Pitch Perfect: Boys of Summer, Book 1 (2 page)

She tried to pull away, but his fingers tensed. The feel of his calloused skin, hot against her—thankfully shaved—knee made her shudder involuntarily. He gave a brief, concerned smile as one might to an injured animal that was ready to bolt.

“Let me look at it,” he instructed. His voice was soft, but she could tell he meant business.

She started to argue since she was perfectly capable of fixing her own oozing road rash, thank you very much, but when he pushed the hem of her pants higher, Emmy relaxed into his touch and sat on the hard ground staring at him. Her back and bloody knee throbbed in time with her fluttering pulse.

Tucker removed the bandana he wore over his dark brown hair and gave her another tentative smile.

“Oh, um, you really don’t need to do that,” she insisted. In her medically trained mind, Emmy thought,
Oh yeah, awesome plan, clean my wound with a sweaty bandana.
She placed her fingers on his wrist in an attempt to stay his hand. It was nice to have a smoking-hot MVP pitcher attending to her, but he was the MVP pitcher
she
would soon be attending to. Professionally. How could he respect her as his therapist if he thought she didn’t know how to look after a little scrape?

“It’s okay, I know what I’m doing,” Tucker insisted, his gaze meeting hers, and up close she got a chance to marvel at his famous eyes.

A lot of baseball players had pretty eyes. Sometimes it was all you could make out of a man with the brim of his cap pulled low and a serious scowl on his face. Tucker’s eyes were famous because of how unusual they were, though.

He had heterochromia—a mouthful to say, but a glory to behold. One eye was a warm melted-chocolate brown. The other was so blue it put the spring sky to shame. He was a bit of a freak, but in a good way.

Staring at his eyes made her forget whatever argument she’d been about to make, and she pulled her hand away from his wrist.

Oh, what the hell? He’s just trying to help.
She made a mental note to douse her knee in rubbing alcohol when she got home.

Besides, his touch
was
distracting her from the pain, and that was something she wouldn’t have been able to do on her own.

She looked from Tucker to his friend, and knowing who the pitcher was, the realization of his sidekick’s identity sank in. Alex Ross. She’d almost run over the star pitcher and the team’s only reliable catcher, all in one fell swoop.

For someone who’d been hired to keep the players of the San Francisco Felons in good working order, Emmy was doing a hell of a job.

She’d joined the Felons club over the winter as their new head athletic trainer. The competition had been fierce—every trainer worth their salt wanted to have an MLB team on their resume—but she’d been the only candidate who needed more than mere skills. She was a woman seeking access into the almost totally male-dominated world of professional baseball, and she’d known from the outset getting her dream job wouldn’t be easy.

But she’d fought for it, clawing her way up the ladder from intern to the head of the athletic department at her alma mater. She had her master’s degree while many of the men in her profession made do with their bachelor’s degrees and prominent internships. More than anything, though, she had a passion for baseball, and it had shown when she’d gone through her interviews.

It wasn’t only about a good job. Emmy had wanted to be an integral part of the team. She wanted to matter to the clubhouse. Even if she couldn’t play the game herself, she wanted to do her part to lead a team to victory.

She’d never been a cheerleader, or a baseball groupie. Emmy was a true lover of the game, and she’d laid her desires on the table during her interview. She must have seemed crazy to the managers, but something about it stuck out because they offered her the job later that same day, and a week later she was moving from snowy Chicago to Northern California.

And now—on her first day at spring training—she’d almost taken two key players in the Felons lineup off their roster.

“I’m
so
sorry,” she said, directing her comment to Alex since Tucker was focused on her leg, and she didn’t think she could watch him work without cringing over his improper medical hygiene.

“It’s nothing to get bent out of shape over,” Alex said, then laughed like he’d made a joke only he understood. Normally it would drive Emmy crazy when a guy thought of himself as hilarious, but Alex somehow managed to make his boorish behavior charming in a ridiculous sort of way.

It also kept her mind off the fact that Tucker had wrapped his bandana around her knee, until he secured it snugly and the extra pressure brought her attention reeling back to the pain. “
Oh.
Ow. Owowowowow.”

“That’s going to swell something nasty. You’re going to want to—”

“Ice it. I know.” She could let him be the knight in shining armor if he wanted to, but she wasn’t going to pretend she didn’t know how to look after her knee.

“You a doctor or something?” Alex asked, his tone teasing.

“Or something.” In spite of the fact they would be meeting her officially in a few short hours at the team’s first practice, this wasn’t how she’d imagined introducing herself. And she couldn’t bring herself to tell
the
Tucker Lloyd she was his new athletic trainer after he’d gone to all the effort of wrapping her up. Especially not when he was kneeling by her side, giving her such a sweet, concerned look.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem. You think you can stand up?” He offered her his hand.

Emmy was struck dumb momentarily when she met his eyes. She shifted her gaze, staring at his hand like she didn’t understand what its purpose was. “Stand up?” She must have still been woozy from the fall.

“Like, on your feet?” Alex suggested. “Did you sustain any head injuries we didn’t see?”

“No,” she said with forced certainty and took Tucker’s hand, letting him draw her up to a standing position. The front of their bodies brushed against each other, making her cheeks flush. His chest was hard and toned and felt warm through the threadbare material of his shirt.

Too bad she couldn’t blame her blush on an imaginary bump to the noggin. What had gotten into her? She
never
got worked up around famous athletes.

“I have to go.” She pushed herself off him, letting her touch linger a moment longer than was respectable before snatching her hand away and giving herself a stern internal lecture.

Bad Emmy!

Her bike hadn’t sustained any serious damage, so when she climbed back on, the frame was still in excellent shape to help her make a speedy getaway, though her knee protested something fierce.

“Hey,” Tucker called after her. “What’s your…?”

His voice trailed off as she turned a corner. She realized too late he’d been trying to ask her name, and she’d run off without so much as a backwards glance.

She’d just completely blown off Tucker Lloyd.

Chapter Three

“Maybe running isn’t for us,” Alex said as he and Tucker stood in line at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. “I knew it wasn’t
fun
, but I didn’t think it was dangerous.”

“You just want an excuse to get out of exercise. Don’t think I’m not on to you.” Tucker gave Alex a whack in the small paunch he’d acquired over the winter. Tucker was listening, but he wasn’t
really
listening. He was thinking about their hit-and-ride, but not in the same way Alex was. The catcher was joking about their eventful job, but Tucker was thinking about the long, sun-streaked, light brown hair and big hazel eyes of the lady cyclist who’d literally crashed into his life that morning.

And stolen his favorite bandana.

“I get exercise,” Alex contested, as he loaded his plate with scrambled eggs and an assortment of fried meats.

Tucker rolled he eyes and filled his own plate with poached eggs and fresh fruit. He wasn’t a health nut, but during the season he tried not to eat like crap. Alex was a tank, and he crouched behind the plate during games. Tucker, on the other hand, needed to stay loose. Fat pitchers were few and far between, and they usually didn’t last six or seven innings, let alone play through all nine. If he was getting old, he didn’t think getting fat was also an option.

Age he had no say in. Flab could be stopped.

The pair of them moved to an empty table near the window, basking like cats in the bright morning sunlight. A few moments after making themselves comfortable—before they could even dig into their food—another two men joined them. A copper-skinned man in his late twenties who Tucker barely recognized plopped down first, stroking a neatly trimmed black goatee.

“What happened to your face, Ramon?” Alex rolled the
r
in the first-baseman’s name with a saucy flourish.

“You like?” Ramon Escalante smirked broadly, showing them a mouthful of pearly whites made even brighter in contrast to the dark hair of his new mustache.

“If I was George Michael in 1997, I would be incredibly jealous.”

Another man, this one younger and quieter, took the empty seat between Tucker and Ramon. The new arrival smiled but said nothing. It was hard to get a word in edgewise when Alex and Ramon were in the same room. The ego tended to eat up all the oxygen.

“You
are
jealous because I look like a man and you cannot grow a simple beard.” Ramon’s Spanish accent, originally from the Dominican Republic, tended to get thicker in direct proportion to how much Alex was irritating him at any given moment.

“Have you seen my face?” Alex ran a palm over his permanent dark stubble. “I have to shave twice a day or I look like
Teen Wolf
. I can grow a better ’stache in my sleep.”

Tucker popped a piece of honeydew in his mouth and nodded to the younger man who’d been the last to arrive. Miles Cartwright, the new kid pitcher who was garnering a lot of early buzz, didn’t say anything but looked at Tucker wide-eyed.

“You think if we leave them alone too long they’ll whip their dicks out and compare measurements?”

Miles choked on the bite of eggs he’d just stuffed in his mouth.

“There is not a ruler big enough,” Ramon said with an indignant snort.

Alex snickered. “Your English is getting rusty. You keep mixing up
big
and
small
.”

“Boys, boys, boys.” Tucker pushed his plate away, unable to stomach the too-sweet fruit. “All this homoeroticism is delightful, but we have a shuttle to catch.”

It was a perfect day for baseball.

The sun was bright, the clouds hanging like cotton balls tossed carelessly into an otherwise flawless blue sky. Tucker lived for the half hour leading up to the first day of spring training. All the nervousness of the morning had faded away, replaced with a bubbling excitement reminiscent of his early years.

Alex and Ramon were trading barbs, but the prattling was drowned out by the whir of the shuttle bus’s wheels against the pavement and the general clubhouse chatter of fifteen other men quietly discussing what they’d done over the off-season or what they thought of a late announcement about a new second-baseman slugger who’d be joining the team.

Tucker was toying with a Felons stress ball in the shape of a baseball, absentmindedly squeezing and releasing the ball, occasionally tossing it up and bouncing it off his forearm, before catching it again on the pop-up. He could do the same trick with a real baseball, but the snap back tended to leave bruises if he wasn’t careful. This year he’d have to be extra careful with his arm.

They rolled into a parking lot filled with a few assorted sports cars, kicking up dust and coating the pristine exteriors of the expensive automobiles. The bus came to a shuddering stop, and the door swung open, wafting the overly warm interior with a fresh breeze.

“E’rybody off,” bellowed the driver, as if he were addressing a school bus full of hormonal adolescents instead of some of the highest paid athletes in the game. The portly man sat back, chewing on something—either gum or tobacco—and eyed them all like they might be up to no good.

Outside, they collected their duffel bags and made their way across the lush emerald-green grass towards the freshly laid infield, its white lines more blinding than Ramon’s capped teeth. It was too early in the year for the bugs to be bad, but a few lazy black flies darted by, giving the air the illusion of being a living, moving thing.

Off from the field proper was a mowed track and an extended makeshift bullpen. That was where Tucker, Miles and the rest of the huge pitching roster would loosen up their winter-rusted arms and find out who had what it took to make one of the five starting spots, who would be relegated to a relief position, and who would be fretting over the lingering threat of a dropped contract or a trade.

Tucker rolled his head in a loose circle, rotating his shoulders to shake off the knot between his scapulae that had a tendency to form whenever the word
trade
came up. He’d had a lucky career so far, drafted to the Felons farm league fresh out of college. They’d been the only club he’d played for in fourteen years. It wasn’t unheard of for someone with his stats to stay with the same team for most of their major league run, but he wasn’t the same player he’d been at twenty-two.

Sometimes, the call came through and there wasn’t a damn thing a player could do to change their fate. You could get traded, you could get dropped or sometimes you were just forgotten.