Triple Score (21 page)

She’d meant what she said their last morning at Spaulding, when he was giving her that vague “family business” bullshit. Life wasn’t all sunshine and roses. He was going to have to trust her with his ugly if this thing between them had any hope of surviving.

“Hey there, sourpuss.” Holly plopped into the seat opposite, looking every inch the trendy upper west side mom in her floral print maxi dress, faded denim jacket and Toms. She maneuvered Joy’s stroller closer to her so she could hand the toddler a sippy cup, which the little girl immediately threw to the floor. Without batting an eye, Holly picked it up, cleaned off the spout with a baby wipe and handed it back.

“Who’s a sourpuss?” Noelle made a silly face at her niece, who giggled and stuck out her tongue before drinking from the sippy cup. “Not me.”

“Yes, you.” Holly mimicked her daughter, sticking her tongue out at Noelle. “You look like you’re mad at the world. What gives? Can’t be my fault, since I managed to get here a full five minutes early, even with the princess and all her gear.”

“Nice to see you, too,” Noelle quipped.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t nice to see you.” Holly pulled a diaper bag from underneath the stroller, extricated a baggie of Cheerios and spread some out over the snack tray in front of her daughter. “But something’s clearly bothering you. Rehearsal not going well?”

“Rehearsal’s fine. Slow going, but fine.” Some days it seemed like Noelle took one step forward and two steps back, but on the whole she was making progress. Yesterday she’d even done some work in the center of the room, away from the barre. Nothing fancy, just some simple plies, a few tendus, maybe a relevé or two on the rare occasion when Yannick wasn’t looking. But it was more dancing than she’d done in months, and it felt freaking fantastic.

There was something completely liberating about starting from scratch, like when she was five and her mother had walked her in to her first ballet class. It had been love at first pirouette, a love that had somehow gotten a little lost in all the pressures and demands of a professional career. Maybe injuring her knee was a blessing in disguise. Maybe it was just what she needed to rediscover her passion for dance and come back stronger—and better—than ever.

“Man trouble?” Holly persisted, dumping what must have been four packets of artificial sweetener into her coffee while simultaneously retrieving Joy’s sippy cup again. She had the whole mother multi-tasking thing down, that was for sure. “Is it that prick Yannick? He’s not threatening to have you thrown out of the company again, is he? I could have one of the stagehands at the theater come around and scare him a bit. They love me. I still bake them brownies every once in a while. And some of those guys are ginormous. One moonlights as a bouncer at a biker bar in the meatpacking district. Or maybe Gabe could send him a cease-and-desist letter.”

“It’s not Yannick.” He’d been hovering over her like a vulture, waiting for her to falter so he could swoop in and pick her apart with his snarky, sometimes sexually suggestive comments about her weight (okay, so she’d put on a few pounds in rehab) or her technique (of course she was rusty, she hadn’t danced in ages). But so far Noelle had managed to ignore him, for the most part.

“Jace, then?” Joy let out a wail that Holly suppressed by scattering more Cheerios on the stroller’s snack tray, which the toddler began unartfully shoving into her mouth. “I imagine he’s pretty down in the dumps now that the Storm released him.”

“We haven’t really talked much...” It took a second for the enormity of her sister’s words to penetrate Noelle’s brain. Jace had been cut from the team? “Wait, what?”

“You didn’t know?” Holly’s face blanched and her eyes grew wide. “Ohmigod, I’m so sorry. I assumed he told you.”

Noelle disguised a disgusted snort as a cough. “Like I said, we haven’t talked much in the past few days.”

And now she knew why.

“It was on SportsCenter this morning.” Holly sipped her coffee and unwrapped a Danish. “I guess his elbow’s not healing so well. They opted not to renew his contract at the end of the season.”

Holly sank her teeth into the pastry, and Noelle’s stomach grumbled. She satisfied herself with green tea. “That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“The sudden silence.” Noelle emptied her cup and crushed it in her hand, sympathy for Jace’s job situation warring with frustration over his non-communication.

“You should call him,” Holly suggested. A smiling Joy babbled her apparent agreement.

“Oh, I’m going to call him, all right. And this time he’s going to stay on the line long enough to listen to what I have to say.” Noelle stood, grabbing her bag from under the table as she did. “But it’ll have to wait until after rehearsal. I’m due at the studio in twenty minutes.”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Holly scolded. “Remember, he’s a guy. They’re notoriously bad at sharing their emotions. Even after three years of marriage, I still have to coax Nick out of his shell every once in a while. I find a little soft lighting and mood music works wonders.”

“TMI, big sis. TMI.” Noelle lobbed her mangled cup into a nearby trash bin. “But I’ll take it under consideration.”

She bid a quick goodbye to her sister and niece, just made the downtown one train, and strolled into Lincoln Center’s David Koch Theater with five minutes to spare.

“You’re late.” Yannick stood in the aisle, hands on his hips. Figured he’d be the first person she ran into. Good. She was itching for a fight. If it couldn’t be with Jace, Yannick would do. For now.

“I’m ten minutes early,” she countered.

“You know what they say.” He crossed his corded arms over his chest. Yannick might be wirier than Jace, but there was no doubting his strength. Not surprising since he lifted and tossed ballerinas around for a living, even if most of them weighed less than a hundred pounds. “Early is on time, on time is late and late is unacceptable.”

“I don’t think that means what you think it means.” She tried to move past him, but he blocked her path. “If you don’t let me get on stage, I really will be late.”

“Have it your way.”

Still, the self-righteous scumbag didn’t budge. Noelle barely resisted the urge to knee him in the balls. With her good knee, of course. “You’re going to have to move. Last time I checked, I wasn’t able to walk through solid objects.”

“Pity.” Yannick stepped aside with a smug smile. “Maybe then you wouldn’t have torn up your knee when you crashed into me.”

“I did not crash into you. You got in my way. Kind of like you’re doing right now.”

Noelle brushed past him, freezing when she felt a hand squeeze her ass. Slowly, she turned to face him. “Do that again, and I’ll go to company management.”

“And tell them what?” Yannick’s Russian accent dripped with disdain. Had she really found it sexy once upon a time? “That I touched you? Something I’ve done hundreds of times on the dance floor?”

“But we’re not on the dance floor now. And you grabbed my ass. That’s sexual harassment.”

He sneered. “You think management will believe your word over mine?”

“I think they’ll believe my lawyer.” Gabe must have a friend who practiced employment law. “So if I were you, I’d think twice before you do that again. To me or anyone else.”

With as much confidence as she could muster, Noelle spun on her heel and marched toward the stage, taking care not to strain the still tender ligament in her injured knee. The last thing she wanted to do was give Yannick the satisfaction of watching her collapse in the aisle. Talk about ruining her dramatic exit.

A couple of rows up, a fresh-faced member of the corps who couldn’t have been more than eighteen gave Noelle a shaky smile. She worried for a split second that the girl had overheard her conversation with Yannick, then shook it off. What did she care? Let everyone know what kind of an asshat he was, if they hadn’t figured that out for themselves already.

Wonder of wonders, the asshat must have taken her threat seriously because he gave her a wide berth for the rest of the rehearsal. Now to deal with the other human of the penis-wielding persuasion who was pissing her off royally...

Noelle was tempted to call Jace the second rehearsal ended, but she held off until she’d made it back to her apartment. Aching muscles soothed and in her favorite jammies, despite the fact that it wasn’t even dinnertime, she slumped onto the sofa she’d spent way too much on and hit Jace’s speed dial, alternatively praying he’d pick up and he wouldn’t.

“’Lo?” he mumbled, his voice in that deep, gruff, sexy place between asleep and awake, making her girly parts tingle.

Stay strong, girl. Stay. Strong.

“Did I wake you? At—” she glanced at the cathedral clock on the faux mantel “—two in the afternoon, your time? I guess now that you’re unemployed, you can sleep all day.”

There was an awkward pause, then he cleared his throat. “Oh. You heard about that.”

“Yeah, I heard. Not thanks to my so-called boyfriend.” She hated her spiteful tone. It seemed that she was kicking a man when he was down. But she had a right to be angry, didn’t she?

“I was going to tell you,” Jace insisted. “It wasn’t supposed to hit the news outlets for a few more days. Someone must have leaked the information.”

“Well, I wished someone had leaked it to me. Namely, you.” She ran a hand through her hair, still damp from the shower. “I suppose that’s why you’ve been so distant lately.”

“I have not been distant. I’ve been...busy.”

“Right. Too busy to tell me about a huge, life-changing event.”

“It’s not that.” He sighed. “I just needed some time to... I don’t know. Get my act together.”

Get his act together? Did he think she only wanted him if he had all the answers? Or if he could play baseball? Didn’t he know she couldn’t care less about that stuff? That love was supposed to be for better or for worse?

Noelle had to scramble to keep from dropping the phone. She loved him. Really-and-truly, honest-to-goodness, ’til-death-do-us-part loved him.

She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had happened. It had come on gradually, creeping up on her like a ninja. She’d lost her heart a little bit more every time he did something like take the time to find out her secret obsession with horror movies or give a scared teenage boy hope for the future by sharing stories of disabled athletes.

She wanted more moments like that with him. A lifetime of moments.

Then there was the way he made her feel when they made love. Beautiful. Uninhibited.

Cherished.

But the sad fact remained that, no matter how she felt, she wasn’t any more than an afterthought in his “busy” life. Not even worthy of sharing in his ups and downs.

“You know what?” Noelle choked back a sob. This was going to be hard enough to do without falling apart. But she had to break it off before she got in any deeper, if that was possible. She’d broken the rules. Love was never supposed to be part of the equation. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”

“What do you mean?”

She swiped a tear off her cheek. “I mean we both knew this was a long shot.”

“What was a long shot?”

“This relationship. Friends with benefits. Or not. Whatever you want to call it.”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” he asked, his voice rising. He sounded totally awake now. “The label? Or is it the distance thing? Because...”

“It’s not that. I told you before. I want your ugly. I can’t be with someone who won’t let me into his life. The good and the bad.” She took a quick, shaky breath and went on with her speech before he could interrupt and break her resolve. “I’m sorry, Jace. About your arm. About us. I wish you the best. Really, I do. You’re a great guy, with lots of talent in and out of baseball. I’m sure whatever happens you’ll land on your feet.”

“So, that’s it then?”

His quiet question almost wrecked her, and she just managed to croak out another “I’m sorry” before hastily pressing the end-call button. Only then did she give in to the overwhelming urge to cry, burying her face in an expensive decorative pillow and sobbing—for him, for her, for them—until she fell into a restless, troubled sleep.

* * *

W
HEN
THE
BALL
hit Reid’s glove, beating the runner to first for the game’s final out, the crowd erupted.

The Storm had made the play-offs. Without Jace, who watched from the box seats behind third base as his replacement rushed the pitcher’s mound, followed closely by Cooper, Reid and the other infielders.

It was the first time he’d been to Southern Pacific stadium since he’d been cut loose. He should feel anger, disappointment or regret.

Something. Anything.

Instead, he felt numb, like he’d felt every day for the past month.

He should have known better than to answer the phone out of a stone-cold sleep that day. He’d been totally unprepared for Noelle’s long-distance attack. Hell, he hadn’t even known his news had hit the airwaves.

And yeah, he should have told her. She shouldn’t have had to hear about something so significant through a third party. She was right about that much. But dumping him? That had blindsided him. And he hadn’t known how to respond.

So he hadn’t. He’d gone down without a fight. What kind of man did that make him?

“A chickenshit one,” Reid said a few hours later when Jace posed the question after pouring out the whole sorry story of his breakup over celebratory drinks at their usual post-home-game watering hole.

“Bush league move,” Cooper agreed, sipping the cheap swill that passed, in his oh-so-humble opinion, for beer.

“Okay.” Jace stared into his scotch. “So I fucked up.”

“And that’s supposed to surprise us how?” Reid chuckled.

“If you love this woman, you’ve got to step up your game,” Coop continued as if neither of them had spoken. “Bring out the big guns.”

“And what exactly are the big guns?” Jace made air quotes around the last two words.

“Put your heart on your sleeve.” Reid swirled his bourbon. Like Jace, he preferred a good whiskey over watery beer. “Lay it all on the line.”

Jace traced a circle around the rim of his glass with his index finger. “Can you two clowns talk in anything other than clichés?”