HARD AND FAST
Lisa Renee Jones
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID
PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
My thanks to:
Razor Shines for the interview
Matt & Ronald for the baseball insight!
Diego for believing when I didn’t
My mom for supporting my dream
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
1
AMANDA WRIGHT was living a dream.
New shoes. Expensive outfit—also new. Press pass around her neck allowing entry into a professional baseball players’ locker room—a room certain to display hot male bodies in various stages of undress.
It was the perfect female fantasy come to life.
Or it should have been.
But right now, Amanda felt as if she were about to walk into the lions’ den and those lions—aka ballplayers—were going to eat her alive.
Her high heels clicked on the concrete floor of the tunnel leading to the Los Angeles Rays’ locker room, her toes pinched and her mind raced. Her journalistic instincts buzzed with the thought of the after-game activity on the other side of the door. Still, she hung back, wishing like hell she could tap her heels together and transport herself back to Dallas, Texas.
Dallas, the place where she’d had a position reporting high school sports for one of the daily newspapers. It didn’t matter that her work had lacked any semblance of challenge and leaned dangerously close to boring. She’d had job security. And her parents and her sister. She’d had her comfortable little downtown apartment overlooking White Rock Lake—she really loved that view.
Nerves flooded her system, and she stopped. For a moment, Amanda stood, watching people pass. What would she do if she went into that locker room and made a fool of herself? What would happen if she didn’t impress her editor with her first column? Or didn’t attract readers?
What had she been thinking? She must have been insane to leave her comfortable life behind. And for what? A sports column with her name attached? Didn’t seem like such a sweet deal at this moment.
She took a deep breath. A dream column, she reminded herself. On game days she got space in the paper no matter what, just as she had back home. But now she’d hit the big time. Twice a week she had her very own feature in the sports section. And this wasn’t high school baseball. This was the majors. An opportunity she’d fantasized about for years.
But, of course, the job had come with extreme pressure. There was one tiny condition she hadn’t shared with her family because they’d only worry more than they already were. Her new boss, Kevin Jones, had given her a short time frame in which to build a readership or she’d be gone. Seemed her predecessor had left and taken many of his fans with him. When she’d asked Kevin how short, he’d simply said, “Short.”
The ringing of her cell phone offered a welcomed excuse to continue to stall. She shoved a wayward strand of long, auburn hair behind her ear and reached inside her purse, a petite Louis Vuitton bag her sister, Kelli, had given her to celebrate the new job.
The minute Amanda hit the Answer button, her sister’s voice snapped through the line, a lightning rod of reprimand. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
Kelli ignored the question. “Why are you answering your phone?”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Why are you calling if you don’t want me to answer?”
“Because I knew you would,” Kelli retorted. “I didn’t want to be right, but I knew I would be. Shouldn’t you be in a locker room full of hot bodies, drooling enough for the both of us?”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“Like you’d answer if you were”. A pause followed and in her mind’s eye, Amanda could see Kelli shaking her head. “You’ve worked yourself into a state of self-doubt, haven’t you? Why do you always do this to yourself?”
“I’m not doing anything,” Amanda said, lying. Kelli was right. Amanda tended to let big events work her into a ball of nerves, so much so that she often would get sick. Every year, the first day of school had been greeted with a horrible cold and a red nose. Before a swim meet, she’d have abdominal cramps from the knots in her stomach. It was a miracle she’d managed to perform so well, time after time.
“Right,” Kelli said. “I wasn’t born yesterday. You’re standing on the wrong side of that door talking yourself out of this dream.”
“Okay, so I am or I was or—”
“Stop trying to think of excuses. You’ve wanted your own column for years. It’s the only thing you’ve talked about with excitement since you left competitive swimming. You can do this. You’ve been doing it for years.”
Amanda hadn’t left swimming. Her knee injury had stolen her aspirations. Shoving away the thought, she reminded herself that period in her life was history and should be buried. The here and now counted and she had new mountains to climb. Or, rather, locker rooms to conquer.
“I covered high school events,” she reminded her optimistic sister, stepping out of the path of passersby and leaning against the wall. “These are professional ballplayers.”
“You’ve dealt with plenty of professional athletes.”
Following her NFL team doctor dad while she was a teen did not count. “Years ago!”
“Well then, you better come home,” Kelli said. “Absolutely, you are in over your head. You could get your old job back. You know you could.”
Amanda absorbed the sarcastic comments as a much-needed reality check. She’d spent years trying to get away from the high school grind. Her ex-husband had been rooted in Dallas and had refused to move, determined to work himself into her father’s good graces and the better opportunities—a higher-end clientele along with the status and money that accompanied it—to which he had access. Her ex had cared about those things more than her. After being sideswiped by his affairs, she’d welcomed the divorce, but had needed the security of having family nearby.
Now, she’d found the courage to land her dream job, to relocate, and she couldn’t blow it. Not now. She had to do this. She pushed off the wall and straightened.
“I don’t know if I should curse you for your snarky attitude or thank you,” Amanda said.
“You’re welcome. Now go get ’em, girl. With all that sass and your hot new image, you’re gonna kick butt. Which outfit are you wearing?”
Amanda smiled, thinking of shopping with her sister a month before. That had been the day Amanda had decided to make herself over with a new, sexier appearance and take on the world with a new attitude.
“The black Jones New York skirt,” she informed Kelli. She loved her new look. Why she’d hidden in long skirts and flat sandals for so long, she didn’t know.
Actually, she did know. She’d been so completely absorbed in competitive swimming that nothing else had seemed important. When her knee injury had burst that dream, her ex-husband’s career had easily taken center stage. It had been as if she’d lost herself, her very identity stripped. She’d been Amanda the swimmer who??
?d become Amanda the wife. Nowhere in there was space for Amanda the woman or Amanda the reporter.
Her makeover changed more than her outside. It gave her confidence and transitioned her into a new state of mind that was dedicated to finding herself and her dreams again. That change of perspective had helped her shine in her job interview.
“Very nice,” Kelli said, approval in her tone. “The skirt is one of my favorite picks. Did you go with the Bandolino sandals with those cute ankle straps?”
“Ah, yeah, though I regret letting you talk me into them. They’re killing my feet.”
“Smile through it, sis. They look sexy and that’s what counts. Now kisses and kick butt.” The line went dead.
Amanda smiled and slid her phone into her purse. She hitched the strap over her shoulder, prepared to take charge of the locker room and, if she got lucky, a few good men along the way.
With that in mind, she charged forward, no longer caring about the pinch of her toes. No longer letting nerves get in her way. She had a hot new image and a hot new job. No way was she going to stop moving forward now.
In fact, she decided arriving a little late might be good. The guys wouldn’t be expecting her. Their guards would be down and she’d get her story.
But it wasn’t their guards that fell as she entered that locker room. It was hers.
Surrounded by half-naked, gorgeous men, Amanda’s eyes went wide. Everywhere she looked she found rippling muscle and rock-hard backsides exposed by gaping towels. For a girl who hadn’t had sex in so long it was embarrassing, the sight was downright shocking. Okay, arousing.
She should have been prepared for this. After all, she’d been in plenty of locker rooms with her father. Clearly, years of working the high school circuit had made her forget just how delicious grown men could be.
And these grown men—correction, half-naked, hot grown men—were all staring at her as the noise had dissolved into silence.
Suddenly, Amanda’s bravado of moments before slipped into hiding. Her slim-cut skirt—the one that seemed so perfect only moments before—now felt revealing.
“Hi,” she said, waving nervously, while promising herself she would not look below the waist to the display of muscled thighs and teeny-weensy towels. “I’m the new reporter for the Tribune.” She reached for the badge hanging from a chain around her neck and held it up.
She was met with a few smiles and murmured hellos. Some turned away, curiosity satisfied. Many continued to stare. Without conscious effort, she did exactly what she’d vowed not to do. Her gaze dropped and took in several sets of rather enticing male torsos, complete with defined abdominals. Worse, before she realized what she was doing, she swiped a strand of hair off her forehead, trying to get a better view.
Afraid she would be caught peeking, Amanda snapped her attention to eye level. She’d come here for a story, and not just any story—one for her very own sports column. Her reaction proved, however, that she needed to address her state of sexual deprivation. Otherwise, being in the company of these men would pose a real distraction.
“Great game, guys,” Amanda said, smiling. “Who wants to be the headliner for my first story?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” The voice came from Amanda’s left. A thirty-something man, wearing a sports coat and jeans, stepped into view. His piercing black eyes gave her a rude sweep from head to toe. “Has Kevin lost his mind?”
“Kevin?” Amanda asked, her eyebrows dipping, thinking. She’d come into town only the day before and met the staff at the paper in a whirlwind that morning. But there was only one Kevin she remembered. “As in my boss, Kevin?”
He crossed his arms in front of his plaid-covered chest before she could locate a press badge. “I’m surprised he didn’t go for blond and big-breasted.”
Who was this jerk? Amanda didn’t know nor did she care. Everything that happened here and now set a tone for the future. She wasn’t about to be made a fool of her first day on the job.
Amanda gave the jerk a bored look. “And who might you be?”
“Jack Krass,” he said, a slight gloat to his tone that said she should know the name.
And she did, as did the rest of the city. Jack Krass’s face was plastered on billboards—lots of them—advertising his column with a competing paper. She should have recognized him. Amanda had replaced him at the Tribune, meaning he’d once worn the shoes she now had to prove she could walk in. Worse, they were shoes two other reporters before her had failed to fill. Even though his confidence could be justified, in Amanda’s mind there was no call for him to be snide and nasty.
“Your name sounds vaguely familiar,” she said, a finger to her chin in mock concentration. “Wait!” She pointed in the air. “I know how I know you. A bunch of the guys at the paper were playing pin the tail on the Jack Krass this morning.” Her eyes went wide. “Wow. That must mean they really don’t like you. Why is that?”
A roar of laughter drew Amanda’s attention to the handsome face of Brad Rogers, who shared her hometown in Texas. The blond, blue-eyed pitcher had a lightning-speed arm and a reputation as a bad boy.
He was also her father’s favorite player, so Amanda knew him well, as did most women. The man was a walking sex god. Amanda didn’t have to look too closely to decide he was even more of a hottie in person than on television.
Leaning all six feet of his rippling muscles against a locker, he fixed Amanda in a come-get-me stare. When he winked, she felt it all the way to her toes. The sizzle was instant. He made her burn. If she could pick any man to end her sexless existence, Brad would be the one. Too bad their jobs put him out of reach.
“Jack Ass fits him well most of the time,” Brad drawled. “But we let him hang out, anyway.”
“You can be a real ass yourself, Cowboy,” Jack said in a biting tone and then shrugged. “And you let me hang around because I get you damn good press.”
“Actually, it’s all that free beer you buy us.”
Jack’s brow furrowed. “Say what you will, but we all know I deliver the readers.” He looked at Amanda. “Unlike others.”
“Since Jack got his face on the side of a bunch of buses and signs, he thinks he’s important,” Brad offered. “We know better.”
Jack tuned Brad out, focusing on Amanda. “Do you know anything about baseball?”
Officially, Amanda was irritated. Jack had pushed far enough. Time to strike back. She laced her words with sticky sweet sarcasm. “You mean I need to understand baseball to do this job? Nobody told me that. Maybe you better start explaining it to me.”
Laughter echoed against the tiled floors, boosting her confidence.
Numerous offers to school her on the art of baseball filled the air. Jack’s expression soured until he looked as if he’d been sucking lemons. “Sweetheart, looking good will get you laid, but it ain’t gonna get you a story.”
She laughed, but inwardly the words stung, nestling amongst her insecurities that the only reason she had this job was because she looked good. She eyed Jack’s slightly protruding belly and her response held more bite.
“Right. I most definitely do not want to look good. That makes me a very, very bad reporter. I should drink more beer and get me a body like yours. Then I’ll get lots of stories.” Amanda reached for her pad of paper and pen inside her purse. “I should take notes. What else do you think I need to know?”
More laughter filled the air. Jack’s face reddened. “Funny. Real funny. We’ll see who is laughing when your readership comes up a big zero.”
She eyed her fingernails as if bored and then waved at Jack. “Bye-bye. Run along. I’m sure you have some major ego stroking to do.” She turned her attention to Brad, offering Jack her back. “Great pitching today, by the way.”
He grinned. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“You’ve had two shutouts in a row, but there’s speculation your old teammate, Mike Ackers, could rattle you next week. In fact, he promises a home run. What’s your take on that?”
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Brad eyed Jack with amusement evident in his expression, then motioned Amanda toward his open locker. “Well, darlin’, why don’t you step right over to my little home away from home, and let’s talk about it.”
She didn’t have to look at Jack to know he was glaring. Amanda felt his stare like a dart landing in her back. Ah, but she liked it, relishing a little high from her successful verbal banter.
But the high shifted as she stepped close to Brad and his towel. Though she maintained a calm exterior, her heartbeat kicked into double time, pounding like a drum against her chest. The spicy scent of freshly showered male invaded her senses, and his gaze, direct and attentive, warmed her skin.
Amanda had met her share of professional athletes over the years, and none had affected her this way.
“So, ah, about those shutouts…” Amanda lost her words as he reached down and made a slight adjustment to his towel. She followed the action with avid interest. She swallowed and forced her attention upward. “Maybe I should let you get dressed.”
The corners of his full mouth lifted, mischief once again in his expression. “I trust you to shut your eyes if it falls off.”
That made her laugh. She couldn’t help it. No way in hell was she shutting her eyes if Brad Rogers lost his towel. He was lucky she didn’t yank it off.
His eyebrow inched upward. “What’s so funny?”
She shook her head, aware he was working her. “You’re being very bad and you know it. You should cut the new girl a little slack.”
“What fun is that?”
“Hey, reporter lady!”
Brad and Amanda both looked over to find Tony Rossi demanding her notice. An Italian with dark good looks and the best bat on the team, Tony had a reputation for playing the field with the ladies as much as he did the game.