Stealing Home(23)

Luke chuckled as he crunched on his toast. “Middle school courting at its finest. Pretending the person you’re into doesn’t exist.”

“Well, look at us now.” I glanced across the table at him. I was eating breakfast with a shirtless Luke Archer after experiencing a night of wild abandon and even wilder sex.

“Yeah, look at us now.” He filled my cup of coffee back up and shot me a wink. “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”

“Mr. Ruth?”

He nodded. “Mr. Ruth.”

We were quiet for a minute, working on our breakfasts and enjoying the peaceful silence. I didn’t feel the need to fill it. Luke didn’t seem to feel the need either. We were comfortable with the quiet, which seemed like the highest step a couple could aspire to. Strange, since we’d only known each other for weeks and been “together” for hours.

I broke the silence once we were pushing the last few bites of our meals around. “So how are we going to make sure that no one finds out?”

“We’ll have to be discreet,” he said.

“Are you capable of being discreet?”

“I am when I have to be. When I’ve got the proper motivation.”

“And this, us, is proper motivation?”

“This, us”—he waved his fork between us—“is the definition of proper motivation.”

The dead serious look on his face made me laugh. Male motivation was not one of the great mysteries of life. “You’ve got a date with an ice bath, but I’ve got one more question before I give your family jewels frostbite.”

“Good one.”

I continued, “If you’d been watching me for a while—been attracted to me for a while—why did you decide that night on the plane was the right time to make your move?”

His eyes lifted to mine as he buttered his toast. “You’re telling me my opening line of whose ass do I need to kick, Doc didn’t do it for you?”

“It worked, obviously, but it was a unique approach.”

Luke stretched his legs out and leaned back into his chair. “No, that hadn’t been part of my plan at all, but seeing you sitting there, looking so sad, I didn’t care. I had to talk to you.”

Something inside me softened right then. Maybe it was my heart. Maybe it was my head. Maybe it was both. “You’re kind of wonderful, Luke Archer.”

He set his hand on the table, holding it open and waiting. When my hand settled into his, he held it tightly. “You’re kind of wonderful too, Allie Eden.”





BEING DISCREET WAS harder to do than I’d guessed. Luke was actually doing better with it than I was. I kept finding myself checking the duration of my stares or the degree of my smiles or the tenor of my touch when I changed his compress. Second-guessing and self-regulating had become the way of things ever since we checked out of the hotel in Florida.

For all of the effort, I was confident we’d done a decent job of coming across as nothing more than one trainer and one player working together. A couple of raised brows from Reynolds that I wrote off as muscle spasms—Reynolds was the kind of guy who wouldn’t notice much unless a couple was straight-up getting it on a foot in front of him—was all the suspicion I’d noticed aimed our way. Of course, once the Sports Anonymous cover came out, we’d see more.

We were in New Orleans, and it was a game day. After checking into the hotel last night, Luke and I had gone to our respective rooms, though not from his lack of trying to change that. But I was too worried about someone catching me slipping into his room or him sneaking out of mine. Without the excuse of round the clock treatment, there’d be no reason other than the obvious for a woman to be in Luke Archer’s hotel room at night.

The team and staff had checked into the locker room an hour ago, and I’d been busy taping, massaging, and stretching the players. I hadn’t seen Luke since he’d finished his ice bath a while ago, but I found my gaze shifting over to his designated locker, with his uniform and cleats, every few minutes, wondering where he was.

“Eden!” Coach Beckett’s voice echoed through the entire locker room. “My office!” He didn’t wait for me to acknowledge him or pause to locate me in the room—he just marched back into the coach’s office.

“Thanks, Doc,” Watson, one of the team’s back-up pitchers, said, winding his arm a few times after I succinctly had to finish my massage.

“You bet. Just make sure you give yourself a proper warm-up tonight before you jump the mound and start throwing one hundred mile speedballs, okay? That’s how you get on the list for needing a new shoulder before your thirtieth birthday.”

Watson acknowledged me with a grunt as I headed for the coach’s office. I didn’t have a clue what Coach wanted to see me about, but it wasn’t uncommon for us to have trainers’ meetings with him if he needed to be brought up to speed on a player’s status. Those were scheduled though, and never held a mere few hours before a big game.

When I stepped inside the office, I found I wasn’t the only one Coach had rounded up. Shepherd; the team’s doctor, Dr. Callahan; and Turner, the physical therapist, were all circled around someone sitting in a chair across from the coach’s desk.

Luke.

He didn’t divert his attention toward me when I entered the room; he kept his gaze on Coach and his expression conventional. He was in a pair of jeans, a snug-fitting white tee, and had his team ball cap on backward, sending the ends of his hair curling out around the rim of it.