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  That was a stranger talking, a Chase Stern who hadn’t been around in a long time. A stranger who needed to stay hidden, especially around a minor. If there was one thing worse than fucking a teammate’s wife, it was screwing one’s daughter. Even he realized that. He thought of her question about Davis’s wife, how she had gone to the jugular, his harsh response not scaring her away, the strength in her eyes only glowing brighter when she’d stepped to the plate and called him on his shit. That had done something to him, snapped some piece of his armor off.

  He never should have talked to her. Not in that locker room, not in that tunnel, and definitely not buying her candy and luring her outside. Talk about creepy behavior.

  The kiss … he couldn’t regret that. Wouldn’t. There would never be another moment in life worth more of a risk. The quiver of her mouth, like her heart was beating so hard it would jump out of her chest. The tentative press of her tongue against his. The hungry way she had clawed at his chest, wanting more. The taste, the connection, the energy. Men had been killed over kisses like that. Careers had been lost. Hearts had been stolen.

  He needed to stay away from her. Focus on his game and forget everything else. He had gotten here, to the place of his dreams. Hell if he’d mess it up now. Hell if he’d survive another kiss like that.

  JUNE

  “It turns out that Rachel Frepp had attended a couple of Yankee home games that 2011 season. But it took years for them to know enough to even look for that connection. When she died, no one thought it was because of the Yankees. It’s a big city, with a lot of pretty blondes who die. No, it took a few years for NYPD to tie it all together.”

  Dan Velacruz, New York Times

  30

  New York

  I nodded my head to the beat, Jeremih and 50 Cent pumping as loud as my Beats would allow. Wiping down bats, I sang along to the lyrics, my rhythm interrupted by Big Lou, who tugged on the cord of my headphones, speaking to me in a string of Spanish. I obeyed his request, pulling out the headphone jack, my phone blasting “Down On Me,” the beat hitting hard, the Dominicans laughing at my music before nodding their heads in time. I beat-boxed with Frank, dancing in place as he rapped out a line, his version ten times dirtier than my clean mix.

  I spun, my hands raised, a laugh spilling out, and saw Chase. He stood in the doorway, a towel over one shoulder, his V-neck shirt dirty with clay stains. I looked away, before our eyes met. Laughing at Frank, I stepped back to the bats, focusing on the task, the beat continuing, everything continuing, but everything, as it always was when he came near, was different.

  31

  She was laughing, her head back, smile big, her blonde hair fanning out as she lifted her hands and turned.

  It might have been the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  32

  Beneath my feet, the slight vibration of travel. Above my head, my seat light shone down on the pages of my economics textbook. When the ball of paper dropped from above, a gentle tap on the page, I stared at it. Tightly crumpled, the size of a grape, it looked innocent, coming to rest in the gully of my textbook. A silent, deadly foe. I glanced around, my dad sound asleep in the next seat, the same fate hitting the two men across from me. I glanced back, the Yankee jet dark behind me. I unrolled the ball of paper carefully, stretching it out.

  check underneath your seat

  The handwriting was terrible, slanted and sloppy. I didn’t have to study the lines of it, didn’t have to turn around to identify its thrower. In this plane, it could only be from one man.

  I didn’t want to dig under my seat. I wanted to be the stubborn, proud woman who tore up love letters and moved on to the next great event in her life. But I wasn’t that woman, and this wasn’t anything close to a love letter. This was bait and at three in the morning, it was infinitely more exciting than the power of the euro in economies of scale. I reached under my seat, my hand closing around two distinct objects, and I smiled before I even pulled out the Starburst tower and the Twix.

  I unwrapped the Twix, halfway into my first bite, when the second ball of note hit my lap. This time, I didn’t hesitate, my fingers fast in their work.

  Quit hogging the only candy on the plane. The hot guy five rows back is starving.

  I almost laughed, my lips clamping down as I glanced quickly at my dad, a well-timed snore coming from his sagged chin, his cap pulled over his eyes. I finished my chew and contemplated my choices. There were really only two—stay in my seat or don’t.

  I didn’t. I got up slowly, as quietly as possible, laying my textbook on the seat, and stood in the aisle. My eyes tried to adjust to the dark, scanning the rows of sleeping athletes. He waved, six or seven seats back, and I stepped toward him, stopping by his seat, his lazy smile tilted up at me.

  I looked at him in mock confusion, holding up the wrinkled scrap of paper. “This says…” I squinted at it in the dark, “a hot guy.” I looked up from the paper in time to see him tilt back his head and laugh. I didn’t think, prior to that moment, I’d ever found a neck sexy. His was. Half-covered in the dotted texture of stubble, thick and strong, leading to that jaw, then that mouth. I tried to remain unaffected, to not think about what it could do, how it could taste.

  “Sit down, Little League.” He patted the empty seat next to him—a window seat. I looked down at his long legs, stretched out, the crawl over one that would be impossible in any sort of a lady-like fashion. He saw my predicament and leaned forward, standing up, towering over me in the small space, our bodies too close for comfort. “Sit,” he whispered, right against my ear.

  I sat, his return to his seat giving me the vague feeling of being trapped. This was a bad idea. I should be back at my seat, finishing my work, not surrounded by sleeping giants, holding out my candy to the worst one in the bunch.

  He took the candy, breaking off a piece of Twix before handing it back to me. There was a pause, and I wondered what on Earth we were going to talk about.

  33

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I argued, pulling my hair into a messy ponytail. “It’s selfish.” New fact learned about Chase Stern: he had a family. A mother and father, still married and living on five acres in Ohio. His mom worked as a paralegal, his father an electrician. They wanted him to be a lawyer, and still wondered when he would ‘stop this ballplaying and settle down.’ He hadn’t mentioned any siblings. We’d gotten distracted at the mention of Casper.

  “How’s that selfish? It’s my dog.”

  “It was your dog. Then you decided on a career that put you on the road. You can’t play baseball and have a relationship with your dog.”

  “A relationship?” he coughed, shaking his head as he finished off his water. “It’s not a relationship.”

  “It should be,” I pointed out. “The strongest bond on Earth … man and his dog…” I waved away his skepticism, plowing forward. “You can’t take the dog away from everything he knows and bring him to New York. It’s wrong.”

  “He doesn’t exactly have Wednesday coffee dates with his friends,” he said. “He plays in the yard with a Frisbee. He can do that in New York. I’ll get a yard. Besides, he’s mine.” He reached out and stole a Starburst.

  “Your mom wants what’s right for him. She’s the one who’s taken care of him for the last four years. I agree with her.” I shrugged. “Here he’s going to sit at your house, all alone, and be miserable.”

  “You can come over and play with him,” he offered.

  “Ha.”

  “Seriously. I’ll hire you. You can be his new best friend.”

  “No. And his owner is supposed to be his best friend.”

  “You can teach me.”

  “I don’t know anything about dogs.”

  “Ha!” he said loudly, and I gripped his arm in warning. Swoon. So strong, I felt the tendons move when he turned toward me, my fingers instinctively tightening, wanting to feel every pulse, every seam of his body. He glanced at my
hand, and I let go.

  “Shh,” I hissed, and his eyes lifted to mine. Our seats suddenly felt too close, the side of my knee against his.

  “You just said you don’t know anything about dogs,” he whispered.

  “So?”

  “So stop telling me what I should do with mine.”

  “He belongs at your mom’s house,” I whispered back, our eyes still connected, our arms now touching as we hunched together, over the center console.

  “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he said, the words husky, his hand moving forward to cup—

  I leaned back, needing air. Possibly a soda. Maybe I was dehydrated. Something was wrong; I was too flushed, too hot in this space, my skin jumping against itself, the twist and pull of right versus wrong, kissing him versus not … we couldn’t do this again.

  “Were you about to kiss me?” I accused, my whisper forgotten, my voice too loud, and he looked around in warning.

  “Watch it,” he snapped.

  “Were you?”

  “I don’t know.” He sat back in his chair. “What if I was?”

  “You can’t kiss me again.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just…” My eyes darted front, my dad in shouting distance. “Don’t.”

  “You know, most girls, if their dad tells them to stay away from someone, they do the opposite.”

  “And most guys avoid jailbait.”

  “I’m avoiding you.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  He watched me closely, his direct eye contact something that twisted my stomach into knots. “We’re friends.”

  Friends. I didn’t have a lot of experience with friendship, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t it. “You kiss all your friends?”

  The corner of his mouth turned up. “When they have a mouth like yours.”

  I snorted. “Please.” Did he mean it? Had he been as affected as I was by our kiss?

  He kept his eyes on me. “You think you know me, Little League?”

  I considered the question. “I know enough.”

  His mouth twisted in a mocking smile.

  “I do,” I pressed. “Honestly. It’s embarrassing my level of Chase Stern trivia.” I waved him on. “Go ahead. Quiz me.”

  “You know what’s been written about me. That’s not me.”

  “You love to do interviews. That tells me something.” Dad never did press, despite every attempt by the Yankees to push him into the spotlight. Nineteen years in the Majors, and I’d never once seen him sit down with a reporter. Chase had them trailing him like groupies. Dad once said that a man who sat down and spilled his soul to strangers didn’t have much of a soul to protect.

  “I have a brand. I feed it.” He tossed up the ball and caught it. “Try again.”

  I jabbed harder. “I know you make some stupid decisions.”

  He scowled. “Life is a series of stupid decisions interrupted by luck.”

  “Poetic, but completely wrong.”

  He spun the ball on the center console, the red stitches blurring, the ball wandering toward the edge. “You can’t always recognize stupidity, Ty. Most of the time it takes years to see your own mistakes.”

  I caught the ball when it fell off the edge, squeezing it hard, my fingers at home in their grip. I looked up from it and into his face. “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?

  I expected him to say the Davis affair. Or the DUI he got rookie year. Or the two years he wasted at Stanford. I was wrong.

  His answer took everything I thought I knew about Chase Stern and scattered it to the wind.

  34

  “Emily.”

  A girl. A small part of me, the one that still drew hearts and flowers around the words Ty Stern in my notebook, wept. His biggest mistake was a girl. I swallowed hard. “Was she your first love?”

  “My only.” A new look crossed his face—somber. It haunted his eyes and closed off his features—his jaw tight, mouth hard. “You ever think you could love someone too much?”

  I hadn’t. But in a way, a seven-year-old girl’s way, I had. There was a reason I never thought about my mother. A reason I avoided women, their perfumes and hugs, their kind words and motherly gestures. Some things were too painful to mourn. My love for her had been too great for my little heart to handle. “Yeah,” I said softly.

  “Emily was ten.” He reached over, pulling the ball gently from my hands. “She was my little sister.”

  I said nothing. I couldn’t ask, couldn’t bring myself to voice a question he wouldn’t want to answer.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was wood, no life in its syllables, no movement in his eyes. “I forgot to pick her up from gymnastics. I had practice; it ran late. She walked home. Didn’t make it.” His mouth tightened, voice growing thin. “It was getting dark. She didn’t look, ran across the road toward our house. A truck…” he stopped.

  I reached over, covering the ball with my hand, his fingers moving, reaching for mine, our hands looping together around the ball. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, leaning into his chest, his other arm wrapping around my shoulders, pulling me tight.

  We stayed like that for a long moment, the tension leaving his body slowly, one muscle at a time, his fingers still tight through mine. When the jet started its descent, the sun peeking over the New York coastline, I got up slowly, carefully crawling over his legs, my fingers gentle in their pull from his grip, his body still curled around the space where I had been.

  I felt off balance, settling back into my seat. So many of my impressions of him changing, his skill on the field fading in my mind, the details of Chase Stern emerging as everything I felt about his blurred. I had thought, with all of my fandom, all of my research, all of his stats and interviews and press, that I knew him. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe there was more than talent and ego stretching those veins.

  35

  Chicago

  Knives clinked against china. Gold-press wallpaper and black velvet curtains held in the loud conversation—twenty hungry bodies pulled close to the table. I chewed on a piece of filet and half-heartedly listened to Dad’s discussion with Fernandez about immigration reform. Across the table, a few bodies down, was Chase. Our eyes had met once. I had given a small smile, then hadn’t looked back. I could feel him watching me. It was uncomfortable, but I craved it, the scratch to the itch that wouldn’t stop crawling across my skin.

  To my left, Mr. Grant wished me a happy birthday. Asked about school. Told me Tobey was coming to the Cincinnati series next week. I nodded politely and remembered our kiss, grabbed in those shadows of their mansion, right before the news of Chase broke.

  “You should hang out with him,” Dad said, his bony elbow poking me in the ribs.

  “Sure.” I smiled politely. “Maybe we can grab a matinee.”

  “You don’t have to work the game,” Dad offered. “Take the night off. Celebrate your birthday.”

  “We already did.” And we had, in high-style. Road trip up to Maine. Two days stuffing our faces with lobster and crab, our shirts stained with butter, smiles big. Dad sang karaoke in a dive bar in South Portland, and I won twenty bucks against bikers in Portland. I hadn’t needed friends, and watching a chick flick with Tobey a week after my birthday wouldn’t come close.

  “I know Tobey would love to see you,” Mr. Grant pushed.

  I coughed out an uncomfortable laugh, pinned between the two of them. “I appreciate it, Dad, but I’ll work the game. I’ve never—”

  “—missed a game. I know. Just know the offer is there.”

  I met his eyes and narrowed my own. It was no mystery that my father loved Tobey. Five or six years ago, when Tobey wanted to be a pitcher and Dad had spent the better part of a winter coaching him—they’d bonded over Revolutionary War history and the Steelers. Since then, Dad and Mr. Grant had been scheming, trying to put us together. But he should know better than to think I’d give
up a game to prance around the mall.

  I pushed on the edge of the table and stood, flashing a regretful smile at the two matchmakers. “Excuse me, I need to use the ladies’ room.”

  I sidestepped down the table, my eyes sliding forward, past the row of men hunched over their food, each engaged in conversation or busy eating. All except for Chase, who sat back, one arm draped over the back of a chair, his expression impossible to read, his stare dark and penetrating and locked on me. I tried to look away, but couldn’t, holding the contact until I reached the end of the table and was free, all but tripping in my heels in my haste to exit.

  I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to find a reason he’d stared. Spinach in my teeth? Nope. Giant zit on my face? None. I flipped the handle, was washing my hands under hot water, when my cell buzzed. I grabbed for a paper towel and reached for my phone, a moment of confusion at the text.

  Grant’s son? Didn’t realize your Yankee loyalty went that far. Oh. And Happy Birthday.

  I leaned against the counter and sent back my best attempt at coyness. Who’s this?

  Guess.

  I didn’t need a guess. I hesitated, then had a moment of evil inspiration. Holding back a smile, I replied. Please stop. We were a one-time thing. Get over it. It wasn’t even that great.

  I sent the red herring into cyberspace and waited, smiling. Let my new ‘friend’ stew over that. I watched dots of activity appear, and then stop.

  Ty?

  I waited an appropriate length of time, leaving him hanging, then set the hook. Who’s this?

  Chase.

  Oh. Nevermind. I thought you were someone else.

  I didn’t wait for a response, my high note hit. I stuffed the phone in my purse and tried to compose myself, to hide my smile, before I stepped back out. The man needed to be taught a lesson, needed to learn to mind his own business. It’d do him some good to stew over my mythical team boyfriend.