Always Right (4 page)

“Go ahead,” Norton shouted, slipping off his glove. “I’ll catch them.”

She remembered her line. “Sure,” she called twisting the word with sarcasm.

He smiled, teeth sharp and white against his tanned face, against that—God help her—drop-dead sexy scruff of beard. “It’s my
job
,” he said.

And some other force—not Amanda—plucked the sunglasses from her collar. Some other force held her arm out over the fence. Some other force made her wait as Norton took two long strides forward. And some other force opened her fingers, let the sunglasses somersault into Norton’s waiting hands.

There was a scattering of applause from folks who’d been close enough to observe the exchange. Norton slipped on the glasses and nodded to her. She wished she could see his eyes, wished she could read what he was thinking.

But she didn’t get a chance to wonder anything else, because he turned toward home plate, toward the batter who was sending balls skying off toward the fence. Norton caught one and tossed it into the stands, toward the family to her right, making the kids squeal in excitement. Then, he was focused back on home, watching the batter, reading the balls. He was like a hound focused on a scent, like a cougar stalking across a plain. Amanda could have been a million miles a way. The blackmail money in her pocket could have been dust.

Batting practice wrapped up. The game started. Norton caught a high fly for the third out of the first inning. And he hit one deep into left the first time he came up to bat, continuing his hitting streak.

~~~

Later that evening, Kyle dozed as he leaned his head against the wall, stretching out his legs on the cracked, fake-leather bench. Every few minutes, someone arrived or left through the front door, but not one person questioned his presence in the apartment building lobby. It was after ten when Amanda finally walked through the door, lugging a tote bag that looked like it was filled with half the books in the Wake County Public Library.

She’d changed out of her shorts some time after the game. He couldn’t say those baggy sweatpants were an improvement. She’d stripped the braids out of her hair, too, but her T-shirt was still knotted above her waist.

He climbed to his feet as she collected her mail from the bank of brass-colored boxes on the wall, obviously unaware that he was there. She was shuffling through half a dozen envelopes—they looked like bills—before she finally glanced at him.

“What are you doing here?” One hand slipped inside her purse, and she groped around for something.

He held up his hands, trying to look innocent. The last thing he needed was an eye-wash of pepper spray. “I thought we should talk.”

“How did you find me?”

He shrugged. “You do your research. I do mine.” Actually, he’d asked the team’s public relations office track her down. It had taken about two minutes for them to text him Amanda’s address and phone number.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you want?”

Before he could answer, the elevator doors slid open, and four women boiled into the lobby. He barely glanced at their tight skirts and sky-high heels, but he couldn’t ignore their helium chatter as they talked about some club they were heading to. One more place in Raleigh he’d be happy to avoid forever.

He waited until the women had passed onto the city street before he said, “Don’t you think we should find some place a bit more private to talk?”

“If you think I’m asking you upstairs, you’re crazy.”

I could have waited for you in Apartment 314.
He almost said it out loud. Not that it was true—he didn’t actually know how to pick a lock. But he could have lurked in the hallway, could have scared the hell out of her as she stepped off the elevator. He’d purposely stayed in the public lobby, for all the good that did.

He took his car keys out of his pocket. “Fine. Let’s go somewhere else.”

She snorted. “I’m not getting in a car with you either.” But she put the envelopes in her tote and resettled the heavy bag on her shoulder. “Come on. There’s a bar on the corner. It’s not trendy, but it’ll do.”

The last thing he wanted to do was sit in a bar. But he was pretty sure he wouldn’t get anywhere by insisting that Amanda give in on this. And despite everything, despite the checks he’d written out last night, despite the craziness of waiting for her all night here, he needed her to agree to his next request. “Lead the way,” he said. As she walked past him, he gestured toward her bag of books. “Let me carry those.”

“Yeah, right. Like you’re walking me home from school.”

“Something like that.” He watched her fight her instincts, but he could tell the bag was heavy. She winced a little as she eased it off her shoulder. He took it easily, making sure it didn’t seem like he was doing her any big favor.

She shook her head, but she headed out the door, not saying a word as they walked the half block to The Shamrock. She was right—the dump wasn’t trendy. But there were a dozen guys sitting at the bar, watching the late game from San Francisco. And there were four or five booths on the back wall, dark enough to make people think they could talk in private. There was even a tired cocktail waitress who took their orders—vodka rocks for Amanda. Tonic water with lime for him.

“What do you want?” she asked again, after the waitress had brought their glasses.

He sipped his bitter drink before he answered. “I paid up,” he said. “Now I want my money’s worth.”

As he expected, her eyes went wary. He wanted her to think bad things. He wanted her to be relieved when he told her all he really wanted. “Go on,” she said. Those two spare words reminded him of something he’d read years ago. Good lawyers never asked a question they didn’t already know the answer to. They didn’t volunteer a word of information, either.

Well, he wasn’t a lawyer, good or bad. All he could do was put his cards on the table. “Look,” he said. “I want to make today a regular thing. Every day game we play at home—you in the stands, with the glasses. Drop them down to me during BP.”

She nodded once, not betraying a shred of emotion. She took a sip of her vodka and set her glass down very precisely in the wet circle it had already made on the table. “So, what’s the deal?” she finally asked. “Is it something sexual for you?”

He laughed. Of all the things he thought she’d say—all the protests, all the refusals, all the statements that he was plain old batshit crazy—he hadn’t expected her to go straight to sex. But just looking at the even expression on her face made him hard as a maple bat. He shifted his feet, easing the seams of his jeans, and he told himself not to look at her lips, not to watch her tongue dart out, not to see her teeth catch her lower lip.

“No,” he said. “It’s not sex.”

“What then?”

He looked her right in the eye and said, “I told you before. Superstition. I need you there so I can hit.”

“Correlation is not causation.” He must have looked confused at that, because she shrugged and said, “Why do you need me, anyway? You’ve got the glasses. Wear ’em all you want.”

He shook his head. He knew he sounded crazy, but he also knew how superstitions worked. Across baseball, the first baseman caught a ball thrown from the dugout every single time he jogged in at the end of an inning. It wasn’t enough that he’d caught one the inning before, the game before, any other time. The magic needed to be recharged. The ritual had to be completed.

He fought to find words to wipe the skeptical frown off her face. “You dropped your glasses to me at a day game. That’s the catch. That’s what makes them work.”

“Maybe they ‘worked’ because it was a
Sunday
game, not Saturday, like today. Maybe they ‘worked’ because Harvey was standing beside me. Maybe they ‘worked’ because the breeze was blowing in from the north, or the temperature was exactly eighty-seven degrees, or a butterfly was flapping its wings somewhere in the Caribbean.” With every outraged example, she mocked the idea of “working” by curving her fingers into air quotes. Her sarcasm burned as she said, “You took a real risk today, Norton. You could have broken the magic by getting me back in the park.”

“Nothing broke,” he said, leaning forward to make her understand how important this was to him. “My streak continued today. And it’s going to keep going on, as long as you help me out.”

He knew he sounded stupid. But superstitions were the foundation of baseball. Half the guys he knew wouldn’t step on the chalked line between home plate and first. Pitchers wore power necklaces and wrote magic words in the dirt behind the mound. Hitters pointed their bats toward specific points in the park. All of it worked in some crazy way. All of it made the game come together.

She had downed half her drink. Now she looked at him with real challenge in her eyes. “So, what? Now you want me there every Saturday?”

“Every day game. For the rest of the season.”

“What?” Her shout was loud enough that some of the guys at the bar looked up. She lowered her voice and said, “That’s insane! I don’t have time to attend every day game. And what am I supposed to do when you guys hit the road? Follow you to every park in the country?”

“No,” he said, purposely pitching his voice low, making his words soothing. “Just the home ones. That’s all I’m asking.”

~~~

“That’s all!” She heard the strangled note of disbelief in her own words.

“Come on, Amanda,” he urged. “Say you’ll come to the park.” When she only shook her head, he leaned back on his bench in the booth, tracing his finger around the rim of his glass. He looked up at her through eyelashes that were thicker than any man deserved. “Or I might have to tell the authorities about your offer of representation,” he drawled. “About your little
retainer fee
.”

Dammit! He had her trapped. She’d deposited his checks after the game, dropped them into an ATM on her way back to the office. Even
if
she argued that his money was payment for legitimate legal services, she’d be hard pressed to explain to the North Carolina bar why she’d placed client funds into her own bank account.

This was ridiculous. It was absurd, the trap she’d sprung on herself when she’d made her stupid threat to expose his past. She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been furious with him, with his living the life of Riley while she watched her own career crumble around her. She’d lashed out without beginning to calculate the cost of her actions.

This was why she preferred numbers to words. This was why she avoided emotion. Anger, frustration, rage—they all led to mistakes.

It was too late to apply cold, hard logic to the situation. Too late to grab a cocktail napkin and dig a pen out of her purse, to pull out her phone and look up some statistics, to write down all the equations that
proved
he was far more likely than not to have broken out of his hitting slump after twenty-seven games, with or without her.

She’d blackmailed him, and she’d deposited his money into her account. Her position in the partnership was now secure. She owed him. So what could it hurt, if she gave him what
he
wanted? What possible harm could there be in playing out his little game?

She took a gulp of vodka, sucking in air after the clean, cold burn down her throat. “All right,” she said.

~~~

“All right?” He’d been certain that she’d refuse, that she’d call his bluff about exposing her blackmail. Because he really couldn’t imagine going to the authorities. Not when he needed her at the ballpark. Not when she seemed so flustered that she’d ever asked for his money, that she’d ever demanded his checks. Relief felt like a hot shower, water pouring over his head, melting the tension out of every muscle in his body. “You’ll do it?”

She pursed her lips. “It’s crazy, Mr. Norton. But yeah. I’ll do it.”

“Kyle.” At her confused look, he said, “My name’s Kyle. I think we know each other well enough now to use our first names.”

“Kyle,” she said, and they shook on it. But he didn’t take her hand to seal the deal. He took her hand because he wanted to touch her fingers. He wanted to feel the warmth of her palm, to see if he could feel her heartbeat matching the pulse that raced through him. He couldn’t, but not for lack of wishing.

After that, there wasn’t any reason to stay in The Shamrock, and there were about a hundred good reasons to leave, each one glistening in a partially-filled bottle behind the bar. He slipped out of the booth and pulled his wallet out of his pants. He dropped a couple of bills on the table before he picked up her tote bag from the bench where he’d been sitting.

“What have you got in here? Are you planning on opening a bookstore?”

She actually laughed as they slipped into the hot summer night, and he wanted to make another joke so he could hear the sound again. “That’s my light bedtime reading.”

And just like that, he pictured her in bed again. He was imagining what she looked like beneath that T-shirt, what her tits would taste like when he had her naked and needy beneath him.

He managed to say something normal, but he couldn’t have repeated it, not if she’d offered him his hundred thousand dollars back. At least she laughed again, and her steps stayed easy beside him, relaxed, just like he wasn’t thinking about tearing off every stitch of her clothing, starting with those goddamn sweatpants.

But when they got back to her apartment building, she stopped. She looked at him, actually caught his gaze before she started twisting her fingers into knots. She glanced back toward the bar, sad and guilty at the same time.

“What?” he asked.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I told you. I need my hitting—”

“No, why are you trusting me? I’m the one who… I ordered records, you know. Proof about Spring Valley.”

What records were those? And what the hell difference did it make? He’d already paid her hush money.

He’d paid because Spring Valley terrified him. But
she
was scared too. He’d seen it in her face, heard it in her voice, in the very fact that she was questioning him here, now. She wasn’t some hard woman, used to trapping guys into making stupid mistakes.