Chapter 17

17

Tripp

Between the cops who insist on stopping by to make sure that everything's okay after Lila and I tripped the silent alarm and I gave the wrong password over the emergency intercom, and then the firemen who showed up because my cookies burned so badly they caught fire in the oven, I don't get to bed until almost three AM.

Lila snuck out—head held high, staring down one of the cops who gave me a wink and a thumbs-up—and I have so many regrets, I can't begin to name them.

Mostly, I regret that I didn't move us directly to the kitchen once the kissing started, because hot chocolate chip cookies are an excellent tool in foreplay, whereas burnt cookies and visits from the cops and firefighters are more or less lifetime cock-blockers.

I'm not looking forward to waking up this morning and facing the fact that I shouldn't have kissed Lila again, that I shouldn't have had my hands up her shirt, and that I shouldn't have been enjoying the hell out of her riding my dick through our clothes. But at least she'll be back in New York.

I won't have to face her again until we've both inevitably done seventeen other things to piss each other off.

Unfortunately for me, that starts with a six AM phone call from the night shift guard at Duggan Field.

"She's what?" I mumble, slapping my own face, because I can't possibly be awake, and I didn't hear him say what I think I just heard him say.

"Ms. Valentine's here. I'm making sure she don't disturb the ducks, just like you said I should anytime she comes by the field, Mr. Wilson, but she wouldn't say why she needed to poke around at this hour of the morning either."

And so I'm texting my mom, asking if she can keep my kids a little while longer while I deal with something that came up at work.

Traffic's light at this hour on a Saturday morning—it's so early, the sun isn't up yet—and even with a stop at a drive-thru to get the largest coffee I can order, which won't come close to being enough today, I get to the field in thirty minutes. I park under the single lit streetlamp in the players' lot, right next to Lila's rental car.

The guard meets me at the door. "She was heading into the Fireballs locker room last I saw, Mr. Wilson."

I check the visitors' locker room and dugout first.

Ducks are still fine—the area's roped off while we've been giving tours to season ticket holders so they can get pictures of the ducks—and there's no sign of Lila here.

And overall, she doesn't strike me as the duck-murdering type. Although, if another duck came at her with its weirdly terrifying hard-on hanging out like that again, can't say I wouldn't do a few things to it myself.

"Don't be assholes, okay?" I mutter to the ducks.

One quacks back at me.

"Don't you need water?"

"There's an accidental pond under the third base seats," the security guard tells me. "I was wondering that very thing—why a duck doesn't want to live close to water—and got to thinking about a plumbing problem we had a few years ago. Used to be a storage room for extra balls, but now it's just empty. They get to it through that hole in the wall there. Probably need to fix it."

Yep.

Not enough coffee.

"Does maintenance know?"

"Well, yeah, but with the ducks, we didn't want to curse anything by making them move. I mean, can't hurt to have lucky ducks sitting here, can it?"

"Unless they're lucky for the visiting teams."

His eyes go wide.

Hell, mine do too as it occurs to me just how likely it is that the ducks would be lucky for the visiting teams, and I'm not all that superstitious.

"Still our field," I remind him.

"I hope you're right, Mr. Wilson. You want me to watch the ducks while you go look for Ms. Valentine?"

"Probably a good idea. Duck blood's not good for anyone."

"Here. You take this." He hands me a two-way radio. "Call if you need me."

I nod and take the device.

He stops me as I turn to go. "My kids submitted salamanders as the new mascot. They think you can make a salamander look really mean and shoot a fireball out its tail."

Not much to say about that, so I mutter a hmm behind my coffee cup and head across the field to the home dugout.

No Lila in the dugout.

No Lila in the locker room. Or the weight room. The players' lounge. I step into the team manager's office—don't ask how that search is going, because I want to talk about it as much as I want to talk about my own nanny search—and something creaks above me.

I eyeball the ceiling.

Nothing about the Fireballs' clubhouse under the stands is worth writing home about. The showers leak. The audio-visual equipment is twenty years old. The cinderblock walls are stained with god only knows what. The carpet can only be called carpet because that's what it used to be before it was worn down to its threads.

Gutting the place was in the budget and the schedule for next winter, after we got a few major concerts in here next summer to get revenue flowing in again.

The Bro Code network in Hollywood and the music industry is still strong, and you're damn right we were planning to exploit every opportunity we could to get major acts in to remind people that Duggan Field exists. We would've even considered a reunion show, and I haven't played in years, and Davis hates the spotlight. But all of our plans got put on hold when Pakorski decided to give Lila a chance.

It's not that we want to see her fail.

It's more that we have no intention of calling in favors just to get screwed over if she decides to sell to someone else.

And Davis is right—she's getting cash of her own somehow to fund the team. That look on her face last night when I asked if it was Wellington…

There's something there.

I know Lila's an orphan. She's only ever worked for Wellington, and she started high up at a young age. According to some of the information Davis and the team found, she steered a majority of the company's business developments and off- shoot companies, all of which were sold to the employees over the course of the last three years in the build-up to Wellington's retirement.

Her boss has been letting her run the ship.

My jaw aches, and I make myself unclench it.

Maybe he's been a father figure.

Or maybe he's less into retiring, and more into still controlling part of her life through influxes of cash into the broken baseball team she inherited.

Whatever it is, I don't like it.

I could be investing in the Fireballs. We could be co-owners.

Wellington sure as hell won't be getting big-name acts onto Duggan Field, and he won't be contacting celebrity friends to get them here often enough that fans will start coming out in hopes of catching a glimpse of someone important, and he also won't be seeing a single dime of his money back anytime soon.

The ceiling creaks again, but this time, it's closer to the lounge. I flip on the flashlight on my phone and aim it upward, ignoring the water stains and pink gum stuck to the ceiling while I track the sound.

First ducks.

Now what?

Raccoons? Squirrels? Fox? Deer?

Fuck .

Better not be deer. How the hell would a deer get into the ceiling?

Actually—how would anything get in the ceiling?

I'm reaching for the radio clipped to my belt when I hear another distinct noise in the ceiling.

A noise that sounds very much like a feminine oh, shit .

And that's all the warning I get before a leg pokes through the textured drywall between two buzzing fluorescent light panels right above my head.

Plaster and insulation rain down on my head and all over my covered coffee cup. "What the hell ?"

There's a shriek, a crack, and then an arm punches through the ceiling, followed by a whole body.

I reach out to catch her the same time I realize there's a fucking body falling through the ceiling .

Also, gravity isn't working in my favor here, and while I was once an extra on the set of one of Jessie's movies, playing a man who saved a baby stroller from a runaway truck, there's no way to catch a body falling without getting the wind knocked out of you and crumpling to the ground yourself.

"What the fuck ?" I snarl as my ass hits the threadbare carpet over concrete. My coffee is toast, spilled and sprayed all over the room.

Lila flings an arm that nearly does for my face what her hand did to my balls just a few hours ago. "Let go!"

"You're welcome for cushioning your fall, you crazy-ass idiot."

She jerks her head to look at me, mouth going round. "What are you doing here?"

Her curly red hair—which might've been pulled back in a ponytail a minute ago—is covered with dust and dirt and spiderwebs and puffed out at odd angles. Her cheeks are smeared with grime. Her shirt's ripped just below her breasts. And her eyes are watery and red, blinking rapidly while she reaches for them with her dusty hands.

"What are you doing in the ceiling ?" I fire back. "When you're supposed to be on a plane to New York ?"

She doesn't answer.

Probably because she's wincing too hard while she rubs her eyes.

I disentangle myself from her for the second time in under eight hours, grab her by the arms, and jerk her to her feet. "Are you hurt?" I bark.

Jesus.

She could've broken something. Or gotten lost in there and eaten by rats. Or fallen when no one was around. And she's probably in danger of losing her eyeballs to an infection if she doesn't get them rinsed out.

Fast.

"Are you hurt?" I repeat, and when she doesn't answer quickly enough while she tries to rub at her eyes, I scoop her up, toss her over my shoulder, and race us to the showers.

Water.

She needs water to rinse out her eyes.

"Let—me— urff —down," she pants.

I spin a handle on the wall and shove her under the spray. "Rinse your eyes," I order.

She yelps and fights, but I hold her there.

My pulse is pounding. If this doesn't work, I have to take her to the hospital.

Fuck. Fuck .

Not the hospital.

I'm gonna throw up my coffee.

Why don't we have eyewash stations around the stadium? People could get beer or peanut dust in their eyes at any given time. Or get dive-bombed by bird poop. Look up at exactly the wrong time, and splat . And then they'd have to wear a pirate eye patch the rest of their lives because of a bird poop infection that could've been avoided if we had eye rinse stations around the park.

I've seen a man have to wear a pirate eye patch before.

Don't tell me it couldn't happen.

"What are you doing? " she sputters.

"Saving your fucking eyeballs," I snarl back while my pulse goes past I'm running a marathon and into complete and total panic mode. "Quit rubbing before you scratch your cornea and get an infection."

She blinks up at me, and I tilt her head so the water will run into her eyes.

She won't lose her eyes.

She won't get an infection.

It won't spread to her brain.

She won't die.

Not on my watch. Not if I can wash her eyes out.

She won't die.

She won't die .

She coughs and sputters and takes a swing. " Back off ."

"Rinse your fucking eyeballs." My own eyeballs are wet. My clothes are soaked, my voice is hoarse, there's a boulder of fear and regret cutting off my air supply, and she's trying to stop me from saving her life.

"I will if you back off ."

My toes are numb. My toes are numb, and there's a dull throb forming at the base of my skull that might be an aneurysm waiting to burst, and if it is, who's going to raise my kids?

Who's going to fucking raise my kids?

" Fine ," I roar. " Lose your fucking eyeballs. "

I spin and head through the clubhouse to the dugout.

Need fresh air.

Need so much fresh air.

I burst out onto the field with my lungs heaving and my stomach roiling.

Logically, I know I'm overreacting, even as the thought hits me that the water in the showers probably has specks of calcium and lime and thousands of other minerals that shouldn't go in human eyes either.

"Mr. Wilson? Mr. Wilson, sir, you okay?"

"Towels," I grunt. "Get Lila a towel."

"Mr.—"

" Go ."

I refuse to toss my cookies on this field. Instead, I gulp in air, so fucking grateful that my kids are safe with my mom and don't have to see this. Black dots dance at the edges of my vision and my fingertips are tingling now too.

I slump to the ground, my back to the wall separating the field from the stands, and shove my head between my knees.

It takes a minute to remember how to count, but when I do, I make myself count to five.

Over. And over. And over.

Until my breathing is back under control and blood returns to my toes and fingers and that dull throb at the base of my skull subsides.

Gradually, I realize it's fucking cold out here, and I'm soaking wet.

And I need to check on Lila.

Who isn't going to lose her eyeballs.

And who can go to the hospital with the guard if she needs medical attention.

The thought makes me flinch, and not because of the hospital thing, but because I hate handing over responsibility for anything to someone else.

Old habits die hard. And I've been responsible for other people for as long as I can remember.

First Levi, since Mom couldn't do everything on her own, even though she insisted she could. But I was, by default, the man of the house, and I took my role seriously.

Then Bro Code. Again—I was the oldest. It was my job to make sure these men that I called my brothers didn't do anything stupid. I left college so I could keep an eye on them, because it was the right thing to do, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Then Jessie. And our kids.

I take care of people. I watch out for them. It's what I do.

And in the last twelve hours, I've hit the silent alarm on my alarm panel while trying to make out with Lila, almost burned my house down, and now watched Lila fall through a fucking ceiling and probably scratch her corneas.

After a week of balancing a new job and bad nanny interviews and late hours working after the kids are in bed and worrying that I'm just letting them all down.

That I can't do it anymore.

Getting hit with panic attacks that I thought I was past after Jessie died.

"You want to talk about it?" a quiet voice asks beside me.

"No."

Something settles around my shoulders. A towel, or maybe a blanket. And then another one on my head, and suddenly gentle hands are rubbing at my hair. "You're soaked."

I don't answer, because if I do, I'm going to demand to know what the fuck she was doing in the ceiling, and I don't trust my voice just yet.

"Thank you for catching me."

I blink my eyes open and twist my head to peer at her from beneath the towel.

Or possibly glower at her. Eviscerate her with my eyeballs.

She sighs and hands me another towel, looking away. "I thought I heard an injured animal."

I don't have the energy to call out the lie, but I do have the energy to give her a dad look.

She shrinks back a little. "It's none of your damn business."

That , I believe.

At least, I believe she believes it.

Her eyes are puffy and red, her hair's wet but not dripping, so the red curls are dancing around her face, which is clean of all makeup, and she's wearing baseball pants and an oversized Fireballs sweater.

Fucking adorable.

And now I'm pissed that she's adorable when I'm so pissed at her that I almost gave myself a stroke.

I push her hand away and finish drying my hair myself, even though I want her to keep touching me so that I know she's still here. "Thought you were going to New York."

Pink touches her cheeks. "My flight isn't until later today."

"What the fuck were you looking for in the ceiling?"

She turns those green eyes on me again, and even puffy and raw, that glare is deadly. "I heard a rumor last night that you were planning to completely gut the ball park."

Avoidance. Awesome. "Needs it."

"And that's exactly what I was trying to determine for myself."

"By crawling through the underbelly."

"Yes."

She's lying.

She's fucking lying to my face, after having a fit about me lying to her.

And yet I want to wrap my arms around her and reassure myself that she's still breathing, and in one piece, and not broken anywhere from her fall.

"Congratulations, Mr. Wilson. You are correct. The ball park needs to be gutted." She stands, dusts her pants, squeaks and grabs them when they start to fall down, and slowly backs away. "You can send your proposal for the phases of the project, along with estimates and bids, to my office in New York by Friday afternoon."

And suddenly it all makes sense.

She's pushing me away.

I rise to my feet slowly, my joints creaking and my hip grumbling after that fall, while the ducks quack and Lila flinches.

I wait until she straightens and looks me in the eye again. The determined, fearless, spine-of-steel business woman, even when she's a mess.

That's not who she is at all.

Not all of her, anyway.

Lila Valentine has layers, and she's hiding them behind this face she paints on for the world. But I'm on to her. I'm on to her, and I'm going to figure out what it is she wants, and why she's so damn determined to not let anyone in.

Anyone beyond Dalton Fucking Wellington.

I don't care if he's a recluse. He and I are going to have a chat.

"Yes, Mr. Wilson?" she asks with a tapping toe.

"You're welcome."

Her lips part.

And I take advantage of her momentary surprise to cup her cheeks and press a kiss to the edge of her lips, then pull back just far enough for her pretty eyes to come into focus. "You're welcome for saving your life. Try to not fall through any ceilings in New York while I'm not there to catch you."

I release her, snag the last two towels, and turn away from her to head back into the locker room.

And I feel her gaze on me every last step of the way.

I don't know what this is, but I know that I'm not done figuring out Lila Valentine.

Not by a long shot.