faith in some programmers who ultimately couldn’t deliver on what they promised and he’d been too stupid and stubborn to realize that until it was too late.
Charlie told Roy to find someone he could trust. A place he could go with baseball people who would give him a workout but who wouldn’t be squawking to the sports reporters about what Roy was doing. They needed to establish if his arm still had the juice and what role he might play on a team. Maybe he couldn’t be a starter, Charlie mused, but with Roy’s sinking cutter, he might have closer potential. In baseball the only person who had the potential to make as much money as a starting pitcher was a lights-out closer.
One or two years playing, maybe an eight-million-dollar contract, and Roy could start over again.
Only this time he would do everything differently.
Roy shook his head. No, he couldn’t see that far ahead. He’d already failed once, so he couldn’t imagine having the confidence to try some other new business venture. Which meant he should stick to what he knew he could do. What he’d always done.
Throw a ball.
A ridiculous gift, really, that might set him up for life. Again.
Roy pulled up to the Minotaur Falls stadium, home of the Triple-A minor-league team for the New England Rebels. Minotaur Falls was also the home of the legendary Duff Baker.
Duff Baker, the only person in baseball Roy thought he might be able to trust. Duff had won four World Series titles as the manager of three different teams. Two of them with Roy. It was a remarkable accomplishment because it meant he could reach the top with different groups of players. That was because Duff had a better eye for talent than anyone in the game.
He had walked away from managing professional teams about eight years ago, but he hadn’t been able to leave the game entirely. Some might call being manager of a minor-league team a step down, but Duff just called it retirement.
Roy had phoned his former manager and asked if he could meet with him and if they could keep it private. Roy hadn’t given him a reason or any information, really.
That the old man hadn’t hesitated to say yes humbled Roy in so many ways.
Duff had been Roy’s first manager when he’d made it to The Show. Roy had been as cocky then as he had been through the rest of his career. In hindsight he could see what a handful he must have been to his manager. He used to shrug off bunting advice from the old man like what he was selling was old news. Duff had had every right to punch the upstart Roy had been, but he never did. Instead Duff just kept proving how his way worked until eventually Roy figured it out.
He’d been sad when Duff left the team. It was the first time Roy had ever felt any emotions for one of his coaches.
Excluding his first, of course. His dad.
Roy got out of the Jeep, grabbed his equipment bag, which still smelled like his basement, and hiked it over his shoulder. He hesitated before taking that first step, though.
It wasn’t the physical element of the game that bothered him. Either his arm could still do what it used to do or it couldn’t. There wouldn’t be much getting around that.
It was everything else.
Every failure out on full display, when he would have to tell Duff why he was here.
Well, not every failure. Roy didn’t plan to discuss the time he humiliated and hurt Duff’s daughter. That, Roy figured, he could keep in his pocket.
Lane Baker.
Hell, there would probably be a picture of her on Duff’s desk. Roy would have to brace for that. Maybe even a new wedding photo. Five years since the divorce, it almost seemed likely she would have moved on with her life.
Damn, that was going to hurt.
Don’t think about it. There was no backing down. He’d turned his life into this heaping pile of dung on purpose and now it was time to face the music.
Roy made his way through the stadium entrance to the second level, where the team’s offices were. Nothing fancy about minor-league security, so he was able to go wherever he wanted. He found a door labeled Private and Manager and knocked.
“Come in!”
It was a female voice who made the offer. For a second, Roy paused again. No, Lane couldn’t be here. She was in Virginia Beach last he heard. Helping wounded soldiers. Doing everything right, while he’d been doing everything wrong.
Roy put his internal pity party on hold and opened the door.
The woman standing in the office did remind him of Lane. Long hair tied into a ponytail, face devoid of makeup, wearing a heavy plaid shirt that might have belonged to a man at one point.
She stared at him for a good second. “You’re Roy Walker.”
“Yep.”
“My sister hates you.”
Not that he needed further confirmation of who the woman was, but her statement gave her away. Scout was Lanie’s younger sister. They also had an older sister, Samantha, who was known as one of the most cutthroat agents in the game, but everyone knew she and Duff weren’t close.
Scout was the opposite of Samantha. Where Duff was, Scout was.
“Yep,” Roy said again.
“You’re here to see Duff?”
The Baker girls called their father Duff. It was something Lane had told him about once while working on his shoulder with her voodoo physical therapy. Their mother had claimed that, because he was gone for so much of the year, they couldn’t legitimately call him a father. So they were to call him Duff.
Not hard to see why that marriage hadn’t worked out.
Which was part of why Lane had been so devastated when hers had ended.
Do not go there. Back to baseball, okay. But not back to Lane Baker.
“I have an appointment,” he said.
Scout tilted her head and eyed him as if he was a suspect in a criminal case. “He didn’t tell me. He tells me everything.”
“I asked him to keep this private.”
She assessed him and he had a hard time trying not to think about Lane. Lane was prettier than Scout. Softer around the edges where Scout was all sharp lines. Cheeks and chin. Still, it was easy to see they were sisters. They both had the same honey-wheat-colored hair with green eyes. A similar shrewdness in those eyes.
And honesty, with no thought of pretense.
“You’re here to see your first major-league manager. The man who led you to your first epic World Series win. You’re carrying an equipment bag that smells a little moldy and you look like you’re going to vomit if you breathe in that smell too deeply, which makes me think you’re nervous.”
“Hey, Sherlock, give it a rest. I need to talk to Duff.”
“Damn,
