“No problem. You think you can stand up?” He offered her his hand.
Emmy was struck dumb momentarily when she met his eyes. She shifted her gaze, staring at his hand like she didn’t understand what its purpose was. “Stand up?” She must have still been woozy from the fall.
“Like, on your feet?” Alex suggested. “Did you sustain any head injuries we didn’t see?”
“No,” she said with forced certainty and took Tucker’s hand, letting him draw her up to a standing position. The front of their bodies brushed against each other, making her cheeks flush. His chest was hard and toned and felt warm through the threadbare material of his shirt.
Too bad she couldn’t blame her blush on an imaginary bump to the noggin. What had gotten into her? She never got worked up around famous athletes.
“I have to go.” She pushed herself off him, letting her touch linger a moment longer than was respectable before snatching her hand away and giving herself a stern internal lecture.
Bad Emmy!
Her bike hadn’t sustained any serious damage, so when she climbed back on, the frame was still in excellent shape to help her make a speedy getaway, though her knee protested something fierce.
“Hey,” Tucker called after her. “What’s your…?”
His voice trailed off as she turned a corner. She realized too late he’d been trying to ask her name, and she’d run off without so much as a backwards glance.
She’d just completely blown off Tucker Lloyd.
Chapter Three
“Maybe running isn’t for us,” Alex said as he and Tucker stood in line at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. “I knew it wasn’t fun, but I didn’t think it was dangerous.”
“You just want an excuse to get out of exercise. Don’t think I’m not on to you.” Tucker gave Alex a whack in the small paunch he’d acquired over the winter. Tucker was listening, but he wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about their hit-and-ride, but not in the same way Alex was. The catcher was joking about their eventful job, but Tucker was thinking about the long, sun-streaked, light brown hair and big hazel eyes of the lady cyclist who’d literally crashed into his life that morning.
And stolen his favorite bandana.
“I get exercise,” Alex contested, as he loaded his plate with scrambled eggs and an assortment of fried meats.
Tucker rolled he eyes and filled his own plate with poached eggs and fresh fruit. He wasn’t a health nut, but during the season he tried not to eat like crap. Alex was a tank, and he crouched behind the plate during games. Tucker, on the other hand, needed to stay loose. Fat pitchers were few and far between, and they usually didn’t last six or seven innings, let alone play through all nine. If he was getting old, he didn’t think getting fat was also an option.
Age he had no say in. Flab could be stopped.
The pair of them moved to an empty table near the window, basking like cats in the bright morning sunlight. A few moments after making themselves comfortable—before they could even dig into their food—another two men joined them. A copper-skinned man in his late twenties who Tucker barely recognized plopped down first, stroking a neatly trimmed black goatee.
“What happened to your face, Ramon?” Alex rolled the r in the first-baseman’s name with a saucy flourish.
“You like?” Ramon Escalante smirked broadly, showing them a mouthful of pearly whites made even brighter in contrast to the dark hair of his new mustache.
“If I was George Michael in 1997, I would be incredibly jealous.”
Another man, this one younger and quieter, took the empty seat between Tucker and Ramon. The new arrival smiled but said nothing. It was hard to get a word in edgewise when Alex and Ramon were in the same room. The ego tended to eat up all the oxygen.
“You are jealous because I look like a man and you cannot grow a simple beard.” Ramon’s Spanish accent, originally from the Dominican Republic, tended to get thicker in direct proportion to how much Alex was irritating him at any given moment.
“Have you seen my face?” Alex ran a palm over his permanent dark stubble. “I have to shave twice a day or I look like Teen Wolf. I can grow a better ’stache in my sleep.”
Tucker popped a piece of honeydew in his mouth and nodded to the younger man who’d been the last to arrive. Miles Cartwright, the new kid pitcher who was garnering a lot of early buzz, didn’t say anything but looked at Tucker wide-eyed.
“You think if we leave them alone too long they’ll whip their dicks out and compare measurements?”
Miles choked on the bite of eggs he’d just stuffed in his mouth.
“There is not a ruler big enough,” Ramon said with an indignant snort.
Alex snickered. “Your English is getting rusty. You keep mixing up big and small.”