“I told you to back off,” I hiss into the phone.
“Did he cop a feel? If he copped a feel, I’ll cut his arms off.”
“I know where you get bagels every Tuesday morning. Back. Off.”
The line goes dead.
Is that—that is smoke. “Is your house on fire?” I ask Tripp.
He’s on his back in the foyer, knees bent, eyes closed, on his phone too. “No, I don’t need police assistance. I was distracted by—yes, I have the password. Snaggletooth.” He grimaces with his eyes closed. “And I’ll need to talk to someone about changing that. Again.”
I look at the wall.
At the alarm panel on the wall, which is what I was shoved against.
Do you believe in signs?
I believe in signs.
And that, right there, is a sign.
“You do have security,” I say dumbly.
One eye slides open, and I get a Tripp Wilson special. One very direct you’re such a dumbass look, aimed straight at my noggin. “Yes, Lila, I have security.”
I take a step back and trip over a toy firetruck.
Which is appropriate, since the smoke alarms go off a split second later.
“The cookies,” Tripp groans.
Cookies.
I am so not getting any cookies tonight.
Because every time I try to get my cookies, we set off a smoke alarm.
Tripp’s gaze meets mine.
His lips quirk up in a smile like he’s thinking the same damn thing.
And my heart squeezes so hard it sucks all the air out of my lungs.
It is definitely time to go.
17
Tripp
Between the cops who insist on stopping by to make sure that everything’s okay after Lila and I tripped the silent alarm and I gave the wrong password over the emergency intercom, and then the firemen who showed up because my cookies burned so badly they caught fire in the oven, I don’t get to bed until almost three AM.
Lila snuck out—head held high, staring down one of the cops who gave me a wink and a thumbs-up—and I have so many regrets, I can’t begin to name them.
Mostly, I regret that I didn’t move us directly to the kitchen once the kissing started, because hot chocolate chip cookies are an excellent tool in foreplay, whereas burnt cookies and visits from the cops and firefighters are more or less lifetime cock-blockers.
I’m not looking forward to waking up this morning and facing the fact that I shouldn’t have kissed Lila again, that I shouldn’t have had my hands up her shirt, and that I shouldn’t have been enjoying the hell out of her riding my dick through our clothes. But at least she’ll be back in New York.
I won’t have to face her again until we’ve both inevitably done seventeen other things to piss each other off.
Unfortunately for me, that starts with a six AM phone call from the night shift guard at Duggan Field.
“She’s what?” I mumble, slapping my own face, because I can’t possibly be awake, and I didn’t hear him say what I think I just heard him say.
“Ms. Valentine’s here. I’m making sure she don’t disturb the ducks, just like you said I should anytime she comes by the field, Mr. Wilson, but she wouldn’t say why she needed to poke around at this hour of the morning either.”
And so I’m texting my mom, asking if she can keep my kids a little while longer while I deal with something that came up at work.
Traffic’s light at this hour on a Saturday morning—it’s so early, the sun isn’t up yet—and even with a stop at a drive-thru to get the largest coffee I can order, which won’t come close to being enough today, I get to the field in thirty minutes. I park under the single lit streetlamp in the players’ lot, right next to Lila’s rental car.
The guard meets me at the door. “She was heading into the Fireballs locker room last I saw, Mr. Wilson.”
I check the visitors’ locker room and dugout first.
Ducks are still fine—the area’s roped off while we’ve been giving tours to season ticket holders so they can get pictures of the ducks—and there’s no sign of Lila here.
And overall, she doesn’t strike me as the duck-murdering type. Although, if another duck came at her with its weirdly terrifying hard-on hanging out like that again, can’t say I wouldn’t do a few things to it myself.
“Don’t be assholes, okay?” I mutter to the ducks.
One quacks back at me.
“Don’t you need water?”
“There’s an accidental pond under the third base seats,” the security guard tells me. “I was wondering that very thing—why a duck doesn’t want to live close to water—and got to thinking about a plumbing problem we had a few years ago. Used to be a storage room for extra balls, but now it’s just empty. They get to it through that hole in the wall there. Probably need to fix it.”
Yep.
Not enough coffee.
“Does maintenance know?”
“Well, yeah, but with the ducks, we didn’t want to curse anything by making them move. I mean, can’t hurt to have lucky ducks sitting here, can it?”
“Unless they’re lucky for the visiting teams.”
His eyes go wide.
Hell, mine do too as it occurs to me just how likely it is that the ducks would be lucky for the visiting teams, and I’m not all that superstitious.
“Still our field,” I remind him.
“I hope you’re right, Mr. Wilson. You want me to watch the ducks while you go look for Ms. Valentine?”
“Probably a good idea. Duck blood’s not good for anyone.”
“Here. You take this.” He hands me a two-way radio. “Call if you need me.”
I nod and take the device.
He stops me as I turn to go. “My kids submitted salamanders as the new mascot. They think you can make a salamander look really mean and shoot a fireball out its tail.”
Not much to say about that, so I mutter a hmm behind my coffee cup and head across the field to the home dugout.
No Lila in the dugout.
No Lila in the locker room. Or the weight room. The players’ lounge. I step into the team manager’s office—don’t ask how that search is going, because I want to talk about it as much as I want to talk about my own nanny search—and something creaks above me.
I eyeball the ceiling.
Nothing about the Fireballs’ clubhouse under the stands is worth writing home about. The showers leak. The audio-visual equipment is twenty years old. The cinderblock walls are stained with god only knows what. The carpet can only be called carpet because that’s what it used to be before it was worn down to its threads.
Gutting the place was in the budget and the schedule for next winter, after we got a few major concerts in here next summer to get revenue flowing in again.
The Bro Code network in Hollywood and the music industry is still strong, and you’re damn right we were planning to exploit every opportunity we could to get major acts in to remind people that Duggan Field exists. We would’ve even considered a reunion show, and I haven’t played in years, and Davis hates the spotlight. But all of our plans got put on hold when Pakorski decided to give Lila a chance.
It’s not that we want to see her fail.