Designated Hitter (Reedsville Roosters Book 4) Read online

  She gave her head a slight shake. “Eat what you want. We’ll swap when you’ve had enough. The other one is German potato salad. I couldn’t decide what I wanted today.”

  He extended his long legs toward the center of the gazebo, and then crossed them at the ankles. “You don’t strike me as the indecisive type.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  He took the sandwich half she offered and peeled back the wax paper. “So, where are you going when you’re done with this project? You’re staying to the end, right? Not gonna leave me here up to my own devices?”

  “I don’t know. Are you saying I shouldn’t trust you to make good choices?”

  He scoffed and took a big bite of the sandwich. It was an obvious stalling tactic, but she was patient when she had to be, and she needed the silence, anyway. She was using those little pockets of time to unpack his words and actions. To understand him.

  “Most folks don’t trust me,” he said.

  “I get the distinct impression that you don’t give most folks a good reason to trust you.”

  “I figure I’ll save them the trouble of trying.”

  “That’s a hell of a way to go through life, Quinn.”

  He took another bite. “It is what it is.”

  “How’d you get to be that way?”

  “Maybe I’ve always been like that.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Why not?”

  It was her turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m trying to find some reason to trust you. Maybe I want to trust you.”

  “So you can leave me here while you do other stuff.”

  She flinched. “Well, a girl’s gotta make money.”

  “You’ve got plenty of that already, don’t ya?” he asked dryly.

  She put her spine against the seat back and stabbed her fork, perhaps a bit too aggressively, into the potato salad. “Had to go there, huh?” A couple of little starchy cubes went flying over the railing.

  “Shit, Marina, I didn’t mean to piss you off,” he said quietly. “I figured it was a well-known fact. Maybe it was tacky of me to state it, though.”

  “I don’t appreciate the implication that having money means I don’t do work or don’t know how to make my money work for me. I’d love to be at the beach right now or on my boat”—he raised an eyebrow, and she poked his shoulder hard—“that I paid for with money I earned. If you’re hostile to me that I got a leg up in life, I get it. I do. If I could turn back the hands of time, I wouldn’t choose not to be wealthy. That’s silly. But having money to spare doesn’t mean I’m not productive or that I don’t try to redistribute some of my wealth.”

  He dragged his free hand along the scruff on his chin and eyed her for a moment. There was no heat to his gaze this time. It was more pensive and assessing.

  She wondered what he saw when he looked at her like that, and whether or not he liked it.

  “I don’t like talking about religion or politics or money,” he said, “but hopefully won’t be too out of line if I ask what you do with it all. I just can’t imagine being that rich.”

  Probably no more than she could imagine having a blue-collar upbringing. She tried to humble herself as much as she could, but she knew better than anyone that her privilege blinded her to some things. Although she strived to be sensitive, often, she lacked empathy. She didn’t have the right experiences to draw on.

  She let out a ragged breath and plucked a bit of errant banana pepper off her sandwich half. “I don’t go around buying baseball teams, I can tell you that much.”

  He laughed. An honest-to-goodness you amuse me laugh that made his smile broad and eyes bright. “Nobody in her right mind would want that kind of frustration.”

  “So you assholes know you’re frustrating, then.”

  “Hey. You can’t really count me in that lot anymore since I no longer have a place on the team.”

  “And how do you feel about that?” His tone had been so level and resigned that she couldn’t get a reading off him about it.

  Maybe he didn’t care anymore, but she cared a little. He was a good player. It was a shame he hadn’t been able to get major league attention, because he had all the right stuff. He was fast, limber, had a phenomenally good arm, and could hit a ball like a demon. He also had a face that cameras loved. While that certainly wasn’t a requirement of playing major league ball, it sure as hell didn’t hurt.

  “Baseball was important to me for a long time. It still is, I guess, but some things you just have to let go of.”

  “I’m not so sure it’s time. You could always play in the Caribbean like Boswell did a couple of years ago,” she said. “Might get some attention from other teams.”

  He grimaced. “I dunno. I think I’d be better off hustling here.”

  “Being a manservant, you mean?”

  “And other things.” He took another bite of sandwich.

  She let her knee bob and stared at him until he was done chewing. “Is it all about money for you?”

  “Money makes my world go ’round, let’s put it that way.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “What do you do with yours, if not buying baseball teams?” He cast her a narrow-eyed glare that hinted that she’d touched a sore spot, but she wasn’t going to back off. She felt like she was finally getting somewhere with the man—learning what made him tick.

  He gnawed on one of his cuticles, eying her with suspicion.

  He didn’t trust her, and she didn’t like that feeling one bit. She was the one who was usually so reticent to trust.

  “Fine,” she said softly. She set down the potato salad container, brushed some sandwich crumbs off the bodice of her dress, and waited for him to meet her gaze. “There’s a website that lets people with cash to spare seed fresh starts for ladies who need them. Sometimes, those ladies just need a place to stay because they’re running from an abusive partner. Maybe they’ve got an obscene amount of medical debt because they were treated for some hard-to-cure illness. Maybe their banks are threatening to foreclose on their houses because they had to take out new mortgages to help their kids pay for college or bail them out of jail. Or maybe they’ve just got a damn good idea for a business and absolutely no capital and no credit.”

  “You…help them?”

  “Sometimes anonymously, sometimes not. When we’re talking big money, I want to meet them and make sure they’re not running a scam. I haven’t been burned yet, but I’m sure it’ll happen one day. I try not to let that deter me.”

  “Noble of you.”

  She turned her hands over. “I don’t see it as noble, but rather something I simply have to do. My father inherited most of his wealth from my grandmother. When she was alive, he used to criticize her for giving away so much of her money, but she figured, ‘I can’t take it with me when I go,’ and she wanted to have a say in where it went. Sure, she put some aside for her children, but the vast majority of her wealth went to charities. Her sister’s convent, for one. It had always done good aid work. Disaster relief. That sort of thing.”

  “Where’d she get all that money?”

  “Being descended from royalty has its perks, I guess.”

  Quinn stopped fondling his sandwich, and groaned. “God, does that make you some kind of princess?”

  “No, just a bitch with a lot of money.”

  “Come on, Marina, I—”

  “I think you were going to tell me something.”

  Brow furrowed, he passed his sandwich from hand to hand, nervously, seemingly. “Was I?”

  “Mm-hmm. You were going to tell me what you do with all your money.”

  “Shit.” He set his half sandwich down on its wrapper and put his spine against the bench’s back. “I hate talking about this shit. It’s embarrassing. Folks always have opinions, and none of them are ever all that helpful.”

  “Plenty of people offer me opinions about what I should do with my money, too. I ignore most of it
, so I’m definitely not going to offer you any unsolicited advice.”

  He put his head back and looked up at the gazebo’s ceiling. “People would get along so much better if they weren’t always trying to tell folks things they already know.”

  True.

  “I don’t even see most of my money, to be honest,” he said. “If I get paid on the last day of the month, it’s gone by the first of the next one.”

  “Child support?” Fuck. Quinn’s filter might have been functioning property, but hers was becoming more and more unhinged. “Shit, don’t answer that. I just know that more than a handful of Roosters have garnishments.” She didn’t like to judge, but she hated that those bozos hadn’t taken care of business the way they were supposed to—that they hadn’t stuck around.

  He shook his head and straightened up his posture. “No kids, no ex-spouses. Just student loans and crippling credit card debt.”

  “You went to college?”

  “That shocks you?” He laughed and tossed a wadded-up napkin at her, which she swatted away. “Shit. I guess you thought you knew everything worth knowing about me.”

  She had.

  “I went for a couple of years. A really expensive college, at that. Financial aid didn’t cover living expenses. Tried to hang in there, but I got myself into a hell of a hole. I couldn’t take out any more loans, and the school wouldn’t let me return until I paid my tuition balance.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah. I robbed Peter to pay Paul, as the old saying goes. Paid what I owed with credit cards, and then had a fun summer removing my clothes and sweating my balls off on hot stages to pay down the cards. Of course, when word got back to the athletic department about how I was spending my free time, I got kicked off the baseball team. From that point, I figured I’d take some time off and reevaluate what I was doing with my life.”

  “And you never went back.”

  “As my loan balance cruelly reminds me every month. That’s why when I’m not playing baseball, I’ve got a bunch of jobs. Maybe I’ll work thirty-nine hours a week in one, ten in another, and pick up a few hours for the third.” He laughed, but there was nothing mirthful about the sound. It was heavy with stress and just tiredness.

  And it made her sad.

  She couldn’t even imagine what that felt like. Although she had plenty of stress in her life, none of it prevented her from achieving her goals, assuming she wanted to work for them. Finances had never been an impediment. Wealth felt like a curse at times, but she sure as shit didn’t take it for granted.

  She reached across the gap between them and smoothed the collar of his polo shirt. He looked like he needed a touch, and she wanted badly to be the one providing it. She wanted to see him smile. “What were you studying?”

  “I never got around to declaring a major. Gave serious thought to becoming a vet, though. Figured that’d be a useful skill set back in Montana.”

  She dragged her fingertips up his neck to his jaw to just see if it felt as velvety as it looked.

  He took her fingers in his and stared at her for a moment, looking at her as if she were a bug that had landed on his skin and he couldn’t tell if it was the kind that would sting.

  Maybe she was, but she didn’t pull her hand back. She just waited. Being able to wait was what made her so good at controlling situations, even when she was so stressed. And yeah, Quinn had her stressed. He had her wound tight and aching to fix him so that she would feel better.

  He dropped his hand to his lap and she continued her gentle exploration of his face. The satiny ridges of his lips, the cleft of his chin, the smooth sable of his sideburns.

  His eyelids drooped when she passed her fingertips up the straight line of his nose.

  “You still want to go back to Montana?” she asked.

  “It’s home, I guess,” he said quietly. “It’s as good a place as any.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “Wanna go back better than I left.”

  “I see.” She brushed her hand down the side of his neck and across his broad shoulder, pausing to rub it. So tense, so high strung.

  “It’ll take me a while to get there,” he said. “Gotta get rid of all the bills.”

  “Mm-hmm. Might help to find a stable job.”

  “Yeah, it might. Don’t know what that’d be with my résumé being what it is.”

  “Understandable.” She pulled her hand back to her own lap and continued to eat. After a moment, he did, too.

  He glanced down at his phone when it buzzed, and then tapped it back into the pocket of his khakis.

  “Do you need to get that?”

  “Nah, it’s the agency’s app. It makes me check in at certain times. It’s supposed to generate an email at the end of the day where you’re supposed to log in and confirm the hours.”

  “Right. I got one last night for yesterday. Very efficient.”

  Automated and impersonal, in truth, but impersonal was what Marina thought she’d wanted. She’d wanted some guy to be her stand-in so she could stay out of the orbits of those blustering construction blowhards. Impersonal didn’t seem like the best tactic to take with Quinn, though. It seemed he’d had enough of that in his life. No one ever asked what he needed.

  “What are you doing after work?” she asked. “Got another gig lined up for tonight?”

  “I’ve got a thing tonight. And Friday.”

  “What kind of thing?” It wasn’t her business, but she wasn’t one to leave questions unasked when she had them.

  “I’m supposed to fill in for a guy at a club.”

  “A…club.”

  He chuckled. “Bartending.”

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t strip anymore.”

  “You assume I was thinking that?”

  His grin was soft. “You were thinking it.”

  “Okay, maybe.” She took a big bite of her sandwich, deploying one of Quinn’s stalling strategies. She couldn’t speak through a mouth full of bread and meat, and he couldn’t expect her to.

  “Did you need me for something?” he asked.

  She could think of a few things she wanted him for, but wants didn’t equate to needs. She’d always been very good at telling the two apart, but with Quinn, that was getting harder to do.

  “Um. A house came onto the market today,” she said. “The sellers are motivated because the husband took a position out of state and they can’t afford to carry two mortgages. I want to go look at it as soon as I can.”

  “You want to flip it?”

  “Either flip it or buy it to rent it out. It’s an excellent location near the university. I don’t want to get in the landlord business for the same reason I don’t want to be on my job sites. It’s a business with the potential for a lot of confrontation from people I can’t avoid. I also don’t want to leave money on the table. I haven’t looked at it yet, so I’m not sure what strategy I’ll take.”

  “What time were you thinking? I have to be behind the bar at eight.”

  “I made an appointment for six.”

  “Just tell me where.”

  “You might be cutting it close.”

  He shrugged. “I’m curious, I guess, and if you need a second pair of eyes, I can be that.”

  “Okay. You’ll have to meet me there. By the way, I’m not going to be on-site here tomorrow.”

  He furrowed his brow and put down his sandwich. “You’re gonna leave me here?”

  “I don’t see where I have a choice. I can’t be two places at once and I need to go vet some folks for windfalls while I’m in the area.”

  “I see.” His tone was sullen, even if his expression was perfectly neutral. “You’ll need to tell me what to do.”

  She had no business wanting to push the boundaries of his volunteerism and see just what he was willing to do, but she was lonely. In spite of Quinn’s numerous flaws, he had a genuineness about him that was so damned sexy and companionable. He was honest and passionate, roug
h around the edges—sure—but she could work with that.

  She just had to decide if she should.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Quinn hoped that Marina wouldn’t fire him once she found out how he and the carpenter had gotten into it over a damaged section of wall in the kitchen. One of his subcontractors fucked up the installation of a cabinet and busted up the drywall, nudging some plumbing out of alignment in the process.

  The plumber they’d called in could fix it fast, but for a big pile of money. That had been fine with Quinn, until the carpenter muttered out of the side of his damn mouth that Marina would be footing the bill.

  So, they’d argued. Loudly.

  In the end, the carpenter agreed to eat the cost, but Quinn worried that he’d stepped way out of bounds. He wasn’t Marina’s employee. He was day labor, at best, and it wasn’t up to him to make executive decisions of that scope, but he’d been on-site and had to act quickly to keep the project rolling. He could have called her, but she’d said at lunch that she would be busy all afternoon.

  Maybe I made the wrong choice.

  At the press of her hand to his back, he jerked, and turned away from the small powder room he was peering into.

  “You’re skittish as a cat,” Marina said. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked so pretty in that swishy sundress with the full skirt and narrow straps that left her bronzed shoulders bare. He could slide them down easily and let the bodice fall to her waist so he could see her breasts, play with them, if she let him.

  He’d get on his knees if she told him to. He’d deserve to after the mess he’d made.

  He closed his eyes on the decadent sight she was and let out a breath. “Nothing. Listen, I need to tell you something. I—”

  “So, what are you thinking?” came the realtor’s cheerful voice from the hall behind them.

  Quinn groaned quietly. With many more interruptions, he might never get up the courage to say what he needed to.

  Marina turned to the lady. “Give me the skinny,” she said. “You’re the listing agent so I know you can’t give me too much information about the sellers’ circumstances, but this place needs a little work.”