would do much more than entertain the front office for a few minutes.”

“Right.” Wendy didn’t sound offended. Paige got the feeling she was used to Crush’s caustic style. “Are you sure you need Trevor to win?”

“Yes. We aren’t guaranteed to win with him, but we’re guaranteed to lose without him.”

A pause, a clink of glassware against a plate. Paige winced, hoping her father wasn’t about to knock something else off the table.

“What are you going to do?” the mayor finally asked.

“It’s not really up to me. If they call him up, they call him up. Bye-bye championship. But with this revelation about his juvenile record, they’re getting antsy. They want me to give them my recommendation. Duke has already said that Trevor’s ready and they should take their chances with a call-up. Now they want me to weigh in.”

“So if you agree with Duke, you lose Trevor, the championship, and the team.”

“Correct.”

“And if you don’t agree, what happens? Will they drop Trevor Stark?”

“Probably. He has a morals clause in his contract. It won’t be hard to find a reason to dump him. They probably could have already if they wanted to. But he can hit like an all-star, so they keep hoping he’ll straighten out.”

Don’t drop him,
Paige wanted to scream.
He deserves better. He’s screwing up on purpose, just for his sister.
She fought with her conscience for a long moment, standing there in the kitchen, with the teakettle starting to whistle.

Crush was in an impossible situation. So was Trevor. And so was she. If she told Crush what was really going on, Trevor would be furious.

“What do you think, personally?” Wendy asked. “You must have an opinion on the most controversial Catfish of all.”

“You came to a game the other day. You saw him hit. What do you think?”

The mayor got a teasing note in her voice. “Well, he’s a baseball player, so . . .”

“So he’s superior in every way,” Crush said, finishing her sentence.

“Arrogant and cocky, was more where I was going.”

“All a matter of perspective. If you can back it up, it ain’t arrogant. So who was that man you were with at the Italian place?”

Paige took that as her cue to get out before the pair interrupted their flirting long enough to notice someone was in the kitchen making tea. She tiptoed out the back door, snagged her flip-flops, and ran to the Range Rover her father had told her to use during her stay.

The least she could do was warn Trevor about what the Friars were considering.

S
tomach growling with hunger, Trevor swung by the Smoke Pit BBQ on his way back to his hotel. During his time in Texas, the local obsession with charred and sauce-drenched meat had grown on him. As a city kid, when he first arrived in Kilby he’d seen nothing more than a slowpoke town with a shortage of tall buildings. But now he actually cared about the place. The people were friendly—at least the ones not chasing him with a BB gun. Or the ones writing petitions to send the Catfish to another town.

He loved the way people brought signs to the games, the way they really got into the ridiculous promotions. Kilby was a fun town where people watched out for each other. And best of all, he’d met Paige Taylor here.

How she’d managed to sneak under his extremely well-constructed defenses, he had no idea. Somehow, she was just there, as inevitable and glorious as the sun. What was he going to do about Paige? She’d changed things inside him, and he no longer knew what end was up. For so long, his guiding purpose had been to keep Nina safe. That need still existed, but others clamored for attention too.

Especially the one with wild hair, endless legs, and dazzling blue eyes.

At the Smoke Pit, he talked a little baseball with the owner, Bud, and ordered baby back ribs, a side of corn bread, and a bottle of Snapple to go. With his white to-go bag in hand, he headed for the exit.

A hand on his arm made him pause just outside the door. “You gotta minute?” The low voice with a Texas drawl didn’t make it sound like a question. Three big beefy men in cowboy hats muscled him behind the
Smoke Pit, where a Dumpster squatted against the back wall. The stench of meat and smoke and grease hung heavy in the air.

He didn’t struggle, figuring three huge men in a dark alley probably had the advantage over him, but every muscle in his body went on full alert. He clung to the fact that these guys were wearing cowboy hats and worn jeans. They weren’t from Detroit.

“What do you want?” he asked, pulling his arm from the man’s grasp.

“Let him go.” Someone stepped from behind the Dumpster, avoiding the hazy light cast by the rear window of the Smoke Pit. His build, stocky and imposing, with the stance of someone who’d spent plenty of time in a saddle, looked familiar. The last time he saw the man, he’d gotten a shot of vodka out of the deal.

“Dean Wade?”

“That’s right.” Wade came forward to shake his hand. Trevor had no desire to make friends with the guy, but considering the three huge men still hovering around them, he decided to comply.

“How y’all doin’, Trevor Stark?”

“Well, aside from the fact my barbecue’s getting cold and I’m hanging out next to a Dumpster, not too bad.”

Dean Wade chuckled. With his bolo tie and black leather jacket, he didn’t look like a power-hungry millionaire, but Trevor knew that’s what he was. He’d seen the kind of clout the Wades wielded in Kilby. But what did the most powerful family in town want with him? “Sorry about that. I saw the opportunity and seized it. You’re not the easiest guy to reach.”