Stealing Home(8)

“Everything’s great,” I muttered.

“Thanks. I get that a lot.” Archer’s eyes were spilling amusement.

Grumbling under my breath, I did my best to stay cool and collected through the remainder of the shoot. I felt the opposite though. In fact, I felt my own arousal wetting my underwear. Shit. My body was responding to his. Of its own accord. Without my permission. Feeling him hard and ready against me should have made me want to turn and run. Instead, my body was doing the opposite—welcoming him and inviting him closer.

After a minute, Archer must have noticed the frustrated look on my face. “Sorry,” he whispered.

Even hearing the softness his voice could attain, feeling the heat of his breath on my cheek, made my body weaken.

“Sorry for what?” I asked. “That I’m wearing nothing but your jersey? That I somehow wound up in this photo shoot when I had no idea I’d be posing for Sports Anonymous with Luke Archer? Or are you sorry for your erection you clearly can’t control when I’m stuck sandwiched between you and a baseball bat?”

Archer lowered his head so his mouth was beside my ear. “I’m sorry if my ‘erection’ makes you uncomfortable.”

“But not sorry because you have one, right?”

His head shook slowly. “No, not sorry for that.”

“Of course not.”

When he shrugged, the band of muscle beneath his chest moved against my hand. “At least now you know.”

“At least now I know what?”

“How I feel.”

I blew out a breath. “Yeah, I have a really good idea how you feel. Thanks for clearing it up.”

The harder Archer fought his smile, the more pronounced his dimple became. The auction price for these issues just spiked a grand or two. The children’s hospital could thank me later.

“You know how this game works. I know how.” He paused, letting that settle in the space between us. “You just have to decide if you want to play.”

“Because you have decided?”

His bat pressed deeper into my back, drawing me impossibly closer to his body. His arousal settled hard into the side of my stomach. “Doc, I’m already playing.”





DID I WANT to play the game?

That was the question that had been playing on repeat through my head the past two weeks. I still hadn’t arrived at any answers though.

For as strong as Archer had come on, he’d backed off to the point of simple formalities. I wasn’t sure if that was his way of letting me work things out without any pressure from him or if he’d lost interest or if, hell, I’d imagined everything during that twenty-four-hour period.

Either way, I was still considering my answer. Do I want to play the game?

Typically that question would have been followed up with an immediate and inviolate no. But this wasn’t the typical guy asking. It was Luke Archer. It wasn’t the name or prestige that came with the name that had caught and kept my attention; it was the man behind the name. He was a good one—a decent one.

Now that I was watching Archer through a different lens than the athletic trainer one I’d observed him with before, I was noticing new things. Like the way he always made it a point to take time before and after a game to sign autographs on kids’ baseball gloves or balls or napkins or whatever they waved at him from the fence.

Or the way he embodied the role of a team player—never showboating after nailing a ball over the fences, never failing to pat a teammate on the back when they trudged back to the dugout after striking out.

Or the way he was the first one on the field to warm-up and stayed after to help pack up. As star athletes went, he was the only one I’d come across who didn’t behave like a star.

In terms of men to get involved with, he seemed like the best kind a woman could hope for. I just couldn’t decide if this woman was ready to get involved with anyone, especially someone on the same team. Especially the star player who had no lack of scrutinizing eyes and rolling cameras aimed his way at any given time.

No matter how discreet we tried to be, someone would always be watching. Someone would find out. It was inevitable. And I couldn’t risk getting caught sleeping with a player when I’d already had to fight tooth and nail to get noticed on my own merit.

I couldn’t afford to be that athletic trainer who’d clawed her way into the pros by clawing her nails down Luke Archer’s back. Was a few weeks or months of wild abandon with Archer worth the risk of losing all my credibility?

My frustrated groan rolled down the hotel hall as I stormed down it some time after two in the morning. I’d never been much of a sleeper, and ever since Luke Archer’s roundabout proposition, sleep had been that much harder to attain.

The exercise room was open twenty-four hours a day, thank god, because I needed to work out some serious pent-up energy. We had a big game tomorrow against the Orlando Rays, and everyone was on edge. On edge translated to being ripe for injury, which translated into the athletic training team being extra busy tomorrow. The Shock and the Rays were rivals, but that rivalry ran deeper than most rival relationships did. The players couldn’t stand each other, and the last time Reynolds’s nose had been broken was during a game against the Rays. I didn’t know where the rivalry came from, but I was dreading tomorrow’s game.