Love on the Line
Authors: Pamela Aares
Tags: #Romance, #baseball, #Contemporary, #sports
LOVE ON THE LINE
Book Four in the
Heart of the Game
Series
Cara and Ryan
© 2014 Pamela Aares
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Also Available in the
Heart of the Game
Series:
Love Bats Last
(Book #1, Alex and Jackie)
Thrown By Love
(Book #2, Chloe and Scotty)
Fielder's Choice
(Book #3, Alana and Matt)
Hiding her identity was a small price to pay for freedom...
Heiress Cara Barrington fled the opulent world of her rich and famous family to carve out an idyllic existence on the California Coast. In the sleepy town of Albion Bay, she’s embraced the simple way of living she's always craved. No one knows her identity, and she’s free from the pressures of wealth... until her sexy new neighbor threatens the unpretentious world she’s worked so hard to build.
All-Star athlete Ryan Rea enjoys his high-profile status. He’s used to charming his way into the heart and bed of any woman he desires while keeping his own heart secure behind a steel wall. When he meets Cara, she throws him a curveball—she’s unlike any woman he’s ever met, and he has to have her.
Cara’s growing attraction to Ryan endangers her hard-won anonymity, and when she inherits the family business, she must choose between the world she left behind and her new life in the community she’s come to cherish. But facing up to her responsibilities could destroy her freedom and cost her the greatest love she’s ever known.
A note from Pamela:
What a journey it has been writing about All-Star Alex Tavonesi and the emotion-packed love stories of his teammates and family! I'm so lucky to have the most wonderful readers in the world—your emails and tweets asking for more of the Tavonesi clan and their captivating friends keep my fingers flying.
Stay tuned, as the next books in the series will bring Alex's sister Sabrina's story and the unexpected arrival of the Tavonesi clan from Italy. With their passion for wine and polo and their exuberant love of life, the wine country of California will never be the same.
If this is your first time reading a book in the
Heart of the Game
series, each book can be read as a standalone--and I hope each story carries you away!
Thanks to all of you who've written to tell me how much you love the whole series--it means so much to know that the happy-ever-afters of the
Heart of the Game
are as much fun to read as they are to write! Strong women determined to follow their dreams and sexy heroes fighting to open their hearts make for some sizzling romance!
I hope you enjoy meeting Alex's off-the-charts sexy teammate Ryan Rea and getting to know the captivating woman he won't live without.
Pamela Aares
Table of Contents
Dedication
For my mother who taught me to treasure my dreams and for readers everywhere who believe in the power of love.
Chapter One
A high-pitched scream was once something that stopped Cara’s heart. But not anymore. After two years of driving the Albion Bay school bus, Cara found it would take blood or the report of an injury to have her take the antics of the children seriously.
A quick glance in the side-angled mirror over her head told her that Sam Rivers was up to his usual tricks. His repertoire included dropping lizards down the backs of girls’ hoodies and the other occasional pranks of a typical twelve-year-old.
Sam and his friends liked nothing more than to get a rise out of Cara as well. Though she was twenty-three, the older kids sometimes treated her like a buddy. She walked a careful line with her charges, happy that they liked and accepted her, while taking seriously her responsibility for their safety.
Secretly she was glad they had the spunk and verve that they did. Some days their enthusiasm rubbed off on her, their innocent, youthful energy wrapping a snug web of delight around her heart. But today the curving coastal road to the Albion Bay middle school was littered with rocks that had slid down the cliff side during the night. Dodging obstacles and getting her charges safely to school was foremost in Cara’s mind.
She glanced back up to make sure the boys hadn’t done any harm and was surprised to see Sam race to the driver’s side of the bus and throw open a window.
“There! I told you I saw it!” Sam pointed to a red car parked in the driveway of a newly renovated ranch house.
Not just any red car.
Cara knew a Bugatti when she saw one; her brother had two, although he preferred muted colors.
She maneuvered a curve that brought them closer to the ranch house. Whoever had bought the old Smith property had done a speedy job of putting a new face on the dilapidated old ranch.
“It’s a Ferrari,” Timmy Brown said as he stuck his face out the window.
“It’s
not
. It’s an Aston Martin,” Cara heard Sam say with definite authority.
She smiled to herself. What did the name of a car matter? But hearing the awed voices of the boys did give her pause. Money could buy such a car, but unless the owner was part of a racing circuit, there was usually only one reason someone needed a two-million-dollar sports car in a rural coastal California town.
Ego.
Well, that and the desire for the flash that went along with it. All one and the same, really.
The high-end sports car was a visual reminder of the world she’d spent three years fighting to escape.
And only because she knew that novelty was scarce in Albion Bay did she slow the bus and give the boys a good look at the car.
But as she drove closer, it wasn’t the car that caught her eye.
A ridiculously handsome specimen of male was unloading a hay bale from the passenger seat of the Bugatti. He was tall, maybe six-foot-three, and handled the hay bale as if it were a sack of feathers.
Hay
?
Now,
that
did make her smile. A sports car wasn’t a sensible vehicle for transporting hay bales. The guy was crazy, desperate or just lacked everyday common sense.
Whatever his foibles, his broad-shouldered physique and rugged good looks were likely to cause a town buzz that went well beyond a group of preteen boys. The man looked up and flashed a wave toward the bus. When he followed his gesture with the most beaming smile she’d ever seen, a smile that zinged into her core, she was sure of it.
Cara threw her keys onto the kitchen counter. It’d been a good day. No fights on the bus and a good turnout to help with the harvest in the Albion Bay community garden. Over the next two weeks they’d can the surplus and take it down to the community food bank for distribution. For some residents, the extra food from the canning sessions got them through the winter.
She poured a glass of iced tea and glanced around the small cabin that had become her sanctuary. For all its faults, the simplicity of the cabin suited her. She’d had to put in new pipes in the bathroom so the shower wouldn’t leak through the floor, and the kitchen had been a challenge, but two refurbished burners in the stove and an overhaul of the fridge had made it serviceable. A coat of bright paint that she’d applied herself had spiffed up the bedroom upstairs.
The rest of the cabin she’d left mostly untouched, although before the winter rains set in she’d have to hire Adam Mitchell, the local carpenter, to shore up the roof over her bedroom and replace the worst of the sagging boards on the front and back decks.
Her one indulgence had been a set of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that housed her most precious volumes. The books were her best company on rainy winter nights.
There were only two doors in the cabin. The front door was a bit battered, but the two glorious rose bushes that flanked it made up for the sagging beams and peeling paint. The paned windows at the top of the back door that led out from the kitchen provided a view of her vegetable garden and the small deck where she loved to drink her coffee on lazy Saturday mornings.
Cara walked out that back door now and set the glass of tea on the redwood stump that served as her outdoor table.
Turning her head left and right, she pulled the elastic band from her hair and let it swing free around her shoulders. She tried to stretch out the worst of the kinks in her neck and then rubbed at her temples. The din of thirty kids crammed into the bus, bursting with energy after a long day at school, had made her head throb.
The stem of a ragweed poked its head up out of her herb bed. She knelt at the side of the garden box and tugged the weed out, careful not to disturb the roots of the basil plant growing next to it. She’d dry the basil and send it to her family in ribbon-wrapped jars for Christmas. Though they poked fun at her homemade gifts, she liked to imagine they appreciated her efforts.
Working in the garden after her afternoon shift of bus driving usually relaxed her, but all the talk in the community garden that afternoon had been of Albion’s newest resident, Ryan Rea.
As she’d suspected, the boys on the bus weren’t the only ones who’d noticed the flashy Bugatti of their town’s newest resident, and Cara wasn’t the sole woman to have noticed his rugged good looks.
Ryan Rea
.
His name made him sound like an extra from a Texas Western. And the smile he’d flashed as she’d driven past him had made her pulse leap, surprising her. She didn’t need the complication of a flashy man in her life. No indeed.
She put both thumbs to her temples and pressed hard.