Stopping Short: A Hot Baseball Romance by Mindy Klasky Page A

her chair, letting her head loll as she massaged the bridge of her nose. She had a headache, probably because she hadn’t slept last night. Another roll of thunder echoed in the room—rain was still pelting the palm trees.
    Suddenly, she longed for the shower she’d skipped that morning. It would be refreshing. She could read the new files and write more articles, get in another three or four hours of work before Drew came home from his late afternoon game.
    As she stepped under the spray in the bathroom, she promised herself she’d talk to Drew that night. She’d explain her entire business strategy. And she’d tell him they needed to put everything else on hold until after Sunday—the physical stuff, the things she’d started out at the beach house. She needed to give her complete concentration to the business task at hand.
    He’d understand. He had to. Everything she was doing was to save both of them.
    ~~~
    Drew heard the shower running the moment he opened the door to the hotel room. Good—she was here. They’d finally have a chance to talk. It had taken every ounce of his self-restraint not to phone Jessica last night, after he got her text. He’d thought about picking up the phone that morning, too, but he didn’t want to push her. He had to let her set the pace. So he’d stayed at the beach house until it was time to drive to the park.
    Now, he ran his fingers through his hair, shaking off rainwater. February weather wasn’t usually too bad down here, nothing like Florida’s summer storms. But this one had been strong—the rain had started at noon, but it was two o’clock before the forecasters finally admitted there was no end in sight. They called the game, and here he was, feeling like he’d just been let out early from school.
    And he had to admit, it felt almost as good coming home to surprise Jessica as it had felt to get on his bike when he was a kid, to pump hard up the long hill in front of the house, to put as much distance as possible between himself and chores and responsibilities and punishments.
    Not everyone had taken the day off, though. Jessica must have worked straight through the night. Her computer was open, and handwritten notes were scattered all over the desk. He dropped his gym bag by the dresser and crossed to see what she’d put together.
    Juvenile Record said one piece of paper, at the top of three stacks of scribbled notes. And beneath those two damning words, underlined twice, she’d written PURGED .
    A hell of a lot of good that did him.
    There was another paper that said High School , with three stacks beneath it—had to be one for each high school he’d attended. Another said Middle School —four piles there. He caught a quick glimpse of his report cards, the computer generated forms that spit out a mix of Bs and Cs. Mostly Cs. But his grades weren’t the only thing Jessica had tracked down.
    He paged through the papers, picking out letters from school counselors to his parents. In the absence of any clinical diagnosis explaining Andrew’s repeated behavioral problems, we continue to recommend that your son enroll in some outside activity to expend some of the energy that consistently gets him into trouble in class.
    Yeah. There’d never been a clinical diagnosis for what caused Andrew’s problems. Susan never took him anywhere near a doctor who might clinically diagnose Father beats the crap out of Son .
    Bobby had terrified her, said he’d kill her if anyone ever found out. Whenever Drew took a beating too bad to hide—and it happened about once a year—she just pulled him out of school, kept him home for a few weeks, a month, the whole summer if that’s what it took to heal up. Then the whole family moved, and he’d start at a new school in a new town. No one ever knew.
    And Drew sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone about it now. He wasn’t going to explain why he hadn’t stood up for himself, why he hadn’t fought back. Because “I don’t