Double Play

“Don’t bullshit me, son. You were favoring the shoulder yesterday in the pen.”

“You need glasses. My ERA’s 2.90 right now. Top of the league.”

“Uh-uh, 3.00.” Red peered into the shower, all geriatric stealth, trying to get a good look at his shoulder, but Pace had cranked the water up to torch-his-ass hot so that the steam made it difficult to see clearly.

“It’s fine.” Pace didn’t have to fake the irritation. “I’m fine, everything’s fine.”

“Uh-huh.” Red pulled out his phone, no doubt to call in the troops—management—to have the multimillion-dollar arm assessed.

It was one of the few cons to hitting the big time: from April to October, Pace’s time wasn’t his own, and neither was his body. Reaching out, water flying, he shut Red’s phone. “Relax.”

“Relax?” Red shook his head in disbelief. “There’s no relaxing in baseball!”

Okay, so he had a point. The Heat had been gaining momentum with shocking speed, gathering huge public interest. With that interest came pressure. They were hot, baby, hot, but if they didn’t perform, there would be trades and changes. That was the nature of the game, and not just for players.

Red was getting up there and not exactly in the best health. Pace didn’t know what would happen if management decided to send the old guy back down to the minors instead of letting him walk out with his dignity intact and retire on his own terms. Well, actually, Pace did know. It would kill Red. “Just taking a shower, Red. No hidden agenda.”

“Good then.” Red coughed, wobbling on his feet at the violence of it, glaring at Pace when he made a move to help. When Red managed to stop hacking up a lung, he lay Pace’s towel over the tile wall. “You’ve had enough hot water. You’re shriveling.”

When Pace looked down at himself, Red snorted. “Get out of that hot water, boy.”

Boy.

He hadn’t been a boy in a damn long time, but he supposed to Red he’d always be a kid. Waiting until Red shuffled away, Pace turned the water off and touched his shoulder. Better, he told himself, and carefully stretched. Good enough.

It had to be.

Red had a lot at stake. The Heat had a lot at stake.

And knowing it, Pace had everything at stake.

Reporter Holly Hutchins prided herself on her instincts, which hadn’t failed her yet. Okay, so maybe they routinely failed her when it came to men, but as it pertained to work, she was razor-sharp. And given that work was all she had at the moment, she really needed this to go down correctly. She was waiting to interview Pace Martin, the celebrated, beloved badass ace starting pitcher she’d just watched in the bullpen.

He probably hadn’t been aware of her observing his practice. There’d not been a manager or another player in sight, certainly no outsiders, including reporters or writers—of which she happened to be both. She’d sat on the grassy hill high above the Heat’s stadium, surrounded on one side by the Pacific Ocean and on the other by the steep, rugged Santa Ynez Mountains, and studied Pace from the shadow of an oak tree.

She hadn’t used her camera. That would have been an invasion of privacy. She might be the epitome of a curious reporter, but in spite of her ethicless, demanding ass of a boss, Holly had a tight grip on her own personal compass of right and wrong. Taking pictures when Pace hadn’t been aware of her even being there would have been wrong.

Which was a shame, because he’d looked pretty damn fine in his warm-up sweats. Not a surprise, really, since he was currently gracing the cover of People magazine’s “Most Beautiful People” issue.

But what had been a surprise: his pitching had sucked.

She hadn’t wanted this assignment, had fought against it—hell, she’d known only the basics about baseball before spending the last two weeks cramming—but Tommy had forced her to do this or quit. Since she’d grown fond of eating and having a roof over her head, she’d agreed.

Reluctantly.

And since she did nothing half-assed, she was in this, for better or worse. She knew Pace was the best of the best. He had two Cy Young awards and a Gold Glove, and routinely won a minimum of twenty games a season. She also knew that the Heat needed a fantastic year and that the pressure had to be enormous. Holly understood pressure; she wrote under enormous pressure on a daily basis.

She wasn’t tabloid. No, making up tidbits and taking racy pictures didn’t turn her on. The truth turned her on, a throwback from a disillusioning childhood. Tommy White, the editor-in-chief for American Online Living, had given her a weekly blog on his site, where she picked subjects of national interest, then profiled that subject in depth for three months at a time—with an interesting angle. Secrets. As she knew all too well, everyone had one and people loved to read about them, and since she was the master of digging them up—thanks, Mom—it was a natural fit.

Her last ongoing series had been on space travel. It’d garnered her awards for exposing the dangerous use of inferior, cheaper parts, which had resulted in two tragic accidents . . . and a bitter breakup when her boyfriend had turned out to be one of the rocket scientists on the wrong side of the law.

Before that, she’d blogged about the ghost towns of the great wild, wild West, using her own photographs to document what had been left behind when those towns had failed and what the cost had been in terms of human suffering. That one had ended up getting her a segment on 60 Minutes.

Yep, secrets had both once destroyed her and served her well.