Back in the Game Read online

  “No,” he said. “You can’t understand me because I don’t understand myself.”

  In that moment he sounded so completely vulnerable that her frustration evaporated. “What do you mean?”

  “Can’t we find a way to tell my story without digging up the past?”

  “No. Not really. The readers want to know who you are. In order to do that you’ve got to give them a glimpse into the events that made the man.”

  He pushed his plate way, his meal half eaten.

  “I don’t get it. If you didn’t want to talk about the past, why did you agree to write your autobiography?” she asked.

  “I’m writing the book because I want to tell the world about the truth about Dugan Potts.”

  “Which is?”

  Rowdy’s jaw jutted out. He looked so different from the teasing, fun-loving, adventuresome man she’d come to know. How much of that persona was real? Chill bumps raced up her arms as she realized she really didn’t know him at all.

  “You’re right,” he said. “This whole mess did start in my childhood.”

  “What mess?”

  He looked haunted. “My life.”

  She gulped, not knowing what to say. She had not expected that interviewing him was going to be the most difficult part of the job.

  “All right. You win,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll pack a picnic lunch and go on a field trip.”

  “Where to?”

  “The beginning. You want to know where I came from? You need to see it for yourself.”

  CHAPTER 11

  A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown

  divided into nine innings.

  —EARL WILSON

  At ten a.m. on Friday morning, they stood in front of a run-down house on the seediest block in the seamiest neighborhood of Stardust. Breeanne felt strangely exposed in a high-necked powder blue tank top, white Bermuda shorts, and sandals, and wished she’d worn something more substantial.

  Like body armor.

  A shiver sliced through her belly. No wonder Rowdy had been reluctant to talk about his childhood.

  “There it is.” He folded his arms over his chest. “Home sweet home.”

  Breeanne stared at the dilapidated shack, windows boarded, roof sagging, porch caved in. A large red ant mound was centered in a front yard bald of grass, and busy insects formed a streaming trail from their bed to a doughnut box lying open in the gutter. In the side yard, a tire cracked with age hung suspended from a dead mimosa by a frayed yellow rope. Had Rowdy once played on that tire swing?

  She turned on the digital voice recorder clipped to her waistband. “This is where you grew up?”

  “It didn’t look this bad back then.” He picked up a rock, spun it with an underhanded pitch. The stone skipped over the bare patch of ground, hopped four times, then hit the droopy chain link fence with a solid ping. “At least I don’t think it did.”

  A locomotive approaching the train crossing just beyond the house, blasted its horn. Breeanne covered her ears. After a while, the engine stopped honking, but it remained impossible to hold a conversation above the sound of the boxcars clacking across the rails.

  Rowdy lifted his mouth in a sad half smile that said both nothing and everything. The sound of the train had been his childhood lullaby.

  She looked into his face and felt the same zap of recognition she’d felt the first day on Irene Henderson’s front lawn. As if a curtain had parted, and they could see straight into each other, deeper than anyone had ever looked at either of them before. He was not just a good-time Charlie jock. She was not just a mousy wallflower, bookseller, writer-wannabe. Labels. Those were simply labels that didn’t begin to describe who they were or what they felt.

  In his eyes she saw the reflection of everything he’d suffered. But more than that, she saw her own reflection, and knew that he could see the empathy of her own suffering in her eyes as clearly as she could see his. They passed it back and forth, this shared knowledge of each other. This simple but powerful understanding of who they were at their core.

  He made her think of soulful kisses and tangled sheets and her bare legs wrapped around his naked back, and everything seemed obvious. It was a funny thing, hot desire. If it was one-sided it was a handicap. If it was a two-way street, it was a connection. The connection was there, but she was leery of the inevitable ending. How many times had she shied from beginning because she was scared of the finale?

  Then his smile changed, his mouth going down on one corner so it was only half of a smile—a sardonic, aren’t-you-sorry-you-asked smile.

  But no, no, she wasn’t sorry. She felt privileged to be here.

  Several minutes passed, marked by the exchange of glances and the long rumbling of the train. Finally, as the sound of the caboose raced away, she touched his forearm, and his smile brightened back to normal.

  He winked.

  The melancholy mood and their deeper bonding vanished as if she’d imagined it, his glib curtain dropping firmly back into place. The skin on this particular onion was not an easy peel, and if she wasn’t careful, he was going to make her cry.

  “Wanna see where we used to play?” he asked.

  Did she? Images of dirty syringes and used condoms and ugly graffiti popped into her head. The poverty of his childhood piloted twin beads of sweat down her sides in a long, slow slide. She ironed her hands over her tank top, blotting up the moisture.

  “You wanted me to open up. Here it is. Me opening up.” He spread his arms wide. “You in?”

  “Yes,” she said, bracing herself for dark things she’d seen only on TV, generally over the top of a pillow propped on cringing knees so she could quickly hide her eyes. “Show me.”

  “Let’s stop by the SUV first, and get the picnic basket.”

  “It’s not lunchtime.”

  “It will be.”

  “Are we staying that long?”

  “Now that we’re here, yeah. Might as well make a day of it.”

  She surveyed the dreary surroundings, and any appetite she might have had vanished. Ugh. Was he trying to get back at her for dragging him out here in the first place?

  But his tone was mild, his face soft. No resentment. How had he come out of this environment without a boulder on his shoulder?

  “Not the ideal picnic spot,” she said.

  “Do you trust me?”

  “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

  He held out his palm. “Give up the recorder. All work and no play makes Breeanne a dull girl.”

  “I have a deadline.”

  “There’s plenty of time.”

  “I might miss something.”

  “Yes, you’ll miss the experience of being in the moment because you’ll be taking notes and thinking too much. You think too much, Breezy.”

  He had a point. She did tend to overthink things.

  “I’m your boss, right?” he said. “I declare you off the clock.”

  “What if you say something riveting?” she asked, her fingers curling around the recorder, reluctant to turn loose of the advantage. Why was it so hard for her to put the recorder into his upturned palm?

  “I promise I won’t.” There it was again. That camera-ready smile he whipped out at will and flashed like a newly minted police officer flashing his badge. She liked the half smile better. It was more honest.

  “You might without knowing it.”

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Solid point.” Rowdy chuckled, the sound echoing strangely in the mirthless surroundings. When he lived here, he must have been the star of the neighborhood, brightening up the dreary blight.

  “All right then.” She let go of the recorder.

  The smile turned into a lopsided, you’re-a-good-sport grin that sent her lungs reeling, churning, stirring up air, but not really moving oxygen.

  He sprinted to the Escalade on long, sexy legs wrapped in faded distressed Levi’s and she thought,
I want.

  Simple as that. I want. Desired. Lusted. Craved him.

  He came back with the picnic basket and a thick Santa Fe print blanket.

  “This way,” he said, surprising and delighting her by taking her hand and interlacing his fingers through hers. It felt nice.

  Very nice.

  Too nice.

  He guided her around the back of the vacant house and over tracks still warm from the heat of the train.

  She wrinkled her nose against the scent of oil and tar. “What’s that odor?”

  “Creosote.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A wood preservative railroad ties are soaked in.”

  “Stinky.”

  Rowdy inhaled deeply. “I like the smell.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I know it sounds strange, but growing up here we didn’t have air-conditioning.”

  “In Texas? That must have been brutal in the summer.”

  “Actually, you get kinda used to it. But one year it was over a hundred degrees for three weeks straight, even at night. We kids would lie awake sweating in our underwear, no covers on, windows and doors thrown open, ceiling fans running full tilt. The smell of creosote got into everything—our hair, our clothes, our skin, our food.”

  “You’d think that would make you hate the smell.”

  Still holding on to her hand, he paused and leaned his head back and took another deep breath. “Yep, smells like home.”

  The man knew how to make lemonade from lemon seeds. She’d give him that. Breeanne squeezed his hand.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he said. “This is just where I came from, not who I am.”

  It was the most profound thing she’d ever heard him say. Sadness balled up in her throat and she wished like hell she could wave a magic wand and make his childhood pain disappear.

  While you’re waving it, why not wave the wand for yourself too? While she’d been well loved, her childhood hadn’t been a walk in the park.

  He shook his head, laughed, and chucked her playfully under the chin. “Don’t look so serious, Breezy. I turned out okay.”

  “It could have . . . You could . . . Things could have gone down such a different path,” she said.

  “But they didn’t.” He led her over the last train track, the blanket-covered picnic basket swinging from his other arm. Ahead of them lay a pine forest lining the railway. As they approached, sunshine filtered through the branches, casting his face in dappled light.

  “Where are we going?”

  He dropped her hand, turned, and started walking backward into the pines, crooking a come-with-me finger. Birds twittered overhead. A brown squirrel scolded them from a tree limb. The damp ground, littered with pine needles, felt spongy beneath her feet.

  Her writer’s imagination went wild, and she pictured this place in the dark filled with the sharp call of whippoorwills and the shivery scream of screech owls. So easy to believe in those East Texas swamp stories of ghosts and goblins and things that went bump in the forest at night.

  But the sun was high in the sky. Broad daylight.

  She paused.

  Rowdy drew farther into the copse of trees, almost disappearing from her view. “Breezy,” he coaxed her in a provocative singsong. “Come along with me.”

  Lured by his Pied Piper voice, she followed.

  The path narrowed and the deeper they went, the thicker the trees grew, squeezing too close, strangling each other for sunlight. While she’d grown up in the piney woods, she’d spent so much time in bed recuperating from surgeries, and her parents had been cautious and protective. She had not played in the woods much. And definitely not unsupervised.

  “You used to play here?” she asked.

  “When me and my friends weren’t in a vacant lot playing baseball.”

  She pushed aside a bushy frond that sprang back to slap against her calf. “Why do I feel like Little Red Riding Hood?” she joked nervously.

  “Are you saying I’m the Big Bad Wolf?” His teeth flashed white.

  “It’s spooky in here.”

  “But in a good way.”

  “Depends on what you mean by good,” she mumbled.

  “This,” he said, parting tree branches in front of him.

  Sunlight shone on the other side, and he led her into a clearing where a blue pond, the same color as his eyes, shimmered.

  An oasis.

  A treasured gem buried in the center of a pine thicket. Rabbits and squirrels scampered in the undergrowth. Mockingbirds called. A carpet of colorful wildflowers spread over the ground. The odor of creosote was replaced with the sweet perfume of prairie verbena, scarlet paintbrush, pink buttercups, and lazy daisies. The train noises, the dilapidated shacks were a world away.

  Magical. A fairy tale.

  “Rowdy.” She breathed. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Told you.” He settled the picnic basket down, and spread the blanket on the ground.

  “Night and day from where we were,” she marveled.

  “Refuge. A surprising gift from Mother Nature to the people stuck living by the train tracks.”

  “Nature doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor,” she said.

  “As long as man doesn’t come along, put a fence around it, and charge admission.”

  “We’re not trespassing?”

  “Public land.”

  He reached his arms behind him, fisted two handfuls of T-shirt, and in one relaxed move, peeled the shirt over his head. There he stood, cock-of-the-walk, the nearly noonday sun of late May flaring a hot glow over his sublimely naked torso, low-slung jeans hugging his lean hips.

  “Um . . .” Breeanne gulped. “What are you doing?”

  He didn’t answer. Just flung her that born-to-sin grin. His thumb flicked loose his belt buckle, and he yanked the belt through the loops of his jeans. It hissed a seductive slithering sound, leather whipping against denim. He toed off his boots, peeled off his socks. Stood the boots, with the socks tucked inside them, near the blanket.

  “Rowdy?” Her voice came out shaky.

  He winked, slow and easy. Unsnapped his jeans.

  Oh Lord! A thousand wicked thoughts of what she’d like to do to and with this man flooded her brain.

  “What’s happening?” she squeaked.

  He looked utterly amused at her shock. Was she that big of a prude? “What do you think is happenin’?”

  She noticed he dropped the “g” from “ing” verbs when he was being intentionally provocative. The potent charm of the Southern masculine drawl. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t even lick her lips, much less spit out any more words.

  “Why, sweetheart, did you think I brought you here to seduce you? That’s so cute. But you gotta get your mind out of the gutter. I’m hot and sweaty and the water’s clear and cool. That’s all.”

  Swimming. Oh. She felt a bit let down.

  “You set the ground rules for this relationship, and I’m abidin’ by them.”

  Her eyes were glued to his exquisite body. She’d seen him nearly naked before but she hadn’t been so stoked by wild thoughts or so completely alone with him. Warwick was always lurking in the background. But now, it was just the two of them.

  “I don’t want to lose you before we ever really get this book started,” he said.

  All she heard was I don’t want to lose you. Everything else he said was white noise.

  “You’re welcome to join me.”

  Her lungs burst into flames. She tried to breathe, but the five-alarm fire inside her burned up every lick of oxygen. It was all she could do not to rush over, tug down his zipper, strip the pants from his body, and touch every masculine inch of him.

  “Last one in is a rotten egg.” He turned his back to her, shucked off his jeans, and dove, buck-naked, into the pond.

  The sexiest butt on the planet had just flashed her, and she wanted to pinch it to feel those rock-hard muscles. Which was most likely his intention. The tease!<
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  He broke the surface, treading water, crooking that beguiling finger at her again. “C’mon in. The water’s perfect.”

  “Wh-wh . . .”

  “Speechless, huh? From the look on your face, I’m guessin’ you’ve never been skinny-dippin’.”

  “No . . . no . . . nor am I about to start,” she sputtered, scandalized, mortified, dissatisfied, and oh-so-tempted to join him.

  “Aw, you gonna leave me hangin’ here all alone?” He mocked up a faux-sad face, shook his head, and sent water flying off his wet, dark hair in all directions.

  “You got yourself into this . . .” She cinched her arms over her chest, mainly so he couldn’t see how her nipples were turning into marbles underneath her camisole.

  “Live a little,” he coaxed, smooth as the devil. “You know you want to.”

  Slowly, she shook her head, but she smiled. Why did she smile?

  “It’s liberatin’. Nothing between your skin and the water.” He was messing with her. Assuming she didn’t have the stones to take him up on his offer.

  “I can get that any time I want in the bathtub.”

  “It’s not the same. This is nature. Free and easy.”

  “Too free and easy.” Gosh, she sounded like an old maid.

  “You don’t know what you’re missin’.” He sounded like he felt sorry for her that she’d never had the experience of swimming naked in a pond.

  He was right about that. She’d missed out on so much in life.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll make it easier for you. I’ll turn my back, and you tell me when you’re in the water.”

  Did she dare? “How do I know you won’t turn back around before I’m ready?”

  “I give you my word.”

  “For what that’s worth,” she muttered, but her irreverent fingers plucked at the hem of her tank top.

  “Here I go.” He raised his arms in a gesture of surrender as if a robber had a gun pressed to his back, and he turned around.

  “Um . . .” The sensible part of her brain was frantically trying to put on the brakes. “How deep is the water? I can’t swim.”

  “Woman, have you been living under a rock for twenty-five years?”