Moonshot(13)

It’d be an extra late night, the two-hour rain delay pushing back our bedtimes. I shivered in the empty hall and walked faster, rounding the final corner toward the locker room and running smack into someone.

Someone with a hard body.

Tall, the bill of my hat hitting his chest, my hands instinctively coming up and pushing against his stomach, nothing but hard abs felt through dry uniform.

Uniform. My throat went dry; I stumbled back, my wet cleat slipping against the painted concrete, out from under me, and my hand tightened against his uniform, holding on, his body reacting, and suddenly I had his hands on my hips.

His hands were on my hips. I tried to process that thought, the feel of his fingers tightening, his body bent forward, over me, as I tilted back. I frantically moved my feet, my shoes sliding, legs spreading, and I finally came to a halt, one shoe stopped by the wall, his grip tight on me.

“Don’t move,” he ordered, both of us in danger of falling if I continued my leg windmill. My face was tucked into his chest, an intentional move I had made milliseconds earlier because keeping my chin up would have put us in a Hollywood dip of sorts, and that was quite possibly the only thing that would have made this more embarrassing.

His uniform smelled good. Some sort of cologne, unless he rolled out of bed smelling like a medley of forest and ocean. Dad wore Old Spice, which was the most unsexy, spicy scent on the planet. This … I didn’t want to let go. I wanted to yank off his shirt and wrap it around my head, surgically affix it to my face, and smell just that, forever, even if it made me an elephant man freak in the process.

Don’t move, he had said.

I didn’t. I stayed in place until he pulled me up, my feet almost lifting off the ground, and his hands stayed in place until he was certain I was firm on my feet, our bodies parting, my hands releasing their grip on his shirt, nervously moving to adjust my baseball cap into place, to pull at the front of my wet shirt, releasing the cold material from my skin.

“Thank you,” I muttered.

“You should get into dry clothes.”

“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.