Playing Hard (33 page)

Finn nodded. “Understood. Is that all you came to say?”

Oliver shrugged. “Yes.” He turned, reached for the door. Then had a sudden image of Amelia frowning at him. If he was going to stay in her life that meant he had to be able to get along with Finn. “Look, Castro, I know you don’t like me. I know you want my job. Fine. I’m not joining your fan club, either. Frankly, I’m not sure what Amelia sees in you. But she told me what you did for her mom and that tells me that once upon a time you were a good guy. A guy who thought saving a life was more important than anything else. Who put love for a girl who was part of his family over everything else. Maybe you’ve buried that guy under whatever mountain of bullshit it is that’s fueling that chip on your shoulder. Maybe you’ve lost him for good. But if I were you, and I wanted to get my life back on track and save my career and my relationship with my sister, then I would try to find that guy again. That guy sounds like someone I could be friends with.”

*   *   *

Amelia handed her passport and ticket over to the woman behind the airline checkout and tried to remember to breathe. She was leaving. Today. Going to Hong Kong. Leaving New York. Along with everything in it. She’d spent half an hour on the phone with Em earlier and somehow that had made the fact that she was leaving the country seem real for the first time. Em had managed not to cry, though she’d sounded weird. Amelia had also managed not to cry until she’d had a call from Finn. It had been short and awkward but he had at least apologized. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it yet. Something to worry about once she was in Hong Kong. But the call had somehow made leaving feel overwhelming and she’d found herself in tears before the driver of the car she’d booked called up and she’d had to pull herself together.

“Ms. Graham, I have you as an upgrade,” the woman said, with a flash of very white teeth.

“Um, I’m already in business class,” Amelia said. She’d been surprised when she’d gotten her ticket. But apparently Pullman wanted her ready to work on the other end of her flight.

“Yes, but I have you in first.” Brightly painted fingernails sped over the keyboard. She pressed a button and the computer spat out a boarding pass. “Once you get through customs, there’s an elevator up to the first-class lounge. Just show your boarding pass and they’ll take care of you from there.”

“Okay, thanks.” Amelia took the boarding pass, still confused. Maybe she had just lucked out. Airlines upgraded people sometimes, didn’t they? She’d only ever flown coach, so she didn’t really know how this all worked. But hell, first class sounded damned good to her, so she wasn’t going to argue. She headed to security and made it through customs without too much hassle. Then she followed the instructions and went up to the first-class lounge, half expecting to be told it was some horrible mistake when she got there. But the man at the reception desk welcomed her with a smile. So she was none the wiser about why she’d gotten lucky until she walked through to the lounge itself and saw Oliver sitting in a low chair near the entry.

She stopped dead, which almost made the man walking behind her run into her. He stepped around her with a muttered, “Watch where you’re going.” She barely noticed. Because Oliver was there.

Oliver stood. Headed in her direction.

Her head was spinning. What was he doing here? She tried not to give into the frantic happiness spilling through her.

“You’re blocking the path,” he said when he reached her.

“You’re here,” she said. Brilliant reply. Not
Why are you here?

He gestured back to where he’d been sitting. “Come and talk to me.”

Talk about an invitation she couldn’t refuse. She followed him to the chairs. Put her purse down and tucked her carry-on against the table. But she didn’t sit. Neither did Oliver.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I had a thought,” Oliver said.

“A thought?”

“About long distance,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I see,” she said, not seeing at all.

“But then I had another thought,” he said. “Which was that we don’t have to do long distance. Because I don’t actually have anything to do for the next few months, and the thought of sitting in New York doing nothing without you was making me crazy. So I bought a ticket to Hong Kong.”

He reached into the pocket of his jacket. Pulled out a boarding pass. Which was for the seat next to hers in first class. Mystery solved. “Question is, do you want me to use it?”

“Yes,” she said fiercely. “You idiot. Yes.” Then she stood on tiptoe and pulled his head down to hers. Kissed him. Kissed him the way she’d been wanting to for two weeks. Only stopped when she realized there was a smattering of applause echoing around the beautifully styled sleek space of the lounge. Then she pulled back. Tried to catch her breath. Watched him trying to catch his. “But what about your hand? The Saints?”

“My doctors have hooked me up with a therapist and a surgeon to check on things over there. I might have to fly back here if the New York guys get concerned by what they hear from the Hong Kong docs or want to see me in person but hey, what’s a plane flight or two? If I’m eased into spring training, I won’t need to be in Florida until the end of February. Maybe even March. We’ll figure that part out when we get there. If my hand is ready. It won’t be for so long then if I have to come back. This is just for six months, right?”

She nodded, grinning. “Yes. Though I still want to travel.”

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go. I promise. If I can still play, then you give me the seasons and I’ll do whatever the hell you want or need the rest of the year. And if I can’t play—well, heck, maybe I’ll just follow my globe-trotting executive gal around the world for a few years till we decide we’re ready to settle down somewhere.”

“Settle down?” she said faintly.

“Someday,” he said. “When we get there. For now, I just want to be crazy with you, Amelia Graham. What do you say?”

“I say, I’d love to be crazy with you, Oliver Shields,” she said. “So kiss me.”

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Eileen Rothschild for editing superpowers and all the team at St. Martin’s Press. Thank you also to Miriam Kriss who continues to be a great agent to have on my side. For all my fabulous writer gal pals who are always there during the good bits and the bad bits with wise words and good booze and my friends and family who embrace the writer weirdness. And last, but certainly never least, to all the fabulous readers, reviewers, and bloggers out there who let me know you love my books and share the joy of all the good stories with the world, you’re the best.

Read on for an excerpt from the next novel by
Melanie Scott

Playing Fast

Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks!

Chapter One

Eva Harlowe had been many things at work. Happy, bored, sad, stressed, excited. Occasionally pissed off. She’d never before been one-hundred-percent mortified.

She looked down at the security pass she’d just run through the laminator and resisted the urge to flee the building.

Finn Castro.

That was whose face stared back at her from the otherwise innocent piece of plastic.

Finn Castro. Baseball player. Tall, dark, and trouble. Not to mention six years younger than her. On whom Eva had had an unreasonable, melting-underwear-level, unrelenting crush for, oh, at least a year.

There was nothing wrong with having a crush. Countless women swooned over actors and singers and, yes, athletes every day. Having a crush was harmless. Particularly a celebrity crush. Perfectly safe. Never going to be able to do anything about it except maybe one day pose for an awkward photograph if you ever ran across the person in real life and could summon the courage to ask. They could live in your head and cheer up your day and maybe, occasionally, when you were having one of those days, cheer up your nighttime fantasies, too.

One hundred percent A-OK.

Until of course, you found out that the object of your crush was coming to work where you worked.

Then it was mortifying. Totally, excruciatingly, horrifyingly, mortifying.

So mortified she was because, exactly six weeks ago, just after New Year’s Day, the New York Saints had announced that they were sending Finn Castro to play a season at their AAA team, the Preachers.

Where Eva was the administration manager. Which was a glorified title for “does anything that really needs to be done and keeps things from falling apart at an inconvenient moment.” Including getting new players set up with all the administrative things they needed to be set up with and, usually, giving them a quick tour of the place before they were handed over to the coaching team.

Which meant that any minute now, Finn Castro was going to come waltzing through her office door and she was going to have to act like a normal adult woman around him.

Seriously, life sucked.

She stared down at the picture and his way-too-handsome face merely smiled back at her. A smug smile. Like he knew her secret.

Thankfully, no one at the Preachers did. She’d worked there for a long time. Close enough to thirteen years. She wasn’t dumb enough to admit a crush on a ballplayer to anybody on the premises, let alone a player from their parent team. She never would have heard the end of it. Nope, she’d kept her secret to herself and instead pretended to share her best friend Jenna’s infatuation with Tom Hiddleston.

And she’d tried to get over the “Finn thing,” as she had dubbed it.

Really tried. Ever since Don Mannings, the Preachers’ manager had made the announcement that Finn was coming to Saratoga Springs at a management meeting back in January.

She had deleted every photo off her home computer. She’d unsubscribed from the Hotties of Baseball blog she’d been guiltily following. Stopped scanning the sports pages for mentions of him. Then she’d gone on a mad hunt for a guy who might distract her brain. She’d watched every TV show and movie she could think of. She’d scrolled through Pinterest boards for hours. And yes, there’d been a few guys who’d caught her attention. Men with beautiful faces and bodies sculpted to perfection. Men who made her girl parts happier just looking at them. She’d thought her plan had been working.

Until the photographs had leaked.

The ones from the sponsorship deal that Finn had lost when he’d gotten into a fight in a Brooklyn nightclub. A nightclub owned by Raina Easton who was married to Mal Coulter, who was one of the part owners of the Saints, what’s more. Long Road Home, who made fancy fitness gadgets, had made polite public noises about wishing Finn well and then dropped him like a hot potato from being the face of their forthcoming ad campaign.

But somehow the pictures of Finn they’d taken for that campaign had leaked.

They were amazing. Finn being athletic and manly with a big black masculine Long Road Home fitness band clamped around his wrist, each shot showing off his well-honed body to perfection. Climbing rocks and sweat-drenched in gyms and riding a motorcycle. But it was the last shot that had gotten her. Finn standing thigh-deep in the ocean. Wearing a wet, white T-shirt and dark jeans, a storm brewing behind him.

Moody black and white and gray. Except the eyes. Those they’d left enough color in to let you guess they were brilliant green. Predator eyes. Dangerous eyes to go with the dangerous body outlined in wet fabric. It was a magnificent photo. And she knew photos. It was brilliant. The perfect embodiment of the male animal, barely contained.

The picture had been everywhere. Impossible to avoid.

It had reignited her crush like a match put to gasoline.

The image was burned in her brain. Popped into her head at inconvenient moments. Made her pulse race and her body want.

Want things it could never have. Because she did not date baseball players. Particularly not bad-boy, only-in-town-because-it-was-a-pit-stop-to-the-Major-Leagues, never-going-to-stay baseball players. She’d seen enough of those in her time at the team to know one when she saw one. Finn Castro was definitely one. Sent to the Preachers in disgrace. Sent to redeem himself.

She didn’t need a Taylor Swift song to know trouble was walking in her door.

So she would be rational and adult and treat him exactly the same way she treated all the other men here. Off-limits. Not an option. No crushes allowed.

It was the only sane thing to do. Even though she was planning on leaving the Preachers at the end of the season, there was no reason to go crazy.

Except, as the door to her small office opened and the man himself walked through, she realized that the picture had, it seemed, done little justice to the real thing.

And that a whole world of trouble had just landed in her lap.

*   *   *

Finn Castro looked down at the face of the woman behind the desk and got the feeling he’d done something to piss her off. Dark blue eyes studied him through narrow black-framed glasses, their expression distinctly cool. Not the first impression he’d been hoping to make. Or rather, needed to make. He’d been told to report to Eva Harlowe at the Preachers’ headquarters today. The first day of his exile, as he’d been trying not to think of it.

What it really was was the grown-up version of a time-out. Because he’d done some dumb shit last year. Dumb enough to give himself a wake-up call.

Dumb enough to make Alex Winters, Lucas Angelo, and Malachi Coulter, the owners of the New York Saints, decide that he wouldn’t be playing for the Saints this season. That he needed to prove himself all over again. The thought made his jaw tighten. He’d spent most of his life trying to prove himself when it came to baseball. And here he was starting from the fucking beginning again.

But he was the one who’d fucked up, so he was the one who had to suck it up. Keep his head down, work hard, get back to the Saints.

Be on his best behavior and make a good impression.

And here he was apparently screwing that up already. Or maybe he was just reading her wrong. He tried a smile. His smile usually worked on reluctant females. His looks were an asset. He knew that. So it would be dumb not to use them when he needed to. “Hi. I’m Finn Castro. Are you Eva?”