Pitch Please (There's No Crying in Baseball 1)

“Your brother’s a baseball player, right?” Hancock asked, his eyebrows lifting with his question.

I nodded my head.

“He is,” I confirmed, wondering where he was going with this. “For the Sparks.”

“Then him being in the Major Leagues has to mean that he didn’t just start being a baseball player last week,” he continued.

I shook my head.

“No, he’s been playing since he was six and I was five,” I explained. “Why?”

His mouth kicked up at one corner.

“You reading Baseball for Dummies?” he hinted. “You’ve seen your brother play.”

I promptly blushed.

“My best friend, Rainie, was responsible for that,” I muttered, lifting my coffee cup to my mouth and taking a sip. “She thought she’d be funny and give it to me on my first big day right before the game. I opened it in the dugout.”

“Ahhh,” he nodded his head. “The blonde?”

I grinned.

“You saw her?” I guessed.

“It’s kind of hard not to see her,” he admitted.

I started to laugh.

“Rainie is an all-in kind of girl. She doesn’t do anything halfway if she can manage all the way,” I told him.

Explaining anything about Rainie was difficult to do at the best of times. Explaining her to a man like Hancock seemed rather impossible.

Hancock’s lips twitched as he tried to keep himself from laughing.

“What does your Rainie do?” he asked, leaning back so his legs could stretch out in front of him.

The movement put his legs directly against mine, and I struggled with not yanking my legs back as far as I could make them go.

Surely, it would be okay to allow his legs to touch mine…right?

“Rainie is a free spirit,” I told him, fondness for my best friend leeching into my voice. “She’s had eight jobs in the last two months, and she’s lived in three different apartments.”

“How does she manage to do that?” he asked curiously.

I took another sip of my coffee before answering.

“Her daddy is a bad ass lawyer who funds all of Rainie’s crazy whims,” I disclosed. “He pays her rent. Pays for her car. Pays for anything and everything. Pretty much allows Rainie to do whatever the hell she wants to do.”

Hancock lost his fight with his smile.

“Must be nice,” he muttered, taking his own sip of coffee.

My brows rose at that.

“Last I heard, you had a multi-million-dollar contract under way with the Lumberjacks,” I murmured. “Seems to me like you’re not hurting for money.”

Hancock nodded.

“I’m not,” he agreed. “Anymore,” he added. “But when I was younger…” he shook his head. “We survived on Ramen noodles, Beanie Weenies and peanut butter. And those were our good days.”

“Hmm,” I murmured. “We didn’t eat anything we didn’t grow or kill ourselves,” I informed him. “I think I was a senior in high school before we ate out for the first time.”

Hancock’s foot twitched, and I had to hold my breath when his bare foot touched mine.

We were both in flip-flops due to the excessive Texas heat, and that meant that we were skin on skin when he touched me underneath the table.

He watched me squirm with a gleam in his eyes, and I was just about to pull away when he stopped, his foot next to mine, and asked me his next question.

“What have you been doing since you graduated?” he asked. “Was this always a place you wanted to work for?”

I nodded my head.

“I wanted to work for the Sparks, actually, but then my brother got signed there, and I decided that I couldn’t handle seeing him every day. So, I applied here,” I grinned. “I’d been interning for Bob for a while when I was free, so it was nice to step right in as head athletic trainer when he decided to retire due to his heart attack.”

“Baseball season is long,” he agreed. “And Bob was old as fuck. It doesn’t surprise me that he signed on the dotted line.”

“So, in short, I really do know my shit when it comes to baseball,” I smiled. “I was head athletic trainer at UT Tyler for a couple of years before I got this job. A job I didn’t think I’d get,” I pointed out.

He set his empty coffee cup on the table in front of us and looked at me with those intriguing gray eyes.

Was it normal for eyes to be such an intense shade of gray?

And, oh my God. He had powdered sugar in his beard from his French toast.

Jesus Christ, I wanted to lick it off.

That would be inappropriate, though…wouldn’t it?

“You have powdered sugar…” I gestured at my own face where it was on his, and he lifted his hand to swipe at his beard.

“I was saving it for later,” he chuckled.

A grin stretched my mouth wide.

“That’s acceptable, I guess,” I said. “But I would hate for you to have pictures taken of you with food in your beard.”

I gestured at the table behind us full of women who were talking about Hancock. They were whispering quietly, of course, but I’d heard them ask four or five times already if they thought it’d be okay to ask for a picture.