Strike Out: Mustangs Baseball #6 (14 page)

“Please, Royce.” Her legs tightened around his, anchoring him in place. “Don’t make me wait another second.”

He knew his smile was feral, but the need in her voice mirrored the desperation he felt inside. Pulling back so only the tip of his cock opened her, he held her gaze for the length of a heartbeat before he gave them both what they wanted.

She took all of him, rising to meet his thrusts, keeping the pace he’d set. As much as she needed to feel him filling her over and over again, every time he sank deep inside her, she dug her nails into his ass in a futile effort to keep him there. Nothing had ever felt as good or as right as when their bodies fused completely.

Emotions she had no business having filled her heart to overflowing. She closed her eyes and focused everything she had on the point where they were no longer individuals but one single entity with two hearts beating in tandem. She was probably nothing more than a sexual partner to him, but he was so much more to her. He’d tire of her soon enough, but she knew at her core there would never be another person who made her feel the way Royce did.

His cock stroked her pussy in long, powerful movements. On an elemental level, she was his—always would be. Everywhere he touched her, her skin hummed as if awakened from a deep sleep. She wanted things with him she’d never dreamed of with anyone else. She wanted to be naughty, so he would spank her. She wanted to drop to her knees and wrap her lips around his shaft. She wanted to come for him the way she had before, kneeling at his feet or lying across his lap or beneath him, taking him inside her, giving her body to him. She wanted it all.

“You feel so damn good.” Supporting himself on one arm, he cupped her breast in his big, rough hand then bent to take her puckered nipple into his mouth. His tongue teased the aching bud, and she arched her back, silently begging for more. He obliged, sucking hard. She knew enough about the female anatomy to know there was no direct connection between her breasts and her pussy, but it was as if his mouth clamped to her tit completed some secret circuit of nerve endings. Pleasure arced from point of contact to point of contact. Tricia cried out and gripped Royce’s ass harder. There was no stopping the orgasm rolling over her, twisting her insides before flooding her body with the most intense pleasure she’d ever felt.

“That’s it, sweetheart. Give it to me.”

She had no choice but to give him what he demanded. Her body wasn’t her own.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Anxiety crawled over Royce like roaches in the dark, making him twitch on the bench. The first inning had proved, unequivocally, Jason Holder’s cure for a slump wasn’t a cure at all. A person couldn’t have better sex than Royce had experienced with Tricia the night before they left on the road trip, yet he’d given up three runs to a team he should have been able to best with his eyes closed.

Hell, maybe I should close my eyes. My pitching couldn’t get any worse than it already is.

The Waves were using their best pitcher against the Mustangs in hopes of winning the first game of the series, and from the looks of it, their strategy would be successful. After two and two-thirds innings at bat, the Mustangs had yet to get a runner on base. Royce needed to keep them in the game by keeping the runs scored against them to a minimum. Before his divorce, the task wouldn’t have been a problem. Hell, he’d struck out every player in the Waves lineup more than once in his years on the mound. That they were hitting his pitches like kids playing T-ball was depressing. He had to find his groove again, or he’d be picking splinters out of his ass in the Minor League.

“You okay?”

Royce kept his gaze fixed on the field. Bentley Randolph was one of the nicest guys on the team, but Royce wasn’t in the mood for small talk. “Fine.”

“Relax, man. You look like you’re walking a tight rope without a net beneath you out there. Loosen up. This is a game, remember?”

Royce clenched his jaw tight, causing a nerve ending to fire in his neck. He reached up to massage the taut muscle. The left fielder smirked.

Turning his upper body toward his teammate because the pain in his neck wouldn’t allow anything else, he asked, “What?”

“See? You’re wired so tight, your own muscles are protesting. Do us all a favor and lighten up.” At the sound of a bat hitting the ball, both men stood in time to see Tony Ramirez be thrown out at first base, ending the top half of the inning.

Fuck.
Every inning the Mustangs didn’t score meant added pressure for him to be his best. It had been so long since he’d seen his best, he could barely remember what it looked like. Grabbing their gloves, the two men walked out on the field together. As they approached the pitching mound, Bentley laid his glove on Royce’s arm, silently asking for a second of his time. Turning, he raised an eyebrow in question.

“I know how outside stuff fucks with your head. Whatever it is you’re strung out about, you’ll get past it. Just remember, until you do”—he swept his arm out to encompass the field—“we’ve got your back.”

After flashing Royce a brilliant smile guaranteed to make the sportscasters wonder what they’d been talking about, Randolph jogged out to his spot in the outfield and Royce stepped up to the mound.

For years, he’d suspected his teammate was gay, but two seasons ago when Sean Flannery joined the team at first base the attraction between the men had ended all speculation on Royce’s part. Sean had since retired, and Royce still wasn’t sure what the heck was going on between the two men.

It wasn’t his business, he thought as he threw a warm-up pitch. He rolled his shoulders, letting out some of the tension he’d been holding in. The batter stepped into the box. Royce knew him. Batting eighth in the order, he had a low batting average and even lower on-base percentage. Like a fried chicken joint, Kiefer Reynolds had never seen an outside pitch he could pass up without trying to get a bite.

Jason flashed the sign Royce knew was coming. Why put fancy crystal on the table when paper plates would do?

Royce came to a set. He dropped his chin to his chest, felt for the seams of the ball until they lay against his fingers in a familiar pattern. Kicking his left leg high, he put all his strength behind the pitch. The ball sailed toward home plate, breaking low and outside at the last second. Reynolds swung and missed.
Strike one.

Unable to believe he’d actually thrown a pitch that went where it was supposed to go, he turned to the scoreboard to verify the call. Yep. One strike on the batter. Maybe he still had it after all.

He took the sign from the catcher. Jason knew everything about every batter the Mustangs faced, so when he called for more of the same, Royce didn’t dare argue. Going through the motions again, he found the seams and launched the ball. He’d done everything the same as before, but instead of breaking in front of home plate, the pitch remained on a straight trajectory—right down the middle of the plate.

He couldn’t have served up a better pitch to hit if he’d tried. The sound of maple colliding with cow hide rang out louder than a church bell. He didn’t even turn to watch where it went. That sound was unmistakable—he’d heard it enough in the last few months. The ball was gone. Taking a deep breath, he watched as the Waves’ fourth run trotted across home plate.

Whatever he’d done right on the first pitch, he’d failed to do on the second. And the worst thing was, he didn’t have a fuckin’ clue how the two pitches differed.

***

Tricia ignored the curses flying around the Mustangs’ owner’s private box. Though her heart ached for Royce, she was busy isolating the information from his last two pitches. Before the runner crossed home plate, she had the data sets side-by-side on her computer screen. They couldn’t have been more different.

Excitement coursed through her veins
. Oh God! This is real! I have something to work with!

Keeping one eye on the game, she fed the new information into the programs designed to analyze and quantify specific data. With a little luck, she’d have something to show Royce after the game, something he could use to fix what was wrong with his pitching.

While the programs ran in the background, she returned her attention to the data continuing to stream in. In the fourth inning, Royce struck out the lead-off batter with three beautiful pitches in a row, and a few Mustangs fans in the Waves stadium came to their feet to chant his nickname, “Strikeout! Strikeout!” After that, Royce seemed to get into a groove. He fell behind in the count less often, throwing more strikes than balls, but he was still allowing too many runners to get on base. Good defense by the other eight players on the field prevented the team from giving up even more runs.

Royce didn’t come back out in the fifth inning, so Tricia packed up her computer and left the stadium. Though she was staying at the same hotel as the team, she hadn’t traveled with them. Getting a cab outside the stadium was easy enough, and soon she was back in her room, her computer open, running every program she had to see what, if anything, could be gleaned from the new data she’d collected.

Something about the pitch sequence in the third inning bugged her. She’d been over it and over it, but every time she clicked away from it, she was drawn back to it, as if the data was trying to tell her something.

In an effort to see anything new, she isolated the data from the first pitch, bringing it up on her screen in every form available to her. A knock on her door drew her away. After receiving the pot of coffee she’d ordered from room service, she poured herself a cup then returned to the small desk where she’d set up her work. As soon as she sat down, one of the colorful graphs she’d seen a dozen times before caught her eye.

She blinked. Then blinked again.

I’ve seen that before. But when?

Setting her cup aside, she programmed a search for matching data. It wasn’t long before an almost identical graph appeared on the screen.

Holy shit! It can’t be.

Her hands trembled on the keyboard as she brought up the time stamp for the first data set. When it came up, she dropped back in her chair and stared at the information.

It is.

Oh. My. God.

Not believing what she was seeing, though down to her bones she knew it wasn’t a mistake, she ran comparison programs on both sets of data. The similarities were there. Every muscle group she’d collected data from tonight in that instant when Royce threw his first perfect pitch was identical to the data she’d collected while she had been on her knees—sucking his cock.

It was impossible. But the data didn’t lie.

Figuring out what it meant would be the hard part.

Royce obviously couldn’t pitch with his dick in her mouth, so if the data was going to mean anything, she had to figure it out. And she would, as soon as she got a clue how to do it.

***

Staying away from Tricia slowly chipped away at his sanity. The Mustangs were three games into a four game series with the Waves in San Diego, and Royce had only seen Tricia on the first day when she’d wired him up before the game. Staying away from her while they were on the road was killing him.

He’d pitched like crap the other day, but crap was one step up from shit, and he’d wanted to talk to her about his performance. He couldn’t get her out of his head, and it had nothing to do with her research. If she’d discovered something that could help him she would let him know. He understood that. What he didn’t understand was how she had come to mean so much to him in such a short period of time.

Sure, she was beautiful, and her brain was about the sexiest thing he’d ever encountered. He loved the way he could tell when she was over analyzing something. She’d get a crease between her eyebrows and she bit down on her lower lip. Fuck, that was hot, especially when he had his mouth on her pussy and she looked at him with that expression. She’d done it the other day when he had her in his bed, and he’d redoubled his efforts to short-circuit her brain. He’d done a pretty good job, if her orgasm was any indication.

Tony had told him she was working night and day to make sense of all the information she was gathering, and had asked to be left alone to do her analysis. In the meantime, with nothing to do since he wasn’t due to pitch again until they arrived in Seattle later in the week, he had plenty of time to think about her.

Hell, when he wasn’t obsessing about his dismal ERA, he was missing Tricia. He missed her voice. He missed her scent. She always smelled like spring—sort of flowery, but
warm
flowers. Fuck, he didn’t know what he was thinking. Warm flowers? What kind of poetic shit was he coming up with? She smelled good, and God, she tasted even better. Thinking about her scent made him think about her pussy which rivaled every flower on the planet in beauty and scent.

Yeah, he had it bad, so when he saw her name on the Caller ID as he stepped off the bus delivering the team from the stadium, his cock was the first part of his anatomy to answer the call.

The first thing he noticed when she opened her hotel room door were her eyes. They were red-rimmed and swollen, but the flaw did nothing to detract from her beauty. Stepping inside, he closed the door then took her into his arms. She melted against him as if she’d held herself upright as long as possible, and once he was there, gave the duty over to him. A rush of tender possessiveness washed over him.

Always petite, tonight she seemed frail. Had she lost weight? Damn. He silently berated himself for not seeing to it she ate when she was working. From this moment forward, he’d look after her. “Did you have dinner?”

“No. Wait. What time is it?”

Shit.
How many hours had she put in if she didn’t know what time it was? “Close to midnight. Weren’t you at the game tonight?”

She shook her head. “I told Tony to tell you I was going to stay here and work. I guess I lost track of time.”

Being reminded of her work brought a now-familiar pang to his chest. He wanted her to succeed professionally, but at the same time he knew he couldn’t let it happen. His duplicity was tearing him apart. “You’re working too hard.”

She didn’t protest when he led her to the easy chair in the corner and urged her to sit. He placed a call to room service then returned to sit on the footstool in front of her.

“What’s the rush? The data you’ve collected isn’t going to morph into something different if it sits there for a few days…or weeks.”

“I know, and I haven’t been working on all the data, just a tiny part of it.”

“Did you find something? Is that why you asked me to stop by?”

She rung her hands in her lap, and if she bit her lower lip any harder, it was going to need stitches. His gut twisted. She had found something, he just didn’t know what.

“You can tell me. Is the program not working? You aren’t getting the results you expected? What?”

“The program is working.” She took a deep breath, raised her gaze to his. He fuckin’ hated the pain he saw there.

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so, but I can’t use the results. I’d be the laughing stock of academic research if I published my findings.”

The thrill of victory coursing through his system was followed by a bitter rush of guilt. This was exactly what he’d hoped for. The best outcome he could imagine. She’d have the satisfaction of having accomplished something, yet no one but her would ever see it.

“Why not?”

She sighed, returning her gaze to her lap. He took her hands in his to keep her from wringing the skin off of them. When she tried to tug them loose, he held on tight. In some small way, he wanted to convey his support.