We sat down with our plastic trays piled high with arcade pizza, nachos, chili fries and beverages. A soda for me, a beer for him.

“Sure you don’t want your own?” Nathan asked, offering me the beer. The scent of it was enough to remind me of last night’s debacle and this morning’s pain and I quickly shook my head as a wave of nausea swept through me.

“No thanks.” I dug through my purse looking for my phone. When I found it, I placed it on the table with the recording app ready.

“Probably a good idea.” He was eyeing the phone like it was a spider. “I was barely able to defend myself last night.”

“Defend yourself? Against Nick?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Against you.”

“Me?” I sputtered, trying to think of big, broad Nathan Ryder needing to defend himself against anyone, let alone me. Though, I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing him try. I imagined the two of us tangled together in a way that was anything but defensive.

“That’s right,” he said seriously. “I was scared for my life.”

I rolled my eyes. “Men.”

He put a hand on his chest as if I had wounded him. “You are a powerful force, Ms. Hall,” he told me. “Your little friend practically curled into a ball on the ground the moment you left.”

Shit. I had totally forgotten that I had left Nick and Nathan alone together after I had stalked off. I could only imagine what they had found to talk about.

As if he could tell what I was thinking, Nathan grinned.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We didn’t get into any male bonding after you left. He pretty much slunk back to the bar and I went home. Though I did feel like you let him off a little too easy.”

“Too easy?” I had been yelling at Nick about our crappy sex life in the middle of a sidewalk in Austin. I couldn’t imagine how I could have been more terrifying to a guy who, once he was off the stage, was usually startled by his own shadow.

“Any guy that leaves his girlfriend unsatisfied deserves a far worse punishment than you gave him,” Nathan said seriously.

My blush came on fast and intense. I wanted to put my head down on the table and just disappear. The last thing I wanted to do at this moment was discuss the sex I had, or more accurately hadn’t been having with my stupid ex-boyfriend. Then the rest of my drunken rant came back to me and I realized I hadn’t just been telling Nick how bad sex had been with him, but I had also screeched something about how I wish I had been having sex with Nathan. I think I had also said something about his cute butt.

Fuck me.

No. That was what kept getting me into trouble in the first place. Fuck no one, I corrected myself. Fuck no one, especially not me and especially not Nathan.

When I finally managed to compose myself, my cheeks still tingling from embarrassment, I glanced up to find Nathan looking at me with an expression of complete satisfaction. Jerk, I thought, but without any anger.

I cleared my throat and reached for my phone, but before I could start the recording app, Nathan’s hand closed over mine. His fingers were warm and soft.

“Good boyfriends don’t treat their girlfriends the way he treated you,” he said. “You deserve better.”

You deserve me, was what his expression seem to say, but those words went unspoken. I was grateful because I felt a strange rush of sadness. I hadn’t allowed myself to grieve the end of my relationship. Despite its flaws and its short length, there had been good things, and now I realized that I was on my own again. That I would be going back to Houston to a bed that I no longer shared. And that made me sad.

But this was not the time.

I cleared my throat and pushed away the embarrassing tickle of tears. Pulling my hand and phone out of Nathan’s grasp, I pasted a smile on my face.

“So, Nathan Ryder,” I said, pointing the speaker at him. “Tell me what you love about baseball.”

* * *

After an hour I started to worry. Nathan was funny and kind and a great person to talk to, but any time he started talking about anything personal, whether it was about his family and friends, he flashed me a smile and said: “But this is all off record.”

Off record I had a great human-interest piece. A story about Nathan and his three older sisters, a lawyer, a doctor, and fancy New York editor—how they put on family talent shows where Nathan did juggling tricks. Or a story about Nathan’s parents—both teachers who met when they were in high school. Or a story about Nathan’s first coach, who had noticed his natural talent and encouraged him to join a local team. Nathan was a good student, a good kid, and a good ballplayer. Only he didn’t want anyone to know about it. He didn’t want me to write anything that wasn’t already in the millions of profiles that had been written about him. I couldn’t say anything new. Even the poetry thing—which was adorable—was off the record.

I had been trying to construct an article around him for the past half hour but had barely come up with anything more than “Nathan Ryder was a stand-up kind of guy but I can’t really tell you why, just trust me.” It would be the kind of article that people would skim for some sort of big reveal or interesting tidbit and would come away disappointed when they found neither.

I leaned back in my wobbly plastic arcade chair, trying not to feel so depressed.

Even when I tried to ask questions that weren’t even about personal details, just preferences, he still managed to dodge them. I was starting to get really, really annoyed. Like he had sprayed me in the face with water again, if that had been an accident.

“Favorite dessert?” I thought that maybe if I tried working through a few innocuous questions, I could wiggle a few more personal ones past him, but he just raised his eyebrow at me, as if he could tell exactly what I was trying to do.

“Well, off the record,” he began, and I bit back a frustrated groan. There was a possibility I would dump my soda on him if he kept this up. “I love ice cream. The more chocolate, the better. And I usually don’t share.” He winked at me. “Unless someone asks very nicely.”

“Favorite holiday?”

“Off the record, it’s Thanksgiving. It’s cheesy, but I really enjoy spending time with my family. And stuffing. I really like stuffing.”

“It certainly doesn’t show,” I muttered. Nothing about his body said that this was a guy who enjoyed eating as much as he claimed to.

“Baseball is good exercise,” he said. “It’s all about control and strength. There’s nothing like being able to take a baseball and with the aid of a piece of wood, knock it up into the sky with everyone around you cheering. It’s kind of an amazing feeling.”

I was totally enthralled. This was the kind of Nathan people wanted to see. Someone intense, eloquent, and totally enamored with his sport. He loved baseball, that was clear, and at the end of his little speech, I loved it as well. But he seemed to realize he had exposed himself a little more than he intended because he then shot me a wicked grin. “And I have been known to enjoy working off those calories in other, more creative ways.”

Immediately my mind went to work imagining those various different ways. I swallowed hard, as several different images of how we could burn calories together popped into my head.

“So you have other interests outside of baseball?” I quickly tried to take back control of the interview.

“Of course,” he told me, his gaze now intense. “In fact, I bet I share quite a few of those interests with you.”

Goddamn it, he was good, I thought, my pulse thrumming in my throat. Get it together, Hall, you won skee-ball, you can win this interview. I shot him a smile and leaned forward slightly, hoping he’d catch a glimpse of my cleavage, which had previously been respectfully restrained. I wasn’t going to let him distract me. If anything, I was going to do the distracting. Maybe he’d forget all about his stupid “off-the-record” rule.

“Well, why don’t you tell which interests you’d like to share with me,” I offered, lowering my voice to a purr.

“Hmm.” He reached across the table where my hand lay and gently smoothed his fingers across the inside of my wrist. I shivered, despite myself. “Like I said, the right person could persuade me to share anything, whether it’s my favorite ice cream or,” he glanced down at my open blouse, “or my favorite shirt.” His eyes caught mine again. “I can be very, very generous when it comes to those kind of things.”

I found that I was speechless, my entire body humming with desire. Until he spoke again.

“But, of course, that’s all off the record.”

Fuck.

I yanked my hand away.

“Seriously?” I asked, feeling frustrated, in more ways than one. I needed an ice bath. “You’re not going to give me anything?”

“Told you,” he shrugged, at least having the decency to look a little sheepish. “I’m not newsworthy.”

“No, you’re an incredible pain in my ass,” I shot back bluntly. “And that’s on the record.”

“And off the record?” he wanted to know.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I told him with a glare.

He looked down at the table now covered with paper plates that had practically been licked clean. I would have been embarrassed, but Nathan had gone at the cheap, greasy food with the same enthusiasm. Both our plastic cups were empty as well. He picked them up.

“Let’s refuel before we start on the next question.” Without waiting for a response, he took our drinks to the counter, leaving me alone at the table. It would have been a perfect time to think up a new line of questioning, but I found myself distracted by the perfectly delicious sight of Nathan in his well-worn jeans. I bit back a sigh as he leaned forward to grab the now-refilled drinks, giving me and the rest of the room a great look at his great ass. Too bad I couldn’t write my article on the perfection of his body, going into agonizing detail of the way the soft denim cupped his rear and clung to his muscular thighs.

I felt the heat rise again in my face as he turned, arms full of drinks, and caught me openly staring at him. His own smile grew, from the charming one he had shared at the table, to something slightly wicked.

He headed back to the table, and if I didn’t know any better, I would have sworn he was putting a little more a lazy, languid roll to his hips with each step. Either way, I knew that it was going to take a whole lot of self-control to keep on topic once he returned to the table.

But I was nothing if not resilient. I was also just undersexed, I told myself. I was still upset about the break-up and looking for attention and attraction in all the wrong places. He was a baseball player, for god’s sakes, I told myself. He could have his pick of literally any woman. He was flirting so he wouldn’t have to answer questions. Because there had definitely been a few that he had quickly rejected.

“What about girls?” I asked when he sat back down at the table with our drinks.

The sexy grin flickered; he was clearly sensing that I was not fucking around anymore. No more Miss Nice Reporter, I thought. You brought out the bitch and she’s not leaving until she has her on-the-record details. “You don’t even give a guy a moment to settle down, do you?” he asked. I still needed that story and I was allowing myself to get distracted by his great ass and fantastic smile.

“It’s just getting late,” I said, pointing to the rest of the arcade which was half as full as it had been when we arrived. I hadn’t looked at my phone, but I was going to bet there were at least three more messages from my editor asking for a draft of the article and I still didn’t have anything of substance to put in it. I was going to have to prod a little more aggressively. “Girls,” I repeated, pushing my phone a little closer to him.

He frowned at it. “Are you asking for yourself or for the article?”

“For the article, of course,” I said, wishing that were the whole truth. I could sense that there was something there, but I did want to know why a guy like him seemed to be so interested in a girl like me. My lips and hair were nice but they weren’t nice enough to land a soon-to-be major league baseball player. Were they?

“Well.” He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Off the record, there’s no one.” He gave me a smug smile.

I glared at him. “I don’t know what the problem would be in telling people that you’re single.”

“Because that’s something that seems unnecessary for anyone to know except myself and a person I might be interested in.”

I did my best to ignore him. It was like skee-ball again, only instead of brushing against me, he was going to distract me with comments like that.

“What about high school,” I tried again. “Did you date in high school?”

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked abruptly.

“This isn’t about me,” I reminded him.

“It’s about baseball,” he told me, but there was a glimmer in his eye. Maybe if I gave him something, he’d give in return. An answer, of course, though I had the impression he’d give me anything else I might ask for. I shuddered.

“Fine,” I said, crossing my arms.

“Do you think I would make it in your fantasy draft?” he asked.

I was confused. What was he talking about?

“Mandy told me about the piece you did for that online magazine,” he clarified. “The one where you drafted all the historical players and reviewed the season. I read it the other night.”

My mouth dropped open. “You read the whole thing?” That had been an entire season’s worth of articles. Several hours’ worth of reading. Nick had gotten through half a paragraph.

“Stayed up late,” Nathan confessed. “Couldn’t stop reading it, actually.”

I felt myself blush, but for the first time with him, it wasn’t because he was making me feel all hot and bothered. I was truly touched by what he said.

“You really know your stuff,” he said.

“I’m just a nerd who likes baseball,” I told him and he grinned.

“And I’m just a nerd who likes to play it.”

We just stared at each other for a moment before Nathan cleared his throat. I looked away, feeling strangely emotional.

“Come on.” He abruptly rose from the table. “Let’s get out of here.”

Before I could say anything, he grabbed the trash from the table and tossed it in the garbage, took his beer, downed it, and headed out the door towards the parking lot.

Dammit, I thought to myself as I followed him. I had lost my chance to get something out of the interview.

But when I got outside, instead of spotting him halfway across the parking lot, waiting by his car, I found him completely distracted. By the batting cages. A guy and girl, clearly high school sweethearts, were in one of the cages together, the guy with his arms around the girl, showing her how to hold the bat.

“Ever tried one of these?” Nathan asked as I came to stand next to him.

I shook my head. Even though the arcade my mom had often left me in had a batting cage, I had never really given it a shot. It seemed a little scary, the whoosh and smack of a ball hurtling at uncomfortable speeds often towards your head. For the first time I realized how terrifying it must be to experience that in front of a stadium full of people, all of them hoping you’re going to hit the ball and win the game.

But the look on Nathan’s face was one of excitement, not fear. It was clear he absolutely loved all aspects of this game. He smiled fondly at the couple, still trying to get the girl’s stance correct, and I found myself with a stroke of genius.

“Nathan,” I said, coming around in front of him. “What would you say to making another bet?”