Second Thoughts: A Hot Baseball Romance (4 page)

His world turned upside down.

Sure, he’d read the words before, maybe even thought them a handful of times: the instant his Little League team won regionals… The moment he opened his acceptance letter to University of Raleigh… The heartbeat when he saw Jamie for the first time and the earth-shattering eternity when they first slept together…

None of it meant anything.

Not one of those moments prepared him for seeing his own daughter sitting in a corner of the dugout, scribbling intently on a piece of paper. There was no question—the kid was his. Her bright red hair was the first give-away, the way it flew from her face in waves that refused to be tamed by braids. But there was more than that—something about her chin, about the rim of dark green around her lighter irises, identical to his own weird eyes.

“Twelve?” he said to Jamie, still staring at his
daughter
.

“Nick.” He knew that tone of voice. He’d heard it a hundred times before. She was fighting down emotion, trying to keep herself bottled up. Once upon a time, he’d done everything he could to break down her control when she got like that. He’d reveled in setting her free. Now, though, he was strangely grateful for her rigid restraint.

She wasn’t an idiot, of course. Never that. She closed her computer with absolute authority and said to her assistant, “Robert? Can you keep an eye on Olivia for a moment?” She flashed an automatic smile at DJ. “I just need a short break. I’ll be back in five.”

Nick didn’t care about DJ. Robert either. Nick only cared about
Olivia
.

Shock. That’s what he was feeling. His chest felt like a runner had slid hard into second, cleats up. Nick knew he’d fallen badly, been spiked somewhere vital. But the pain wasn’t real yet. The injury wasn’t known.

Mechanically, trusting to the muscle memory of four years playing for the Rockets, he stumbled down the hallway toward the locker room. No. Not the locker room. Anyone could be in the locker room. Guys might be meeting with trainers, hanging out, shooting the shit.

He straight-armed the door to the laundry room.

Jamie followed him in. Give her credit. She wasn’t a coward. Never had been. She was the one who’d asked
him
out to dinner the first time, raising the stakes from coffee. She was the one who’d asked him back to her dorm room, a single, five flights up in an old stone building that looked like a medieval castle. Jamie had always figured out what she wanted, then gone for it.

“What the hell?” he asked, the instant the door bumped closed. His shout was absorbed by the countless stacks of white towels, the mountains of neatly folded terrycloth waiting patiently on metal shelves.

“I found out I was pregnant a month after graduation,” she said evenly.

A month. He’d been in California then, proving himself on a minor league team. Showing he had the stuff to make it in the majors. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her mouth set in a tight line. That was the look she’d given the director of the on-campus art museum when he’d pulled two of her photos “to make room for other students’ work.” It was the look she’d given
him
, when he’d first said he was going to Cali. It was the look she’d retreated to after he cut her loose.

“We were through, Nick. I’d already given you back your ring. The last thing you needed was a baby to distract you, to keep you from succeeding.” She looked him straight in the eye and said, “It was tough where you were going. There weren’t luxuries, weren’t opportunities for a soft life. For an easy life.”

Shit. She’d memorized every word he’d told her that day. Every trite, overworked phrase his agent had fed him, that he’d recited like a goddamn parrot as he’d paced the scarred floorboards of her dorm room.

His belly tightened like someone had just punched him in the solar plexus. The acid in his throat was guilt. If he’d known about…Olivia. “I would have been there for you, Twelve.”

“Stop calling me that.”

Stop calling her that? That’s what he’d called her the entire time they’d been together. That’s how he’d thought of her in the seven years they’d been apart. But that was the least of his problems now. “Jamie,” he said, treating the two syllables like they were made of glass. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. What did you do? Go back to Connecticut?”

She nodded. “Until she was born. For almost a year after. And then I had to get out of there. Had to get my own life back, stop letting my family do everything. You know how they are. I was living in the basement at Mom and Dad’s. My sisters traded off babysitting so I could work at the photo place in the mall. My brothers and their wives just ‘happened’ to invite us over every weekend, and no, there was never anything I could bring.”

He nodded. He’d seen the Martin clan in action. He’d been
part of
the Martin clan for four years. Four years of visits—winter, spring, and summer—when he’d slept in the frilly guest room, every single time. Even if Twelve had slipped into his bed every single night, she’d awakened in her own stuffed-animal, pretty-pink-princess bedroom every goddamn morning.

“Ashley said you moved to New York?” Back when he’d talked to Ashley regularly. Before the college roommates had closed ranks against him.

“Ashley has a big mouth.” She pursed her lips in eloquent frustration. “Yeah, I lived in New York. Spent most of my time working in music clubs.”

“That’s what you always said you wanted.” He could
feel
her lying next to him in bed, the countless times they’d talked about their futures, their dreams. Shit, that was why he’d broken up with her, to give her a fair chance to do all that. It had comforted him to picture her working in the smoky clubs. If she couldn’t be with him, at least she was happy.

“I loved it,” she said, and her voice softened around the words. “Until I didn’t. All of a sudden, I realized I needed to change things for Olivia. She needed more stability than I could give her with my crazy hours, with that crazy life. I had missed so much…Was only going to miss more. So I called Ashley, and she helped me find a place down here. And a babysitter. And a couple of starter jobs, industrial stuff, shooting food for restaurant ads. Building my portfolio for corporate work.”

He heard the pride in her voice, justifiable, after everything she’d achieved. But even after she’d chosen to move back here, she hadn’t called him. She hadn’t forgiven him, despite seven long years.

Of course she hadn’t.

He could remember ever second of their last conversation, every single thing he’d said in that goddamn dorm room. It had been hot up there, only May but the radiators had been jammed on, just like they’d been for the past four years. The windows were blocked open, a breeze cutting through the sweat on his palms as he recited the words he’d practiced since midnight.

Ep had told him what to say. Jeremy Epson, the guy who was going to be his agent, the second he picked up his diploma. The guy who still represented him in every negotiation of his professional life. He’d needed Ep; he’d relied on him to show the way through the exciting, terrifying, life-changing transition from college to professional ball.

He’d fucked up.

Sure, he’d made the decision—one he still thought was best. Twelve, er, Jamie shouldn’t have been tied to him, shouldn’t have given up everything she loved, just to be with him. She shouldn’t have been forced to take on the life of uncertainty he was willing to risk for himself. What if he wasn’t good enough to make it to the majors? What if an injury ended his career before it even began? What if he was traded somewhere terrible, somewhere no sane person would ever want to live?

So he’d listened to Ep and tried to protect her the only way he knew how. He’d taken the decision from her. And from Olivia, too.

But even as he thought that, he realized she’d done some taking, too. “Jesus, Twelve.” He saw the irritation spark inside her eyes, but he didn’t bother to correct himself. “Didn’t it cross your mind I’d want to know? I had a right to know!”

~~~

Sure, it had crossed her mind. A million times. But she wasn’t going to give him that power over her. Wasn’t going to let him back into her life.

Because he’d pretty much destroyed her, that day in Lockhart Hall. He’d torn her heart out by its roots, splintered it into a million jagged pieces and left her gasping, still trying to figure out exactly what had happened.

For a long time, she’d asked herself how she hadn’t seen it coming. Why hadn’t she realized he was going to break up with her? Why hadn’t she suspected that their four years of college were just that—fun times before moving on, a finite time and space that he’d never consider expanding.

It had felt like a death. She’d gone through all the stages of mourning, just like her Sociology textbook had told her she would.

Denial: In those first shattered minutes, she’d refused to accept what he’d said. He’d be back in a minute. He’d gone to take a run around campus, to work off some of his excess energy. He was nervous about graduation, about testing his skills in professional baseball. But he’d be back. He loved her, and he’d be back for her.

Anger: In the hours that followed, she’d realized he was an asshole. If he’d known all along that he was going to leave her behind, the least he could have done was let her in on the game. She should have taken the chance to sleep with the hockey jock across the hall when he’d asked her out that drunken night in February. The hockey jock wasn’t going pro.

Bargaining: In the days after graduation, she’d been willing to do anything to get Nick back. She could fly to California, show up at his minor league game that night. She could set aside her plans for her photography business. She could keep house for him, do whatever he needed to make his life easy. He’d obviously only left because he was stressed, and she’d do anything humanly possible to make that better for him.

Depression: For two full weeks, she knew he’d been right to dump her. She was an iron weight, dragging him down. No sane person would ever want to spend time with her, much less
live
with her. Why had he even put up with her for four years? She was fat, and ugly, and she couldn’t take a picture to save her life. She’d been fooling herself, thinking she could ever make the photography gig work. She couldn’t even get out of bed, much less build a career.

Acceptance: A month after graduation, she broke through to a new realization. Nick had left her, sure. But she had a diploma from the University of Raleigh. She had a loving family. She had skills—she could write well, and she was better with a camera than anyone she’d ever personally met. She’d be okay. Lonely, yeah. And sad. But she’d be fine. She’d survive.

And then she’d realized she was pregnant.

It was her own damn fault. She was the one who’d come down with bronchitis. She was the one who’d forgotten all those warnings on her monthly packets of birth control pills, the ones that said that antibiotics made them substantially less effective. She was the one who’d celebrated her first day of real recovery by seducing Nick, by welcoming him back into her bed.

The funny thing was, all the books said she should slip right back into those five stages once she discovered the pregnancy. She should plummet straight back into the emotional chaos. But she’d never been tempted to go back there again, not even for a heartbeat. It was like she’d lived through a forest fire, and her fingers were immune to the flicker of a single match.

In the end, she had Olivia and none of the rest of it mattered.

“Jamie?” Nick said, and she heard the dark challenge in his voice, the fire beneath his words that matched the gleaming copper of his hair.

She shook her head. “No. You don’t have the right. You don’t have any rights at all. You’re the one who walked away.”

He closed his eyes like she’d slapped him, and he kept them closed as he said, “This is different.”

“How?” There. She
did
still have some anger to draw on. It scorched that single word like wildfire. She let a little more of her rage bleed into her voice as she said, “Is it different because there’s an innocent child you can walk away from now? I don’t trust you, Nick. I’ll never let you hurt Olivia the way you hurt me.”

She watched him swallow, heard the sound above the thunder of her own heartbeat. It was so hard to stand here with him. How many times had she seen light glinting off the stubble of his day-end beard? How many times had she seen his mouth twitch as he searched for a specific word? How many times had she watched those ridiculously long eyelashes, waited for them to rise, to reveal the green eyes beneath?

The green eyes that matched her daughter’s.

The green eyes that looked at her now with the same grim determination she’d last seen seven years before, in an overheated dorm room, when he’d cut the bonds between them forever.

“I could have done something,” he said, and his voice was soft enough that she actually took a step closer to him. “I could have helped you.”

“I didn’t want your help,” she said.

“I could have sent money.”

“I didn’t need your money.”

“Dammit, Twelve, I should have been there for you!”

She didn’t bother answering. There wasn’t anything to say. The old nickname gave the lie to the rest of his statement—he should have been there, but he’d given up that right. He’d forfeited it the day he’d chosen to walk out. Nevertheless, she wasn’t surprised to hear his next question, the one she’d been dreading from the moment she’d seen him in the dugout.

“Can I see her? Will you let me talk to her?”

“Nick…” She surprised herself by not knowing the answer to his questions. For years, she’d told herself she had to protect him, had to keep him from feeling responsible for Olivia. She had to protect Olivia too, had to keep her safe from a man who could walk away without a backward glance. But he was asking for involvement now. His eyes were open, and she had no excuse.

“You can be there,” he said. “I just want to meet her.”

“Let me think about it.” She saw the defiance settle in, tracing the lines of his lips, of his rugged jaw. He’d fight her on this. With phone messages and texts, with hand-written letters in her mailbox. With lawyers and judges and juries, if she didn’t give in.