Warning Track (Callahan Family #1) - Carrie Aarons Page 0,54

that I would have completely overlooked before. The taper of his waist, the indent of his ass cheeks in his pants, so sculpted and globed in a way that should be criminal. The way his biceps flex and curl when he throws the ball. I’ve even memorized the way his pants mold to his thighs and calves when he bends to field a ground ball.

My lips have been tattooed with his taste since that night in Baltimore, and we’ve picked up our texting right where we left off before his date interrupted the flow of our connection. I have to try to keep my focus, not let it affect me too much, but I’m finding that my girlish guilty pleasure is rearing its ugly head at the exact wrong time. I’ve never been boy crazy, never spent hours doodling in my notebook or following a guy around the college bars just to get him to notice me.

I’m not really doing those things now, but I find myself nodding off into daydreams about Hayes far too often. And right now, I’m in the best place I’ve ever been in my career. The scandal news has died down a bit, even with my father still trying to hock his story for a buck. We’ve gotten a lot of the indiscretions in terms of contract or bribe money cleared up. We’re in talks with players who were brought here under false pretenses and constantly checking in on their mental state and comfortability with the team.

Those are only my post-Jimmy Callahan responsibilities. The regular duties of a GM are always on my checklist, being written and crossed off almost weekly, with each new opponent and game.

All in all, I have absolutely no time for a relationship or to be thinking about the taste of Hayes Swindell’s tongue in my mouth. Doesn’t mean my heart, and the tingling bud between my thighs, are listening to my brain.

I decided to come up to my office just before the fireworks start. We have them every year, a colorful, all-out bloom of pyrotechnics over the ball park for the guests and players who stay until after the ninth inning. Watching them from up here, where you feel like you can almost touch them, is something I’ve always wanted to do.

The rest of the executive offices are dark, quiet, most of my employees or coworkers have long gone home. But this is my home, even more than my ranch house. And I could use a couple quiet moments of wonder.

With a big Pistons-red clap, the fireworks start, painting the sky above the stadium a rainbow of colors. I watch in awe, seated in my white velvet desk chair facing the wall of windows that are usually at my back.

Someone clears their throat, and I whirl around in my chair to Hayes, leaning one gorgeous bicep against my doorway. Clad in dark jeans that accentuate every muscle in his legs and a soft gray T-shirt, his blond Thor-hair is damp and hanging to his shoulders. Stubble dots his cheeks and jaw, and he looks … dangerous. Like the kind of man who could make a woman’s clothes fall off from a single snap of his fingers.

Low in my belly, fire simmers, causing a snarl of tingles to float both up to my heart and down between my legs.

“I had it on good intel that you were up here. Alone.”

There is something in his presence that feels lethal, that alerts me to the fact that we’re no longer flirting with the line of no return. I’m pretty sure we’ve passed it.

I stay seated. “You found me.”

He walks into my office, closing the door behind him, and I audibly gasp when he flicks the lock closed.

We’ve been messaging for days, probably a week now, and it’s gotten increasingly more intimate. The other day, Hayes asked me what I wore to bed. And then I had the nerve to ask him if he preferred going out to dinner or spending the night at home when on a date. We were all but coming out and saying the whole damn enchilada, but I have a feeling that stops now.

Not that he’s talking much. He isn’t even halfway across the room and I’m sweating, a single trickle falling between the cleavage of my breasts.

“Good game tonight,” I say, trying to infuse some cooling agent to the fire that is starting to burn out of control between us.

It had been, for everyone, but especially for Hayes.