Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 114011 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114011 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
“It’s fine. I’ll, um . . .”
I pause at the doorway, presumably to let Bud go in first. In reality, I stop because it hits me that I’m the team mom and Cole is the coach. That means I’ll be collaborating with him.
Oh shit.
Even if my brain rebels against the idea, my body does not. It hums with appreciation and forces my mind to visualize situations that have no business being anywhere near a baseball field.
“See the mess?” Bud sweeps his arm around the compact building filled with baseball gear. “If you could just get it in some semblance of order—so the coaches can find the baseballs and bases, things like that—it would be so helpful.”
“Oh, sure. I can try.”
Bud smiles. “I owe you one.” He starts to leave. “I have to get back to the sporting-goods store for a bit. We got a shipment in today, and I haven’t even started to go through it. I’ll come back and lock up in a couple of hours.”
I look around at the mayhem around me. “Sure.”
The shed creaks as Bud steps off the step, and I’m left alone.
There’s no good place to start, so I grab all the errant baseballs that I can find and load them into empty buckets. Then I set them in the back corner until I can formulate a better plan.
My hands are dusty and white with chalk as I peer into bags, relocate bases, and try to figure out what to do with catcher’s gear that was probably bought before I was born.
“This organization needs a fundraiser or something,” I say, taking in the state of the equipment.
I need to pull things off the shelves and start to make sense of them, but a massive pitching machine is in the way. I try to push it to one side, to no avail. Then I grab the back and try to drag it deeper into the shed, but that doesn’t work either. So I heave a breath and grab it from two sturdy pieces of metal in the front and push.
Nothing.
I rock it from side to side, wondering if it’s stuck to the wooden floor.
It’s not.
“Just move,” I groan, grabbing the metal brackets again.
I squat, feeling my butt cheeks stretch the fabric of my yoga pants, and lean back on my heels. Then I pull with every muscle fiber in my body.
I pull until my face feels like it’s going to burst. I give the machine another jiggle, hoping it will break free. But the only thing that breaks free is me.
“Ah!” I yelp as my movement propels me backward. My sneakers slip, my arms flail, and—“Umph!”
Suddenly, I’m not flying through the air but being scooped up and hauled into a hard chest.
Cole’s deliciously hard chest.
I would’ve been more prepared to smash my face into the sharp end of a cleat, bang my head off a base, and then fall face-first into a bag of brick dust than to land in Cole’s arms.
He turns me to face him. His hands lock against the small of my back. I’m not sure if it’s to steady me or to hold me close, but I’m in no state to start assessing that kind of damage.
My nostrils fill with the scent of leather. A spike in my body temperature has me teetering on the edge of passing out. The contact of our bodies—chest to steel chest—makes my insides turn to mush.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asks, a chuckle in his tone.
The levity in the words is what lets me shuffle myself back into some semblance of a grown woman not in the throes of a lust-fueled breakdown.
I push away from Cole and then make a show of checking for injuries—mostly so I don’t have to look at him.
“I was trying to move the pitching machine so I can organize around it,” I say, dusting off my knees even though I didn’t land on them.
“Where do you want it?”
He means the pitching machine. Clearly. I blame it on the fact that I was touching my knees and he was looking at me like he wanted me on my knees that my brain goes . . . elsewhere.
I look up and realize he’s thinking the same thing.
He smirks. “The pitching machine, Palmer?”
“Oh. Yeah. Just . . . put it wherever it fits best.” What? Oh shit. “I mean, just push it to the side.”
This doesn’t help.
I roll my eyes as he laughs.
“I’ll help?” I say to avoid stumbling over more words that lead us both to the gutter.
“I think we’re both safer if you just stay back.”
My hand goes to my hip in defiance. “Like you can move it yourself. I can’t even budge it.”
He flips me a look, and then, as casually as reading the Sunday paper, he glides the machine to the entrance.