Chapter 9

If you tickle me, I won’t think it’s funny. I will, however, laugh when I punch you in the face.

-Words people don’t expect to hear when they’re tickling you

Baylor

“You’re sure you’re feeling up to it?”

I flipped my brother off.

He meant well. I knew that.

However, everyone was treating me like I was an invalid.

It’d been two weeks since the incident, and they were still acting like I’d nearly died.

In retrospect, I realized that I’d certainly felt like I was dying. However, actually dying probably hadn’t been in the cards for me.

Yet, here they were, still acting like I was a dainty little flower instead of a capable adult.

“Yes, Travis,” Hannah said. “Give him a freakin’ break.”

I grinned at Hannah and pulled her to my chest, giving her a hug.

“Don’t touch my wife.”

I let Hannah go, but not before I dropped a kiss on her cheek.

“For good luck,” I cooed at her.

My brother tried to punch me, but I danced away before he could so much as swing in my direction.

“You’re bad, Bay,” she teased.

I winked again and picked up my bat bag, tossing it carelessly over my shoulder as I headed to the dugout.

We were playing a friendly game of softball today.

The Hail Raisers and the Swamp Jockeys, another towing company from one county over, were rivals.

We had our annual softball game every single year, and every single year that I was home, I played.

Last year I’d been out, but this year, I was ready.

There was a man on the other team, his name was Sergio, who continuously kicked my ass.

This was my year, though. I could feel it.

Being in my own little world as I walked, I almost missed the legs.

Almost.

Those legs, though. They were hard to miss.

They’d been in my thoughts for a long time now, and I was getting to the point where I was almost desperate.

My eyes traveled up the legs that were stretched out on the bleacher in front of her, up to the same fucking pair of tiny jean shorts that I told her to never throw away, causing me to smile.

“You kept them.”

My eyes jerked up to the woman, who’d been deep in conversation with her friends, Hennessy and Krisney.

I grinned at that.

If there were two women in this entire place that she could’ve had, befriending them had practically assured that she’d be thrust into my space around every turn.

Hennessy being married to my best friend, and Krisney being my brother’s ‘not so ex’, meant that it was almost guaranteed that I’d see Lark.

I fucking loved it.

But, for some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that she’d be here today.

“Yeah,” Lark said softly. “How are you?”

I’d just seen her that morning, but it felt like freakin’ weeks.

It’s like my eyes were thirsting for just a glance of her.

She had her hair piled on top of her head in a messy knot, and it definitely worked for her.

Her smile was small, but it was definitely there.

“I’m good, honey,” I said. “You here to watch the game?”

She nodded.

“Good.”

With that I kept moving, knowing that she was watching my ass as I walked away.

***

Lark

“What…” Krisney turned to me. “Was that?”

Before I could answer, Hennessy piped in. “That was hawwwwt.”

My brows rose. “It is pretty hot out here,” I tried to distract them. “I rode my bike to work today. When I got there, I had to go change clothes because everything was drenched. My underwear. My shirt. My bra. It was rather gross, if you ask me.”

“You know damn well I wasn’t talking about the weather,” Hennessy countered. “What was that?”

She gestured to the man walking away from us with a tilt of her chin.

Before I could reply, however, Tate Casey passed us, pulling on Hennessy’s ponytail as he passed.

“Hey!” Hennessy cried out. “What the crap?”

“What the crap?” I snickered. “What are you, eleven?”

“She’s a preacher’s daughter who used to freak the fuck out if he heard her say something more sinister than dangit. Trust me. What the crap was pretty good for her,” Krisney said. “Now spill.”

Once again, we were interrupted, this time by Hannah arriving with her son fast asleep in a stroller.

She took a seat, crossed her legs and looked at me intently.

“What?” I asked.

“What was that?”

I rolled my eyes skyward and wondered if I’d get out of telling these women what ‘that’ was.

The way they were all staring at me so intently, I highly doubted it.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I hedged.

There weren’t just three snorts in response to my weak explanation, though, there were quite a few more.

My eyes widened, and I turned, realizing then that not only were the three women in the front row listening to me but so was another woman who was just walking up.

I had no clue who she was, but the other ladies with me knew her.

“Kennedy!” Hannah waved. “Come sit down.”

Kennedy took a seat on the other side of Hannah, which made her as close to me as Hannah and Hennessy were.

“So, you’re the one that our Baylor can’t shut up about.”

My brows went up.

“Our Baylor?”

“Baylor’s sort of our mascot.”

My brows furrowed.

“He bounces around everywhere, picking up slack where he’s needed,” Hannah explained. “Pretty sure that he doesn’t even need to work at this point, though.”

Before I could ask her to explain what she was talking about, the stadium around us went quiet as a girl of about fifteen made her way out to the mound.

“Is that…”

“Yep,” Hennessy answered Kennedy’s question.

“Adorable,” Krisney said. “I didn’t know that she was singing today, or that they were back.”

It was like they were having a conversation partially in their heads because I had no fucking clue what they were talking about.

“Umm,” I paused. “What are y’all talking about?”

The newcomer, Kennedy, grinned.

“That’s Adrienna, the daughter of Andie.” Kennedy pointed across the gate to where a woman was sitting, waving at her girl, who waved back. “They’re apparently old friends of the Hails. I only met them a couple of months ago when I sold her and her daughter a chicken.”

“A chicken?” I asked.

Kennedy nodded. “I raise chickens, goats, and sheep.”

I nodded my head. “That’s pretty cool.”

I meant that, too.

I’d always wanted chickens.

Not an overly large amount, mind you, but a few. Like two or three.

But, being in the big city of Dallas, I wasn’t allowed to have them in our backyard. Not that my ex would’ve allowed that anyway.

If it made me even remotely happy, I wasn’t allowed to do it.

Grocery shopping? I saw people and that made me happy, so I wasn’t allowed to do it.

Running to the post office? I got so much pleasure out of dropping off the mail that my ex decided that he would go with me as soon as he realized I got something out of it.

Sure, for me they were my only chances to get away from his overbearing, controlling ways, but he saw it as me wanting to do something pleasurable without him, so they became forbidden activities.

And that wasn’t even including things that I truly did love to do, like get my hair done or go for a manicure.

Those things hadn’t happened for so long that I couldn’t even remember the last time.

The National Anthem’s first haunting notes started to fill the air, and I stood up so fast that I nearly lost my balance. I was so lost in my own head that I hadn’t even realized that the entire stadium was now standing around me.

Shit!

“Oh, say can you see…”

The girl was good. She sounded like a young Reba McEntire, and I knew one day she’d go somewhere.

Literally, there was no doubt in my mind whatsoever, she was that good.

By the time the last words were sung and the girl’s voice trailed away, my heart was in my throat.

She’d totally nailed it, and by the roar of the stadium around us, I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

My hands hurt with how loud I was clapping.

“God, that girl is amazing.” Kennedy shook her head in amazement.

I completely agreed.

“Kid has more talent with her voice than I do in my entire body,” I murmured.

My eyes stayed on the girl as she made her way off the mound, but my heart started to pound as I watched her detour from her original path to a new one that included running straight into the arms of a man.

The man who I had a crush on, but I wasn’t willing to admit to it.

Baylor bent down and scooped her up, bringing her to his chest and swinging her around.

The girl’s laugh was adorable.

I looked away when the woman who’d been sitting in the bleachers on the opposing team’s side walked up to her daughter and Baylor, and placed her hands on both of their backs.

Krisney shifted in her seat, pulling my attention away from the sickly-sweet sight in front of me. “Now spill.”

Oh, I wanted to spill alright, but not the words that I’d been so close to spilling before. Now I just wanted to spill my lunch in the form of vomit.

“Nothing to spill,” I hedged.

And there wasn’t.

Seeing that girl, and then the Andie chick, wrapping their arms around Baylor like they were one big, happy family was the exact thing I needed to get my head on straight again.

And honestly, it was a good thing.

I didn’t have the time, nor the desire, to deal with that again.

Been there, done that, had the broken heart to prove it.

Why was I here again?

On that thought, I got up and walked away before I could embarrass myself by crying, leaving all four women to watch me go with varying shades of confusion on their faces.

It was probably the first time they ever had someone walk away instead of answering their question.

But I didn’t care.

I’d learned to protect myself the only way I knew how.

By walking away.

***

Baylor

With sweat dripping down my face, I walked over to our group and scanned the crowd of people left over after the game.

“Where’s Lark?” I asked.

I was eager to speak to her again.

I’d watched her leave sometime during the game, but had assumed she’d gone to get a drink or something. But I hadn’t been able to spot her again anywhere in the complex.

“She left before the game started,” Kennedy, Evander’s wife, answered.

I looked over at her.

“But hadn’t she come to watch the game?”

Kennedy opened her mouth to answer, but Krisney, who was as far away from Reed as she could without breaking off from the group, answered before she could.

“I asked her if she wanted to come. She said yes, but agreed only to stay for as long as she felt like it.” She hesitated. “Apparently, she was done.”

My eyes twitched.

“Baylor?”

I looked over and down, turning slightly to the right to allow Adrienna to enter the huddle.

“Hey there, Adrienna. You heading home?”

Adrienna nodded her head, giving me a full-throttled smile. “My grandpa is coming to pick me up tomorrow. I have to be well rested, he said, because we’re going to Sea World in the chopper.”

My brows lifted.

“You are?” I asked. “That sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Adrienna’s grandfather was Ruben Kelly, the same man who’d given me the money when his son had nearly ruined my life.

“If you say so,” she giggled then. “Grandpa still thinks I’m all of five years old. I told him that Sea World really isn’t something I’m interested in anymore, but he refuses to see reason.”

“Your grandfather likes to remember that you are his daughter’s daughter.” Andie came up to her daughter. “You need to be nice to him, and act like he’s doing the best thing ever. One day he won’t be around anymore, and you’ll miss him.”

Wasn’t that the truth.

I grinned at Andie.

It was a small world.

A lot of years ago, Andie had been married to a good buddy of mine. A man who had died while we were deployed.

I’d lost touch with her up until the accident that’d nearly killed me.

Andie had come back from wherever she’d gone, and in that time Adrienna hadn’t been the only one to do some growing up. Andie had, too.

Left in the old Andie’s place was this woman who I rarely saw smile unless she was watching her daughter succeed.

“Not to interrupt,” Parker, another man that now worked with us butted in. “But Baylor, are you gonna need a ride or will you be catching one with one of your brothers?”

I looked over to find Parker staring at me intently.

What he wasn’t doing was looking at the woman at my side.

His eyes were solely on me and not on anything else.

“Nah, man,” I said. “House is about a half mile walk from here. I planned on hoofing it.” I paused. “Thank you for the offer, though.”

Parker nodded and left without another word.

“Nice of him to stay for the after-party,” Travis muttered to no one in particular.

I snorted.

“Y’all aren’t a very welcoming lot,” Rafe said as he grabbed his bag and slung it over his shoulder. “It takes an act of Congress to get you to do anything without your certain group of people.”

With that, he left, too.

Which didn’t surprise me.

Rafe was another one of ours. He was new as well.

When Dante had decided to call it quits with Hail Auto Recovery, he’d left a void that was just now being filled.

With Rafe, Brock, and Parker stepping up, it’d given us the additional help we’d needed, and it was only recently that we’d each gone from working seven days a week to five.

It was a breath of fresh air, if you asked me.

“Who was that?”

I looked over at Adrienna.

“Which one?”

She pointed to Parker’s retreating back.

“That’s Parker,” I said. “He works with us.”

She nodded.

“Mom, did you see him?”

I looked over at Andie, my grin widening.

“Yeah, Andie. Did you see him?”

She flipped me off.

Laughing, I shouldered my own bag and ruffled Adrienna’s hair. “Have fun with Shamu. I’ll catch y’all later.”

As I turned and started walking toward the parking lot, I heard my family’s jeering taunts behind me, egging me on to stay.

I waved them off.

“My fuckin’ knees hurt,” I told them. “See y’all tomorrow.”

With that, I stepped off the curb and started in the direction of home, my eyes looking out for a certain woman.

If I hadn’t been hurting so badly, I’d toss my bag into my yard and go see her. However, with my knee acting up with what was sure to be a pending storm, I knew walking wasn’t in the cards today.

Driving was, though.

So, after I showered, I got into my truck and drove the three streets over that led to Travis, Hannah, and Lark’s street.

Why, I couldn’t tell you.

I was just so fucking obsessed with her that I’d rather spend time with her than with my entire family.