Perfect Catch(58)

“Right. Of course.”

“So we play it out through the season. If we decide come fall that this is…whatever it is, if it’s anything…then I’ll resign from the league and we can take it public. Okay?”

Well, when she was all perfectly logical about it like that, it was hard to be offended by her desire for secrecy. She wasn’t trying to hide him away, she just wanted to know what they had was real before she upended her whole life for him.

Fair was fair.

“Okay, I think I can handle that.”

“Good.”

“Now can I make a request?”

She stared at him, her nervousness apparent. “Sure.”

“Take off your pants, woman. I’m exhausted and I want to get inside you before I fall asleep.”

“How can I resist such a charming offer?”





Chapter Twenty-Five

One week.

That was the precise amount of time Alice’s perfect happiness lasted before it all got shot straight to hell. She should have known to expect it. She had expected it, right up until Alex told her not to worry. He’d made her believe they could really do this, and one week was all it took to show her what a fool she’d been.

The picture was pinned to the locker room door when she showed up for work. It was a gritty snapshot, the kind of quality one might expect from a camera phone, but there was no doubt about the contents. Her and Alex in the front seat of his rental truck.

K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

Karl was the first person she saw when she stepped inside, a smug, triumphant smirk on his face that clearly said, Not so perfect now, are you?

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Alice snapped, yanking the picture down.

“Donovan wants to see you.”

Alice’s stomach fell. She hadn’t thought it would be possible to feel any worse than she had when she saw the photo, but clearly she’d underestimated how shitty this day could get. If Donovan wanted to see her, she was willing to bet it wasn’t so he could tell her which base she’d be on that afternoon.

She hiked her duffel bag up higher on her shoulder and elbowed past Karl, who intentionally stood in her way. The prick was beside himself with joy knowing how bad this fuckup was going to cost her.

Hadn’t she and Alex been careful? In the week since they’d decided to make a go of it, they’d divided their time between his hotel and her house. The picture the photographer caught had been such an innocent thing. She and Alex had shared a dinner at his suite and he’d dropped her back at her car. It was a quick good-night kiss. They hadn’t even had sex that night.

But someone had known they’d be there.

Someone had been waiting.

Which meant the secret was out, and it sure hadn’t come from her. And there was a small club of people who knew their secret, which limited the options as to who had spilled the beans.

She didn’t know who’d done it, but her gut was telling her the answer was going to be the person she least wanted it to be. Kevin was an unlikely candidate, since he was still in the hospital, though he’d been around for Alex’s first appearance. But it would take a hell of a lot of effort for a guy in traction to call up a sports blog. No, it wasn’t him.

Liv, too, was unlikely. Her daughter, though chatty, wasn’t going to talk about Alice’s love life to strangers. Liv had gone nine years without spilling the beans about Matt in school, so her dropping the Alex bomb didn’t seem plausible.

As for Misty, while her mother might not approve of Alice dating another baseball player, she also still owned a VCR and had a hopelessly out of date cell phone. It would never occur to Misty to contact an online sports blog. She wouldn’t even know what a blog was.

Then there was Alex. She’d hoped so badly she could trust him—he’d insisted he could trust her, in fact. Could he have leaked the story? And if so why? Was it for publicity? To get his name back on everyone’s radar? He’d said and done all the right things to make her believe he was a good guy. Alice had thought he was the best guy, someone she could imagine building a future with.

Now she was flustered and confused. She didn’t want to believe he was capable of throwing her under the bus for the sake of his own fame. Everything she knew about Alex made it impossible for her to think he could do that to her. But things were going up in flames, and her relationship with him was the reason for it. Even if he wasn’t responsible for it directly, she was still experiencing the worst-case scenario she’d imagined at the start.

How could she have been so goddamn stupid?

How many times did someone have to get burned before they stopped playing with matches?

She’d known it was a bad idea to get involved with a player, yet she’d taken the risk anyway. And now she had to face the firing squad all on her own.