Perfect Catch(64)

Why did the sex have to be as good as it was? Why did the man have to be so damned…loveable?

In all other aspects of life she managed to keep a level head, but a man with skilled fingers and a sharp tongue was all it took to get her panties down around her ankles—or in the backseat of her car—and her entire future up in smoke.

Her professional future anyway.

Alice looked at the back of Liv’s head as she bobbed it up and down to a silent song only she could hear. Squeezing Kevin’s good leg and tickling the bottom of his foot, she had to remind herself all was not lost in the rest of her life. She still had the people who mattered most to her, and if she kept telling herself that, things didn’t seem so bad.

Then she glanced at the TV where the cameraman captured a shot of Alex removing his face mask and offering a wide, warm grin to his pitcher.

Her heart lurched, and she sipped her pop in the hope the fizz might knock out her uneasiness. Instead of feeling better though, now she felt nauseous and bubbly.

She hoped forgetting him would be easy, but all it took was one look at his face, his stupid dark stubble and those round, friendly cheeks, and she wanted to hold him. One second on TV and she wanted him back.

Less than the time it took for her to lose her breath, and she knew she was still in love.

And that made her twice the fool she feared she was.





Chapter Twenty-Eight

Alex was experiencing a very painful case of déjà vu.

“You’re more tense than a hooker after a busy shore leave,” Jasper scolded, digging a thumb into the dense tissue between Alex’s shoulder blades. Alex winced, the finely focused pressure more painful than anything.

“I don’t even know what that means,” he grumbled.

“You need me to spell out what hookers do for sailors on shore leave?” Jasper seemed to sense Alex’s tension ramping up and eased off on the kneading. “I don’t think you can pretend to be that innocent, Alex.”

He wasn’t sure if Jasper was talking about his fumble into the gossip columns or making a statement about his lack of innocence in general. To be fair, if it was the latter, he had a point. None of the guys on the team were angels, and Alex hadn’t been living a celibate life before he met Alice.

Since Alice, though…things were different.

He’d spoken to Violet earlier that morning, and in uncharacteristic advice from a hopeless romantic, she’d suggested he “get back on the horse”. It was better than Ricki telling him he was a poon hound, but still distressing to hear his younger sister advise him to “climb on the next available woman and bang out all your frustrations like she’s a vending machine who won’t give up the candy”.

Under normal circumstances he would have been on board with the logic. Go out, get his dick wet, find a way to get the girl out of his mind. But Alice wasn’t any normal girl, she wasn’t a girl at all, and maybe that was the difference. She was a woman, and a mother, and she’d proven she had no patience for bullshit.

He hadn’t been the one to screw her over, but it didn’t change the fact he was partly to blame. If he hadn’t insisted they get involved, if he hadn’t chased her relentlessly, she would still have her job. He’d thought he’d known what she needed, and like the foolish idiot he was, he’d assumed she needed him. But being with him hadn’t gone so great for her, and now he was left without an awesome lady, with no idea what he should do next.

Holding his proverbial dick in his hand, as it were.

Emmy had suggested he call Alice to apologize for his part in their last fight. She’d even offered to act as a proxy. But Alex had tried. He’d called, he’d texted and emailed, and done everything short of sending messenger pigeons or singing telegrams. If he thought a man in a gorilla suit could make things better, he’d have shipped a fleet of them to Alice’s house.

The unfortunate fact was she didn’t want to talk to him. She’d made up her mind they shouldn’t be together, and even though she’d been wrong to accuse him of talking to the press, he couldn’t shake off a feeling of guilt for getting her axed and for him saying some truly stupid shit.

Move on.

That was what logic, his friends, his family and all the online advice columns were saying. If she didn’t want to talk to him, he couldn’t force her to. Yet in the three weeks since he’d come back from Florida, all he could think of was how to make Alice listen to him.

The only thing he could hope was maybe she was watching him. Every ball he hit out of the park, every miraculous catch he made behind the plate, hell, all the foul tips he took to his mask, he hoped would be the thing to make her notice him. She used to send him texts whenever he did something noteworthy, to signal to him she was out there keeping tabs. He’d liked that, knowing someone on the other side of the country cared enough about him to send a one-line note saying so.