“You’re doing great. Open your eyes.”
He did and stared right at her.
“Three.”
“Three,” he repeated.
“Just look out, not down.” She pointed to the horizon and the view of the full city below them. “It’s beautiful.”
“It is beautiful,” he replied, but he wasn’t looking at the horizon.
“Four. Look.” She nodded.
“I am looking.”
“Five,” she said.
And he kissed her.
Chapter Seventeen
It was the most romantic kiss of her life, and Emmy had to cut it short.
The perfect view of her hometown glittered around her like Christmas lights, and a gorgeous man had her cheek cupped in one of his big, rough hands—touching her as though she were the most breakable thing he’d ever encountered. His lips tasted spicy from the banana peppers and hot chili flakes, and there was nothing unpleasant about it.
Her body curved into his like it was designed to fit alongside him, and she squeezed his hand when he parted her lips and grazed his tongue against hers.
She whimpered because she wanted more, she wanted everything, but she knew it wasn’t right.
“Stop,” she said, and that one word brought the perfect moment to an end.
He pulled back the second she said it, breathing harder than he had been before, and he disentangled his hand from hers, stepping off the ledge and onto the safety of the carpet.
Emmy looked down at the nothingness below her feet and felt dizzy, but she didn’t think it was because of the height.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not for the first time that evening.
“It was my fault.” She wasn’t sure how since he’d kissed her and not the other way around, but somehow she felt she must be to blame for what had happened. She’d brought him here, she’d given them this perfect backdrop. His actions made sense given everything she’d done leading up to it.
He never would have kissed her if they’d gone to the monkey house at Lincoln Park Zoo instead. Nothing romantic happened when primates were busy flinging poo at one another.
“No, it was my fault. I’ve been wanting to do that again for weeks. Every damn time I see you I want to.”
She knew. Part of her knew. And what was worse, that same part of her wanted him to.
“I knew you were going to be trouble.” She tried to smile, but they were both too distracted for it to work.
“I guess you were right.”
If there was an All-Star game for being a jackass, Tucker was a shoo-in to be the starting pitcher.
He’d made great progress with Emmy since his initial fuckup in Florida, and what had he done when she finally started feeling comfortable around him again?
He kissed her.
What kind of amateur, asshat move was that? Now she’d started keeping her distance from him again, only talking to him as much as was necessary and polite for them to work side by side.
And what was worse, it was totally screwing up his game. Every time he’d gotten to the plate in the three weeks since Chicago, it was a fiasco. He’d build up for a fastball and then he’d think about her patient instruction and how she’d walked him through the physical mechanics of how to fix his pitch.
That’s when he’d lose it. The pitch would go wild, and he’d fall back to the knuckleballs. He was still doing okay, and the team was cutting him a lot of slack by assuming his dodgy performances were due to the year he’d taken off.
But the real reason he wasn’t playing up to his full potential was standing in the dugout, quietly watching as he got worse and worse. Sure, it was only three bad starts, and he’d managed to go into later innings in two of them, even pulling the wins, but it didn’t matter. He knew he could pitch better than what he was doing, and anything below his best was garbage.
Now he understood why for the longest time women were considered bad luck on boats. He’d tried to bring one onto his ship, and suddenly he couldn’t find north to save his life.
Considering he could shut out the noise of forty-two thousand fans and play in spite of their jeers, it was all the more fascinating that one woman’s silence was all it took to knock him on his proverbial ass.
After striking out the third batter in the bottom of the fifth, he walked slowly off the field while everyone else jogged, and without stopping went right through the dugout, down the stairs and into the clubhouse.
It was unclear how long he’d have, since an inning was only as short or long as the side made it, but he needed a minute to himself if he had any hope in hell of finishing the game with a W.
The fates were against him though because he reached the clubhouse and walked into Emmy carrying an armload of fresh towels. She was so surprised to see him she dropped half the stack on the floor.