Winning With Him (Men of Summer #2) by Lauren Blakely

“Okay. Talk.”

“I handled everything badly. I should have called you to explain.” His earnestness threatens to seep through the wall I’ve built over the past week. All that carefully stacked stone and brick, and already I feel it crumbling.

“So you should have called to break up with me on the phone instead of via text?” I counter.

“No. I mean I should have called to tell you what happened.”

Dark thoughts invade my brain, horrible ones that make my blood go cold. “Did you meet someone else? A new guy in Florida?”

“No! God, no. Not at all. I couldn’t be with you like that and then someone else. You have to know there’s no other man.”

“Do I?” I press, my jaw tight, my voice hard. Because what the hell? How would I have to know?

“Grant,” he says, pleading.

“Why would I have to know?” I bite out, my tone as tight as my heart is precarious in his hands.

“You know what it was like when we were together. There was no one else. There couldn’t be anyone else,” he says in that same tender tone he used when he asked me to be his.

Like that, the wall collapses, and my heart cracks open to make room for him again. The quickness of it terrifies me. “I don’t know anything,” I say, trying to stay cool and calm.

Like Declan.

But then, he doesn’t sound so composed, either. He sounds stretched thin with pain. “When I arrived in Florida, my dad was at the ballpark waiting for me.”

“What did he want?” I can’t help my curiosity—I don’t have a clear idea of what’s going on with his dad. Declan barely let on what their issues were.

“He said some things . . .” There he goes again, back to doling out scant bits of information but never the full picture. “And then you had a great game, and I figured that you’d be better off without me.” Declan is leaving out critical clues to this equation. “You played better without me around. And you played better before we started up.”

“So you made the choice on my behalf,” I spit out, shaking my head in frustration. He thinks he did this for me. He went back to his stance at the start of spring training—that relationships are a mistake for a rookie.

Maybe they are, but he gave me no say in the decision, left me no options. He shut me down and iced me out.

“I did, and I’m sorry,” he says.

He goes quiet again, and in his silence, I hear a warning bell. I hear Coach telling me I made the roster. I hear the crack of the bat, the snap of the glove.

I hear what’s on the other side of the choice.

Baseball.

“Listen, Deck,” I begin, needing to stop him, to end this call before all my progress on the diamond slips through my fingers.

“Rookie,” he says, all soft and impossibly sexy, and a tingle shoots through my stomach and wraps around my heart. Just like that, I can see him and me together again.

The walls tumble completely. I ache to feel him against me. His voice says he feels the same.

And that’s too damn dangerous.

“Please don’t call me rookie,” I whisper, almost begging him to stop.

“Why?”

“You know why,” I say.

“Okay, Grant. I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

That sorry is another nick with the knife, another slice of my soul. If I stay like this with him, if I let him talk, he’ll cut me to pieces.

And for what?

For an apology?

He said he was sorry. That’s why he called. Mission fucking accomplished.

“It’s Opening Day tomorrow,” I say, grasping for any bit of willpower. “Don’t do this to me right now. Please don’t get in my head. I accept your apology. Let’s just move on.”

“I don’t want to get in the way. I never wanted to get in the way,” he says gently, but like this is hurting him too.

Even so, this is barely the beginning of an explanation.

This is Declan not letting me in again.

This is a man who isn’t ready.

And, I know now, neither am I.

“Good luck tomorrow, man,” I tell him, meaning it. “I wish you the best.”

“Same to you.”

Then I do the hard thing.

I hang up.





Declan turns out to be some kind of oracle.

Well, not completely—I don’t hit a home run. But I snag a single in my first Major League at-bat, knocking in two runs.

We go on to win the game, and it is utterly exhilarating, more so than I ever imagined.

Even when I have to see my mom and my dad afterward, going through the motions. I take pictures with them, I hug them and say hello and make small talk and ask how they’re doing. Even when Frank brings me in for a hug too, it doesn’t dull the shine on my day.

All of this stuff? My parents? My mom’s boyfriend?

I’ve got it.

I’m good with it.

The past isn’t my albatross—the present is.

That’s why I grab a minute alone with my grandfather after the game—to focus on someone besides me. We go to a coffee shop near the ballpark. “What’s the story with your knee, Pops?”

“I’m going to have the surgery in a few months.” His sigh turns into a what-can-you-do shrug. “But it’ll be fine.”