Off the Hook by Laura Drewry Page A

should have stayed on the mainland. I might have hated it, but at least I got to work with adults.”
    When Finn’s next grab failed, too, he slammed his fist awkwardly against Liam’s right biceps, but Liam didn’t flinch, just kept on twirling his spaghetti with his right hand while holding the ice with his left.
    “Stop it,” Kate growled. “And give him back his ice.”
    She may as well have been talking to her fork for all the reaction she got.

    After a few more seconds of Finn’s hands flapping aimlessly in their attempts to reach the ice, he finally sat up—albeit slowly—and with bits of dried blood crusted around his nose and over his top lip, he looked Kate square in the eye.
    “I’m fine, and I really am sorry for being such a dick.” His expression softened a little when he smiled and tipped his head toward Liam. “I usually leave that kind of shit up to him; he’s way better at it.”
    Liam jerked his elbow up and feigned nailing Finn again, then stopped, hesitated a second, and tossed the bag of ice back at him.
    Nothing like a forced apology to make an uncomfortable situation even worse, yet, oddly enough, Kate was the only one who seemed the least bit uncomfortable. Liam had kept right on eating as though nothing had happened, and it wasn’t long before Finn and Jessie both joined him.
    “If they hadn’t gotten into it over you, it would’ve been something else soon enough,” Jessie explained, talking as if neither Liam nor Finn was sitting at the same table. “With these two, more often than not it’s just them goofing around, but every once in a while things get bloody. At least now it’s out of their systems for a while.”
    “But they’re grown men!”
    “Ha!” Jessie snorted. “That’s where you’re wrong. They might look like grown men, but inside they never got past adolescence—and it’ll get worse when Ronan shows up.”
    “Great,” Kate muttered. “Can’t wait.”

Chapter 5
No baseball pitcher would be worth a darn without a catcher who could handle the hot fastball.
—Casey Stengel
    Liam never should have punched Finn. It wasn’t that Finn didn’t deserve it—he did—but now Finn couldn’t get the catcher’s mask on properly. He said the cage put too much pressure on his swollen nose, which was why Liam spent the next few nights throwing the ball into the net again instead of into a glove.
    It was hard to judge his accuracy without a human target behind the plate, but he did it anyway because he didn’t have any other choice.
    The upside was that it was time he had to himself, without Finn or Jessie chirping in his ear about what needed to be done. Liam knew damn well what needed to be done, and he knew that ripping down and rebuilding the fish shack was going to keep him away from other jobs for a few days, but he didn’t care.
    If they were going to jump-start the Buoys, they were going to do it by starting fresh and by leaving every last dark cloud behind them. The fish shack was the last of those clouds, and it had to go.
    He’d just thrown his last slider of the night when he heard someone shuffling toward him. Standing under the trouble lights, with the rest of the yard unlit, he had a hard time making out who it was, until she spoke.
    “It’s not the easiest stuff to walk in, is it?”

    “Kate?” He was still squinting when she finally stepped into the light, decked out head to toe in catcher’s gear. “What are you doing?”
    He heard her snort before he could see her features enough to make out the smile.
    “Oh, come on, Sporto,” she said. “I know you’ve been away from the game for a while, but surely you recognize catcher’s gear when you see it. Think of me as your Russell Martin.”
    Liam had played against Martin a few times, and never once did Martin look like that in his gear.
    The leg guards came up well over her knees, meeting the bottom of the chest protector about mid-thigh. The face guard hung a little crooked, and the