One in Waiting (Reedsville Roosters Book 2), page 17
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One in Waiting was originally written as an installment to the multi-author, shared world Den of Sin series, which is why the venue and the Beaudelaire family features so prominently in this story. I spun One and Waiting and the Season 3 story Winterball off into the Reedsville Roosters series so that I could explore the team dynamics more fully. Subsequent stories will all take place—for the most part—away from The Beaudelaire.
Look for two new Reedsville stories in February 2016 featuring the players Al Felton and Quinn Hathaway with two very special ladies. Suffice it to say nepotism doesn’t fly with the Roosters, and these ladies really know how to put players in their places.
Reedsville Reading Order
1 – Winterball (m/m)
2 – One in Waiting (m/m/f)
3 – Lucky Break (m/f)
4 – Designated Hitter – in the At Her Service anthology (m/f)
5 – Out of Bounds (m/m/f) – coming late spring 2016
Subscribe to my contemporary romance newsletter so you don’t miss a Reedsville Roosters release, and then turn the page for a peek at Reedsville #3: Lucky Break.
LUCKY BREAK
Baseball tore Edy Wallace’s family apart when she was a child, and now she paints all athletes with the same broad brush. She refuses to have some player running around on her like her father did to her mother, so she avoids getting involved with the scoundrels on the team her father manages.
When Reedsville Roosters slugger Al Felton breaks his leg during spring training and needs a special escort home to Baton Rouge, her father calls on her for a favor she can’t refuse. Al’s not a man who’s so easy to ignore, but Edy refuses to let her guard down. His charming smile and pretty words appeal, but she’s convinced that he’ll be one more man who’ll choose baseball over her.
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Chapter One
If there was one thing Edy Wallace hated more than baseball, it was baseball players, and she’d given up on feeling sorry about that.
Staring at Al Felton and his smarmy leer reinforced her revulsion of the two things. Even high on painkillers and leaning precariously on his crutches between her father and Al’s Reedsville Roosters teammate, Cameron Moreno, he couldn’t stop himself from teasing.
“Why ya lookin’ so mean?” Al snorted. “Not nice, you being so mean. You should smile. Won’t kill you to smile, witchy woman.”
Stupid jocks. All the same.
She was happy Al had broken his leg because it meant he was hurting. She wanted him to hurt.
She cleared her throat, crossed her arms over her chest, and looked to her father. “What exactly do you expect me to do with him?”
Pop shrugged. “I figured since you were heading that way, you could take him home.”
“Why can’t you fly him home?”
“Because you driving him is easier on the team’s budget than us putting him on a plane. How’s he gonna fly with that big-ass cast, anyway? He can’t bend his knee.”
Her gaze fell down the third baseman’s body to the cast that ran from thigh to foot. He’d broken…something-or-other. Edy had sort of tuned Pop out once the pitch of his voice dropped to a particular range. She knew him too well. She’d been standing behind her station wagon packing up her camping gear when he’d walked up, and had felt it in her bones that he was about to ask her for a favor. Pop didn’t ask for favors very often—he figured he didn’t have the right to, and he was right about that—but when he did ask, they tended to be whoppers. He hadn’t disappointed. He wanted her to play babysitter and chauffeur from the Texas Hill Country all the way to Baton Rouge.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and sucked in a calming breath. “Are you sure you can’t just keep him with you?”
Cameron adjusted Felton’s arm around his neck, and groaned. “Come on, Edy. He’s just gonna bitch and moan all season. We can’t do nothin’ with him, and there’s no point of him sitting around. He’s on the disabled list now. Gotta pull someone else up.”
Edy clucked her tongue and shook her head. “You have the hardest time keeping players, huh, Pop? How many starters have you lost in three seasons? Five?”
“Now, you hush with that. And what do you expect? Up until a couple of years ago, we were the worst team in the minor league. Most of the guys I had couldn’t hit a beach ball if it were tossed at them.”
Cameron cleared his throat.
Pop sighed. “Present company excluded. We’re getting better. This is just a minor setback, is all. It’s not like losing a captain or anything.” He said that last part through clenched teeth and fixed his glare on the ranch house they were standing in the driveway of.
The Roosters, at the moment, were on Emilie Beaudelaire’s Texas ranch. The heiress had graciously let them use some pasture space for their spring training exercises. Their home field back in Florida had been flooded out during a freak spring storm system, and they weren’t allowed back yet…because the turf was all mud. They probably shouldn’t have ripped all the sod out to get rid of the weeds.
The Roosters’ last captain was shacking up with Emilie. He’d quit the team…as had his longtime partner. Supposedly, Marshall and Thompson had the strongest arms on the team, so they’d left Pop somewhat in a lurch. Edy could see how being on the ranch would cause Pop some angst, but hell—it wasn’t her fault he couldn’t keep players. She did everything she could to avoid them.
The only reason she was in Texas at all was because Emilie threw a twice-annual shindig called Camp Out that was part music festival, part group camping event, and part bacchanal.
Edy had enjoyed relaxing in her little pop-up trailer over the long weekend, listening to music and catching up on reading. The barbecue had been nice, too. She was pretty sure she’d eaten ten pounds of ribs, not that she kept count anymore. It didn’t matter if she ate or not. Tits, ass, and thighs like hers didn’t go away with starvation. She’d learned that the hard way.
She took another breath and smoothed back her ponytail. “I just don’t know what you want me to do with him, Pop. I was going to take the slow route back to Baton Rouge. I built this vacation into the office’s annual holiday. I don’t have to be back at work until next Monday. I’ve got a hotel room booked for tonight and something else planned for tomorrow.”
“No reason you can’t go slow,” Pop said, propping a drooping Al up a little more.
Al’s eyelids were sagging, but that lecherous sneer of his remained fixed. It must have been some kind of perverse gift.
Edy groaned and shifted her weight. She looked at Pop, who seemed extremely tired, and Cameron, who just looked bored with it all.
“Know the feeling, guy,” she muttered and threw up her hands. “Fine. Whatever. I don’t know how you’re going to fit him in my car with his leg like that, but do what you have to do.”
“Thanks, Edy!” Pop called out, already herding the busted player toward the station wagon. “Don’t you worry. Even if we have to fold down the backseat and lay him flat as a corpse, we’ll get him in there.”
“Pretty sure it’s illegal to travel like that.”
Cameron scoffed. “Not like the cops would be able to see him. Just try not to make any hard turns. We’d like him back next season.”
“Too bad he couldn’t have been one of the expendable ones, huh?”
“You said it, not me.”
“I was joking, Cameron.”
Pop flinched and pulled open the back of Edy’s station wagon.
“Hey. It’s not like we’re rolling deep with talent,” Cameron said. “We have maybe seven strong players, which is more than we had three years ago, but if we lose just one, it hurts.”
Pop pulled out Edy’s luggage and toted them back to the trailer.
Obviously, he hadn’t been joking about putting down that back seat.
He swapped the luggage out for some blankets and a pillow and made Al a little pallet.
Then he opened the left rear passenger door and crooked his thumb toward it. “All right, Felton. Scoot on in there. Try not to arouse the suspicions of the five-oh, so don’t sit up, don’t wave your arms, hell—don’t even breathe too hard so you don’t fog the windows. If you give Edy a hard time, I will personally fly to Louisiana and kick your ass with my cleats on.”
Al’s pale green eyes rolled back in his head and he let his lips sputter. “Yesh, shur. Ay-yi-yi, shur.”
Edy cringed. “What the hell kind of painkillers do they have him on?”
Cameron got the swaying player into the doorway and took his crutches from him. “Dunno. Might want to have something for him to throw up in just in case, though. I think whatever it is was a pretty high dosage. I mean, he broke his leg in two places. Shit probably hurts.”
“How’d he break it, anyway?”
Al, inside the car, smacked his hand over Cameron’s mouth. “Don’t shay onnnne word. Comprehendo?”
Cameron narrowed his eyes at his teammate, took a step back, and closed the door.
Al pulled his arm in just in time.
“I’ll let him tell you,” Cameron said. “Suffice it to say it was a comedy of errors unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.” He chuckled, and walked away, turning his baseball cap backward on his head as he went.
Pop sighed and crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “You want some gas money?”
“Yeah.” She held out her hand.
“Bill me.”
“Pop.”
“Gotta go through the team accountant. You know how to submit an expense report, right? Just save all your receipts or whatever.”
She rolled her eyes and started for the driver’s side. “Remind me to never again be in the general vicinity of where you are.”
“Aww, don’t be like that, dumplin’. At least I’m appreciative.”
“The problem is that your appreciation often comes through on a delay.” She dropped into the seat and yanked the seatbelt across her body, adding, “of a decade or two,” through clenched teeth as she did it.
Pop leaned into the doorway. “I could always ask your sister to do stuff, but you know how it goes.”
“Which sister?”
“Cordy.”
“Oh, well of course, Cordy. Yeah, she’s too busy and you wouldn’t want to inconvenience the princess.”
“Edy…”
“Save it. I know the spiel. Ol’ dependable Edy, right? Just like Mom?”
Pop’s cheeks went red as if someone had slapped him hard, but Edy wasn’t going to apologize—not for that. “Edy, listen, I—”
I don’t want to hear it. “Pop. I need to get on the road, okay?” She tried to put a little sunshine in her voice, but she’d never been good at faking it. “I…um. My optometrist says I shouldn’t drive at night. Unless you want me to end up in a ditch with your little slugger back there, let me get on my way. Please.”
Pop dragged a hand through his thinning hair and took a step away from the door. “All right, dumplin’. Call me when you stop for the night and let me know how he is.”
“No. He’s your player. Why can’t you call him?”
“Fair enough. Drive carefully.”
“I always do, unlike some people.” Unlike Cordy. How many cars has she been through now?
Edy plugged her aux cord’s jack into her phone, opened her GPS app, and input the address for the night’s hotel. It was only a five-hour drive to Shreveport, but the day was already late. She’d planned to get on the road right after lunch, but there went Pop in the team bus, blocking her in, and then escorting that idiot with the cast out of it—fresh from the hospital.
She gave her father a wave, shifted into drive, and carefully backed down the driveway.
“Bumpity-bumpity,” Al said.
“I can make it worse if you complain, Felton.”
“Gotta work on your bedside manner.”
“Take it or leave it. And by leave it, I mean get out.”
“Nah. Gotta go home.”
“I’m sure your girlfriend would take you home if you called her.” Edy knew there was a girlfriend. She was typical for the kind of cleat-clingers that hung around the Roosters. The guys were known far more widely for what they were swinging between their legs than how well they swung on the field.
“Girlfriend?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“You know my girlfriend?”
“Sure. I’ve bumped into her once or twice.” Damn near run her over, actually, but that wasn’t hard. Kit probably weighed ninety pounds, and five of that was mascara. Edy had turned around and collided with her at the concession stand the previous summer, and she’d bounced off Edy like a stuntwoman who’d had a rope yanking her back to stage a dramatic fall.
But Kit was always dramatic. Edy did her best to avoid her and all the other cock groupies, too.
“What’d ya think of her?” Al asked.
“Why do you care?”
“Just curious. Cameron dated her first. They weren’t quite right, either.”
“What do you mean either?”
He didn’t respond. She looked at him through the rearview mirror and found his head lolled to the side, his lips parted, and eyes closed.
“Hope he’s not dead,” she muttered. She cared a little, but not enough to stop driving. She hadn’t been lying about that night driving thing.
She queued up a playlist on her phone as she paused at the turn to the county road, and took a long sip of cherry cola.
Then she looked back again. “You’re alive, aren’t you Felton?”
He didn’t respond.
“Ugh, Felton.” She drummed her fingertips on the steering wheel for a while, waiting for him to move or cough or something, but he didn’t.
Grimacing, she wedged a finger between the toes left exposed by his cast and tickled his foot.
He didn’t move.
“Dammit.”
She put the car in park, yanked up the emergency brake, and released her seatbelt buckle.
“If he’s dead, I’m gonna kill Pop.” She stepped between the car and the trailer behind it, straddled the hitch, and then opened the wagon’s rear door.
She put a finger under Al’s nose and felt the faint tickle of his breath. Just to be sure, she pressed a hand between his pecs and sought out the beat of his heart.
Seemed strong enough. Steady, but slow. That could have been normal for him, or maybe the painkiller was doing a hell of a number on him.
Her relief had barely settled in before anger chased it back.
There was a calloused hand between her tits, trying to inch down her cleavage, and her nipples had perked up just that quickly in an embarrassing “Well, hello.”
She knocked his hand away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Thought we were feeling heartbeats. Yours is down there somewhere, I reckon. Want me to find it with my mouth?”
“Oh my God, I was trying to make sure you were alive. I’m very much alive, by the way. I don’t need you to prove that to me.”
“I’m feeling pretty alive right now, too.” His hand inched down his belly and settled over his crotch.
“Don’t you dare.”
He squeezed it, and sighed. “Life hurts. Make it stop hurtin’.”
She closed her eyes and groaned.
“Touch me some more,” he said drowsily. “Bend over me again. Nice view from here. I wouldn’t even mind if you suffocated me a little.”
“Pervert.”
“So? Tits are fun. I bet yours are real fun.”
“You know who probably has really fun tits?”
“Who?” He actually tried to sit up a little as if it were really crucial he learn that name.
“Your girlfriend. Kit.”
He let his lips sputter and put his head down. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Since when, two minutes ago?”
“Since, like, November or something. Thanksgiving is in November, right? Or is that Christmas?”
She furrowed her brow. “November.”
“Yeah. Sounds right.” He folded his fingers atop his belly and his head lolled to the side again.
“Why’d you break up?”
“With who?”
“Kit.”
“I think she’s hung up on Cam.”
“Oh.” Brow furrowed, Edy closed the gate and walked back to the driver’s side of the car. She got in, and got them moving once more.
Al slept, and she let him. It was probably for the best that they didn’t talk.
Lucky Break is available now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Holley Trent is an award-winning author of more than forty works of contemporary, paranormal, and erotic romance. Raised in rural, coastal North Carolina, she currently makes the Colorado Front Range her home.
In addition to her independently published works, she has books available through Crimson Romance and Kensington Publishing. See her full backlist of stories at her website.
Want to chat about One in Waiting, the hunks on the Reedsville Roosters team, or other topics? Catch her online on Twitter where she tweets under the handle @holleytrent. You can also chat with her on Facebook.
COPYRIGHT AND CREDITS
ONE IN WAITING
Copyright © 2015 by Holley Trent
Excerpt LUCKY BREAK © 2016 by Holley Trent
All rights reserved. Except for use in review, no part of this work may be reproduced in any format without permission of the author. Holley Trent, PO Box 2407, Longmont, CO 80503/holley@holleytrent.com.
ONE IN WAITING is a work of fiction. Names, places, entities, and scenarios in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover art credits:
Model: ©VJ Dunraven Productions/Period Images
Rooster stock: ©inga via Dollar Photo Club
Background: ©inoumasa via Dollar Photo Club
Baseball: ©pixelrobot via Dollar Photo Club
Copy edits by Jen Duffey.
