What’s Next?

Quit Your Pitchin’

Book 2 of The There’s No Crying in Baseball Series

George & Wrigley

7-20-18

Chapter 1

Dear Lord baby Jesus, please make baseball season start sooner.

-Text from Diamond to Wrigley

Wrigley

Lumberjacks vs. Strokers

I’d never, not once, been to a major league baseball game. But, for my sister, I’d do just about anything. Even sit down at some sporting event and pretend to act like I cared.

“You could at least act like this place isn’t infecting you with hepatitis,” Diamond hissed under her breath at me.

I grimaced.

This place was gross.

Well, it didn’t look gross, but the seat was sticky.

As a certified occupational therapist who worked with a home health agency, I was no stranger to dirty places and things. But I didn’t do sticky very well. There was just something about it that grossed me out.

“I’m sticking to the chair,” I spat, standing up and looking at the seat.

The seat was black plastic, so at first, I couldn’t see what the stickiness was from.

But, upon closer inspection, I could see that there was some residue dripping down from the platform above the chair behind me.

I braced both hands on the metal arms of the chair and bent over the seat, peering behind to see what was dripping and groaned.

“Umm,” I said, looking up at the man that was paying a great amount of attention to his phone. “Your drink is spilling. And it’s dripping down my chair.”

The man looked up, reached forward, and tipped his cup back up.

But, in the process, he’d spilled even more of his drink—this time directly onto my chair.

“Wrigley!” Diamond hissed. “Sit down!”

I did, but I didn’t stop the grimace that curled the corner of my mouth when I looked at her.

“There’s a red Slushee all in my seat…” I paused when a thought occurred to me, turning and trying to see my ass over my shoulder. “Is there anything on my shorts.”

“Absolutely nothing.”

I froze at the sound of that deep voice, and I turned to follow the direction I’d heard it from. And nearly swallowed my tongue.

Why?

Because there was a man standing on the grass right below the short wall that separated our seats from the field.

And the man?

He was gorgeous.

He had a yellow jersey on with ‘Lumberjacks’ written across the chest. His jersey was tucked into a pair of skin-tight white baseball pants, and those pants were pulled up above the calf to expose his matching yellow socks. His feet were encased nicely in a pair of pink baseball cleats.

One hand was tucked into a glove, and the other was holding the rim of his baseball hat—which he pulled off moments later, giving me a blinding smile.

He had red hair.

Red hair that leaned more toward orange than red, and a trim beard that closely resembled the same shade.

His teeth were straight and white, and his eyes were a bright green that shone like shiny emeralds.

And he was staring straight at me.

“Ummm,” I hesitated. “Did you say something?”

“I said there’s not a damn thing wrong with your shorts,” he repeated, then he walked off, leaving me standing there stunned.

“Oh my God!” Diamond hissed. “Do you know who that is?”

I looked at my sister and followed her gaze back to the man that was now in a circle swinging his bat.

“I have no clue who that is,” I admitted, shaking slightly. “Should I?”

God, he really made my heart race.

And how freakin’ tall was he? Holy shit!

He had to be at least six-foot-four or five. And, he wasn’t skinny either. He was stocky.

Tall and stocky.

The man looked like he’d take down a freight train.

“That’s Furious George Hoffman,” Diamond said as if I should know this. As if I’d disappointed her by not knowing. “He’s won the Home Run Derby three years in a row, and has one of the highest batting averages in the entire major league.”

I nodded my head as if that was the coolest thing in the world. “Nifty.”

She rolled her eyes. “You have no clue if it’s any good or not.” She snorted. “You disgust me.”

I had no clue what a home run was. But, a derby, I knew was like with horses and at the race track. I just couldn’t see the correlation.

I grinned, then patted my sister on the head. “I’m gonna walk up there and grab a few towels to wipe my seat down with. Be right back.”

My sister waved me off and returned her eyes back to the game, and I was just about to hike my way back up the million stairs I’d just descended when a crack had me looking up.

People around me started to squeal, and I looked up and around just in time to take a baseball straight to my left eye.

I hit the ground seconds later.

***

George

I cursed and started running, hopping over the small wall that separated the stands from the field.

The moment I hit the concrete, I vaulted up the two steps and crouched down beside the woman I’d just beaned in the face with one of my foul balls.

The brown-headed temptress dressed in her tight white jeans shorts, tiny black tank top, and flip-flops looked like a broken doll.

“Wrigley!” the girl that’d been sitting beside the bombshell cried. “Move!”

I growled at the people that were crowding around me and said two words. “Back. Off!”

They backed off, giving me enough room to shift the woman’s hair away from her face and take my first look at her eye.

It was already swelling, turning a deep shade of purple.

Shit.

“George!”

I ignored Coach Siggy’s voice and felt for a pulse, happy when I’d found one.

Passed out. Not dead. Good.

“George!”

I kept ignoring him and smoothed a hand over the woman’s face.

“Wake up, beautiful.”

As if she’d been waiting for my call, her eyelids fluttered open, and the intense gray eyes were once again staring back, looking at me.

“Hello,” I smiled. “I’m sorry.”

She smiled back. “Sorry for what?”

I pressed lightly on her forehead, right above where the swelling was starting, and said, “For hitting you in the face with a ball.”

She moaned. “That’s gonna suck the next few weeks.” She frowned. “I’d say I’d take your balls to my face any time you want but…I have a class for battered women tomorrow. This is going to be hard for them to look at.”

I held my laughter inside…barely.

I also silently agreed with her.

My mother wouldn’t have taken advice from some woman with a black eye. She’d have just looked at her like another victim.

The girl started to sit up just as the medics made their way down the steps to us.

“You okay, ma’am?” the first medic asked.

“Yes,” the woman answered.

“Wrigley!”

‘Wrigley’ looked around my crouched form and saw her sister there, staring at her with worry in her eyes.

“I’m okay, Diamond,” Wrigley promised. “I told you we shouldn’t have come here.”

Diamond gave a watery laugh. “I also told you to watch for fly balls in this section. Which you insisted we sit in because it didn’t have netting to obstruct your view. Are you glad we sat here now?”

Wrigley stuck her tongue out at her sister, and I found myself thinking about sucking that tongue into my own mouth.

“Game’s on, Hoffman!” Coach Siggy bellowed. “Either get your ass over here and get the game back on or find your way to the locker room.”

I’d rather find myself into something else, but alas, I wasn’t a total cad.

I stood up, but not before pressing a kiss to Wrigley’s hand. “Hope you’re not too fucked up tomorrow to give that speech.”

Wrigley’s eyes met mine. “Oh, I’m a pro at hiding my bruises.”

And, before I could so much as comment on that, or relay how angry it made me feel to know that she had any experience at all hiding her bruises, she made her way up the stairs with the paramedics, leaving me no reason at all to be standing in the stands.

I sighed and went back down, easily vaulting myself over the wall.

Then I went back to the box, and hit a solid line drive up the middle, yielding me a double.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t look for her throughout the game.

She came back some time in the third inning. She was gone by the eighth.

***

Too Bad So Sad

Tyler & Reagan

8-8-18

Book 5 of The Simple Man Series

Chapter 1

Never run with a set of bagpipes. You could fall and poke your eye out, or even worse, get kilt.

-Text from Reagan to her dad

Reagan

I looked over at my friend.

“You want me to what?” I asked in surprise.

“Go on a blind date,” she said. “I want to set you up with someone I know you’ll adore.”

I highly doubted I’d adore anyone.

I never did.

I was, by definition, a very shy person.

Until someone pissed me off, then not so much.

But I didn’t think that a blind date would piss me off—it took a lot.

I snorted and turned to face Janie fully. “I don’t have time to go on a blind date with anyone. Besides, what if he’s a serial killer?”

Janie gave me a droll look. “He’s not a serial killer. In fact, he’s a cop.”

Like that was any better?

I winced. “I’m not dating a cop.”

I refused.

That was a big fat no. I would not, under any circumstance, date a cop.

It’s not that I had anything against them. My dad was a cop, after all. However, cops had certain personalities that tended to clash with my wild and free soul.

I was a quiet person. I was a scholar. I was a pain in the ass, and on occasion, I did some not so legal things that might get a cop in trouble if they knew about it and didn’t arrest me for.

No, I didn’t do drugs. And no, those things weren’t all that bad.

It’s just that sometimes I got myself in hot water while quenching my thirst for knowledge.

You see, I was a botanist.

My job was working for Texas Parks and Wildlife investigating the nuisance aquatic plant, hydrilla vertilicatta. The hydrilla was starting to take over Texas lakes and was proving to be very harmful to the habitat.

I didn’t necessarily perform anything illegal for the state. I did, sometimes, get caught up in my brain and trespass. A lot. But it was on my own time, when I was researching my own things—such as a type of moss that grew on the trees near the lake that belonged to the state.

Not intentionally, though.

“Are you even listening to me?” Janie groaned, sounding exasperated.

I looked at my friend and sighed. She knew precisely when I was listening—and when I wasn’t.

She’d been my friend since I was a young girl. I couldn’t recall a time when she wasn’t around—well, until lately that is, since she moved to this town and promptly started luring the rest of the kids that’d grown up with us this way.

“No,” I didn’t even bother trying to lie. “I don’t want to go out on a date. I want to go watch some Sam and Dean on Netflix. If I go out on a date, that’s possibly three episodes that I wouldn’t get to watch.”

“Okay,” she said. “Say it with me now. Sam and Dean from Supernatural are not real.”

I flipped her off. “I know it’s not real, Janie. I just like to watch them, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “If you don’t come, I’ll make you regret it.”

I sighed loudly.

“Fine.” I crossed my arms. “When?”

She smiled brightly. “Six. At the Taco Shop. We’re bringing Cora, June, Johnny and a couple other people…maybe our husbands if we can get them to say yes.”

I looked over at Kayla, Janie’s best friend for forever, and snorted.

Kayla was asleep on the couch, her mouth hanging half open as drool started to leak out of it onto the leather.

“You should probably take a picture,” I informed her. “That’d make a good profile picture.”

Janie reached for her phone and snapped a few, then looked at me expectantly.

I waved at her. “Fine.”

That’d give me six hours to get some work done. My thesis would be perfect…I just needed a little more information.

***

I was ankle deep in mud—on someone’s property, perilously close to that someone’s home—and I was on my haunches looking at the moss that was growing on the trunk of a tree.

I’d just scraped off a sample of it into a petri dish and taped it up when I heard a male clearing his throat behind me.

I looked over my shoulder to see a very sexy man, his arms crossed, standing at the foot of his dock.

And when I say sexy, I meant to die for. He had me experiencing the kind of full body awareness that zoomed down my spine and shot straight to my vagina.

Jesus Christ, he was a wet dream.

He was tall, built, and tattooed.

He had longer brown/black hair and a trimmed beard covering the lower half of his face, but I could definitely see that he had an angular jaw and beautiful lips.

His legs were braced apart, encased in a pair of tight blue jeans that left very little to the imagination—such as he the fact that he situated his junk on the left.

The t-shirt that he wore was stretched like a second skin over a taut chest that looked like it’d seen the inside of a gym more than any man on the planet.

He had bright blue eyes lined by long, dark eyelashes that I would need several coats of mascara, and possibly the addition of fake lashes, to have any hope of achieving length-wise.

And his foot was tapping in his muck boots as he looked at me incredulously.

How had he gotten all the way down it without me hearing him coming?

I waved.

He scowled.

“This is private property,” he growled.

I stood up and winced when my knees popped.

When I was a young girl, I’d started playing softball.

I was good, too.

I’d even made the Olympic team.

I hadn’t gone, though.

Why, you ask, would a person turn down an Olympic team begging for you to play for them?

Because I was an idiot.

Well, not so much an idiot as a woman who loved her boyfriend and didn’t see how awful he was until much too late.

My boyfriend at the time had begged and pleaded with me not to go. He didn’t like that I’d be in Arizona for at least six months training with the team.

When I’d told him I was going anyway, he got angry and purposely crashed the car that we were in and shattered every single one of my dreams in the process.

My knee had suffered the most damage, and at the age of twenty-one, my softball career had officially ended.

Four years later, I was still trying to figure out a way for my knee not to hate me.

I started trudging out of the woods without another word, slinging my backpack onto my shoulders as I did.

If I hurried, I might make it to the blind date on time. I had about a half-mile walk back down to the public access boat ramp, and from there, it was about a mile and a half down the road to property that I was renting for the spring and summer.

“You do realize that the entire five acres that you’ll be walking through is someone else’s property, correct?” the man asked, interrupting my thoughts.

I shrugged.

Yeah, I knew.

Although, if I had been on the outer five feet of this land, I wouldn’t be on that person's property…but that was currently under water from all the rain we’d been getting, so that was a no-go.

“You do know how to use big girl words, don’t you?”

Alrighty then. The sexy man was also a dick.

I turned and gave him my eyes.

I didn’t say anything, but I did give him the stink eye.

His lips twitched in amusement.

He found my anger funny?

Nice.

I turned around and continued to walk, but his voice stopped me once again.

“Did you steal something?” he asked.

This time, though, he wasn’t on the dock where he had been, he was on the ground, in the mud right along with me.

I looked at him over my shoulder and said, “No.”

“I saw you put something in your bag,” he pushed.

I dropped my backpack off one shoulder, and then reached into the pocket with the moss that I’d put in a petri dish and showed it to him.

He took the dish out of my hands, and before I could reach for it, he had the thing open.

Once he’d taken my moss, he handed the dish back.

“Next time, don’t steal.” He paused. “Or possibly ask permission to be on someone’s property.”

I narrowed my eyes to dangerous slits that clearly relayed my unhappiness.

But, he was right.

I was on his property.

But dammit! I’d have to come back later on tonight to get that moss, because I needed it for my thesis.

I had a few tests I wanted to run on it, and currently his trees were the only ones I could reach from my house since the damn lake was so flooded.

I stomped a little harder than I should have, and felt the mud slosh up the side of my boots and start leaking down inside.

God. Dammit.

I turned around and was going to glare at the man, but he was gone.

I halted, tempted to turn around and snatch some more moss, but as soon as I had my foot turned in the opposite direction, his voice stopped me.

“Don’t even think about it,” he growled.

That came from in front of me.

I jumped, whirled, and lost my footing, ending up ass first in the cool mud.

I breathed through clenched teeth and looked up at the smiling man.

Was throat punching illegal?

I should probably move off of his property before I did that though since it wouldn’t look good for me if I was arrested.

And my dad would be pissed. Again.

Not to mention, I might get a criminal record, and then I’d lose my scholarship.

I stood up—without the bastard’s help—and started on my way again.

This time I didn’t stop at his taunts. I just kept walking until I reached the boat ramp.

Then, once I was at a part that had concrete and I could wash myself off, I waded into the lake, washing the mud off my boots, shorts, and lower half of my shirt.

Once they were clean, I walked back up the boat ramp, took my boots off and emptied the water out of them.

Once I had them back on, I stripped the shirt from my body and tucked it into the back of my waistband.

Then I resumed my trek home.

All the while, I was very much aware of the man’s eyes on me.

He watched me go and didn’t stop watching until I was out of sight.

Only then did I look over my shoulder.

***

I walked into the restaurant, very mindful that I was well on my way to being over half an hour late.

I did not want to be there.

Which was why I was wearing my t-shirt that said, Sorry I’m late. I didn’t want to come.

It seemed fitting, and hopefully my blind date would get the message that I was not happy about being here and didn’t want anything to with him.

Unfortunately, I’d do just about anything for Janie.

Even go out on a date that I didn’t want to go on.

I pulled the door open and inhaled deeply, relishing in the scent of tacos and spices.

I loved food.

I loved food so much that I planned my day around good food.

For instance, today I got up early because I knew that it was special day at the gas station—two bacon, egg and cheese taquitos for the price of one. But you had to get there early, because if you didn’t, they’d be all sold out.

They were that good.

Someone bumped me from behind, and I stumbled.

It was only the quick thinking of the man who’d done the bumping that prevented me from landing on my face on the floor.

Once I caught my footing, I turned and smiled at the person behind me in thanks.

Only the smile immediately slid from my face once I saw who it was.

The man from the lake.

The stupid, tall, dark and handsome Greek god of a man who had made me fall in the mud and had stolen my moss.

The same man who I planned to steal more moss from later on tonight.

Like right now.

I should go now seeing as he was here, and if he was here, I knew he wasn’t at home.

I yanked my arm away and glared.

“You were the one to walk in front of me,” he held up his hands. “Apparently, you need to learn to pay attention to your surroundings. You’ve nearly bit the dust twice today.”

Fucker.