Thrown By Love (31 page)

“Let’s see what lungs you have,” Ribio said, ushering her across the room.

She wiped her face on her sleeve and leaned over the cake. When she blew out the candles, the guys cheered again. Charley cut a tiny square of with lots of icing and plopped it onto a plate.

“We forgot the forks,” he said as he handed the plate to her.

“Thank you,” she stammered. “I happen to have brought my fingers.”

They laughed at that, and she pinched off a big bite. It was sweet and delicious. She brushed the crumbs off her face. “You guys have no idea what this means to me.”

“But we do,” Pete Little said. “And just to prove it, open this.” He handed her a square box with an enormous, elaborate bow. One of the front office women must’ve wrapped it—no man ever made a bow like that.

She pulled off the bow and tore open the box. She dug through a mound of pink tissue paper and pulled out a Sabers cap. But not just any Sabers cap. This one had her name and an infinity symbol embroidered on the back.

Charley pointed to the infinity symbol. “Figured that was your number,” he said with a pleased grin.

Chloe traced the symbol with her finger. Emotion swelled in her throat. To quell it, she plunked the cap on her head and mugged to their applause.

As they finished their cake, an awkward silence fell.

It was time to go.

Not because she was a woman, although she wasn’t so sure the women reporters were as comfortable as they let on or as welcome as the players tried to pretend. But she needed to leave because she was an owner and this was the players’ space.

But first there was something she wanted to say, something she’d wanted to say for a long time.

“Thanks is a small word—six letters,” she said, breaking the silence. “But I mean it.” She pushed her emotions down—
no crying in baseball
wasn’t a reminder she’d needed. “My dad would have been so proud of all of you.
I’m
so proud of you.” She paused. “And I’d like to say let’s win this game for Scotty, but that would be—”

“No.” Ribio said holding up his hand. “Not for Scotty.” He spread his arms. “We play this game for all three of you—Scotty, your dad
and
you.”

The players cheered their agreement. Now she really was going to cry.

“Better let them get at it,” Charley said with a wink, giving her an out.

She huffed a breath and willed back her tears. Best to end on a high note. She eyed the cake. “One slice for the road?”

Pete Little grinned and cut her a huge slab that hung over the edge of the plate. A couple of the players had filed over to their lockers and were starting to remove their shirts and don their batting practice uniforms. She glanced at her watch. It was later than she’d realized. Definitely time to leave.

“See?” Charley said as he walked her out.

“See what?”

“You're an ace.
Our
ace.” He patted her on the shoulder.

In baseball, ace meant really good. And right then, that's just how Chloe felt.

Chapter Twenty-six

Rise and shine!” G’maw chuckled as she arranged a tray with biscuits and coffee on the table next to Scotty’s bed. He pulled a pillow over his head. Sometimes having a grandmother living on the premises was not so much of a treat.

“We’re going back out on that mound today, even if I have to kick you all the way out there.”

The image of G’maw trying to kick his ass made him grin. She was way too short to be able to reach that far. But then again, maybe he shouldn’t take the chance.

After downing a quick breakfast, Scotty threw on his workout gear and headed outside. He felt strong, he was rested. His headaches had stopped, and tests had shown there’d been no residual damage. G’maw had teased him, saying that if he forgot anything from now on, he could just blame it on baseball.

After two weeks of tests, the team doctor for the Giants had cleared him, and he’d be on his way to San Francisco in twenty-four hours. Scotty was pretty confident he had his game back. And though he wasn’t sure pitching to a seventy-eight-year-old woman qualified as a foolproof final test, but the prospect sure cheered him up. Maybe it’d been a bad idea to skip the week in the minors, but he’d jumped at the chance to avoid pitching there. Sometimes rehabbing in the minors could do bad things for a guy’s mechanics. He wasn’t willing to stake his career on
sometimes
. Lucky for him management had let it slide.

His dad was already kicking dirt off home plate when Scotty got out to the field. The sun was hot, but a cool breeze blew in from the north. A perfect day for baseball.

He threw to his dad as they waited for G’maw. A basket with about fifteen balls sat at his feet.

G’maw huffed across to them, picked up a bat and took a couple practice swings over the plate. Scotty tossed in a few slow pitches, then laid one slow and straight across the plate.

“I’m not
that
blind,” she scowled as she smacked it into right field.

He ran through an easy rendition of his pitch sequence, and she smacked a few out into the field. Then his dad traded places with her.

“Show me what you’ve got, son.” He stood poised at the plate, bat in hand. “But go easy on your catcher.”

G’maw smacked his dad on the butt with her glove, and he yelped.

“You want heat, you get heat.” Scotty grinned. He wound and threw in a fastball. His dad connected and blasted it within inches of Scotty’s head. Scotty shot out his glove, pivoted and snatched it out of the air.

“Hair of the dog,” his dad said with a grin before dropping his bat. He turned to G’maw and looped an arm around her shoulder. “I think our work here is done.”

Scotty stared at them as they ignored him and walked away. Then he laughed, calling after them to save him some cookies. He did a full workout using the net he and his dad had rigged at the side of the barn. Satisfied, he showered and then returned to the fields to chase down his dad.

He found him in the garlic.

Scotty bent down and began harvesting a row. “Mighty good-looking crop.”

“Mighty good-looking fastball.”

“Thanks for that . . . out there.”

His dad nodded. “A friend of mine once said that a man should stand at the exit to car lots and ping each shiny newly purchased car with a ball-peen hammer as it was driven off the lot. It’d save owners from worrying about their first ding.”

How long he might have pitched, how long he might have worried about the first ball to whiz close, Scotty would never know. His dad had taken care of that and done it without a word.

They pulled garlic side by side for a while, enjoying the sun and the rhythm of the work, until Scotty got his nerve up to ask the question that had floated in his mind for way too long. He had no doubt that his dad would know exactly why he asked, but he asked anyway.

“Was it ever hard between you and Mom?”

His dad didn’t look up, just kept on with his harvesting. “You were around—how’d it look to you?”

“Like you worked things out.”

“Yup. That’s the key. That and never being unkind. You can be angry, frustrated, even occasionally dislike one another, but if you’re never unkind, it always works out.”

“I meant the gap. That she came from a . . . well, a different family and . . .”

His dad looked up then and grinned. “You mean that she was rich, powerful and upper-class and I was a lowly farmer?”

Scotty nodded. It was exactly what he meant. Exactly what he’d been rolling around in his head for months.

“I wondered how long it’d take you to ask. Been wondering ever since I saw Chloe step out of that jet.” He turned back to the garlic, pulling each bulb out of the ground with smooth, even strokes. “But you should ask your mother. She’s better at all that than I am, has the words for it. All I can tell you is your mom’s the best thing that ever happened in my life. I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of having her.”

They finished the garlic in silence and when his dad turned toward another field, Scotty returned to the house.

When he walked into the kitchen, the strong smell of linseed oil hit him like a wall.

“Jeez. I thought I’d smell cookies or biscuits at least.” He brushed a kiss to his mother’s cheek.

She backed away. “Watch out, you’ll get paint on you. I forgot to leave my smock in the studio.” She ducked out the screen door and took off her paint-splattered apron.

He filched a cookie off the baking sheet and popped it in his mouth. The chocolate drops were still steaming hot and nearly burned his tongue.

“Better?” she said as she slipped back into the kitchen.

“Oil paints are hazardous.”

“Life is hazardous. Oil paints create beauty.” She looked him up and down as a knowing smile lit her eyes. “I can’t say I haven’t loved having you here. It’s been too long.”

“If I stay any longer, Dad’ll have me picking peas.”

“Nothing wrong with picking peas. He loves it. He chose it.” She slid the cookies onto a rack.

“He chose
you
.”

His mother put the tray down and slid her arm around his waist. “And someday you’ll make the same important choice. Maybe the most important. Maybe soon.”

He felt heat creep into his face. Chloe had won his parents’ hearts. Hell, she’d won his.

His mother released him and reached for an envelope on the corner of the counter. “There’s a letter for you.”

Chloe hadn’t written, hadn’t texted, hadn’t called. He didn’t blame her. Some days he wished he’d lost his memory. At least of their last moments together. He’d been an ass. She’d been right to do what she did, and still he’d as much as told her to take a flying leap to hell.

He reached to take the letter from his mother.

She kept hold of one corner of it and held his gaze. “Some choices aren’t made with the mind”—she tapped a finger to her heart—”they’re made here, one way or another.”

She smiled and released the envelope. The letter was from Alex.

Up in his room, Scotty unfolded Alex’s letter. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d received a personal letter. Email and Twitter were about all he could manage. Tracy had a stack of get-well cards from fans waiting for him, and Sabra had actually sent a fruit basket, along with a wordy apology, for keeping him out too late the night before he got beaned. Both Lowell and Luke had been interested in learning more about Sabra, wondered if she might consider dropping in to check on him in person.

Alex’s letter was odd. Three paragraphs about the vineyard followed by an anecdote about Alex’s cousin Alana hooking up with some French venture capitalist she’d met at the Sabers’ picnic.

He stopped reading and stared out the window.

He could still feel the jolt that had rushed through him when he’d bandaged Chloe’s ankle at the picnic. And he remembered every word of their conversations. She loved the mysteries of life. And he loved her for that. For that and for . . . well, for damn near everything.

He looked back to the letter. Jackie had visited Chloe at Woodlands, Alex wrote on the last line at bottom of the page.

Scotty’s heart picked up speed as he turned the page. But Alex just went on about how thrilled he was that Scotty was returning to the Giants. The team needed its funny bone back, Alex wrote. The next line had only Alex’s scrawled signature.

Scotty stared at the paper, as if looking hard would make words he wished he’d seen appear on the page. Words that said there was some slim crack of a possibility that he could go back, call Chloe and she’d talk to him.

But the words weren’t there. Leave it to his buddy Alex to find a sneaky way to make things all too clear by not saying anything. He suspected Jackie had her hand in the letter’s construction too.