Stealing Home (10 page)

“The attraction part,” he said, waving his fork between us.

“Really? You were attracted to me that early on?”

The morning light streaming through the window caught his eyes, setting them on fire. “From the first time I saw you.”

The bite of pancake froze outside my mouth. “Come on. Be serious.”

“I am.” He finished chewing the heap of omelet he’d just stuffed into his mouth. “Are you going to tell me you’ve never looked at a person and known you were attracted to them? You might not know their name or anything about them, but you do know that something inside you is drawn to something inside them?”

Shifting in my chair, I thought that over as I chewed on the best room service pancakes I’d ever had. Might have had something to do with what I’d been doing to work up my appetite for them. “I guess so.”

“I felt that with you,” he said, as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about batting averages or win ratios. “So I started paying closer attention to you. Everything seemed so perfect: the schedule, who you were. Everything was perfect except . . .” His head tipped from side to side. “You didn’t seem to know I existed.”

“You’re Luke Archer. Believe me, I knew you existed.”

“Well, you didn’t act like it.”

Making like Luke, I drained my first cup of coffee in one long drink. I was going to need the sugar and caffeine to get through today. “Well, you didn’t act like I did either, so I guess we’re equal.”

Luke chuckled as he crunched on his toast. “Middle school courting at its finest. Pretending the person you’re into doesn’t exist.”

“Well, look at us now.” I glanced across the table at him. I was eating breakfast with a shirtless Luke Archer after experiencing a night of wild abandon and even wilder sex.

“Yeah, look at us now.” He filled my cup of coffee back up and shot me a wink. “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”

“Mr. Ruth?”

He nodded. “Mr. Ruth.”

We were quiet for a minute, working on our breakfasts and enjoying the peaceful silence. I didn’t feel the need to fill it. Luke didn’t seem to feel the need either. We were comfortable with the quiet, which seemed like the highest step a couple could aspire to. Strange, since we’d only known each other for weeks and been “together” for hours.

I broke the silence once we were pushing the last few bites of our meals around. “So how are we going to make sure that no one finds out?”

“We’ll have to be discreet,” he said.

“Are you capable of being discreet?”

“I am when I have to be. When I’ve got the proper motivation.”

“And this, us, is proper motivation?”

“This, us”—he waved his fork between us—“is the definition of proper motivation.”

The dead serious look on his face made me laugh. Male motivation was not one of the great mysteries of life. “You’ve got a date with an ice bath, but I’ve got one more question before I give your family jewels frostbite.”

“Good one.”

I continued, “If you’d been watching me for a while—been attracted to me for a while—why did you decide that night on the plane was the right time to make your move?”

His eyes lifted to mine as he buttered his toast. “You’re telling me my opening line of
whose ass do I need to kick, Doc
didn’t do it for you?”

“It worked, obviously, but it was a unique approach.”

Luke stretched his legs out and leaned back into his chair. “No, that hadn’t been part of my plan at all, but seeing you sitting there, looking so sad, I didn’t care. I had to talk to you.”

Something inside me softened right then. Maybe it was my heart. Maybe it was my head. Maybe it was both. “You’re kind of wonderful, Luke Archer.”

He set his hand on the table, holding it open and waiting. When my hand settled into his, he held it tightly. “You’re kind of wonderful too, Allie Eden.”

BEING DISCREET WAS harder to do than I’d guessed. Luke was actually doing better with it than I was. I kept finding myself checking the duration of my stares or the degree of my smiles or the tenor of my touch when I changed his compress. Second-guessing and self-regulating had become the way of things ever since we checked out of the hotel in Florida.

For all of the effort, I was confident we’d done a decent job of coming across as nothing more than one trainer and one player working together. A couple of raised brows from Reynolds that I wrote off as muscle spasms—Reynolds was the kind of guy who wouldn’t notice much unless a couple was straight-up getting it on a foot in front of him—was all the suspicion I’d noticed aimed our way. Of course, once the
Sports Anonymous
cover came out, we’d see more.

We were in New Orleans, and it was a game day. After checking into the hotel last night, Luke and I had gone to our respective rooms, though not from his lack of trying to change that. But I was too worried about someone catching me slipping into his room or him sneaking out of mine. Without the excuse of round the clock treatment, there’d be no reason other than the obvious for a woman to be in Luke Archer’s hotel room at night.

The team and staff had checked into the locker room an hour ago, and I’d been busy taping, massaging, and stretching the players. I hadn’t seen Luke since he’d finished his ice bath a while ago, but I found my gaze shifting over to his designated locker, with his uniform and cleats, every few minutes, wondering where he was.

“Eden!” Coach Beckett’s voice echoed through the entire locker room. “My office!” He didn’t wait for me to acknowledge him or pause to locate me in the room—he just marched back into the coach’s office.

“Thanks, Doc,” Watson, one of the team’s back-up pitchers, said, winding his arm a few times after I succinctly had to finish my massage.

“You bet. Just make sure you give yourself a proper warm-up tonight before you jump the mound and start throwing one hundred mile speedballs, okay? That’s how you get on the list for needing a new shoulder before your thirtieth birthday.”

Watson acknowledged me with a grunt as I headed for the coach’s office. I didn’t have a clue what Coach wanted to see me about, but it wasn’t uncommon for us to have trainers’ meetings with him if he needed to be brought up to speed on a player’s status. Those were scheduled though, and never held a mere few hours before a big game.

When I stepped inside the office, I found I wasn’t the only one Coach had rounded up. Shepherd; the team’s doctor, Dr. Callahan; and Turner, the physical therapist, were all circled around someone sitting in a chair across from the coach’s desk.

Luke.

He didn’t divert his attention toward me when I entered the room; he kept his gaze on Coach and his expression conventional. He was in a pair of jeans, a snug-fitting white tee, and had his team ball cap on backward, sending the ends of his hair curling out around the rim of it.

Even being in a room packed with other bodies and neither of us really acknowledging each other, I had a difficult time staying unaffected. The air became a little thinner. My heartbeat a little louder. My breaths a little shorter.

“What do you have to say about this, Eden?” Coach stood behind the desk, already in his uniform and windbreaker, pointing straight at Luke.

My throat constricted at the same time the air rushed out of my lungs. All the eyes in the room, except for Luke’s, turned on me, all of them waiting for my response. Had someone found out? Is that what this unscheduled meeting was about?

My mind went blank as the silence continued.

“Am I speaking in gibberish or something?” Coach grunted, staggering his hands across the desk as he leaned across it. “You’ve spent the last two days with Archer. Start talking.”

My pulse felt like a drumbeat in my throat as adrenaline and anxiety flooded my system. Coach’s stare was unyielding, and the longer I stayed quiet, scrambling for something to say, the more imaginary steam seemed to blow from his ears.

Shepherd’s forehead was drawn together, appraising me with a look that indicated he thought me quite inept. Dr. Callahan's and Turner’s expressions weren’t that much better. Archer was the only one not looking at me, but as my silence stretched on, he shifted in his seat.

“My leg.” His voice filled the room. “How do you think my leg’s doing?”

When he let his head turn just enough in my direction so our eyes connected, I relaxed. This wasn’t a meeting accusing Archer and me of having an inappropriate relationship—this was a status meeting about his leg.

My lungs went from two limp, sagging balloons to bursting. “It’s a stage two pull, as you all know,” I started, having to look away from Archer in order to speak intelligibly. “We continued to treat it through the night, alternating ice and heat, every three hours. The plan is to continue the same through tonight, start some massage and stretching tomorrow, and take it from there.”

Coach was whirling his hand like he was waiting for me to say more. When I didn’t add anything else, he threw his arms in Archer’s direction. “Fantastic. But what does that have to do with tonight’s game?”

“Tonight’s game?” I felt my eyebrows pinch together as I glanced at Archer, still perfectly stoic-faced in his chair, almost like he was waiting to be read a sentence in court.

Coach grumbled something, his cleats clinking on the floor as he started pacing behind the desk. “Yes, can he play or not?” My eyebrows stayed together as he continued, “I’ve gotten everyone else’s opinion on the matter, and now I’d like yours. If it wouldn’t be too big of an inconvenience for you to give it, of course.” Coach shot me a look.

I stood quietly confused for another moment. Waving at Archer, the only one sitting in the room, and ripe from ice and heat treatments, I felt like the answer should have been obvious. “No.” My voice seemed to fill the whole room. “He can’t play tonight.”

I didn’t miss the way Archer’s jaw tightened, his eyes narrowing just enough to give away he wasn’t as removed as he was letting on. I also didn’t miss the rest of the bodies in the room shifting. Shepherd huffed under his breath as his head shook.

Coach didn’t seem to notice any of it—he just kept watching me like he was challenging me to change my answer or something. I wouldn’t though. With this kind of injury, playing a game less than forty-eight hours later shouldn’t even be open to discussion. Archer was out for one game at least, if not a few. It was difficult to say for sure since with an injury like his, you had to take it day by day.

“I’ve got four other people in the room telling me the opposite, Eden.” Coach paused his pacing, his hands going to his hips as he studied Archer in his chair. “What reason do you have to give me for why my star player can’t play a big game tonight?”

Three sets of eyes slid in my direction, varying degrees of smugness and superiority on Shepherd’s, Callahan’s, and Turner’s faces. I returned their looks with one of my own. They all damn well knew it wasn’t in Archer’s best interest to return to the game tonight. Maybe it was in the team’s, but it wasn’t for the player.

“Ignoring the fact that he could barely walk unassisted yesterday,” I began, peaking my brow, “if you put him in the game tonight, Archer has a very high likelihood of reinjuring himself—and much worse. Then your star player might have to sit out the rest of the season instead of a couple of games.”

Coach let that process for a minute while I crossed my arms at the three other people in the room who should have been on board with me. I couldn’t believe that a damn doctor, physical therapist, and the lead athletic trainer would look Coach in the eye and tell him Archer could play tonight.

It was the training profession’s equivalent of malpractice.

But Coach had said the four people in the room had told him Archer could play tonight which meant . . .

My head whipped in Archer’s direction when I put it together. I’d told him he couldn’t play tonight. I’d prepared him because I knew he wouldn’t take sitting out a game well. I couldn’t believe he’d hear me tell him one thing, then go on to tell Coach something else. Anger surged in my veins, and my stare progressed to the point of almost willing him to look at me.

He wouldn’t though. His jaw stayed locked as his stare seemed capable of almost melting the wall in front of him.

“Archer?” Coach’s voice boomed in the room. “You’re sitting out tonight.”

Three annoyed sighs sounded through the room, but all Archer did was give a small tip of his head in acknowledgment.

“We’ll reconvene before the next game, but you’d better make sure you’re listening to the medical team and getting this leg fixed. No more of this tough guy shit, Archer. This team needs you, and not in the form of you riding the bench, you hear me?”

Archer lifted his gaze to Coach’s, his hands gripping the armrests of the chair. “Understood.” Then he shoved out of his chair and left the room without so much as a sideways look in my direction.