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Emmy stopped chewing, the tart sting of the pineapple filling her mouth and making her cheeks burn. How had Tucker known something about her even she wasn’t aware of?
“I guess I do.”
Miles gave them both an assessing look, as if there was something he was missing—which he was—and trying to put together the pieces. “That’s pretty tame.”
“I’m not exactly a wild child.” Emmy’s gaze landed on Tucker, who had started eating his breakfast. The mischievous glint in his eyes told her he was thinking of all manner of retorts to her statement, none of which he could say with his mouth full and company at the table.
The dining room had begun to fill steadily, and most of the tables were occupied with either players or middle-aged couples. Emmy tried to figure out what might bring one couple in their sixties to Cleveland, Ohio, let alone multiple couples.
Under the table something hard brushed her foot, and she jolted, causing coffee to slosh against the inside of her mug. She felt fantastically stupid when she realized the touch had been Tucker’s foot. He didn’t pull away. Instead, the arch of his foot shimmied higher, making her calf tingle.
She took a sip of her coffee and pretended she wasn’t playing footsie with a grown man at eight in the morning. And she tried not to let it show on her face how much she wanted to do it every single morning from then until forever.
“You ready for tonight?” she asked Tucker, slipping her foot out of her shoe and into his lap. His knee twitched, likely not expecting her to respond so boldly. The table bounced, spilling his orange juice onto the white tablecloth.
“I think this table might be broken.” Miles gave the round surface a test rattle. “It’s super wobbly or something.”
“Yeah. Weird.” Tucker closed his thighs together, trapping Emmy’s foot near his crotch. He wasn’t hard, but he was on his way. She stroked her toes upwards against the inner seam of his pants, and he arched a brow at her. She couldn’t quite read the gesture, if he was challenging her to go on or wasn’t sure why she was going so far.
Her foot stilled.
“I’m good to go,” he said. “And with Emmy’s help I’m sure I’ll go all the way.”
“Complete game? You’re calling it?” Miles looked mildly impressed, even though a complete game wasn’t the most dazzling accomplishment. Emmy suspected he didn’t think Tucker had it in him anymore.
Tucker dropped his hand to his lap and gave Emmy’s foot a squeeze, brushing the pads of her toes with his thumb. “Yeah. I’m pretty confident.”
The Cleveland Indians ballpark had a unique feature that drove Tucker nuts on the mound. Instead of walls of advertising or the blue or green padding favored by other stadiums, the Indians had installed lowered fan seating into caged areas next to the dugout.
He could deal with the bored-looking expressions of the opposing team, but his attention got diverted by the fans who were less inclined to watch with polite disinterest. The seats might have been astronomically expensive, but the fans who could afford them were among the most diehard, and they tended to be the most distracting.
Whoever came up with the idea of putting fans on the same level as the players was an idiot. Sure, it was a great way to sell tickets, but the architect obviously knew nothing about the painstaking effort that went into keeping calm on the mound.
Tucker chewed his grape Bubblicious and stared down the batter, an aging player he’d seen a lot through the years and who’d switched teams once a year over the last few seasons. In the game it was referred to as the journeyman phase of a player’s career. Shuffled from team to team until they were too old or too beaten down to be of value to anyone.
It was rare for a player to quit on their own. Most men held out until they were falling apart at the seams and someone half their age sat them down in a small white room and told them the time had come. Tucker wanted to think he’d know when to call a spade a spade and retire gracefully before he was forty, but he honestly didn’t know.
Wasn’t his elbow giving a sign he should have left the game? Had he taken the clue then? No. He’d gone through a painful surgery and had his own tendons looped through his bones. He’d endured a year of hard, torturous physical therapy, and for what? He was on top of his game again and everyone knew it, but he had the GM breathing down his neck, telling him it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped and he was shipped off to God knows where.
The old batter on the mound held his bat over his head like a Japanese fighter’s sword. It was a flashy batting stance, one that hadn’t changed in all the years and all the cities Tucker had seen him play. Tucker had a mental catalogue of all the stupid batting stances he’d seen, but this was one of his favorites. It had panache and was in no way helpful to getting more leverage on his swing, as evidenced by the .189 batting average the guy currently had.
T
ucker could have struck him out with a T-ball bar.
Alex flashed one finger, calling for a straight-up fastball. Given the age and flagging skill of the batter, it was a good call. A fastball tended to be irresistible to once-great men, since it was such an easy shot right down the middle. The problem for a lot of them was they tended to rely on old instincts rather than adapting to their new, reduced skill.
So they would swing when they used to be able to hit a fastball rather than when they should.
Tucker drew up, dove forward and unleashed the ball straight down the middle for a perfect strike. If he’d been throwing at the pitching target, it would have sailed through one of the cutouts without touching the edges.
As predicted, the batter swung too late, and the ball whizzed by him and into Alex’s glove.
Strike.
The Cleveland crowd booed, but Tucker was buoyed by it. If an away crowd was booing, it meant he was doing something right.
And the longer he did something right, the longer it took for the other shoe to drop.
