Page 13 of Moonshot

“I’m fine.”

“Your teeth are chattering.” His hand reached out and was suddenly at my jaw, fingers gentle in their brush over my lips, and I ground my teeth, my eyes moving, shock pushing them up, past his touch, and to his face for the first time.

A mistake. This close, our bodies just a foot apart, his touch soft on my lips … I was unprepared. Unshielded.

There was a line between his eyebrows, a hard pinch of skin. His eyes deep and soft, no laugh in them today, no cocky tilt of that mouth. He pressed his lips together, his jaw tight, skin golden, and it was pure beauty before me. I couldn’t look away—not when our eyes met, not when his hand slid to cup my face.

He let go of me then—the moment his fingertips slid into the dip behind my earlobe, wrapped under the line of my jaw. He pulled away, his hand fell from my waist, and we both stepped back.

“I’m sorry.” He rubbed at his mouth.

“It’s a blind corner. No big deal.”

“No.” He coughed. “I’m sorry about the locker room. What I said—it was stupid.”

“Oh.” I could feel the blush, hot and prickly through my cheeks. “It was stupid.”

He laughed in response, the sound loud and unexpected. “So you didn’t like what you saw.”

I stared at him, my eyes widening, no coherent, logical response coming to mind. “No!” I finally said, and it was five heartbeats too late.

“Really,” he challenged.

I couldn’t respond to that and stepped around him, moving down the hall, my feet quickening. I was desperate for an escape, for room to breathe, desperate for anything but another word of conversation.

“You always run, Little League?” his call rang down the hall, slamming into the back of my head.

I stopped. Turned. Met those eyes across twenty feet of nothing. “You always bunt?” I called back.

He snorted. “Bunt?”

I shrugged. “That’s what it felt like to me.” My lie came out strong, the words mixing his brown eyes into something darker.

“Grand slams aren’t typically called for, in this situation.”

“What situation is that?” I couldn’t shut up. It was like I was running full force to the edge of the cliff, but my legs wouldn’t stop.

“Untouchable women.”

Women. Not girls, not children. Had I ever been considered a woman? Was I a woman?

“And it wasn’t a bunt,” he added, before I had the chance to formulate a response.

“It wasn’t?”

He took a step back, turning away and tossing a response over one perfectly sculpted shoulder. “Babe, I haven’t even stepped up to bat.”

He was around the corner before my brain processed the words. Before I could form the question that followed the receipt.

Hadn’t stepped up to bat? Meaning … he hadn’t even been interested? Or … was that heart-stopping moment just a scratch at the surface of what Chase Stern could unleash?

It was probably good he left. I didn’t think anything positive would come from a further explanation.

That night, the game was cancelled, and I went back to the hotel, my uniform still wet, my mind still wound up.

When I closed my eyes in bed, all I could see was his stare, and all I could smell was the phantom scent of his cologne.

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