Chapter 8

8

Tripp

I'm getting an early-morning workout in at the office gym on my second official morning on the job in late October, trying to put the stress of finding a new nanny behind me—or rather not finding a new nanny, considering my last three candidates have either failed to wash their hands before touching my kids, didn't bring proof of insurance for driving my kids to the park, and—in the last instance—asked if she'd get to meet all of us from Bro Code, or just me.

I had to fire the nanny agency I was using as well after that last one got through.

Adding to the stress?

Emma's decided that the only place she'll sleep is under the kitchen table, naked, while cuddling a rock and using a pile of pilfered underwear as a pillow.

At least I know it's all clean.

Unfortunately, the workout isn't doing anything to relieve the combination of anticipation and irritation at knowing Lila's back in town for the first time since the duck incident. I might also be working out so I don't throttle her during our nine AM meeting after all of the emails I've gotten from her.

The only thing we've agreed on since the night of the great duck penis is that we both know how to say that we want what's best for the Fireballs. However, her vision needs bifocals, while she thinks I'm operating with sunglasses in the dark.

Mr. Wilson, I asked for a plan for the team, not the list of repairs for the stadium.

Mr. Wilson, please copy the front office staff on all correspondence.

Mr. Wilson, please advise your planned work hours.

I'm beginning to suspect that her master plan is to drive me insane so that I quit.

I'm grabbing a dumbbell that's twenty pounds heavier than what I usually use for curls when Cooper Rock, second baseman for the Fireballs, bursts in with panic overtaking his usual I am a baseball god and the ladies love me swagger.

Which is true—he could've been a gymnast for the stunts he pulls at second base, and his bat's second in the league only to Brooks Elliott.

Not that either has helped the Fireballs win.

I've known Cooper for a few years. He grew up in Shipwreck, and he loves playing for his home team. We cross paths. So long as he plays good baseball, doesn't embarrass the organization off the field, and neither one of us turn into dicks over this new arrangement, I don't foresee a problem.

Until he opens his mouth.

"Beversdorf's niece fired everyone ."

I drop the dumbbell I'm holding, realize my arms are the consistency of overcooked broccoli, and subsequently finally admit to myself that I might be holding on to some tension over having to answer to Lila. Actually, my teeth hurt too.

Great.

I'm I need a mouth guard to stop grinding my teeth years old now.

"What?" I say to Cooper.

"She fired everyone . Everyone from Salazar on down the line to Flannery."

Salazar. The team's manager. Head of the coaching staff.

Talking to him was on my to-do list.

But—"Flannery?"

"Clubhouse manager. You don't know Flannery? Dude. Everyone knows Flannery. He stocked gummy dicks in the opponents' locker room and made sure we always had the dartboard updated with the other team's logo before the games."

I blink at him while my triceps twitch. "If that's how you prepped for a game?—"

" Everyone , Tripp. She fired everyone ."

"You?"

He shakes his head, but it's a grim shake. "She hasn't touched the team. Yet. Just the coaching staff and support staff at the stadium. I only heard because—" He stops himself, grins like he's reliving a very good memory, then sobers quickly. "Not important."

Jesus . "Don't bang the coach's daughter, Rock."

"Dude. Give me some credit. She was the travel coordinator's niece. And we didn't bang . We explored a few of the other bases."

"You need to stop talking."

"And you need to stop Lila Valentine before she trades all of us away and leaves the Fireballs with a team that couldn't beat a Little League team."

I don't bother pointing out that a Little League team probably could've beaten this year's team. Nor do I bother with a shower before hitting the elevator. It's not even seven AM, and I'm only here this early because my mom slept over and is watching my kids so I could get an early start.

It's fucking hard to find a good fit in a nanny.

Or maybe I'm too damn picky.

Lila's office is the penthouse office suite, and it looks like it was once used as a porn set and probably needs to be completely quarantined like a nuclear disaster site to fully remove all of the cooties.

And I'm using "cooties" to be polite.

When I break the door down after confirming Cooper's news with a single glance at my phone, which will probably be blowing up all morning now that news is leaking, she's using a jockstrap to wipe off the desk.

That stops me in my tracks.

She lifts a brow, then holds up the jockstrap. "Cleanest thing in the room. You would've picked it too."

I blink twice, remind myself to unclench my jaw, and actively battle the desire to pull a bottle of hand sanitizer out of my pocket and ask the receptionist for Clorox wipes. "You fired the whole fucking management team ?"

She goes back to rubbing the pouch of the jock on the stained wood, though she trains her attention on me. Having those green eyes connect with mine again hits me in the solar plexus.

I should change my name to Glutton .

Glutton for Punishment.

That look on her face when the ducks attacked—and then in the locker room, after I carried her in there with all of her curves and the way she smelled like cinnamon rolls— quit thinking, Wilson. This will not end well.

Just. Stop. Thinking.

"Would you have kept your management team for Bro Code if you were always playing to empty theaters?" she asks.

"Stadiums. We played arenas and stadiums ."

"You're avoiding the question, Mr. Wilson."

"You threw out the baby with the bathwater. There were?—"

"I printed a list of the three best teams in baseball for each of the last five seasons and cross-checked with how many of the management rosters are the same, and which team and staff members might be looking for new jobs. Or even which ones seem to enjoy a challenge. You can start there in the hiring process. And don't yell at me over all those supposed coaches losing their paychecks. Uncle Al's email was full of total bullshit, grown men whining about not wanting to play nice with each other and asking for special perks just because of their titles when they couldn't win more than one in every three games. And hints at gambling too. They all needed to go. Also, I want a list of the players who aren't pulling their weight, and the front office staff has been put on notice. They'll each be providing you with essays about what they love most about their jobs, what they're willing to do for the team, and what they're not willing to do. I expect your report on who needs to go from them as well by the end of next week."

While I'd already had my dream front office staff lined up in my head for months, this is insane. "You cannot build a new team in four months. Change takes time. And people ."

"Four months? We have five until opening day."

"We have four until spring training."

Her brows furrow briefly, then she shakes her head like spring training is irrelevant. "Have you ever seen The Mighty Ducks ? How about Miracle ?"

My eyeball is now twitching harder than my triceps. And my left thigh. And that twinge in my back is new.

I'm not in bad shape. I run. I lift at home. Hell, managing a toddler and a preschooler is a workout all on its own.

But working for someone who would fire over two dozen people with no game plan beyond this sort of worked in a movie is tweaking all my agitated nerves so hard, I either need to punch something, drink something, or fire her .

Since I can't, I settle for tossing my vibrating phone onto the ugly-ass couch across from the desk—I'll dunk it in bleach later—and stare her down.

She doesn't roll her eyes, but she looks damn close to it. "Don't look at me like that. The coaching staff wasn't doing its job and the entire country knows it. It's a pretty good bet other countries know it too, possibly even other planets, and while I appreciate Uncle Al wanting to take care of people, you can't take care of people by coddling them and not asking for their best. So now you get an opportunity no one ever gets. Pick your dream coaching staff, Mr. Wilson. Pick them, and let them know that if they can't build a team that plays well together and inspires people to come back to the ballpark, this will be the last time they ever work in professional baseball."

"It doesn't work like that."

"The whole will never work in baseball again is probably pushing it, hm?" She smiles.

Smiles . With so much cheek and confidence that I don't want to admire, but can't help respecting, and god help me, my body is not immune to that smile.

My mind is trying very, very hard to compensate for my body's shortcomings though. "Do you have any idea how hard it'll be to convince anyone they want to work for the worst team in baseball?"

"I'm sure you have a plan, or you wouldn't have wanted to buy the team so badly." She shakes out the jockstrap, sending a plume of dust rising in the sunlight forcing its way through the filthy windows that should have a clear view of the outfield at Duggan Field, but instead makes the ballpark appear as old and beaten down as the team feels.

Also, when I say dust , I'm purposefully not thinking about the microscopic evidence of what Al Beversdorf might've done in this room for twenty years.

Clorox wipes aren't enough.

We need a forensic cleaning team in here before I let my children set foot in this building again.

"My plan wasn't to immediately have to replace an entire coaching staff," I grind out.

"Then I can't see how your plan would've been successful."

In four steps, I'm standing toe-to-toe with her. "Have you ever played baseball a day in your life? Or even watched a game?"

"I actually love soccer. But I've been doing some reading."

" Moneyball ?"

There's that smile again. She needs to quit doing that, or I'm going to start flashing back to meeting her in the club, when it was stupidly charming that she was smiling through having a drink thrown all over her.

Or to the locker room after being attacked by the ducks.

" The Princess and the Player ," she tells me.

"There's never been a royal owner of a baseball team in major league history."

"I didn't say it was nonfiction, Mr. Wilson."

Fucking hell.

She's using those romance novels she loves to study baseball. And yes, I know about the romance novels.

My team has found out a lot about Lila.

Starting with the implication that this is going to be a disaster. From what we can tell, she's brilliant with business. She's been Dalton Wellington's right-hand woman since she graduated college, running the reclusive billionaire's holdings company. Rumor has it Wellington approves nothing without Lila's endorsement, and she handled the liquidation of his assets as he retreated into retirement.

If I wanted to build a venture capital company, Lila would be the first person I'd call to join my team.

But as far as we can tell, she knows nothing about the business of baseball.

Which is why I need her to trust me if Copper Valley is going to embrace the Fireballs again. "You can call me Tripp."

"Not when I'm scolding you." She winks, still with that damn smile, like she knows a secret and she's enjoying the hell out of pissing me off, and I want to kiss her.

I want to shove her up onto the desk, dust and grime be damned, and kiss her until she's incoherent and incapable of wreaking any more havoc on my baseball team.

Yes.

My baseball team.

I stifle a growl of frustration. I hate not being in charge.

And I hate that her first stipulation was no kissing , and I also hate that I hate that stipulation, because I don't want to kiss her.

I'm so damn inside out right now.

"I believe I'm scolding you ," I grit out.

"Not a good first impression."

"I don't give a damn. You need me. I don't need you. And I especially don't need you making my job harder."

"You do need me. You need me to not sell the team, and you need me not to fire you. Considering two mornings' worth of work have given me about five candidates for team president who could be lured away for the right price, you should be very concerned about your position right now. And in the interest of the team, I'm cutting through the bullshit and focusing your priorities."

"I sent you my priorities yesterday."

Finally, that smirk is fading. "Your priorities are wrong."

"They're right for balancing re-building a team with re-energizing a fan base."

"We're going to have to agree to disagree on this one."

"You make it so I have to build a team from scratch, I might just build my own damn team from scratch."

"The commissioner likes you, but he doesn't like you enough to let you put an expansion team in Copper Valley while this team goes somewhere else."

I grab my phone and flash it for her to see the wall of text messages Pakorski's sending me about getting Lila Valentine under control .

Her nostrils flare. Good . I hate being the only one to show up for a pissing match, and she's finally realizing I have power, whether she likes it or not.

"While it's lovely that your friends know seventeen euphemisms for Lila's being a bitch , it would also be lovely for you to keep your private conversations private, Mr. Wilson ."

I glance at the screen, and dammit .

Davis and Levi are on a group message discussing her over-inflated ego in relation to her intelligence about running a baseball team, which has overtaken the top messages from Pakorski about the media storm coming because of the shake-up.

"That was Pakorski questioning your competence two seconds before," I force out.

"I'm sure it was."

"He can force you out in an instant. And he will if he thinks you're making a bigger disaster here than your uncle did."

Wait.

Why am I warning her?

Her eyes spark. A muscle ticks in her cheek, and her tongue darts out to wet her lips. She straightens until we're nose-to-chin. "Do not underestimate me, Tripp Wilson. You got what you wanted. A chance to turn your team around. If you can't do it, I'll find someone else commissioner-approved who will."

"I can do it, and you know it."

"All I hear is ego."

"All I hear is you holding a grudge and refusing to give me a chance."

"This has nothing to do with New York. It's all business."

"Is it? Because if you want to run a good business, you talk to your president of operations before firing the whole damn coaching staff . And how the hell are you planning on paying for better coaching when the team barely has money to make payroll as it is?"

"The money's my concern. Your concern, Mr. Wilson, should be that if I want to run a good business, I test my president of operations to make sure he's man enough for the job."

Man enough.

Christ.

"Back to that, are we?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Her eyes are so dark, midnight would drown in them.

"I told you I was sorry about New York."

"You told me what you thought I wanted to hear. Apologies don't earn my trust. Actions earn my trust. So go on, Tripp. Prove you have what it takes."

I don't know if we're talking about the team or our chemistry anymore, but I know that my brain is no longer in control.

No, that's all my hormones.

Taking over and driving me to tangle my fingers in her hair, grip her scalp, tilt her mouth to mine, and kiss her the way I kissed her in that club bathroom back in New York.

Not the way to solve this either , an obnoxious voice that sounds like Levi whispers in my ear.

No kissing , it adds. She said so.

But Lila's gripping my sweaty T-shirt and parting her lips and kissing me back, and fuck me, now I'm the one drowning.

Drowning with tongues and teeth clashing with this woman who won't forgive me and who I can't resist, even when she's pissing me off so badly that the Hulk wouldn't stand a chance against my rage.

And I'm even more pissed at knowing it's not just Lila I'm pissed at.

I'm still pissed at myself.

For way more than just kissing her in the bathroom after telling her I was Levi.

But this kiss?

She knows who I am.

She knows what I want.

And those little moans in the back of her throat suggest she's just as on board with this as my baser nature is.

She moves her hands to grip my ears. I push her against the edge of the desk. Her legs wrap around my hips to cradle my rapidly hardening cock, and I want to rip all of our clothes off and thrust into her and end this stupid tension between us.

Show her who I am.

Not the man the world sees. Not the man she thinks I am after our first meeting. The man I am .

She suddenly tenses, and it's as effective as being doused with a bucket of cold slime.

This is not how to win over the boss .

Fuck.

I disentangle myself, but I don't back up. Instead, I stay right in her face. " That was me. Tripp Wilson. The man who's going to save your damn baseball team, no matter what shit you throw my way. Got it?"

I don't wait for a response, because if it's coming in the form of the words you're fired , I don't want to hear it.

I have too much work to do.

And at the top of that list is staying the hell away from my new boss until I can find a way to get rid of her.

This baseball team is mine .

Maybe not officially yet, but they will be.

The sooner, the better.