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She nodded, biting her lower lip as if to clamp down on an overly grateful croak. “It’s funny,” she said, painfully aware that his hands were still clutching her shoulders. “Before I met you, I could have cared less about this assignment. But now, suddenly, I … I’m afraid to lose it.”
He nodded, releasing his grip but gently tugging the valise from her shoulder in the process. “Hey,” she pretended to protest.
“I just need a piece of paper, girl. Dang, you’re jumpy.”
“Yeah, well, I haven’t been kicked out of an empty stadium since I was in high school, okay? Give me a few minutes to process the indignity, will you.”
Shane ignored her, rooting around in her work purse as if they hadn’t just met. Normally she would have yanked it back, shocked by his sheer audacity, but something about those long, sexy fingers rifling through her lipstick and ballpoint pens gave her a sexy little thrill. Finally he beamed, emerging with a sticky notepad and one of the pens in question, handing her the bag back as if he’d already forgotten about it.
He scribbled something quickly, sticking his tongue out in concentration and giving rise to a thousand more fantasies, as if her lurid brain could store one more atop the million he’d already given her that evening alone. He finished, handing her the pad and pen, and beaming with pride.
He nodded at the bruised pickup in the parking space nearby, the only one still left in the lot. “That you?”
“Obviously,” she teased. She was tempted to peek at the note he’d scribbled but too invested in what was obviously their final goodbye of the evening to risk glancing away from Shane for one solitary moment.
“Well, go on, girl. Get!” He sounded like a cowboy trying to shoo an unruly bucking bronco or something, and God love him, Tatum was down for that in a very big way.
She rolled her eyes all the same, as if struggling to retain her last known shred of dignity. “What about you, Shane? Don’t you need a ride?”
The thought of being in the front seat alone with him was flooding what was left of the dry spaces in her poor, sodden panties. “What? To the athletic dorms?” He jerked a thumb to the towering building nearby, gleaming and shiny, and less than a block away.
“I guess you’re right,” she said, shuffling to the door. She thought, for a Southern gent like himself, Shane would have followed, but he remained on the sidewalk, watching her progress from afar. She opened the door, wondering why he’d suddenly gone radio silent. “Well,” she teased before getting in. “Thanks for a lovely evening.”
His grin was sudden and warm, bringing to life those sexy dimples in the shadows beneath his crooked ball cap. “I know you don’t think so, Tatum,” he croaked, voice a notch deeper than it had been all evening. “But it has been.”
She thought of a million things to say, some sexy, some silly, some stupid, all horribly, terribly, clumsily wrong. Instead she merely nodded, grinned, and backed out of her space, wondering what Shane had meant by that.
If he meant anything at all…
Chapter Ten
Shane
“Again?”
Shane huffed, swinging the bat at the flying ball and missing. Again. His roommate, Booger Johnson, snorted and shifted his 240-plus pounds around in his baseball pants, sweating like a stuck pig. “Damn, boy, I know you play right field but you ever swung a bat before?”
“Very funny,” Shane grunted, hoisting the bat over his shoulder again and readying himself for the next ball out of the big rubber chute pointed square across the imaginary plate at his feet. “I’m just nervous, that’s all.”
“About that reporter chick?”
The tube spat. The ball whizzed. Shane whiffed. Again. Booger snorted, making Shane wish for the thousandth time that he hadn’t told his oversized, over-snoopy, over-masculine roommate a single word about Tatum when he’d gotten home the night before, let alone about her crinkle skirt, her poofy nipples, her sexy glasses, or swishy black ponytail.
“Dude,” Booger snorted, sausage fingers slid through the other side of the batting cage, sweaty and out of breath after his spin on the inside. Now it was Shane’s turn, and all he wanted was for Booger to leave so he could swing and miss the whizzing baseballs in relative peace and quiet.
They were the last two to leave conditioning practice for the afternoon, the rest of the team having drifted off to the locker rooms and beyond shortly after their allotted time in the half-dozen batting cages on the far end of the stadium. Booger himself was just killing time before he left for the weekend, his weekly sojourn home to his apparently faithful high school sweetheart, a trip he both looked forward to every week, and from the looks of it, avoided until the very last minute.
“Don’t you have a girlfriend to go home to?” Shane teased just before he whiffed and missed another whizzing baseball.
“Indeed I do,” Booger bragged, puffing up to his full height of 6’2” and leaning against the suddenly straining mesh of the batting cage provocatively. “Indeed I do, friend, but this is so much more entertaining, don’t you think?”
Shane had to chuckle at that. “I’d hit every one of these dang things if I didn’t have an audience,” he huffed.
“Audience? How do you think you’re going to feel when that stadium back there is full of voracious fans once season officially starts?”
Shane let another ball whizz by his face, not even bothering to swing. “By then I’ll be cracking every one of these out of the park, obviously!”
Boomer howled with laughter, as big and obnoxious as everything else about the bonafide jock. “Not at this rate, pal.”
