Chapter 16

Mackenzie

The Fireballs are gonefor a full week. I'd be upset that they're starting the season with back-to-back away series, except they're playing in California, where the weather is much nicer, which is easier on the players, even if the game times are so late that I get a dirty look from my boss a few times for rolling into work exhausted.

I have a normal weekend partially hanging out with my dads, partially hanging out with Sarah, and partially sneaking the meatball costume out to Cooper Rock's hometown in the Blue Ridge mountains for a stroll into his brother's bakery.

It's well worth the hour-long drive outside the city to visit with the Rocks—yes, I can talk to Cooper's whole family, who owns half the town, even though it's only recently that I can talk to him—and I load up with take-out for bingeing on at home all week. The Crow's Nest's donuts are second to none. The banana pudding at The Crusty Nut is the stuff of fantasies, and Anchovies, the pizza place, does something magical with their sauce.

Even better, Desmond—aka Dame Delilah—is driving us in his hybrid SUV since I can't walk as Meaty and also take video of myself, and also since my peapod-size car is a little recognizable, so there's plenty of space for all the goodies that I bring back.

While he drives us home, I pull out my burner phone to text video footage to Tripp and Lila. But before I can upload the video, I realize there's a message waiting for me from "Spike the Echidna."

Exactly like there has been every day this past week.

Today's is simple.

It's a picture of the fortune out of a cookie.

Your dog will bring you great joy.

And beneath it, Brooks has added a little message.

In bed.

I crack up, which has Desmond lifting a brow at me as we arrive back at my apartment building.

He's incognito today, dressed in street clothes, because Dame Delilah stands out in a small town, even a town as friendly and welcoming as Shipwreck, whereas Desmond as a man is nothing more than your average gay black man in an official Fireballs polo accompanying a flaming meatball down the street.

Considering Beck has a weekend house in Shipwreck, there was no reason to make people curious about the man with the meatball. And I couldn't take my dads, because they've come with me a few times and might've been recognized.

Desmond puts the SUV in park and points to my burner phone. "They're going to trace that phone back to you one day."

"And when they do, I'll point out how much good I've done for all of the Fireballs' extended fan family. Plus, you've got my back."

He sighs. "We do, baby girl. That we do."

My dads are off tonight, so I head to their place to watch the game together. We eat our traditional meal of weenie-mac while the Fireballs lose, and we collectively decide we're never eating weenie-mac with baseball again.

Overall, though, while the Fireballs are still losing more than they're winning, there's definitely more talent on the team, and every shot of the dugout shows them talking to each other, and once, the camera caught Brooks putting sunflower seeds in Cooper's helmet while Cooper wasn't looking.

One at a time.

He'd eat a sunflower seed, catch Cooper not watching, and then he'd slide Lopez a grin and drop a seed into Cooper's upside-down helmet.

The whole bench knew it.

And every one of them kept a straight face like they had no idea what Cooper was talking about when he grabbed his helmet and got a rain shower of sunflower seeds.

Epic. Perfection.

I might've teared up at the idea that Brooks is warming up to being a team player.

Monday morning, I head down to my car at a normal, healthy hour—thank you, afternoon games on the west coast—and as I step off the elevator, someone's checking out my car.

Not unusual—it's basically the coolest car in existence. I drive a SmartCar, and it's completely decked out in Fireballs colors, with the logo splashed on the side, and a Fiery hood ornament.

That's right. I found a place for a hood ornament on a SmartCar.

The curious onlooker turns, and I lose my breath.

Brooks Elliott is stalking me. And oh, god, he has a baby sling for Coco Puff. This tall, broad, thick-muscled, corded-forearmed, fine-assed baseball player is carrying his teeny tiny puppy in a baby sling, and my vagina has jumped ship.

Fireballs who? Let's do him!

Our eyes lock, and his lips tip up in the corners. "You didn't show up to make me bacon."

Coco Puff barks. His collar shouts out "Ass-licker!"

Brooks rubs his little head with a single finger. "We won that last home game after you made me bacon."

Did he just?—

He smiles, a real, full smile that brings sunshine into the underground parking garage and makes the concrete smell like roses, and he did.

He used me against myself.

I plant a hand on my waist. "I also petted your dog. Maybe that's what helped."

He puffs his chest, putting Coco Puff closer to me. "You can pet my dog anytime you want."

Gah, that voice is offering me the opportunity to do so much more than pet his dog. "I'm going to be late for work."

"Two of the three games we won on the road, we had bacon with breakfast."

I mutter a curse that would make a hockey player blush, but not because I'm upset about being late for work, since of course, I'm going to make Brooks bacon.

It's more that I'm struggling with the idea of having to actively resist him. Of being near him.

He better not smell like baseball.

"Fine. You can come upstairs and I'll make you bacon. But only so we can test if it's good for the team."

"If we lose today, you can come back to my place tomorrow to see if that makes a difference. Right, Coco Puff?"

The puppy yips and licks his fingers. "I love pussy!"

He smiles down at his dog with the smitten love of every pet owner perfectly matched with his best friend.

Couldn't he have fallen in love with a snake or something? I could way more easily resist a man with a snake. Or one with a pet lizard.

Instead, he's in love with a puppy with a cussing collar, and it's very much working for me. "Why don't you take that thing off?"

"He won't let me. He likes being a foul-mouthed creature of destruction beneath the fluffy exterior."

I could so easily fall for this man.

I climb back into the elevator, this time with Brooks and Coco Puff, and by the time we reach my floor, the scents of leather and pine have invaded my nose and I've fallen a little more in love with those little brown puppy dog eyes.

And I do mean the eyes on the puppy, and not the hazel beauties on the man, which might also be working some unfortunate magic on me.

When I unlock my apartment door, I refuse to hold my breath and await judgment. If he says a single thing about my décor, I'm fully prepared to fire back with all the questions about his place.

His lips twitch when he glances around, but he doesn't say a word, so I let him live, and I head to the kitchen. Coco Puff joins me, leaping at the Fireballs towel hanging from my red oven handle.

Brooks doesn't appear in the kitchen until I'm putting the remaining half-package of bacon back in the fridge.

He sniffs. "Pizza?"

Yeah. Can't open the fridge without the whole kitchen smelling like everything I brought back from Shipwreck yesterday. "Nuh-uh, buddy. You said bacon. You want pizza, get your own."

"You ever worry that your bobbleheads will come to life one night and eat you in your sleep?"

"You ever worry about living to see the rest of the day?"

Coco Puff growls and leaps on a dust bunny under my cabinet. "Fuck-turd!" his collar translates.

Brooks cracks open my fridge, lifts his phone, and snaps a picture of the pizza box.

"What are you doing?"

"Taking notes on pizza to try."

"You can't—" I stop myself, because I can't tell him that he can't get Anchovies' pizza here in the city. And as soon as we start talking about where he can get it, he'll know I went to Shipwreck, and whenever Tripp and Lila decide to broadcast Meaty's latest adventures around the world, his suspicion will turn into full-blown knowledge.

It's one thing to banter back and forth on text and know he suspects.

It's another to give the man I irritate on a regular basis the full knowledge.

"Crow's Nest? Are those—those are." He snatches one of the bakery bags from my fridge and peers in it before I can stop him. "You got donuts from Cooper's brother's bakery."

"I go up there with Sarah and Beck all the time. Beck's weekend house is right next door to Cooper's house. Have you ever been? There's this legend about how the town was founded by Cooper's great-something-grandfather, who was a pirate who loaded up his treasure in a covered wagon and drove out here to hide from the po-po. And they have this pirate festival, and everyone goes digging for the treasure, and?—"

"Are you sleeping with Cooper, or are you only talking to him to convince him to help cock-block me?"

Well. Nothing like getting straight to the point, is there? "Cooper's cock-blocking you? Jeez. I thought there was a code. And were you the same guy who said you were going to sleep with me first, or are you one of those guys who says that to every girl to see who jumps you first?"

His hazel eyes narrow while he lifts a donut out of the bag and bites into it.

My eyes bug out. "That's my donut!"

Banana pudding oozes out the donut and onto the corner of his mouth. When he licks it off, my stomach bottoms out and my breasts get heavy and my clit tingles.

Eye on the prize, Mackenzie. Eye. On. The. Prize.

And I don't mean the man eating the donut.

I mean the Fireballs' winning. I point at him. "Did you eat a donut that morning in spring training? The morning before you couldn't hit a ball?"

"You really want to blame that on the donut?"

"We have to look at everything, because knowing one thing that stops you from hitting a ball doesn't mean we've identified everything. And don't think it's escaped my notice that the Fireballs win every time you get at least a double."

He takes another bite of my donut and makes a contemplative noise. Then he glances down, and all of his features soften into utter adoration for the curly-furred puppy that's gotten the towel off my oven rack and is barking and cussing at it while alternately smiling happily with his crooked tongue.

Brooks has got to stop acting human, or I'm going to forget one of these days that he's a baseball player whose habits and routines need to be fostered for peak performance.

I gesture to Coco Puff. "Do you take him to the ballpark?"

"He has a puppysitter." I get a dubious eyeball, like that's my fault.

So I give him the what's your problem? eyeball back.

"Cooper's cousin," he clarifies. "Who also won't sleep with me, because she's Cooper's cousin."

So apparently funny is blue, because that's both hilarious and infuriating—the part where he casually mentioned he tried to sleep with another woman, I mean—and now, with the two emotions put together, I'm seeing purple.

He snorts like he's suppressing a laugh, and I stifle a growl while I dig into my utensil drawer, looking for something else that I can toss to his puppy.

I riffle through my collection of Fireballs-themed pasta servers, spatulas, wooden spoons, and jar openers until I find what I'm looking for.

It's a silicone mold of the New York logo that one of my coworkers gave me as a joke a few years ago.

Who knew this would come in so handy?

I toss it on the ground. "Here, Coco Puff! Here's a new toy for you!"

Brooks isn't laughing anymore. When I risk a glance at him while the faint scent of bacon sneaks into the kitchen, he's not scowling either. "You get bullied growing up?"

That sound you hear? That's the brakes screeching on this conversation while my heart leaps from zero to sixty at the same time.

No onetalks about my family, my childhood, and my growing up unless I ask them to.

I try to sidestep him, but we're caught in a dance of which way are you going so I can go the other way? and it's not working right, and I can't get away from him. "There's too much different about this morning than the last mornings in your apartment. It's not going to work. We have to go back to the porn cave tomorrow, and I take zero responsibility for what happens today. Good or bad. Do you know how to use a hot mitt and get your own bacon out of the oven, or do you need me to go ask Mrs. Miller across the hall to come in and take care of the poor helpless baseball player?"

He goes left with me. I go right. He goes right.

And I still can't freaking get past him.

He finally grips my elbow to stop us both. "You grew up there? At Periwinkles?"

"Don't think being a big bad baseball player with that baseball butt and that—that—that smile is going to save you from me kicking your ass if you don't shut your mouth right now."

"You've met my sister. And my sister-in-law. You think I'm going to mock your family?"

My heart's pounding so hard it's cramping, and my defenses are dialed up to eleven. "I think you're pissed at me for caring more about my team than about your understandable wish to score with a woman, and people get irrational when they're in a dry spell."

Plus, he also knows I stole Meaty.

He's basically hitting me in all my weak spots.

I don't like it.

"What if I'm not pissed at you anymore?" He studies me like he's staring down a pitcher, and I don't like that either.

"You came here to make me late for work, and you ate my donut, because you're not pissed at me anymore?"

"There's a difference between being a cock-blocking asshole for the joy of being a cock-blocking asshole, and being a rabid fan who wants what every other fan wants."

"You think I'm reasonable now?"

"More like almost understandable. Reasonable is pushing it." He releases his grip on my elbow to slap the wall, and all the bobbleheads in the next room nod in agreement as the walls shake.

Gah, that grin. He needs to put that grin away, because even while my pulse is hammering and I'm poised to fight him if he so much as hints that there's anything wrong with my family, I want to bask in that grin like it's the first rays of sunshine at the North Pole after a long, drawn-out winter.

Coco Puff jumps on his leg, and he bends to pick the cavapoo up in a single hand. "I think we can find common ground and help each other out."

"Why?"

"Why? I'm offering you a truce, and you want to know why?"

"Yeah. Duh."

He sighs while he stretches his neck first one way, then another, eyes on the ceiling. "Because it feels like the right thing to do."

"Is this your new tactic to get into my pants?"

"Do you want it to be?"

"No."

"But what if sleeping with the right woman is what takes my game from exceptional to greatest of all time? What if the team needs you to sleep with me?"

Yep. He's the asshole. "Out. No bacon for you. You're done."

"I'm being serious, Mackenzie. What if you're my one?"

As if that's possible in any dimension. I'm the freak who makes my best friend go to the bathroom every time he's up to bat. I've cock-blocked him directly twice, and probably indirectly several more times. Also, I say goodnight to my Andre Luzeman bobblehead every night, for luck.

There's not a man on the planet who wants my kind of crazy, especially one who knows I'll never sleep with him so long as he's wearing my team's uniform. "I have Tripp Wilson on speed dial, and if I call him and tell him you're harassing me, he'll fire you before he calls the cops on me for anything you think I may or may not have done with a mascot costume."

He makes puppy dog eyes at me. Then lifts Coco Puff to double the puppy dog eye effect.

"Gah." I slap my hands over my eyes. "Out. Go away. Get out. And go do your damn job and freaking win today."

I spin to my oven, shut it off, snag the towel from the floor as a hot pad to pull out the bacon, and toss it in the trash.

Pan and all.

I'll dig the pan out later—of course I'm not going to throw the whole thing away. I'm a freaking trash engineer, and I know better than anyone how important it is that we don't make unnecessary waste.

Except the hot pan is melting the garbage bag, and if plastic melts all over my pan, I'll never get it off. "Gah!" I shriek again.

I grab the whole thing with my bare hand, and pain sears up my palm.

Brooks leaps over, snags it from me and tosses it back in the trash, and drags me to the sink, where he thrusts my hand under cold water. Coco Puff squeals nearby, and for once, his collar is spot on. "Oh, shit!"

Tears prickle my eyes, because fuck, my skin's already puffing up, and the cold water on my burnt skin smarts.

Brooks wraps a hand around my waist, leaning his body against mine while he holds me there, smelling like pine and grass clippings, running water over my booboo.

The pain recedes from my palm in direct proportion to me embracing this feeling of all of that baseball god surrounding me.

When I'm watching a game on TV, the guys are these fit athletes running the bases and swinging bats and throwing balls.

When I'm at Duggan Field in person, they're a little bigger in stature, but still, they look kinda normal.

But when I'm here, basically wrapped up in Brooks Elliott, it's one hundred percent obvious how big baseball players are. He has to be at least six-two, and he's broad as a bat is long.

His thigh against my ass is solid muscle, and I know exactly what that is poking into my lower back. I can't smell the bacon anymore, and I can't even feel the water running over my hand and spilling up my wrist.

We stand there in silence, me attempting not to hyperventilate at how close he is—or, you know, throw myself at him since it's been a while since I've been this close to a man that I'm attracted to—and him firmly holding my hand under the running water.

We're about to enter awkward territory when he finally speaks.

"New York is home. Being here—for me, it's the same as asking you to give up the Fireballs and fall in love with a new team all over again. I'll do my job, but being happy about it—it's taking time."

And there goes any lingering anger or distrust.

Poof. Just evaporates.

All because that makes so much sense, my heart hurts for him.

Could I survive having to root for another team?

Not without a lot of emotional trauma and pain. His being traded here is to him what Copper Valley losing the Fireballs would be to me.

And here I am, standing in the way of the one thing he wants to ease that pain.

I am such an asshole.

He twists my palm and pulls it out of the water, bending over to inspect the skin and giving me a whiff of whatever it is he uses in his hair to make it so perfect like that.

"You have any burn cream?"

I nod.

"You need help with it?"

I shake my head.

Coco Puff is whimpering and jumping on my leg. He's so small, it's like being attacked by a leaf in the wind.

A very profane leaf, but still a leaf.

"I gotta get to the field. There's a thing."

There probably is. The new management and owners have reinstated community outreach, and the guys are meeting VIPs every day before games. And by VIPs, I mean kids from the children's hospital, veterans groups, breast cancer survivors, little baseball players from lower-income neighborhoods with pro dreams, and so on.

The only rich, famous, and powerful people getting access to the Fireballs right now are the ones who pay to watch the game from the stands, the ones coming to sing the national anthem or "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," or who know the guys personally and hang with them anyway after hours.

Brooks lifts Coco Puff back into his sling, kissing the puppy on the head and getting a lick on the nose in return. "Do you want me to call or text anybody?"

I shake my head again.

He's not looking at me. He's looking past my shoulder. "I—sorry, Mackenzie. Just…I'm sorry."

He ducks his head and retreats from the kitchen.

And I finally find my voice. "It's not your fault."

It's my fault.

My fault for, well, being crazy.

Something needs to change.

And that something is me.