Stealing Home (25 page)

IF I SPENT all of my time worrying about finding the worst in a person, I’d never be able to see the best. That was one of the hundred things that had been floating through my mind after dropping Alex back off at Luke’s apartment. He wasn’t there, but Alex had told me where he would be. Where he liked to go when he had things to work out.

I’d been standing in the parking lot and watching him for a while. My sedan was parked next to his tank as I searched for the right thing to say to him. There were a million right things to say to him, a few things I should, and one thing I had to. I only hoped he’d be more receptive to having a conversation than I had been when he tried.

He was hovering at home plate of the field he’d played on in college. Luke had been one of the few players to earn a spot in the pros in the same city where he’d gone to college. I knew that had to do with him wanting to stay close to his family.

He’s a good man.
That phrase kept echoing through my head, a reminder of how many people had described Luke as such. Not just as a good baseball player or a decent guy, but as a good man. He’d lived up to that title again and again. From doing right by his sisters after their parents’ death, to the whole ordeal with Owen, to the way he’d handled me even when I was being psycho.

The one in a million. He was standing right in front of me.

The bucket of balls he was hitting was getting low, and I couldn’t miss my chance. I couldn’t let fear mess things up one more time. I might have felt like I wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it, but really, I knew. Alex had been right about life and love being simple. It was only when we tried to make things what they weren’t, and morph them into something they couldn’t be, that life got messy.

Shoving off from the front bumper of the same vehicle Luke had driven when he’d been a student here, I started for the field. The man made millions of dollars a year and he still drove that thing, not because it was what people expected of him but because it made him happy. I couldn’t help comparing myself to that. Luke could have had his pick of millions of girls, but he’d chosen me. Not because of what the public would expect, but because it was what made him happy.

I was choosing what made me happy too. No more setting booby traps and guillotines to sabotage that.

The parking lot was a long way from the field, so he couldn’t have seen me pull up. From way back there, it would have been impossible to tell it was Luke Archer on that field, hitting ball after ball, the crack of his bat echoing into the night.

When the next ball sailed over the back fence, landing with a mess of others, I realized that maybe it wouldn’t have been so hard to figure out it was Luke Archer after all.

For as hard of a time as he’d had connecting with the ball during the past two games, he was tearing it apart out here. Practically every ball he tossed into the air, his bat sent whizzing over the back fence.

Alex had said he’d spent a lot of time here after their parents died, that this was his way of working out problems and anger. I could see why. All of the lights stationed around the field were on, but no one was in the stands, no announcer was talking in the background, no ballpark smells filled the air. It was so quiet, just the crack of Luke’s bat and his sharp grunt after each swing.

I’d never been on a baseball field like this, and somehow, it was even more magical than it was when it was brimming with players and fans, noises and smells.

Coming up to one of the entrance gates, I paused. It was locked. I wasn’t sure how Luke had gotten in, but I wasn’t going to let one locked gate stop me from doing what I had to. It had been a while since I’d climbed a cyclone fence, and it had been
never
since I’d climbed one this tall, but it only was ten feet of holey metal. If I couldn’t tackle this, I had no right to assume I could tackle all of the other hurdles that would come in this kind of a relationship.

Slipping out of my shoes to make the journey easier, I tucked my shirt into my shorts and started climbing. The up was easy, the over scary, the down tricky, but I didn’t try to make it something it wasn’t. I was climbing a fence. That was all. I didn’t need to think about the possibility of falling, of breaking my neck, of spending the rest of my life paralyzed, of any of the crap that would have kept me from doing it before.

Fear bled the love out of life. When there was an abundance of fear, there wasn’t room for love to grow.

Fear had no place in my life anymore.

After hopping down on the other side of the fence, now barefoot, I jogged through the maze of concessions booths until I’d reached the stands. I walked up the third base line. His back was to me, his focus on nothing but the ball and his bat’s connection with it. As another ball cleared the back fence by a large margin, it was impossible not to wonder if I was watching a legend in the making—one that would be remembered by generations.

Luke was in his standard jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt, his Shock ball cap settled into place. Watching him, feeling him close, made the ache start to spread inside me. It only grew the closer I moved.

I was passing third base when he froze just as he was about to toss another ball into the air. He didn’t turn around; he didn’t speak. He just stood there, rigid and with his back to me, waiting.

Say something, Allie. But don’t just say something, say what you came here to say.

Before I could overthink it and second-guess what to say first, I shouted, “I’m sorry, Luke.” When his stance seemed to go even more rigid, I kept going. If he planned on dealing with this the way I’d dealt with him when he’d tried talking to me, I didn’t have much time to say what I needed to. “I messed up. So, so much, and I’m sorry.”

I was halfway to home when Luke’s bat lowered. “Sorry for what? That list could be pretty long from where I’m standing.”

There was a sharpness in his words I wasn’t used to, and he still refused to look back at me. That was fine, but I wasn’t going to leave here before he knew. “For not communicating with you, for starters. I should have told you why I was so upset and given you the chance to explain.”

Luke tapped the bat against home plate. “So you were upset about something? It wasn’t just about our fuck-buddy shelf life expiring?”

My eyes closed. I’d made a mess by letting my fear drive me. “No, it wasn’t about that. I had you paying for someone else’s mistakes, just like you warned me not to do. I let my fears come between us.”

Luke shook his head. “You let a lot of things come between us.”

“I know.” I stopped when I was still a ways back from where he was. To give him the space I could see he needed.

“You’ve been talking to Alex.” He didn’t voice it as a question.

“You knew?”

Alex had been so proud of herself, thinking she’d given everyone the slip. The first time a seventeen-year-old had sneaked out of the house had been to go talk to her big brother’s girlfriend to talk some sense into her. The “good” gene ran in the Archer family.

“I guessed where she’d run off to when I got the call from Cameron.” For the first time, he glanced back to look at me. It was brief and there was no fondness in his expression, but it somehow managed to make me feel like nothing could really ever be wrong if I could just wake up to Luke’s face every day. “I’m surprised you still have your hair. She wasn’t very happy when she found out you broke up with me.”

“I am too.” I gave my ponytail a little pull. “But she gave me a second chance.”

Throwing the ball still in his hand into the air, the empty ballpark echoed with the sound of his bat connecting with the ball. This one flew over the center field fence.

“She’s always been the generous one in the family.” He reached deep into the bucket for another ball.

“Will you do the same?” I asked, moving a step closer. “Give me a second chance?”

He was quiet for a minute, tossing the ball in the air and catching it. “Did she tell you about Owen?” He was trying to mask it, but the pain in his voice when he said his name was evident. “About what happened?”

I nodded, padding closer. The fine dirt of the diamond felt like cool silk beneath my bare feet. “Yes.”

Luke stared at the center field fence, his eyes narrowing like he was somewhere else. Then his face cleared. “I was going to tell you,” he said, turning so he was almost facing me. “I should have told you sooner, but it’s a complicated story I don’t share freely.” As soon as his eyes lifted to mine, they flitted away. “I want you to know all of me, Allie, but I didn’t want you to know all of me all at once. I wanted the good parts to shine first before the skeletons came falling out of the closet.”

My chest ached, but it wasn’t for me—it was for him. For everything he’d been through and everything he’d risen from. Losing both parents in one tragic night would have ended the careers of most players. Instead, he’d applied for guardianship of his three sisters and made his name a permanent fixture in professional baseball. And then that woman, the baby he’d thought was his—my heart didn’t possess enough beats to throb for him. He could have smeared her name through the mud and cut the little boy off for good. Instead, he’d let the woman be and set up a college fund for the child.

“Luke,” I said, my voice breaking. “You have nothing to explain. I understand all of it.”

His head lowered. “I was just so desperate for comfort after my parents died, for some kind of companionship. I needed someone I could forget about the pain with for a while.” The end of his bat tapped the sides of his sneakers. “My parents had the kind of relationship no one thinks is real, but they had it. Even as a kid, I knew my sisters and I had it good. I wanted what my parents had so badly that I was willing to overlook a lot to find it. I should have trusted my gut with Callie, but I let my desire to find true love justify fake love.”

My hands wound around my stomach like I was trying to hold myself together. “I understand. You don’t have to explain any of that to me. I get it.”

“But I do have to. Don’t you see?” His eyes lifted to mine and stayed there. “Because I want you to know all of me. Not just the good stuff, but the not-so-good too. I don’t want you to know the pretend Luke Archer. I want you to know the real one. Because that’s the Allie Eden I want to know too.”

Flickers of hope were shooting through my veins. “Can you forgive me?”

“Allie.” He exhaled, looking at me like he was surprised I even had to ask. “I forgave you before there was anything to forgive.”

My body rocked from the sob I held back. “How can you say that?”

“Because forgiveness is part of a relationship.” He took a breath and made his first step toward me. “Listen, I’m going to screw up. Everything from a simple mistake like forgetting to bring home milk to a serious fuck-up.” His tongue worked into his cheek. “Like coming on way too strong from the start and making you think all I wanted was a fuck buddy.”

“That’s not why I thought that,” I said. “I mean, yeah, you came on so strong you probably set a few records there too—”

“Can you forgive me for that?” The promise of a smile was in his eyes.

“Forgiven.”

The smile started to spread, but then something seemed to hit him. “Wait. If it wasn’t because of me coming on too strong, why did you think all I wanted was sex from you?”

“I didn’t think that. Not really. Or not at first,” I rambled.

“Not at first? So it was only after getting to know me that you started to think that?” Rightly so, Archer’s face was creasing with confusion.

“No, sorry, this is harder to explain than I thought it would be.”

His brow peaked. “Imagine trying to keep up with it.”

“Someone said something to me,” I tried again. “Something about you and why I was on the team.”

He circled his bat at me. “Because you were the best person for the job?”

“You’d think, right? But no, that’s not what I was told.”

Luke’s jaw stiffened. “What were you told?”

There was no easy way to put this. No gentle way to phrase it. “That I’d been hired to pretty much be your beck-and-booty-call girl. Oh, and after that main priority, to fill in as an athletic trainer.”

Luke was quiet for a minute, his face a blank canvas. Then a few dark strokes of anger lashed across it. “And you believed it?”

I shifted. “This person made a convincing case. He brought up Callie, who’d been on board with the team your first season. The physical therapist the next season, and the dietitian last season.”

His chest was moving fast, the grip on his bat turning his knuckles white. “Other than Callie, I barely knew those women. If they were some perk the Shock lined up for me, they failed to mention it in my contract because I sure as shit wouldn’t have signed up for something like that.”

“I know,” I interrupted. “I know that now.”

“But you didn’t at first?”

My head bowed as I scuffed at the dirt with my toes. “No.”

“Why?”

I made myself look at him. He didn’t seem angry anymore, maybe just a little disappointed. “Because believing someone like you could only be interested in me for sex was so much easier than believing someone like you wanted the rest too.”

His gaze roamed me before settling on my eyes. The look in them siphoned the air right from my lungs. “Someone would have to be the world’s biggest fool to look at you and not want everything, Allie.”

If it was capable of bursting from being overfull, my heart would have right then. “But everyone looks at you, Luke Archer, and wants everything. I’m just one of those millions.”

Luke tossed the ball back into the bucket and started toward me, each step slow and purposeful. “No, everyone looks at me and sees a number, a team, stats. It takes a rare person to see the stubborn ass I can be at times and not walk away. A rare person to put up with this lifestyle, the schedule, my moodiness, and my seeming inability to hit the brakes once I get started. It takes a special person to see the real me and not be scared away.”

“Rare? Another word for abnormal. Atypical. Unusual.” I smiled as he approached me. “So are you saying I’m you’re abnormal person?”