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After two burgers with ketchup and pickles but no buns, a double helping of fruit salad, and one of Elise’s homemade chocolate chip cookies, Rafe said goodbye to the remaining players and headed into the house to find Elise before taking off. His mother had never let him leave a party without saying goodbye and, for some reason, the habit stuck with him today. Maybe it was all those times she’d twisted his ear when he forgot that made the lesson stick. Whatever the case, he never left one of Kane and Elise’s barbeques without finding her to thank her for cooking for all of them, yet again. It was actually getting a little comical how many of the team’s rare days off he spent at his friend’s home. He suspected the Strikers were beginning to spend almost as much time here as the Brawlers.
But, it wasn’t Elise he found in the kitchen. It was her friend, Ashlyn. The quiet one.
She mostly talked to the girls at these things, but he knew who she was because he’d see her at almost every get-together Kane and Elise hosted. Something about her always intrigued him. He suspected she was too shy to talk to the players, or maybe she just looked down on them. There seemed to be two types of women in his world. Some threw themselves at him and any other player in the vicinity, in the hopes of a shot at hooking up, and others looked down on them, thinking baseball players were brainless jocks who got paid too much to play a kid’s game they should’ve given up for “real” jobs long ago.
He’d dated one of those women once. In college, actually, and though she’d liked his status as one of the starting players on the school’s baseball team, when she discovered he had no plans to give it up after school, she dumped him. It had been a real eye-opener for him. He’d assumed any woman would kill to marry a pro baseball player. Who wouldn’t want that? As it turned out, the woman he’d given three years of his life to, the woman he thought he loved and wanted to spend his future with, well, she didn’t want that at all. She wanted him to stop playing ‘childish’ games and ‘get a real job.’
In the end, he’d been glad. He realized he would have been locking himself into a marriage before he was really ready. She did him a favor. She not only saved him from making the marriage mistake he’d seen others make, she taught him how to recognize the women that wanted nothing to do with guys who were stuck playing kid games. And, he was beginning to think that Ashlyn was one of those women.
“Hey,” he said, and laughed a little when she jumped and spun around. Apparently, she hadn’t heard him come in the room. “Sorry about that. Do you know where Elise is? I wanted to say goodbye.”
“Oh,um… ” She looked nervously over his shoulder as if being in the same room alone with him made her anxious. What on earth was up with this woman? “She just ran upstairs to grab something. She’ll be right back.”
“Okay,” he said, watching her intently as he leaned one hip against the counter. She seemed to struggle to come up with something to say. He didn’t feel the need to make idle chitchat about the weather or her latest sewing project or whatever she was about to bring up, so he stayed quiet. Instead, he watched the way her small breasts gently sloped under the peach-colored camisole she wore, wondering if she knew how sensual it was that a tiny scrap of her lace bra showed at the top of the shirt. Probably not. She probably hadn’t intended it to be an alluring outfit, but somehow, it was.
He was so focused on her breasts, he almost missed the words she said, but the unexpected topic caught his attention quickly.
“ … and once you troubleshoot your routine,” she was saying, and he was shocked.
Everyone knew about his routines, but no one other than his teammates was polite enough to call themroutinesinstead of superstitions. Rafe turned his attention to her words and her face, surprised by how animated and excited she seemed when talking about baseball. His level of interest shot up.
“As soon as you troubleshoot things and get your routine back on track, you’ll get the errors worked out and then you can take advantage of the Hawks’ third baseman.”
Holy hell. She was talking baseball like she knew the game. Not only knew the game, but knew it damn well.
“He’s playing you too deep. If you drop a bunt down the third baseline tomorrow, he won’t see it coming.”
Rafe felt a rumble come from deep in his chest as he inched closer to her, trying to get a tiny whiff of the intoxicating scent coming off her. Something flowery, but light. Not overpowering at all. Her scent might not be strong, butshewas overpowering. She was sexy as hell. It wasn’t something a guy would notice at first glance. She was really a tiny mouse of a thing with unremarkable dark brown hair and plain brown eyes, but when she opened her mouth and sounded as sharp as his hitting coach, shit, she did something to him.
She turned him on, is what she did.
Rafe intended to take a step backward, to pull away before he got stupid. But, apparently, he had already hit stupid a few beats back. Instead of retreating, his feet moved closer still, until he was toe-to-toe with her. He wasn’t sure what possessed him to do it, but before he realized what was happening, he had reached out and looped an arm around her waist, pulling her in close.
She put her hands on his chest and gasped in surprise, her brown eyes going round and big, and his cock hardened against her stomach. He didn’t know what in the hell had come over him, but damn, he had to taste her. He expected her to shove him away or maybe even slap him, but a small whimper escaped as she melded her body to his. Those eyes seemed to melt into a caramel color as enticing as she was.
How had he ever thought they were plain?
Rafe lowered his head to capture those cupid bow lips with his mouth, and she answered the kiss with more heat than he would have thought that petite little body possessed, sending all the wrong messages to his dick. Messages about stripping her bare and burying himself deep and hard in her right there on Kane’s kitchen counter.
When Rafe’s arm first came around her waist, Ashlyn was stunned into silence. What on earth could he possibly be doing, grabbing her, pulling her body into his? His very hot, hard body that set her on fire at only the simplest contact.
She felt a brief moment of anger at his audacity. Of course, he thought he could just touch whomever he wanted, grab the closest woman around, whether she’d asked him to or not. Why shouldn’t he? After all, he was the great Rafe Wilson, a player with one of the highest batting averages in the American League so far this year—despite the fact that shortstops aren’t usually known for their batting skill—and one of the most adored shortstops in Strikers history.
Just when she worked up a good mad and was ready to haul off and hit him—or at the very least, tell him a thing or two about himself and where he could put his grabby hands—he’d captured her mouth and melted her senses.
Her instincts, her brain, all of her common sense.
Everything flew out the window in a heartbeat as his tongue slipped between her lips and met hers, setting Ashlyn on fire from the inside out. She was ashamed to say, the response was immediate and utterly unrestrained. Her body pressed to his as his hand came up to cup the back of her head, deepening the kiss, sending images of what that mouth could do to other parts of her body skittering through her head.
In the back of Ashlyn’s mind, a tiny voice was screaming something. Probably something about baseball players being, well,players, as well as something about a white picket fence and a good, safe man. There might have been a vague recollection of being in her friend’s kitchen, making it highly inappropriate to be wishing he would tear her shirt off and put that mouth and those hands to work in other ways.
Ashlyn mentally swatted at the tiny voice and laced her arms around Rafe’s neck, pressing her body even closer. She reveled in the feel of the hard, taut planes of his chest and stomach against her breasts, the sensation of her breasts rubbing against him as he shifted to pull her closer yet. His hard length pressed into her stomach, sending a flush of heat to the long-neglected area between her legs and, for a moment, Ashlyn was lost. Nothing had ever felt like this with any of the white-picket-fence-guys. Not even close.
Then suddenly, the voice in her head was not tiny, nor was it in her head any longer. It was coming from the kitchen doorway and it belonged to what sounded like a very shocked Elise.
“Holy Jeesum! I’m sorry, I’ll just ... ” Ashlyn opened her eyes to see Elise awkwardly backpedaling out of the room, gesturing over her shoulder, mumbling about going back upstairs until they were finished.
Ashlyn gasped and looked from her friend to Rafe—more specifically to her body draped on Rafe’s, one leg actually raised and hooked around his thigh—and then she bolted.
