It’s fucking hard to find a good fit in a nanny.
Or maybe I’m too damn picky.
Lila’s office is the penthouse office suite, and it looks like it was once used as a porn set and probably needs to be completely quarantined like a nuclear disaster site to fully remove all of the cooties.
And I’m using “cooties” to be polite.
When I break the door down after confirming Cooper’s news with a single glance at my phone, which will probably be blowing up all morning now that news is leaking, she’s using a jockstrap to wipe off the desk.
That stops me in my tracks.
She lifts a brow, then holds up the jockstrap. “Cleanest thing in the room. You would’ve picked it too.”
I blink twice, remind myself to unclench my jaw, and actively battle the desire to pull a bottle of hand sanitizer out of my pocket and ask the receptionist for Clorox wipes. “You fired the whole fucking management team?”
She goes back to rubbing the pouch of the jock on the stained wood, though she trains her attention on me. Having those green eyes connect with mine again hits me in the solar plexus.
I should change my name to Glutton.
Glutton for Punishment.
That look on her face when the ducks attacked—and then in the locker room, after I carried her in there with all of her curves and the way she smelled like cinnamon rolls—quit thinking, Wilson. This will not end well.
Just. Stop. Thinking.
“Would you have kept your management team for Bro Code if you were always playing to empty theaters?” she asks.
“Stadiums. We played arenas and stadiums.”
“You’re avoiding the question, Mr. Wilson.”
“You threw out the baby with the bathwater. There were—”
“I printed a list of the three best teams in baseball for each of the last five seasons and cross-checked with how many of the management rosters are the same, and which team and staff members might be looking for new jobs. Or even which ones seem to enjoy a challenge. You can start there in the hiring process. And don’t yell at me over all those supposed coaches losing their paychecks. Uncle Al’s email was full of total bullshit, grown men whining about not wanting to play nice with each other and asking for special perks just because of their titles when they couldn’t win more than one in every three games. And hints at gambling too. They all needed to go. Also, I want a list of the players who aren’t pulling their weight, and the front office staff has been put on notice. They’ll each be providing you with essays about what they love most about their jobs, what they’re willing to do for the team, and what they’re not willing to do. I expect your report on who needs to go from them as well by the end of next week.”
While I’d already had my dream front office staff lined up in my head for months, this is insane. “You cannot build a new team in four months. Change takes time. And people.”
“Four months? We have five until opening day.”
“We have four until spring training.”
Her brows furrow briefly, then she shakes her head like spring training is irrelevant. “Have you ever seen The Mighty Ducks? How about Miracle?”
My eyeball is now twitching harder than my triceps. And my left thigh. And that twinge in my back is new.
I’m not in bad shape. I run. I lift at home. Hell, managing a toddler and a preschooler is a workout all on its own.
But working for someone who would fire over two dozen people with no game plan beyond this sort of worked in a movie is tweaking all my agitated nerves so hard, I either need to punch something, drink something, or fire her.
Since I can’t, I settle for tossing my vibrating phone onto the ugly-ass couch across from the desk—I’ll dunk it in bleach later—and stare her down.
She doesn’t roll her eyes, but she looks damn close to it. “Don’t look at me like that. The coaching staff wasn’t doing its job and the entire country knows it. It’s a pretty good bet other countries know it too, possibly even other planets, and while I appreciate Uncle Al wanting to take care of people, you can’t take care of people by coddling them and not asking for their best. So now you get an opportunity no one ever gets. Pick your dream coaching staff, Mr. Wilson. Pick them, and let them know that if they can’t build a team that plays well together and inspires people to come back to the ballpark, this will be the last time they ever work in professional baseball.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“The whole will never work in baseball again is probably pushing it, hm?” She smiles.
Smiles. With so much cheek and confidence that I don’t want to admire, but can’t help respecting, and god help me, my body is not immune to that smile.
My mind is trying very, very hard to compensate for my body’s shortcomings though. “Do you have any idea how hard it’ll be to convince anyone they want to work for the worst team in baseball?”
“I’m sure you have a plan, or you wouldn’t have wanted to buy the team so badly.” She shakes out the jockstrap, sending a plume of dust rising in the sunlight forcing its way through the filthy windows that should have a clear view of the outfield at Duggan Field, but instead makes the ballpark appear as old and beaten down as the team feels.
Also, when I say dust, I’m purposefully not thinking about the microscopic evidence of what Al Beversdorf might’ve done in this room for twenty years.
Clorox wipes aren’t enough.
We need a forensic cleaning team in here before I let my children set foot in this building again.
“My plan wasn’t to immediately have to replace an entire coaching staff,” I grind out.
“Then I can’t see how your plan would’ve been successful.”
In four steps, I’m standing toe-to-toe with her. “Have you ever played baseball a day in your life? Or even watched a game?”
“I actually love soccer. But I’ve been doing some reading.”
“Moneyball?”
There’s that smile again. She needs to quit doing that, or I’m going to start flashing back to meeting her in the club, when it was stupidly charming that she was smiling through having a drink thrown all over her.
Or to the locker room after being attacked by the ducks.
“The Princess and the Player,” she tells me.
“There’s never been a royal owner of a baseball team in major league history.”
“I didn’t say it was nonfiction, Mr. Wilson.”
Fucking hell.
She’s using those romance novels she loves to study baseball. And yes, I know about the romance novels.
My team has found out a lot about Lila.
Starting with the implication that this is going to be a disaster. From what we can tell, she’s brilliant with business. She’s been Dalton Wellington’s right-hand woman since she graduated college, running the reclusive billionaire’s holdings company. Rumor has it Wellington approves nothing without Lila’s endorsement, and she handled the liquidation of his assets as he retreated into retirement.
If I wanted to build a venture capital company, Lila would be the first person I’d call to join my team.
But as far as we can tell, she knows nothing about the business of baseball.
Which is why I need her to trust me if Copper Valley is going to embrace the Fireballs again. “You can call me Tripp.”