25. Rosie

Chapter 25

Rosie

I was up to bat.

Max was on the pitcher’s mound, facing me down with a distractingly charming grin. We were in the third inning, and even with Dylan’s help, we were down by one.

I got into position, and the ball came right for me. I swung too late and missed.

“Strike one!” the umpire, aka the high school football coach, Luis Farnsworth, yelled out.

“You’ve got this,” Bennett said. “Just focus on the ball.” He was speaking to someone else when he added, “She’s one of our best hitters, except when we play the Bookish Ballers. She chokes under the pressure.”

Ouch, Bennett.

But he wasn’t wrong.

I peered over my shoulder to see Dylan—still in that second-skin orange jersey—standing next to Bennett. I couldn’t believe he actually wore it. Or that he’d joined the team. I didn’t know what Hudson said to him, but the lines around Dylan’s eyes seemed less deep when they’d rejoined us before the game.

I got back into position, and Max lobbed the ball in a perfect strike. This time I swung too early and had flashbacks of practice last week.

It was just … Max. He made me all tense when he was smiling at me like that, and my brain couldn’t compute the right time or way to swing, the way it could when anyone else was pitching.

“Strike two!”

My team groaned.

“This is not time for dirt on your dress, Rosie!” Charlie yelled. “You’ve got this!”

I wasn’t trying to miss my hits on purpose this time. But my head was not in the game.

I took a deep breath and widened my stance. I could do this. I could . Max brushed his thumb over his lips as he stared at me heatedly. Wait. Was that a secret message to me? Could it mean that he wanted to kiss me later? Was my plan actually working?

“Strike three!”

Oops. I’d been so busy contemplating Max’s mouth, I hadn’t swung at all. I tossed the bat down and went back into the dugout. My team patted me on the shoulders, and gave me side hugs, until I wound up next to Dylan on the metal bench.

“What happened out there?” he asked. “You were killin’ every hit until now.”

“It’s Max,” I whispered. “He gets in my head.”

“You’re not losing on purpose, right?”

“No,” I said vehemently. “Purely on accident this time.” I cringed. That sounded so bad out loud. “But since it makes him so happy to win, it’s not a total loss.”

He leaned closer to my ear so no one else could hear our conversation. “It makes you happy to win too.”

“Yeah, but I’m just me.”

“Isn’t that enough?” he paused. “I think so.”

Whoa. Way to hit below the emotional belt, Dylan. Before I could drum up a response, Bennett interrupted us.

“Savage, you’re up next!”

Dylan patted my thigh in a way that proved he had no care for my poor nerves and then left the dugout to grab a bat.

I wasn’t the only person appreciating the sight of him doing his practice swings. His shirt—well, my shirt—was tight across his broad shoulders as he got into position. And when he swung, a portion of rock-hard, tanned sides and stomach were exposed to the rapt masses of Winterhaven.

I could tell you this—no crowd has ever watched practice swings as intensely as they did that day.

Hudson was on first base, Charlie on second, and Dylan was up. He turned to grin at me before he stepped up to the plate. If I thought Max’s grin was knee-melting, that was only because I hadn’t been hit with the full-force of Dylan’s Make ‘Em Weep version. What in the world were we doing all these complicated social media antics for? Just pop that baby in a few videos, and bam. Instant love at first sight for at least fifty percent of the population.

He and Max appeared to be having a stare down before Max got into position to pitch the first ball. It went wide, and Dylan didn’t swing.

“Ball!” the ump called.

Max scuffed his shoes on the dirt of the pitcher’s mound and spit near his feet. He wound his arm back and released. Dylan jumped back to avoid getting hit with it.

“Ball two!”

Max huffed and snatched the thrown ball out of the air as if it had deeply offended him. He threw it against his glove a few times and then squared his shoulders and got into position.

The moment it left his fingers, I could tell that this was going to be another wild throw. But instead of letting it go, Dylan swung. I held my breath as the ball cracked against the bat and went flying. Higher … higher …

He ran backward so he could look to where I was clinging to the chain link fence with my fingers. “That’s for you, Rosie!”

My fingers tightened on the metal as exhilaration raced through me.

Dylan turned and ran, and our team held still with anticipation, and then cheered, as the ball soared clear over the fence.

“Food tastes better after you’ve won,” I declared to Dylan—and anyone in earshot—as I took another bite of the chocolate chip cookie Dylan’s mom had made. She’d brought enough for both teams to have some, because she was classy like that. But ours definitely tasted like victory.

Dylan was lying on the worn quilt in the park, staring up at the gray-blue sky, his hands clasped across his stomach, his eyes closed. This might be the first time I’d seen him look so relaxed. Hudson had needed to take a work call, and Bennett and Charlie had offered to go scrounge up some dinner for all of us from one of the food stands, so it was just the two of us—and the rest of Winterhaven milling around the park and setting up their own picnics.

This close, I could see the faintest scatter of freckles along his nose and upper cheek bones. His beard was trimmed close to his jawline, still allowing for his jaw muscles to be on display, and it framed his peach lips. The cut on his cheek from the last game he’d played was mostly healed but was still a couple-inch red dash.

One piece of hair was draped over his forehead and tangled with his eyelashes, and I lightly brushed it away from his face. His hair was softer than I anticipated. I ran my fingers through it again, just to make sure that one tendril hadn’t been an outlier. Nope. They were all soft.

I pulled my hand away, but Dylan said, “Don’t stop.” His eyes were still closed, and he hadn’t moved an inch.

“You like having your head petted?” I teased him, though my stomach fluttered. “You’re so like Lizzy.”

“In this one way—I’ll agree,” he mumbled. I hesitated, but since his eyes were closed, it was easier to touch his hair and be close to him like this. Besides, wasn’t this the whole point of what we were doing? Pretending to be in a relationship?

He relaxed even more as I scratched his scalp and drew my fingers through his shoulder-length hair. The familiar scent of my shampoo reached my nose as I lifted the hair by his ears.

He let out a low hum—basically a purr—that went straight to my gut. We weren’t doing anything inappropriate. At all. So why were my cheeks suddenly so hot? Maybe because people were starting to take notice. I caught some smiles and whispers and suddenly had a vision of an entire town of matchmakers. I shuddered. It was a good thing we were already fake dating.

“I can’t remember the last time someone did this.” He sounded half-asleep. Me touching him was clearly not causing the same reaction in his body as it was having on mine. I felt wound so tightly, I could pop like a firework any second.

Since I was already in this with both feet, I trailed my fingers over his forehead, across his eyebrows—lingering on the scarred one. I let them drift down to the shell of his ear and over the tendon of his neck. Goosebumps erupted along his arms.

Maybe he wasn’t so unaffected, after all.

The lines of stress and grief in his face disappeared as he relaxed into my touch. I trailed my finger over the bridge of his nose, the dip above his mouth, and lightly across his lips. His breath caught, and it took all my self-discipline not to yank my hand back in embarrassment. His beard was softer than I expected. I continued to let my fingers trail down his neck, past the neckline of his shirt, and toward those pectorals he’d been parading around all day in this tight shirt.

His hand shot up and grabbed my wrist to stop the trajectory of my light touch. His eyes were open and stared heatedly at me.

“If I didn’t know better,” he said, his voice sounding more gravelly than I’d heard it before, “I’d say you were … nurturing me.”

It took me a second for his words to get past the blood rushing through my ears. Wait. Nurturing?

I yanked my hand away and smacked him on one of those rock-hard pecs. I’d show him nurture. He sat up and grinned unabashedly at me as he took my hand and slipped his fingers through mine. He kissed my knuckles, then used our clasped hands to hide his mouth as he murmured against my skin, “Mrs. Bennet, you were about to start something you were not going to want to finish in public.”

My cheeks flushed hotly as I remembered we were at the park on Main Street with most of the town. When I’d been touching Dylan, it had been just the two of us in an idyllic sea of grass on a beautiful summer day.

“I am not Mrs. Bennet,” I hissed.

“You just keep believing that.” He patted the top of our held hands condescendingly.

Ugh. This man. I huffed and yanked my hand from his. “I’m going to go see what the hold up for dinner is.” I walked away to the sound of his chuckling.