“And you’re taking me up on it.” His jaw flexed. His eyebrows scrunched up. His words were clipped.
They were all the signs she remembered from when she’d seen him get mad. Which was just as well, because she was dead serious about the payback.
“You gave me no freaking clue about your motives for breaking up with me last year. None. And then you show up at my door twelve months later and say it was all for my own good?” She’d had time to think about it during softball practice this morning and she still couldn’t swallow his tactics. If he thought he could just waltz in and out of her life this way, he was sadly mistaken.
Even if he did make her feel things no other man had ever come close to inspiring.
A flash of hurt in his eyes nearly undid her. But just as quickly, he shuttered his expression and thrust out his stubborn jaw.
“It was for your own good. And mine. And so is this.” He reached over to her side of the vehicle and withdrew her keys from the ignition.
“What are you doing?” She made a grab for them.
He arced back and with the strength and speed that could gun down a runner trying to steal second, he pitched her keys out the window. They went sailing into the woods where she’d be lucky to ever find them.
“I’m showing you that I’m not going anywhere.” The mutinous expression on his face was the same one he’d flashed umpires from Little League right up through the ranks.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Wrenching open the door to her SUV, she stepped out to go search for her keys. “You can get away with that crazy, temperamental guy stuff on the baseball field because you’ve got skills every manager wants. But this is me.” She started marching away from the SUV, her voice raised so he didn’t miss a word. “You’re not so all-mighty damn important that you can toss me aside when you think it’s best or pitch some unholy fit to make me do what you want.”
She stomped toward the tree line, carried along by righteous indignation.
He was out of the vehicle and jogging beside her in two seconds flat.
“This is not a fit.” He planted his body in front of hers, blocking her path. “This is making you see reason.”
It wasn’t the obstacle of his formidable frame that stopped her. It was the look in his eyes. He wasn’t mad. He was all business.
All passionate drive and intensity.
This time, it was her who was speechless. He stepped forward, backing her up toward her SUV.
“I didn’t come here to mess this up again.” He kept walking toward her until she bumped into the side of her vehicle. With nowhere else to go, she faced him down while he bracketed her with his arms. “I came here to snap you up while you weren’t dating anyone else. I came to tell you that I’ve never cared about anyone as much as you.”
Her heart sort of turned over inside her, its furious beat slowing as Brody looked into her eyes. His body was so close she could feel the heat of him and smell the musky notes of aftershave that had tantalized her the night before.
“How can I trust that?” she asked, feeling weak inside. “You’ve been back in my life for twenty-four hours.”
It would be so easy to go along with him, to ride the tide of his hunger for her and let it sweep her to the sweet, amazing heights. But where would it leave her in the end?
“You can trust it because you aren’t the kind of person to condemn a guy forever for the stupid stuff he did at a time in his life when he didn’t have his head screwed on straight.”
She wasn’t, either.
“How can you know me so freaking well when we haven’t seen each other in so long?”
He skimmed a knuckle under her chin, as light as the breeze blowing off the water.
“Because I dated you longer than anyone else. Because we went to the prom together. We formed a template for each other about what we wanted in a partner just by being each other’s first romantic interests.” He grinned. “Don’t you watch Oprah?”
She nearly choked on a laugh. His goofy admission made her love him even though he’d just pitched her keys two miles into the brush. He was so impossible to resist.
“Okay. Let’s say I buy into that and, for argument’s sake, let’s say I’m crazy enough to fall for you all over again in spite of everything.” Just saying the words made her heart beat faster, the emotions for him surging inside her like a rogue wave. “How do you expect to make a relationship work when you play 162 games a year and are traveling the country from March until October?”
A professional baseball player’s life—while exciting—hardly lent itself to a committed relationship with someone who had roots and ties to a community.
His cell phone rang then, an obnoxious intrusion into an important conversation. She suspected if they ever tried to make it work between them, there would be a lot of that.
Brody didn’t move to answer it.
“Aren’t you going to get that?”
“This is more important.” He ignored the second ring, too.
“What if it’s your team?”
If anything, it had been a miracle that the device hadn’t been ringing off the hook all night, but maybe he’d powered it down to get away from the media requests for interviews and general industry excitement.
“You’re more important to me than baseball.” He paused long and deliberately after that statement, and she recognized it for exactly what it meant.
He couldn’t have told her he loved her with any more emphasis than what he’d just said.
Her heart did backflips. Her knees sort of fell out from under her and she launched herself into his arms. Whatever else happened, whatever they could or couldn’t work out, Brody loved her.
Enough to ignore a multi-million-dollar career.
“I love you, too.” She sort of sobbed it into his shirt, a surprise shower of happy tears raining down her cheeks that this passionate, incredible man would put her before everything else in his life. Still, on the fourth ring, she dug in his pocket and took out his phone. “But you aren’t giving up baseball for me, Brody Davis.”
Flipping open the cell, she pressed it to his ear.
“Hello? Jeff? Um…can you hold on a sec?” He took the phone away from her and held it behind his back, ignoring his caller. “Naomi, I don’t want to screw this up. Staying in baseball would mean a lot of travel.”
She couldn’t believe he would discuss this now.
“Is that your manager on the line?” She felt a little starstruck to think baseball legend Jeff Rally might be waiting on hold.
“Yes. But don’t think about that. Think about how you’d feel to travel with a major league team, never coming back here except for Christmas.” He frowned, the worry evident in his furrowed brow. “I can’t ask you to give up your career any more than you would ask me to give up mine.”
Naomi clutched his shoulders, her heart soaring to think about the kind of future they might have together.
“With you in the lineup, we have a shot at the pennant.” She spoke slowly so he’d remember how important that was. “I have the best interests of you, me and every Boston fan in the world in mind when I tell you that I can take a hiatus from teaching to cheer you on for as long as you can swing a bat.”
The lines on his forehead smoothed away and he wrapped an arm around her to pull her close.
“I am so crazy about you, sweetheart.” He planted a kiss on her lips that reminded her how much she’d be gaining by going on the road with him. “I swear you won’t ever regret this.”
“I know I won’t,” she assured him, grabbing his arm and wrenching it up so he could finish his phone call. “Now don’t keep a baseball legend waiting any longer.”