Slow Heat

Pace and Gage staring at him. “What? I did.”

“I remember,” Gage said. “Everyone dived on you at the plate and you cracked a rib. What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

Pace raised a brow. “You disappear with Sam for an hour, then only you come back, and nothing’s up?”

Wade scrubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And it wasn’t an hour.”

“Forty-five minutes.” Gage looked him over. “Your shirt is half untucked, your tie’s gone, and probably you want to lift your collar to hide that bite mark on your neck. Either you got jumped by some fan girls, or you just got laid.”

Wade tucked the rest of his shirt in. There was nothing to be done about the tie. It was wadded up in his pocket along with Sam’s bra. He lifted a spoon from the table to use as a mirror to check his neck. Yep. He had a doozy of a hickey going.

Gage shook his head.

Pace grinned. “Nice.”

Wade sighed. “Don’t you have a fiancee to worry about? And you,” he said to Gage. “Where’s your date?”

“They’ve gone on a little girls’ room run. They seem to do that in pairs.”

Yeah. Most women did.

Not Sam.

She’d been in there all alone until he’d come along, though he had to say, they’d made a nice pair. Speaking of, where the hell was she? He craned his neck and looked around-

“Lose something?” Pace asked with mock politeness.

Wade ignored him, still searching through the wedding revelers for Sam.

“You know, I was going to keep my nose out of this one,” Gage said. “But-”

“Oh, Christ,” Wade groaned. “Not the but.”

“But,” Gage continued undeterred. “I don’t think you two are a good idea.”

“We’re not a two,” Wade said. “You more than anyone know that this whole weekend is pretend. Make-believe. A complete fallacy. Hell, it was your idea.”

“And a bad one,” Pace muttered.

“No shit,” Wade muttered back.

“But only because you are a two,” Pace said patiently.

“And have been ever since Atlanta.”

“Atlanta?” Gage asked, eyes narrowing. “What happened in Atlanta?”

“Nothing.” Wade shook his head and glared at Pace. “Nothing.”

Pace leaned in close to Wade. “You remember right before the playoffs, when I fell hard for Holly and couldn’t admit it? You made me face it.”

“Yeah? So? You were being an idiot and needed a friendly shove.”

“Consider this…” Pace gave Wade a good, hard shove on his shoulder, nearly knocking him off the chair. “The same.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Gage told Pace. “He’ll just fuck with her head.”

“Sitting right here,” Wade said, feeling more than a little tense.

“I’m sorry, man. But that’s what you do. Fuck ’em and leave ’em.”

“Not always.”

“Always,” Gage said firmly.

Wade opened his mouth to refute that and Gage just gave him a long, even look. “Name one time you’ve been ditched, Wade. One time.”

Wade said nothing, but he counted in his head. His mother. His father.

Sam.

Not that he’d say so.

“She deserves better,” Gage said.

Wade looked at Pace. “You think so, too?”

“She deserves to be more than the pretend girlfriend, I’ll give you that. Because it’s Sam, you know?”

Yeah. He knew. Sam, who they all cared about. Sam, who gave so much of herself to the team. Sam, who’d just given herself to him, and he had a feeling it was far more than she’d intended.

As it had been for him.

He sat there with a headache brewing and the certainty that he’d already fucked it up without even knowing exactly how. “Well, this has been fun, but I’ve got to go.” He pushed away from the table and strode through the reception one more time, but he was certain.

Sam wasn’t here.

He headed inside the main lobby and headed straight for the elevators, punching the button, suddenly afraid he was already too late.

The elevator didn’t come. He hit the button again, swore, then headed for the stairs. He made it to their eighth floor suite three minutes later, running on adrenaline as he burst into their room. “Sam.”

But he knew even before he called her name that she was gone. The note on the bathroom mirror confirmed it.

Take the limo back, I grabbed a cab.

Yep. He’d been ditched. “Well, hell,” he said out loud, pulling the note down. As he did, something on the counter grabbed his attention.

Her bathroom bag.

It was stuffed with makeup and brushes and bottles of stuff-the mysteries of a woman.

It smelled like her.

And just next to the bag lay her mother’s antique pearl pin.

“You were in a hurry,” he murmured, and suddenly he didn’t feel quite as bad. She hadn’t run out on him because she was done with the pretense.

Nope.

She’d run because that pretense had turned into a few moments of… real.

Something neither of them had intended.

It’d been so real it’d scared her.

“Chicken,” he said softly, surprised at this unexpected chink in her armor, while being equally surprised at something else.

He was afraid, too. Which meant it was a good thing she’d gone, a really good thing. And palming the pin, gently running his thumb over it, he willed himself to get over it before he saw her again, before she saw that she wasn’t the only one with a chink in her armor.

Chapter 11

Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything.

– Toby Harrah

Wade got back to Santa Barbara late, and hit the sack. He woke in his own bed, which was infinitely better than the couch had been in the hotel but somehow it was not nearly as much fun.

He got dressed and wondered what his pretend girlfriend was doing. Certainly notreturning any of his calls…

Telling himself he was ready for the opening game of season four against the Padres, he drove to the Heat’s facilities with the music cranking, walked into the clubhouse and felt adrenaline kick in. Adrenaline was good. It meant he wasn’t thinking about Sam, or how she’d felt with her legs wrapped around his waist as he’d plunged into