Chapter 13

 

The Lobster Festival’s youth softball tournament was always a big deal in Brides Bay. This morning, a boy’s team from Spy Hill was opening the six-division tournament against a squad from Bangor. The local kids were leading 5-1 in the third inning, much to the delight of at least a hundred cheering supporters.

Claire was at the game mostly to watch the broad-shouldered, uber-competent guy who was running the tournament. She and Ry saw very little of each other these days, and she missed him to a scary extent—scary because he could never be anything to her but a client and a casual friend. If anything had been needed to convince her of that, their talk after his return home from the race had done it. Ry might as well have set up a billboard in front of his house advertising that he didn’t do commitments, and he sure as heck didn’t do small town life either.

She, however, did.

Soon enough she’d be good and busy. A company from Portland would be arriving to erect the music stage, and then a separate crew would install the sound setup. With Cassidy’s help, it was her job to supervise all that. Ry had promised to be on hand later to work with the sound guys, but right now he was immersed in running the softball tourney, making sure the kids were all having fun.

Unfortunately, fun was in short supply at the moment because the coach of the visiting team, a late-thirties dude sporting a Yankees cap, looked like he might be about to stroke out. He’d been stomping up and down the sidelines screaming both at his players and the poor umpire almost from the first pitch. His behavior was in sharp contrast to Ry’s, who was giving encouragement to every kid on the field and they seemed to respond to him well. She was beginning to think there wasn’t anything he didn’t excel at.

Except maybe genuine emotional contact with other human beings.

She sighed and tugged her ball cap down a little lower to shield her eyes from the bright sun. Ry had only acknowledged her once today, just as she was taking a seat in the bleachers behind home plate. She’d given him a warm smile but had received only a brief nod in return. That was pretty much consistent with how he’d been acting in the two weeks since the New Hampshire race.

It wasn’t like he’d suddenly become frosty to her. He’d just quietly withdrawn again.

She’d spent way too much time thinking about it, trying to figure it out. He’d claimed he was too busy both times she’d asked if he wanted to schedule a guitar lesson or a Stanley training session. She couldn’t help feeling a bit hurt by what was increasingly feeling like a brushoff.

And that made her feel needy. Like she needed his attention and maybe even his approval. It was an unfamiliar feeling and one she hated.

Even worse, yesterday Carter had told her that Ry was going ahead with the rebuilding project, which made the eventual razing of her old house a virtual certainty. He wanted to get started on it as soon as possible, living in the old house while the new one went up beside it. When Carter expressed skepticism that anyone could handle the noise and disruption during the build, Ry had simply quipped that the noise wouldn’t bother him because he’d grown up in a house where everyone yelled at each other all day long. Besides, he would be away a lot for motorcycle races or coaching clinics.

And he had been on the go lately, that was for sure. In the last two weeks, he’d made two more trips to the New York area for hockey clinics and another trip somewhere else—he hadn’t told her where—to “get in some serious practice” on his racing motorcycle. During those absences, she’d looked after both the house and Stanley. Sadly, he’d made a point of telling her she didn’t need to do anything special for his return and shouldn’t hang around until he got home. On each occasion, she’d put Stanley in his crate, locked the door, and gloomily gone back to her apartment. It went against the grain, but that was clearly how he wanted her to play it.

She had to give him credit for continuing to show up at the festival organizing meetings. He’d helped plan the music setup with Cassidy and her, and he’d done a good job. But he’d been all business and had left as soon as he could.

She sighed, resting her chin on her cupped hands as she absently watched the game. They’d been getting along so well, and she still felt that powerful tug of chemistry whenever he was around. But Ry didn’t seem to feel it anymore. Either that or he was doing an awesome job of hiding it.

A loud voice from behind jerked her out of her gloomy thoughts.

“Hey, you moron! Leave the kid alone!”

She turned to see Pam Slowey on her feet, all five feet nothing of her. She was stabbing her finger at the obnoxious coach. Tammy was yanking her wife’s arm, trying to pull her back down onto the bench.

“I don’t care whether he’s the kid’s father or the King of Spain,” Pam barked, loud enough for the whole crowd to hear. “It looks like he’s hurting the boy.”

Claire hadn’t been paying much attention to the field, but now she saw the coach pulling his pitcher off the mound, yammering at him the whole way across the infield. The tow-headed boy, who Pam said was his son, was red-faced and clearly on the verge of sobbing. The poor kid yanked his arm out of the coach’s grasp, ran to the bench, and flopped down, locking his gaze on the ground. When his teammates shied away from him like he was contagious, the youngster burst into tears.

The coach-father stood over the boy, his hands on his hips as he continued to lecture him. Claire couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but the anger written on his face made it clear that it was nothing good.

She was trying to decide if she should do something when Ry bolted out from a gate near the team’s bench and strode straight up to the still-fuming coach. His expression was unreadable, but obviously he’d taken it upon himself to get into the middle of the ugly situation. Claire thought that was a very good thing, because otherwise she wouldn’t have been surprised to see Pam clamber down from the stands and deck the guy.

Ry made a hand gesture to the umpire, who had been watching the little altercation with obvious alarm but so far hadn’t interfered. The ump nodded, as if to say go for it. Ry clamped his arm around the coach’s shoulders and said something into his ear before urging him—more like dragging him, actually—away from the bench. The two of them stopped in the outfield, about twenty-five feet behind first base. Claire felt a brief stab of anxiety that the situation had the potential to escalate into a fight or at least into a nasty verbal altercation.

It quickly became evident that Ry had taken the man aside for a private talking to instead of laying into him in front of his son and the other boys on the team. He was speaking to the guy with his back turned to the bench and the spectators. The coach was paying close attention, nodding several times as Ry spoke.

Claire started to relax. Ry could be mercurial and moody when he wanted to be, but there was absolutely no doubt that he always stepped up when things got tough.

* * *

Ry was so pissed off it had been all he could do not to grab the dumbass coach by the scruff of the neck and toss him right out of the ballpark. But that would have just embarrassed everyone, including the man’s poor, humiliated son. So he’d stifled that instinct and decided to settle instead for a quiet but deadly serious warning.

“What’s your name, pal?” he asked the guy, whose frown remained thunderous.

“Kevin Blocker.”

“Kevin, I’m Ry Griffin. I’m running the tournament this year.”

Blocker stared at him a moment. “Ry Griffin the hockey player?”

“Yep.”

“Hell, I knew you were familiar.” Blocker gave him a shit-eating grin. “Wow, this is one for the books. I’m about to get my ass reamed by a hockey star.”

“You sure as hell are. Look, Kevin, you gotta know that what you were doing out there was totally wrong.”

Blocker looked away.

“I damn well hope you don’t treat your son even worse than that when he has nobody around to protect him,” Ry said.

Blocker swiveled his neck to stare at him. “What? God, no. Of course I don’t. Look, I just got a little too worked up out there. You know what it’s like, man. The heat of competition and all that.”

“Not good enough,” Ry said. “There’s no excuse for what you did. None. And if I see you lay an angry hand on that boy again, you won’t get a second chance. I’ll kick you out of the tournament so fast you won’t have time to open your mouth. And I’ll report you to your home league as an abusive coach. We clear on that?”

Blocker’s face reddened, and for a moment it looked like he might explode again. But then he nodded. “Yeah, sure. Clear as crystal. But I have to say you’ve got a lot of nerve, Griffin. He’s my son. I wasn’t hurting him—ask him if you don’t believe me. It’s good for kids to get chewed out a bit when they screw up. Builds character.”

To Ry, that was an unwelcome reminder of his dad’s coaching and child-rearing philosophy. Yell at ’em and then whack ’em.

“Builds character? What a crock. Listen up, Kevin. If you keep up with that kind of abusive shit, your son will end up hating you for the rest of his life. Trust me on that.”

Blocker shrugged. “Like I said, maybe I got a little too steamed, but you’ve got no right to tell me how to raise my boy. It’s none of your damn business.”

“Somebody sure as hell needs to tell you,” Ry snapped.

“Man, can we just get on with the game now? Everybody’s staring at us, including the kids.”

When the guy shifted as if to duck around him, Ry blocked his path. “You’ve earned their contempt.” He finally took a step back. “Now, go back to the bench and apologize to your son.”

The guy shot him an incredulous look. “I’ll do it when we get home—not in front of the other kids. It would undermine my authority.”

“I doubt that, but anyway I don’t care. Do it right now or you’re out of the tournament. You’ve got another guy there that can step in as coach.”

The guy seethed for a few seconds but then deflated. “All right. Fine.” He started to turn, then stopped. “What the hell are you doing in a place like this anyway, Griffin? Must be one hell of a come down from the Big Apple.”

“Last time I looked, treating a child like crap was frowned on in New York too.” Ry pointed at the bench. “Now go fix things with your boy before it’s too late, and then let’s get on with the damn game.”

Blocker jogged to the bench and took a knee in front of his son. Ry gave a hand signal to the ump, indicating it was okay to restart the game.

As he walked off the field, he kept a close eye on the little drama playing out at the bench. The kid kept nodding and gulping back tears until Blocker reached around and started rubbing the boy’s back, looking as if he might even be remorseful. Ry hoped so, for the boy’s sake.

He moved behind home plate and leaned against the mesh screen. He had every intention of talking to Blocker’s son for a few moments after the game. He’d give him a little encouragement as well as a slip of paper with his cell number. Maybe Blocker was just having a bad day and was actually a pretty good dad, but he wanted the kid to have someone he could call if ever there was a serious problem.

“You did a great job of handling that situation,” a soft voice said from beside him.

He’d been so focused on the little drama going on at the visiting team’s bench that he hadn’t noticed Claire slipping up beside him. Her pretty, open face had such an expression of admiration on it that it made his heart turn over in his chest.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Who knows what’ll happen once he gets the kid home?”

“Well, you seemed to put the fear of God into him, so that’s good.”

He caught the scent of her hair—like summer and strawberries. Something twisted low in his gut, and he had a sudden urge to bury his face in the soft, blond curls that tumbled down from under her white ball cap, as if her kindness and sweet nature could erase the ugliness of the past few minutes.

As if he could forget all the ugly memories of his past by taking her in his arms and sweeping her away to someplace private and dark, where he could strip her naked and lose himself in her gorgeous curves and clinging warmth.

He had to stop thinking about her like that. It didn’t make any sense to get involved with her no matter how much he wanted her. For starters, they couldn’t seem to be together for more than a few minutes without getting into some kind of a debate, although he had to admit that those tense discussions made him feel more…well, challenged. Still, arguing wasn’t his thing, so that left just the sex. Yeah, it’d no doubt be some great sex, but even if he were up for something casual like that, he doubted she’d be.

No, it was better to keep Claire Maddox in a little mental box marked concierge and leave it at that.

“I figured I’d better get into it with the guy before Pam did,” he said in a joking voice. “Man, she’s about as tall as a fire hydrant, but the woman can be damn scary even without Tammy backing her up.”

“Actually, Tammy pretty much had to hog-tie her to keep her from running down onto the field. They had quite a fight over it, as usual. Those two are in a state of warfare almost as often as they’re loving the hell out of each other.”

“I’ve been noticing that.”

They’d had a rip-roaring argument last week when they cleaned his place. Of all things, it was over who would win this year’s muffin-baking competition at the Lobster Festival, a subject that was apparently on the order of importance of world peace around here. The funny thing was that Pam and Tammy never seemed all that angry even when they were yelling at each other.

“Anyway,” he added, “I decided I’d better straighten the guy out before something blew up. I sure didn’t want a full-out brawl in the very first game of the tournament.”

Claire laughed. “Does that mean a brawl would be okay in the second game?”

“You’re a riot, Maddox.”

She seemed pretty upbeat this morning. While it was right to keep his distance, he realized how much he’d hated to see her so subdued around him lately.

“I’m taking this seriously because I’ve never run a tournament before,” he said. “The pressure is just about killing me.”

His tone was joking, but when he was talking to Blocker, he’d felt like every eye in the stands and on the field was fixed on him. The last thing he wanted to do was mess up, and he suspected some of the locals were just itching for him to do just that.

“Really? Why is that?” Claire asked. “Just because Beth will make it a big deal in the newspaper if you screw something up?”

It was like she’d read his mind. “Seriously?”

She laughed softly again. “No, of course not.”

“Don’t forget you were the one who railroaded me into this tournament job. If I’m going to go down, you’re going to go down too, little lady.”

When Claire’s eyes popped wide, Ry realized that statement could be seen in a whole different light from what he’d intended. “I guess that wasn’t the best choice of words, was it?”

“Ah, I’m not sure what you mean.”

She seemed to have had some trouble getting that out. Ry was damn sure she knew exactly what he meant—probably because it was a very revealing and obvious Freudian slip. Having Claire’s naked body spread out for him was a very enticing mental image.

He was saved from responding when the batter, a burly kid from the visiting team, hit the ball with a resounding clank off his metal bat. The ball shot straight at the pitcher’s head and, sadly, the youngster on the mound couldn’t manage to get his glove up in time to catch or block it. When the ball hit him smack in the face, the boy collapsed like he’d been shot. A split-second later, he let out a banshee wail and rolled over onto his stomach.

“Oh, shit.” Ry got set to dash onto the field. “I’ve had plenty of experience with busted noses, and that kid’s got one for sure. I’d better get out there.”

“Yes, yes…go.” Claire was obviously still flustered by their exchange.

Turning his back on his sweet concierge, he jogged toward the latest crisis, determined to put Claire firmly back in the mental box where she belonged.