Jill Shalvis - Slow Heat

Gage shook his head.

Pace grinned. “Nice.”

Wade sighed. “Don’t you have a fiancée to worry about? And you,” he said to Gage. “Where’s your date?”

“They’ve gone on a little girls’ room run. They seem to do that in pairs.”

Yeah. Most women did.

Not Sam.

She’d been in there all alone until he’d come along, though he had to say, they’d made a nice pair. Speaking of, where the hell was she? He craned his neck and looked around-

“Lose something?” Pace asked with mock politeness.

Wade ignored him, still searching through the wedding revelers for Sam.

“You know, I was going to keep my nose out of this one,” Gage said. “But-”

“Oh, Christ,” Wade groaned. “Not the but.”

“But,” Gage continued undeterred. “I don’t think you two are a good idea.”

“We’re not a two,” Wade said. “You more than anyone know that this whole weekend is pretend. Make-believe. A complete fallacy. Hell, it was your idea.”

“And a bad one,” Pace muttered.

“No shit,” Wade muttered back.

“But only because you are a two,” Pace said patiently.

“And have been ever since Atlanta.”

“Atlanta?” Gage asked, eyes narrowing. “What happened in Atlanta?”

“Nothing.” Wade shook his head and glared at Pace. “Nothing.”

Pace leaned in close to Wade. “You remember right before the playoffs, when I fell hard for Holly and couldn’t admit it? You made me face it.”

“Yeah? So? You were being an idiot and needed a friendly shove.”

“Consider this…” Pace gave Wade a good, hard shove on his shoulder, nearly knocking him off the chair. “The same.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Gage told Pace. “He’ll just fuck with her head.”

“Sitting right here,” Wade said, feeling more than a little tense.

“I’m sorry, man. But that’s what you do. Fuck ’em and leave ’em.”

“Not always.”

“Always,” Gage said firmly.

Wade opened his mouth to refute that and Gage just gave him a long, even look. “Name one time you’ve been ditched, Wade. One time.”

Wade said nothing, but he counted in his head. His mother. His father.

Sam.

Not that he’d say so.

“She deserves better,” Gage said.

Wade looked at Pace. “You think so, too?”

“She deserves to be more than the pretend girlfriend, I’ll give you that. Because it’s Sam, you know?”

Yeah. He knew. Sam, who they all cared about. Sam, who gave so much of herself to the team. Sam, who’d just given herself to him, and he had a feeling it was far more than she’d intended.

As it had been for him.

He sat there with a headache brewing and the certainty that he’d already fucked it up without even knowing exactly how. “Well, this has been fun, but I’ve got to go.” He pushed away from the table and strode through the reception one more time, but he was certain.

Sam wasn’t here.

He headed inside the main lobby and headed straight for the elevators, punching the button, suddenly afraid he was already too late.

The elevator didn’t come. He hit the button again, swore, then headed for the stairs. He made it to their eighth floor suite three minutes later, running on adrenaline as he burst into their room. “Sam.”

But he knew even before he called her name that she was gone. The note on the bathroom mirror confirmed it.

Take the limo back, I grabbed a cab.

Yep. He’d been ditched. “Well, hell,” he said out loud, pulling the note down. As he did, something on the counter grabbed his attention.

Her bathroom bag.

It was stuffed with makeup and brushes and bottles of stuff-the mysteries of a woman.

It smelled like her.

And just next to the bag lay her mother’s antique pearl pin.

“You were in a hurry,” he murmured, and suddenly he didn’t feel quite as bad. She hadn’t run out on him because she was done with the pretense.

Nope.

She’d run because that pretense had turned into a few moments of… real.

Something neither of them had intended.

It’d been so real it’d scared her.

“Chicken,” he said softly, surprised at this unexpected chink in her armor, while being equally surprised at something else.

He was afraid, too. Which meant it was a good thing she’d gone, a really good thing. And palming the pin, gently running his thumb over it, he willed himself to get over it before he saw her again, before she saw that she wasn’t the only one with a chink in her armor.

Wade got back to Santa Barbara late, and hit the sack. He woke in his own bed, which was infinitely better than the couch had been in the hotel but somehow it was not nearly as much fun.

He got dressed and wondered what his pretend girlfriend was doing. Certainly notreturning any of his calls…

Telling himself he was ready for the opening game of season four against the Padres, he drove to the Heat’s facilities with the music cranking, walked into the clubhouse and felt adrenaline kick in. Adrenaline was good. It meant he wasn’t thinking about Sam, or how she’d felt with her legs wrapped around his waist as he’d plunged into her.

Much.

The clubhouse was filled and noisy. Most MLB baseball clubhouses gravitated toward a specific identity. The Yankees were corporate. The Rockies were religious. The Heat? Rollicking.

Today was no different. The air was excited and jubilant, just the way Wade liked it. They had an unusually tight, close-knit team, and almost everyone arrived within minutes of each other.

Food was set out, and they ate together: Wade, Pace, Joe Pickler, the Heat’s second baseman, Henry Weston, their left-fielder-turned-shortstop, who was sporting a black eye from his fender bender two days ago, and Mason Rictor. Mason was their first baseman who was currently battling knee problems from a spring training incident involving not a ball but a woman, a stolen night, and her husband coming home early, which had forced Mason out a third-story window.

Gage was still barely speaking to him.

As they sat around inhaling a pile of sandwiches, Mike, their third baseman, and Kyle, their right-fielder, joined them. “Heard you had quite the weekend,” Kyle said to Wade, and tossed down a stack of newspapers to the table.

Wade opened one up and stared at the picture of himself and Sam at the reception. They were locked together on the dance floor. Her arms were around his neck. He had one hand in her hair, the other on her ass.

“Looks like mission accomplished on the tame-Wade thing,” Kyle said, heavy on the irony. “So was this before or after the quickie in the bathroom?”

Wade slid a death-glare at Pace.

Pace lifted his hands. “Hey, I didn’t tell.”

Henry choked on his drink. “You mean it’s true? You and Sam had a quickie in the bathroom? Our Sam?”

All eyes swiveled to Wade.

“We’re boyfriend and girlfriend,” he said.

“Pretend boyfriend and girlfriend,” Mike reminded him.

“Yeah,” Wade said. “Right. Pretend.”

“Wait.” Mike took a closer look at Wade, then glanced at everyone else. “Am I the only one who heard that?” he demanded to know.

“Heard what?” Wade asked.

“Nope,” Kyle said. “I heard it, too.”

“Heard what?” Wade repeated through his teeth.

“That you don’t want it to be pretend,” Kyle told him.

Wade stared at him. “Shut up.”

“You should tell her,” Kyle said, unperturbed. “She’s always telling us that she needs to know everything, and this is definitely need-to-know.”

“Christ! Don’t tell her,” Mike said. “Are you kidding? She’ll kill you. You can’t get dead now, it’s opening day.”

“Maybe she likes me alive,” Wade said, frowning when everyone laughed. Okay, so his and Sam’s tension was legendary. Whatever. They’d gotten past it now.

Or so he hoped.

Gage walked in and as always, the room quieted. He was their age and yet his demeanor was such that everyone deferred to him as… well, God. He grabbed a soda and then slowly took each of them in and narrowed his gaze. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Wade said, and gathered all the papers and threw them in the recycling bin next to the trash can.

“Hey, good job on those, by the way,” Gage said, proving that nothing got past him, ever. “Our sponsors are happy.”

“Good for them.” Not wanting to hear more about how the ruse was working, Wade took off, moving toward the locker area to change for field practice. And yeah, maybe he was also keeping his eyes peeled for a glimpse of Sam…

The Heat’s facilities were now four years old, with everything in it being the best of the best, including the clubhouse around him. Back before the economy had taken a nosedive, the Santa Barbara taxpayers had been ecstatic to put money into a new MLB expansion team. The Heat had returned the love. Last season they’d worked their asses off, and even with bad odds, rough press, and unfair disadvantages-they’d lost a good bull pen pitcher and a great pitching coach midseason-they’d gone to the playoffs.

This season, they wanted to go even further, all the way to the World Series. For a guy who’d been born in the gutter and then survived his childhood to scrape his way through college, Wade had been lucky enough to be drafted straight to an MLB contract. After a few years in Denver, the Heat had signed him, giving him a lucrative deal he’d been more than happy to accept. He’d moved to Santa Barbara, bought himself a big, new house on the beach, and he’d never been more content.