Love on the Line (5 page)

But worse than that, his subpar throw to home in the ninth had cost the Giants the game. At least that’s how he saw it. Sure, he could run a mental replay of all the at-bats and fielding moves, point to any number of split-second plays and come up with a dozen variables that added up to a loss. But
he
hadn’t played well. Not like he could.

“I can shoot that shoulder up with some cortisone,” Mark said after another unsuccessful kneading of Ryan’s muscles.

Some days the pain just went away—it didn’t matter whether he played or had a day off. On days when it hurt so much he thought he’d have to pull himself from the lineup, the trainers tried everything. Ryan’s pain stumped them. Right now, he was the team’s hottest bat and their arm in center field—they’d try anything to keep him in the game. But he drew the line at injections; shots and painkillers would be a last resort. He’d seen what cortisone had done to a buddy on the Red Sox. For now he was going with ice, massage and disciplined physical therapy.

And sucking up the pain.

At twenty-four, he was the youngest center fielder to be in the running for a Gold Glove. An honor like that would put him in a category with Jones and Kemp and would be a dream come true. That it might help settle a score with his father wasn’t an outcome he could count on.

With a month left to go in the season, he already had three hundred and sixty-seven put-outs and eighteen assists, and he’d climbed his fielding percentage to .988. Only two players were close to his stats, and both were veterans with more than a decade in the game.

But the season wasn’t over.

He’d have to work out the kink in his shoulder if he was going to stay on top, if he was going to be a solid asset for the team.

And he’d have to get more sleep.

He woke too many nights in a tangle of covers and sweat, nagged by nightmares. Some nights he felt like a ghost had decided to settle in his muscles and haunt him.

When the Giants bought out his contract with Boston, he’d been sure that that’d be the end of sleepless nights. He’d arrived, hadn’t he? He was playing for the team he’d always dreamed of playing for in a city that loved the game. His agent was negotiating a sweet deal that could bring him a six-year, fifty-million-dollar contract. The early rumors about the contract were probably what had ramped up Elaine’s lawyers’ greed.

Ryan sat up on the trainer’s table. “No injections. I’ll work it out.”

“Walsh would like me to convince you,” Mark said. “The playoffs are ahead.”

Playoffs were ahead only if the Giants kept their lead in the division. Of course Hal Walsh wanted him to try anything that might work; it was a manager’s job to keep his team playing at their best. And Ryan had an obligation to the team to do what it took to play strong. But he knew his body. Cortisone injections weren’t the answer.

“If it’s not better when we get back from the road trip, I’ll think about your needles,” Ryan said, hoping it wouldn’t come to that. Right then he’d say anything to get the trainers off his back. They were trying to do their jobs, but they couldn’t know the nature of his problem. Hell, he wasn’t sure himself.

Ryan grabbed a towel and headed for the showers. He inhaled the steamy warmth and let the hot water beat down on his neck and back.

“Table time help any?” Scotty Donovan, Ryan’s buddy and the Giants’ star pitcher, asked from the shower next to him.

“I’m not a friend of the table.”

“I get that,” Scotty said. “My grandmother gave me some arnica. I have some if you want to try it. It works for me. Sometimes.”

Ryan nodded. He’d try almost anything, as long as it didn’t involve scalpels, needles or drugs.

Ryan turned the handle on the shower and ramped up the heat, giving the shoulder even more attention. When he got to his locker, Scotty handed him a blue and white tube.

“Arnica. Salve of champions.”

Ryan squeezed some of the ointment onto his palm and spread it across his shoulder. “Did you ever hear about that pitcher—the starter for the Reds—that guy that said he had a phantom pain in his shoulder?”

“Henderly? I call him the Love Boat,” Scotty said with a grin. “Any guy who can solve his problems with a beautiful woman is pretty intelligent in my book.”

Henderly had been hot; he’d won the Cy Young the year the pain had tormented him. Ryan had heard that nothing had showed up on MRIs or X-rays. Henderly married the next summer and announced that the pain had gone away. Tales flew around the clubhouse that he’d said he’d been battling with a force in his soul and falling in love had changed everything for him. He’d taken a lot of razzing in the press, but his twenty-one and three record said it all. Ryan shrugged. He didn’t want to believe that pain in his body had anything to do with forces he couldn’t control.

Scotty tilted his head and surveyed Ryan. “If you think it’s a phantom pain, maybe you should see a psychic.”

Ryan was pretty sure he was kidding. As a pitcher, Scotty knew about shoulder pain. But Ryan wasn’t so sure his teammate knew much about psychics.

Ryan shook his head. “Not in the market.”

“Or try Love Boat’s solution. Find a wife.”

“Definitely not in the market.” At least he didn’t think he was. He wanted to get married, of course. But there was no rush.

Pain zinged along the back of Ryan’s shoulder as he turned out of the players’ parking lot at the stadium. He adjusted the seat in his Bugatti and tilted the steering wheel down. The pain eased.

He’d beat it—he had to. He didn’t believe in phantom pains, not unless there was an amputation involved. He already wished he hadn’t mentioned the whole phantom idea to Scotty.

He drove along the Embarcadero and glanced across at Alcatraz. It appeared to float in the tossing waves of the Bay, a reminder of how bad decisions could derail good ones. Had some of the inmates who’d done time there made split-second decisions that landed them in the infamous prison, or had their sentences been the result of repeated poor judgments over a long period of time? Sitting in the courtroom in Boston had made him think hard about the repercussions of bad decisions. And about people and their motivations.

There was a time that he’d thought the best of everyone, had learned from his mother to give others the benefit of the doubt. But the naive man who’d held those values in the past wasn’t driving a Bugatti and thinking about prison inmates. Or paternity suits. Or being dumped by the first and only woman he’d loved. He’d left that gullible man behind. But the wall he’d constructed to keep foolish decisions at bay sometimes closed in on him, closed in too tight.

Jeez.

And there he was, thinking about the downside again.

He had to stop.

He knew how to recognize a pattern and change it. He did it in baseball all the time. Just last year he’d adjusted his batting stance and adjusted his grip. The careful tweaks had changed everything—his approach and follow-through and his stats. And he’d trained himself to sink into a meditative state when he stood in the batter’s box, had learned to let everything but his body, his concentration and his awareness of the movements of the pitcher drop away.

Flow
.

That was what the scientists called the zone he could drop into. With practice he’d found he could shut his eyes and focus, call up the flow and stay with it. Let his striving and worries drop away so he could sink in.

But since the night he’d met Cara, when he shut his eyes and went for ramping up his flow, her face would float in front of him. It spooked him because he didn’t even know her. And it didn’t help that the images of her quickly morphed into hot fantasies that had him wanting to do more than buy tacos.

Perhaps Scotty was right. Not that he should find a wife, but it couldn’t hurt to have a woman in his life. The right kind of woman. He didn’t need the surging images of Cara to remind him that it had been way too long since he’d held a woman in his arms.

Like oxygen blowing onto embers long covered by layers of cold, dark ash, meeting Cara had sparked life into a place inside him that he’d thought his caution and wariness might have snuffed.

Maybe he could date her, keep it light, keep it simple. Maybe they could enjoy each other and do things around town.

But as he merged onto the Golden Gate Bridge, his cynicism tightened its grip, locking him into a war that his brain fought against the urgings of his body and heart.

He’d have to be careful not to lead Cara into thinking he was her road out of Albion Bay.

A rescuing Prince Charming he wasn’t.

And he likely never would be. The experiences with Terese and Elaine had left long, dark skid marks. Nope, he wouldn’t be anyone’s road out.

Chapter Five

Ryan looked through the screen door and into Belva’s cavernous kitchen. Steam hung in the room, hovering among the women stirring pots on a commercial-style stove at the center island. Tables lined a far wall and held camp stoves, and those too sported massive, steaming pots. Four women tended those while others chopped vegetables on a wooden counter that reached across the back wall.

He didn’t bother knocking. No one would hear over the clattering utensils, the laughter and the sound of knives chopping against wood. He stepped through the door. It was twenty degrees hotter in the kitchen than the warm autumn day outside.

His eyes sought Cara. She was studiously stirring a pot that came nearly to her shoulders. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and for the first time he saw the beautiful, heart-shaped frame of her face. She swiped the back of her hand at the beads of perspiration on her brow and held her lips in a half-smile, half-frown.

She had beautiful lips. They were full, but not too full. And the rosy red color was like something out of the fairy tales his sister used to love. But fairy tales weren’t what he had in mind as he watched her purse her lips to sip from a spoon she’d dipped into the pot. She closed her eyes and savored whatever she was tasting. Then she cut her gaze to where he stood in the doorway, and her hand froze, midmotion. Molly Rivers stood beside her. She saw Cara freeze and turned toward the door. Like a herd of startled antelope, the rest of the women stopped what they were doing as a silence fell over the room. The only sounds were the boiling pots and the hiss of gas burners.

Flee
.

Ryan swallowed down the impulse and shrugged.

“For God’s sake,” a heavyset woman called from the end of the kitchen island. “Get that boy an apron, Cara,” she ordered as she walked over to Ryan. “You’re just in time. My husband, Roy”—she crossed herself—“God rest his soul, always helped with the heavy lifting.” A smile crinkled in the lines around her eyes as she wiped her hands on her apron. “You’ll have to do. I’m Belva Rosario.”

She shook his hand with a firm grip. From the look of her and the grip of her handshake, he wasn’t sure she really needed him to lift anything. She had biceps nearly as big as his.

“Ryan Rea.”

“I know who you are,” she said. “I don’t let strangers wander into my kitchen.” She tilted her head toward Cara and Molly. “The girls here say you’ll be handy.”

He wouldn’t want to face the price she’d exact if he wasn’t.

Cara handed him a yellow apron.

“The only other one left is pink,” she said with a laughing light in her eyes. “Not your color, I imagine.”

He ignored the ruffle at the bottom and strapped it on.

“Looks like he has a strong hand,” Belva said.

Being sized up by an Italian grandmother was worse than facing the scouts in college. That she referred to him in the third person brought all those edgy days swooping back. But when she took him by the elbow and led him over to stand beside Cara, he forgave her for stirring anxious memories.

“Back to work, ladies,” Belva said with a loud clap of her hands. “Perk’s picking the canned food up at three.”

Belva handed him an eleven-inch cleaver.

“Our squash has tough skin this year. Usually we’d bake them in the oven, but we don’t have the time. See if you can carve through these babies, and we’ll have squash soup for canning.”

Without a backward glance she marched to the other end of the kitchen and began giving orders to two women peeling pears.

This was not his grandmother’s canning scene. Not even close.

The days when he’d helped put up watermelon-rind pickles and stolen cherries before they went into jam pots seemed very distant. These women were serious. Cain had told him at breakfast that morning that they put up nearly six thousand dollars’ worth of food for the food bank every year.

As he surveyed the crates of vegetables and fruits stacked around the kitchen, Ryan didn’t doubt Cain’s estimate. When he’d asked Cain why he didn’t pitch in and help, the other man looked at Ryan like he was nuts. He’d rather face a tsunami in the open ocean than make a wrong move around Belva, he’d said. Ryan was beginning to see why.

He squared off with the first of the two dozen or so squashes spread before him on the table. He tried using force to press the cleaver into the tough skin, but it glanced off. He tried turning the squash on its end and pushing the blade down with both hands. No go.

He heard a light giggle.

The last time he’d heard a giggle was from his sister Eve when her boyfriend had asked her out in tenth grade. He looked up from the cleaver. Cara smiled. He hadn’t imagined her giggling. Laughing, sighing, moaning when he... He stopped himself. Recalling some of the fantasies she’d starred in while he’d let hot water drill into his shoulder in the clubhouse wasn’t going to help in this situation. Nor likely in any other.

“Try this.” She put her hand over where his rested on the handle of the cleaver. “See the seam, the gap between the ridges? Just edge the blade in there. Give it a little wiggle.”

His pulse picked up at her touch. Giggles and wiggles were not what his body had in mind. He tried to squelch the new fantasies racing through his mind. Sometimes a good imagination was not a guy’s best asset.

She leaned closer to guide his hand, and he felt the curve of her breast barely touch his forearm. As if reading his mind, she backed away.