Catching Hell: A Hot Contemporary Romance (6 page)

He could practically hear his agent counting to ten. “I’ll tell Small we talked. But for
your
sake, I’m not giving him a final answer until Wednesday.”

Zach didn’t bother telling his agent he already had a final answer. Epson was a master at hearing what he wanted to hear. That was how he earned the big bucks.

Hanging up his phone, Zach glanced at the time and swore. So much for getting to the park before the rest of the team. He was famous for his early arrivals. Hell, half the guys thought he just slept on a couch in Coach’s office, living at Rockets Field instead of bothering with details like a mortgage or rent.

But he had to take a shower before he hit the park. Had to pray the hard stream of water would force the fog of too little sleep out of his brain.
 

He cranked the temperature as hot as he could take it and forced himself to stand beneath the stinging needles. When that didn’t do the trick, he spun the dial to cold, grabbed the faucet, and gritted his teeth. As the water punished his chest, he forced himself to face the one question that had leaped into his mind the instant Epson made his announcement.

How much had Anna Benson known last night?

She’d been on the phone the entire time the team had swarmed the emergency room. He’d caught glimpses of her in the orthopedic waiting room, typing away like a reporter on deadline. She’d excused herself from at least one conference with the trainers and doctors, glancing at her phone and saying she had to take a call.

Had that been Small? Had they been planning to cut him loose, even then?

He slammed off the water and grabbed for his towel with a vicious tug that almost pulled the bar from the wall. What did it matter, what Anna had known?
 

He’d handed her a couple of tissues and bought her a Coke. It wasn’t like she owed him anything. Baseball was a business. A young man’s game.
 

And if he’d thought there was anything more than that? If for even one second, he’d imagined that he and the owner’s granddaughter…

Right. He was too old for this shit.
 

He had to get to the park. Take batting practice. Crouch behind the plate and do his best to call fastballs and curves, to get his team the win they’d been denied the night before.
 

And he’d be damned if he made it any easier for
his team
—the team he’d given half his life to—to cut him loose. Wild horses and a hundred million dollars couldn’t make him waive his no-trade clause.

* * *

Three days after she’d summoned Emily to Club Joe for Crisis Coffee, Anna was back in the café with her best friend, sipping her Coke and trying to explain herself. “It’s not that I
can’t
buy a dress for the RADD gala. It’s that I
won’t
. It’s absurd to spend hundreds of dollars on something I’m going to wear once, when I can donate the money instead. Isn’t that what the gala is all about, anyway? Fundraising for Raleigh Against Drunk Driving?”

Emily was undeterred. “I’m just saying people are going to pay a lot of attention to you. This is the first year you’ve been Chair of the event.”

“
Honorary
Chair. You know everyone else does all the work. And it’s actually
Co
-Chair. Gramps still gets lead billing.”

“And
Gramps
can put on a tux and straighten his bow tie, and he’ll be considered perfectly dressed. But you’re going to have to do something different.”

“We’re talking makeup, aren’t we?” Anna couldn’t keep the note of misery from her voice.

“And hair, too.”
 

“Yeah, right.”

Emily sat up straighter. “Wait a second. Are you telling me you haven’t made an appointment yet?”

“For what?”

“A mani-pedi? Your hair? Anna!”

“Hello!” Anna said sarcastically. “Have we met? Have you ever, once in your life, known me to get a manicure or a pedicure?”

Emily shook her head. “You’re impossible. Fine. Come over to my house Saturday afternoon. I’ve got half a dozen dresses you can try on—something will work. And I’ll do your hair and makeup myself.”

“Yay,” Anna said, still mocking. “It’ll be just like we’re five years old and playing dress-up! Can I be a princess, with a sparkly pink tiara?”

Before Emily could retort, the guy at the counter called out, “Anna! Emily!” Both women stood to collect their breakfasts. Before Anna could weave her way through the crowd, though, she heard another name: “Zach!”

It couldn’t be. Half the guys in Raleigh were named Zach. But Anna glanced at the counter and swore, even as she turned back to the table. “Em, get mine, will you?”

“Absolutely not,” Emily shot back. From the gleam in her eyes, she definitely recognized the Rockets’ catcher as he stepped up to the counter. In fact, she took a few awkward steps to her left, guaranteeing that Anna would stand directly in Zach’s path as he collected his breakfast and tried to find his way out the door.

Anna barely managed to wipe the grimace off her face before Zach looked up. “Hey,” she said.

“Good morning.” Zach’s reply showed considerably more pleasure than she’d expected, given that the last time she’d been talking about him, she’d been figuring out ways to have his contract manipulated against his will.

Emily whirled around as if she were astonished to see someone talking to her best friend. “Hello!” she said. “I’m Emily Holt.” Her hand jutted out like the arm of an electric chair.

“Zach Ormond.” He shook Emily’s hand perfunctorily.

As Anna tried to plot her escape back to the table, Emily launched into High Interference Gear. “Oh no!” she exclaimed to the poor guy behind the counter. “I’m so sorry! I need my order to go!”

“Emily!” Anna warned, as the clerk started to box up the tofu scramble and soy bacon.

“Lucky for you,” Emily said to Zach with a smile so warm Anna was probably the only person in the coffee shop who knew it was fake. “Running into us here. Every table in this place is taken, but you’re welcome to take my seat. Okay, Anna,” she said after she took her now-boxed breakfast from the unfazed Club Joe employee. “Saturday. Three o’clock.” She frowned for just a split second. “Actually, better make that two. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Anna considered sticking out her tongue, but she settled for gathering up her lightly toasted bagel with a side order of bacon. A quick glance confirmed that Emily
had
been telling the truth. There wasn’t another table free in the entire place.
 

Great. Just the way she wanted to spend the morning. Wincing through conversation with the man who had seen her totally lose it three nights before. The man she’d agreed to trade to Texas, even though she had every reason to believe he had no desire to modify his contract.
 

Well, she’d never ducked away from ugly reality before. No reason to start now.

“You might as well come on,” she said, looking at Zach’s waffle.
 

“With an invitation like that…” he said drily.

As she led the way back to her table, she thought about every name she wanted to call her best friend. Make that
former
best friend. How
dare
Emily interfere this way?

Once she and Zach were seated, they occupied themselves with the trivia of preparing to eat. He spread whipped butter over his waffle before helping himself generously from the pitcher of maple syrup. She crafted the perfect balance of butter and marmalade, taking care to paint her bagel precisely. When that task was complete, she resorted to turning the plate that held her bacon, lining the strips up with the edge of the table. That left her reaching for her soda. Poking the ice with her straw. Dredging her brain for something—anything—to say that didn’t have to do with Texas or crying or Kleenex or making an idiot out of herself at the hospital.
 

“Look,” she finally said. “I don’t usually fall apart like I did Saturday night.”

“You were under a lot of stress.”

“Everyone was. But I don’t recall anyone else crying like a little girl.”

“You never know what the rest of the team did, in the privacy of their own homes.”

Somehow, his teasing smile put her at ease. He wasn’t treating her like she was fragile, like she was some delicate creature that might collapse into a puddle of tears right there at the breakfast table. And that made it all okay that she’d cried before. She took a deep breath and vowed to put her mortifying reaction behind her.

“So,” she said after diverting herself with an entire slice of bacon. “How does the line go? Of all the coffee shops in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine?”

He snorted. “A man’s not allowed to get breakfast in the building where he lives?”

“Yeah, right,” she said. But then she realized he was telling the truth. “Really? You live in the Whitmore too?”

“Too? I’m in Unit 1401.”

“1911, in the North Tower,” she said, automatically mapping out the building in her head. “Wait! You’re in the South Tower. On the street side. You have a view of downtown!”

“I had an in with the real estate agent, when the building went condo.”

Of course he did, Anna realized. That real estate agent had worked for Gramps. Marty Benson had owned the Whitmore; he’d converted it from apartments to condos when he needed to raise some serious money for the team, about fifteen years ago. Right when Zach Ormond came to town. Gramps had held onto half a dozen units, using them as executive suites for his best players. Anna had been squatting in hers for the three years she’d been home from Michigan.

“But why haven’t I seen you here before?” she asked. “I’m in here every day.”

He shrugged. “I spend as little time in the city as possible. I only stayed here last night because I have an early meeting with…” He trailed off. “A business meeting.”
 

A bite of bagel crumbled to dust in her mouth. She wasn’t an idiot, though. And she never backed down from a fight. “About the no-trade clause.”

He nodded. “The one I negotiated hard for. The one I’m not giving back.”

“Until we find the right motivation.”

“There isn’t one.”

“Of course there is. Money motivates everyone.”

“Not me. Not on this.” From his pursed lips, he might have poured pure lemon juice over his waffle, instead of a stream of maple syrup.
 

This was hardly turning out to be a breakfast worthy of Emily’s conniving exit. At this point, Anna would prefer to be discussing shades of nail polish with her girlfriend, and whether she needed some
product
in her hair on Saturday night.

“Look,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “The Rockets need a new bat, and Tyler Brock is the one player most likely to get us into the postseason. I won’t lie to you. My grandfather put me in charge of this matter. I’m the one ultimately responsible for making it work. And I’m going to do whatever it takes to prove to him I’m up for the job.”

“So you want to trade me.”

I don’t want to trade you
. That’s what she wanted to say. But she wasn’t about to put
those
cards on the table.

Instead, she said, “You know as well as I do that Gregory Small handles all player acquisitions, all trades. If I rein him in now, I injure the team and show that I don’t have what it takes.”

“
If
you rein him in now,” Zach pounced on her words. “That means you’ve considered it?”

Of course I’ve considered it!
Another one of those cards she wasn’t going to play. Instead, she focused on ignoring the flutter beneath her ribcage. Dammit. That wasn’t her ribcage. The flutter was affecting a distinctly lower part of her anatomy.
 

She forced herself to look at Zach instead of her bagel, her bacon, her soft drink, and every other distraction in the known universe. And then she did it, displaying the card she’d vowed to keep secret. “Yes,” she finally said. And even though it felt like she was peeling back her own flesh to make the admission, she confirmed, “I’ve considered it.”

“Well, thank God for that. I didn’t want to think I’d forced my walking papers, just because of what happened at the hospital.”

“Nothing happened at the hospital.”

“You’re right,” he agreed, snagging her with his forest gaze. The entire café around them faded away as he said, “But somewhere between Tucker’s second IV bag and his third, I thought about making a lot of things happen. I think you did too. And you might have acted on those thoughts if the circumstances had been just a little bit different.”

She thought about blushing, about looking away and changing the topic. But that really wasn’t her style. “Why, Mr. Ormond,” she said instead, “I do believe you’re flirting with me.”

“Why, Miss Benson,” he said immediately. “When I’m flirting with you, you’ll know.”

Zap
. His words snapped a cord deep inside her. And he was right. She
did
know.
 

Refusing to give in to the urge to throw herself across the table—maple syrup, coffee, and other breakfast debris be damned—she held his gaze as she played out another conversational gambit. “So, if you don’t usually stay at the Whitmore, where
do
you stay? When you’re not getting ready for early business meetings?”

“Is this the conversation you really want to have?”

No
. But she forced herself to say, “It’s the one we
are
having.”

For a moment, she thought he would refuse. She thought he was going back to
circumstances
and what had happened at the hospital, and—most tantalizing of all—what hadn’t happened.

She wanted him to pick up that line of conversation. She was terrified he would.

His smile was lazy, though, and he shook his head with the patience he was famous for exercising behind the plate. When he swallowed, she watched his throat bob, and when he picked up his coffee cup, she remembered what those fingers had felt like against the base of her neck. He saluted her with the mug before inclining his head in acquiescence.