Bait & Switch (20 page)

“Where did that come from?”

“I believe a nearly naked woman who lures a man into the ocean can never be too prepared,” she said, then wiped out Mitch’s coherent thought by sheathing his erect penis.

She took his hands, leading him deeper into the ocean until the water was at his waist. Then she put her arms around his neck, pressed her nearly naked breasts against his still-clothed chest and claimed his mouth before wrapping her legs around his waist.

“Ah, Peyton,” he said as she rubbed her lower body against him. “You really are one extraordinary woman.”

The material of her black thong was in the way so he reached down to get rid of the obstacle and felt the fabric tear. The fact had barely registered before she was holding him in her hand, guiding him inside her.

For just a moment, he savored the hot, tight feel of her as their mouths fused, but then he wanted, needed more. He cupped her buttocks, moving her up and down on his shaft.

The sea was so calm that the ocean waves were little more than ripples but the sound of the water hitting the shore roared in his ears along with his blood. The wind screamed a long, tuneless song. Somewhere above them, a night bird soared in the sky.

Mitch soared, too, caught on a wave of ecstasy that had more to do with the woman than the act. He held himself back until he heard her moan and felt her inner muscles contract. Then he slid her up and down a final time until the sounds he heard were coming from his own throat.

His release was swift and all-consuming, as though powerful fireworks had been set off inside his body. The pleasure wracked him, more intense than it had ever been before, more meaningful than it had been with any other woman.

As the remnants of his orgasm shook him and he began to think more clearly, a truth more powerful than the love they’d made slammed into him.

He was falling in love with Peyton.

For a moment, the knowledge buoyed him, filling him with incredible happiness. Then a voice in his head that he didn’t want to listen to added a qualifier he had to acknowledge.

He was falling in love with Peyton.
His brother’s girl
.

Because he was falling in love with her, he’d have to come clean about who he was.

And then he’d have to let her go.

“I’D UNDERSTAND IF YOU didn’t walk me to the door,” Peyton said an hour later when Mitch helped her out of the low-slung Miata. “You really should go home and get out of those wet things.”

She cast a meaningful look at his sodden, expensive clothes. His beautiful, dark hair stood in salty spikes after the top-down drive over the Cooper River Bridge, and she spotted grains of sand at the open neck of his shirt. She knew how uncomfortable he must be. Her dress was dry inside and out but it was dusted with sand.

Not that it hadn’t been worth it. She’d gladly stand naked on the beach in a windstorm if it meant she could make love to Mitch again.

“I will get out of them,” he said. “
After
I walk you to the door.”

Peyton was about to offer another protest but it would have been hypocritical. She loved that he insisted on walking her to the door instead of riding off into the night, especially in light of the mind-blowing sex they’d had. It made their intimate encounter more meaningful.

Cary Mitchell, it seemed, had character and depths she’d never dreamed possible. He wasn’t the man she’d thought he was mere weeks ago.

She kept her hand in his and together they walked up the stairs to her second-floor apartment. When they reached her door, she opened her purse to search for her key ring.

“How are you going to get inside with no keys?” he asked.

Her hand, which was inside her purse clutching her keys, stilled. She’d forgotten she was supposed to have lost her keys. She snapped the purse shut but couldn’t shut out her guilt. She should confess that she’d duped him and hope he’d understand.

“Mitch, I. . .” Her voice trailed off at the crucial moment, because she couldn’t make the confession. Not when it might ruin what had been a perfect night.

“I have a spare key over here,” she finished.

She bent over at the waist to tip back a flowerpot and looked at him out of the corner of her eye while in mid-bend. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’ll hurt my back if I don’t bend at the knees?”

“Why would I?” he asked, but his mind didn’t seem to be on the question. His mouth was slightly parted, and his eyes had darkened. She realized with a burst of feminine power that he was staring at her rear end.

“Because you’re a physical-education major. That’s what you usually say.”

“Yeah,” he said in a low voice, “but not when you’re bending over in that dress.”

She giggled and stood up, holding up the key triumphantly. She expected him to grab her and kiss her the same devastating way he had on the beach, but instead the corners of his mouth turned downward.

“You need to find somewhere else to keep your spare. The first places a burglar looks are in a flowerpot, under a doormat or on the ledge.”

“Ah, but mine was
under
the flowerpot, not
in
it.”

He took a step forward. “Promise me you’ll find another place for the spare. Leave it with your parents or a trusted neighbor but don’t leave it under the flowerpot.”

His expression was full of a steely determination she’d never seen before, reminding her of something. She studied him and it came to her in seconds. He looked like the actors she’d watched on television cop shows.

“If I didn’t know better,” she said, smiling slightly, “I’d think you were a cop.”

His expression faltered, probably because he was surprised she’d said such a thing.

“Peyton,” he said, grabbing her by the upper arms, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

Whatever it was seemed so important to him that she merely waited in silence, watching a play of emotions she couldn’t read cross his strong, handsome face.

“I. . .” He faltered, but again she got the impression he was about to say something crucial. A pregnant moment passed before he whispered the rest of the words in a rough, low voice. “I will never go to the beach again without remembering how beautiful you looked standing there in the surf.”

She laughed, the heaviness that had descended over her at his serious mood completely dissipating. She took his face in her hands.

“I don’t want to forget anything about tonight either,” she said, “but I’m all for making new memories.”

Then she kissed him and drew him into the apartment. After that, neither of them spoke another word for a very long time.

The batter ambled up to the plate from the on-deck circle, looking more like a teenager than an eleven-year-old kid. His arms were tree trunks in the making, his upper lip shadowed by the faintest hint of a mustache, his cleats at least a size eleven. He stood a half-head taller than the catcher and a full head taller than the pitcher on the mound.

He was batting cleanup and, appropriately, the bases were loaded. One mighty swing like the solo blast he’d hit earlier in the game and he’d swipe the bases clean. But if the skinny, undersized kid on the mound got him out, the game would be over.

Cary rose from his seat on the bench in the pitching team’s dugout and gave three hard hand claps.

“C’mon, Little Bit,” Cary yelled to the pitcher. “Remember what we worked on yesterday, buddy.”

Little Bit, a.k.a. Jimmy Jacobs, looked over to the dugout, met Cary’s eyes and nodded. He reared back and threw a pitch that sailed over the batter’s head and hit the backstop on the fly. Fortunately, the ball bounced directly back to the catcher’s glove. None of the base runners advanced.

“Remember to follow through,” Cary yelled. “Come on. You can do it, pal.”

Cary suffered through another called ball before the plate umpire declared the next two pitches strikes. Casey Jr., which is how Mitch thought of the kid at bat, had yet to take a cut.

“That’s it, Little Bit,” Cary muttered under his breath. “Point the glove at your target before you throw, pull it back to your heart after you release.”

His knuckles were white from gripping the chain-link fence shielding the dugout by the time the next pitch missed high for a ball. That brought the count to three balls and two strikes. The next pitch could decide it all.

Little Bit stepped off the mound and gazed directly at Cary. He thumped his heart twice and gave the pitcher a thumbs-up signal.

“You can do it, kid,” he whispered a second before Little Bit let the pitch fly.

Casey Jr. cocked his elbow and took a mighty swing. He hit nothing but air.

“Strike three!” the umpire yelled.

“Yeah!” Cary roared as he pumped the air with his fist.

Little Bit leaped off the mound, jumping up and down until his teammates ran from their positions on the field and mobbed him.

After a few moments of wild celebration, the boy extricated himself from the crowd and dashed toward Cary. He waited on the sidelines with his arms open wide, lifted the kid and swung him in an arc.

“You did it!” Cary yelled.

“No.
We
did it,” Little Bit said when he was once again on the ground. “I couldn’t throw a strike before you came along.”

Cary ruffled the kid’s dark hair. “I just gave you a couple pointers, that’s all. You’re the man of the hour. Now go over there and shake some hands.”

Little Bit ran off to join his teammates, who were congregating along the first-base line to shake hands with the opposing players. Cary went to the end of the line, behind a grinning Sam Johnson.

Sam slapped palms with Cary. “Best game we’ve had this season,” Sam said.

Sam and Cary proceeded to press the flesh with the boys on the other team, who had won the league championship the season before. Last in line was the other team’s coach. He was such a large, imposing man that Cary figured he was Casey Jr.’s father.

“You do realize the only reason we played the bottom of the inning was because league rules allow the home team to get its bats even if it’s winning,” the other coach said slowly, addressing both Sam and Cary.

Cary grinned. “Yeah, we know.”

The other coach narrowed his eyes. “So you know your team lost by two runs?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sam said. “We know that, too.”

The man shook his head, bafflement stamped on his thick features. “Then why are you celebrating?”

“The ump stopped our last two games in the fourth inning because we were behind by more than ten runs,” Sam said. “To us, this is one in the win column.”

“As long as you know you’re not
real
winners,” the other coach mumbled before going off to join his team.

Like hell he wasn’t a winner
, Cary thought as he spotted the woman in the wild, look-at-me outfit hurrying toward him from the stands. Leeza Drinkmiller wouldn’t hang around with a loser.

She would if the loser was impersonating his brother
, the voice of his conscience whispered. Ruthlessly, he shut it out and appreciated Leeza’s approach.

He’d spent the night with her after they made love but hadn’t seen her since yesterday morning because he’d committed both to Little League practice and Captain Turk. Now he found he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Her lime-green sleeveless shirt paired with matching capri pants and sandals were almost garish, especially with the Green Monster pinned above her heart. Still he couldn’t help smiling.

He knew her secret. Underneath her flashy clothes, Leeza wasn’t flamboyant or sophisticated. She was a charming mixture of naiveté and spontaneity, a woman whose only fault seemed to be that she didn’t know she was perfect exactly the way she was.

And he couldn’t tell her. Not without risking everything.

Leeza’s worldly, urbane incarnation might indulge in a dalliance with Cary Mitchell. But the real Leeza, the down-to-earth Leeza who spouted strange facts when she was flustered, would want somebody loyal, trustworthy and dependable.

Like the man he was pretending to be.

“What a great game,” she said and he opened his arms. She threw herself into them with the kind of abandon he wished she’d surrender to more often. He grabbed her, swung her around as though she weighed no more than Little Bit and kissed her resoundingly on the lips.

She thinks she’s kissing your brother
, his conscience whispered.

“Shut up,” he hissed when he broke off the kiss.

“Excuse me.” Leeza scrunched up her forehead. “Did you tell me to shut up?”

Hell. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken the words aloud.

“Sure did,” he said, again moving toward her lips. “I said shut up and kiss me.”

The second kiss was as chaste as the first, like a public kiss should be, but nobody had told his hormones that. They were raging, like a rampaging river after a heavy rain.

Trying to keep things light and friendly, he threw an arm around her neck and hugged her to him.

“I’d kiss him, too, if I didn’t think my wife would get jealous.” Sam appeared from somewhere and clapped Cary on the back. To Leeza, he said, “Did you know the kids nicknamed him Dumbledore?”

“Like the wizard in the Harry Potter books?”

“Exactly.” Sam chuckled. “He’s only been with us for a few days, but he’s already working his magic on the team.”

Cary started to say it wasn’t magic, just tried-and-true baseball principles that had been drilled into him during his fourteen years of playing, but then noticed the way Leeza was looking at him.

Was that suspicion in her eyes? Was she wondering how a kid who’d played a few seasons of Little League way back when knew so much about baseball?

“Must be magic,” he said, “’cause I’m not sure what I’m talking about.”

“What do you mean by—,” Sam said, but he was interrupted by a shout from one of his players, a red-headed kid who refused to take off his baseball hat.

“Hey, Dumbledore,” the redhead yelled. He had one hand to his head, as though afraid someone would yank off his hat and expose his hated buzz cut. “You still treating us to ice cream?”

“You bet,” Cary yelled back. “Just give me a minute.”

“I better go keep peace among the troops ’til you’re ready to go.” Sam tipped his too-small cap to Leeza. “Nice seeing you again.”