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  She looked at her blank screen again and winced. “And if it’s biased?”

  “I’ll un-bias it. Send it.”

  “Tommy—”

  “Look, we’ve done this. Send it or quit.”

  She gave one brief thought to doing just that. But two things stopped her. One, her fear of being poor again, and two, quitting in shitty economic times because of a guy she’d spent one hour with had to be the definition of stupid female, and she hated stupid females.

  “What’ll it be, doll?”

  Dammit. “Give me a few hours. I’ll write your damn article.”

  Chapter 7

  There’s no crying in baseball!

  —Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own

  For the first time in recent memory, Pace slept like the living dead. When he woke up, he stretched and felt another first: no aches, no pains. In fact, he felt damn good. He eyed the empty vitamin pack by his bed. If Tucker’s stuff had done this, then it was worth its weight in gold.

  He got up, showered, and checked his e-mail. Samantha had sent him the link to American Online Living and Holly’s first baseball series article on her blog. She’d profiled their close-knit team, highlighting the friendship of Ty, Joe, and Henry. They were a threesome now, but she wrote about how they’d once been a fivesome, before Jim and Slam had been traded. The guys had put a positive spin on the situation for her, and Pace found the article nonjudg mental and thoughtful, but also a little on edge.

  She was on the hunt for secrets, and he knew it. The Heat hadn’t had any bad press lately, and that was always a good thing, but none of them were angels and it wouldn’t take much digging to find dirt.

  Holly sat at the private gate at the airport waiting for the Heat’s plane to be ready for boarding. Tommy was so excited about this Philly trip that he’d called three times since she’d gotten to the airport, and she knew if he could have somehow switched positions with her, he would have.

  “Find any secrets yet?” he demanded to know.

  “Nope.”

  “You losing your touch?”

  “I told you I didn’t want this assignment.”

  “It’s a great assignment. Oh, and if the Heat go all the way this year, I want a signed ball.”

  “If I dig out any secrets, no one’s going to want to sign a ball for either of us.”

  “Yeah.” Tommy sighed. “But since you tend to sell advertising space like crazy, I’ll have to live with a fat bank account instead. So . . . which one are you sleeping with?”

  “What? None of them!”

  “You said you had a crush.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m sleeping with him.”

  “Maybe you should. Get the inside scoop. Yeah, do it!”

  Holly hung up on him and boarded.

  When she’d been invited by Sam on this trip, she’d had no idea what to expect, maybe a luxurious trip from start to finish, with maids and butlers to serve the players every whim. Instead they flew on a relatively no-frills chartered jet with a single steward onboard. The Heat players wore suits and looked good while they were at it. They also smelled good. The support staff was there as were coaches, management. Sam’s brother, Jeremy, was aboard, too. He was Sam’s equivalent at the Charleston Bucks, and the two of them often co-chaired publicity events for both teams together.

  Holly looked at the testosterone filled cabin. All around her was the scent of big, built men—deodorant, soap, af tershave. She’d never seen such concentrated . . . maleness in one place before, and it was distracting to say the least.

  But she was here for a job, and she would use her time wisely. Forcing herself to get to work, she pulled out her computer, booted it up, and opened Word. Then stared at it for a while. Yeah, look at her, hard at work.

  Two rows ahead of her, Ty and Henry were playing cards, Henry’s head bopping to some beat from his iPod. Just to her left, Wade and Pace were talking and laughing, amusing each other with the ease of old, tight friends.

  Then Pace turned his head toward her. Wade was saying something to him, but Pace didn’t take his eyes off her as he slowly nodded a greeting, his gaze dark and assessing and . . .

  Warm enough that she needed to adjust the overhead fan right onto her face. Whew. The guy was edible. No other word need apply. She looked at her blank screen and tried to concentrate, which turned out to be impossible, so she clicked open her Sudoku program.

  Five minutes later she had a good portion of the puzzle done when a deep male voice in her ear said, “Four.” This was accompanied by a long, tanned finger pointing to one of the squares. “Four goes there.”

  She tipped up her head and found Pace. Her mouth went dry. He wore a dark charcoal suit cut just for him, a French blue shirt with a sexy as hell tie and an easy smile.

  “Working hard?” he asked.

  “Very.” As she answered, she shut the Sudoku program, inadvertently revealing the Word program behind it.

  And her blank screen.

  “Ah,” he said. “Invisible font.”

  With a sigh she gave up and sat back. “I don’t do idle very well. I like to be on the move, and I’m usually in a hurry as well. Sitting sucks.”

  He surprised her by folding his long, leanly muscled body into the empty seat next to her. “It’s called relaxing.”

  “Yeah, I don’t do that so well either.”

  “It’s hard for me, too, since I gave up soda.”

  She turned back to him. “Why did you give it up?”

  He patted his flat-as-a-board belly, and she laughed. “Come on.”

  “Hey, you hit thirty and your metabolism changes.”

  “You’re worried about your girlish figure?” Which was anything but girlish . . .

  “It made me sluggish. But I miss it, especially when I’m just sitting. There’s a lot of hurry up and wait in baseball, emphasis on the wait. You’ll get used to it.”

  She nodded, then shook her head.

  “Or not.” He eyed the bruise on her forehead, the one she’d not been entirely successful at covering up. “Ouch.”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “Just do me a favor and don’t offer to play catch with any of these guys,” he said, gesturing to the guys around them. “The last woman who did was a quote ‘dancer’ from some underground club, and she played in the nude.”

  She laughed.

  “Seriously. TMZ took pics.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “Google it.” With a flash of a quick, rare grin, he pushed out of the chair and left her alone.

  She let out a long breath—her version of relaxing—and wished she had an Internet connection as she went back to her blank screen, where she absolutely did not fantasize about playing catch.

  With Pace.

  In the nude . . .

  The team checked into the Philadelphia hotel together, Holly included. The atmosphere in the lobby slowly changed as people realized the Heat had arrived, and the players were sought out by autograph-seeking fans. Though Holly had read about baseball divas, not a single player seemed to mind as they stood around a few extra minutes making nice.

  Even afterward, things remained simple. A few of the guys went to the hotel bar for a drink, others caught a movie. Some stayed in.

  No one got wild and crazy.

  They were a united group, yet respectful of their individual differences. It fascinated Holly, who found Mike and Kyle, the third baseman and right fielder, in the bar with Ty and Henry, and sat with them for a while. They talked about baseball’s place in history and how the perception of the game had changed, especially from a kid’s standpoint. These days, so much more was demanded of the players, and the guys were definitely feeling the pressure.

  Mason, the first baseman, joined them, as did Joe. The discussion was blog-worthy, and as the bar began to fill up with women, Holly left the guys to go write up some notes. But the late afternoon sun drew her, and she stepped outside the hotel for some