Center Stage: A Hot Baseball Romance (Diamond Brides Book 8) by Mindy Klasky Read Free Book Online Page B

the backyard.
    A light snapped on upstairs, in the master bedroom. She pictured Will tumbling out of his striped sheets, tugging at his pajamas as he staggered toward the window.
    “Hotshot!” she cried, not bothering to whisper any longer. “Run!”
    Ryan grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the car. Their feet pounded the sidewalk together, like they were running the bases in some crazy suburban game. She realized he’d left the car doors open. All she had to do was roll into the front seat, and he was slamming her door closed, rolling over the low hood as he got to his own side.
    A dog started barking—not Will’s, because Will didn’t have a dog. He was allergic. Ryan’s door slammed, and the Ferrari’s engine roared to life. They took the corner hard, before she’d even had a chance to scramble for her seatbelt, but Ryan’s arm shot out toward her. His forearm was rock hard against her chest, stable, steadying, just until she was safe, and then his hand was back on the gear-shift, jumping them up to escape velocity.
    She didn’t realize her sides ached from laughing until they had sped onto the highway, heading back to the safety and anonymity of the farmhouse.

CHAPTER 3

    Because she was Lindsey, she worried.
    She worried that Will had seen the red Ferrari, that he’d caught a license plate number before they disappeared around the corner. She worried that she’d left crumbs in the car’s rich upholstery. She worried that Ryan had expected her to invite him into the farmhouse, had expected more than her quick clutch of his biceps and the cheery “Good night!” she’d given him as she ducked out of the car. She worried that he’d tell Zach what they’d done, that she’d have to face her brother’s shock and disapproval.
    She worried that she didn’t feel one bit guilty about actually TPing Will’s house.
    In fact, she slept like the proverbial baby, nestled deep beneath the cotton blankets on her childhood bed. She awakened to sunshine streaming through the crisp white curtains. She took a long shower, making sure that she rinsed away the last of her hairspray, the smudged remnants of the mascara she’d piled on the day before.
    She took her time making a gigantic pot of coffee, and then she fried up half a pig’s worth of the apple-smoked bacon Zach kept wrapped tight in the freezer. Wrestling a skillet and hot grease didn’t count as cooking, not in any real sense of the word.
    After her improvised breakfast—or lunch, if the clock had anything to say about it—she raided Zach’s closet for sweatpants and a T-shirt. Cinching tight the oversize clothes, she set off across the fields, determined to walk the fence-line of the property, to get some fresh air on the gorgeous summer day, and to think.
    She hadn’t been lying to Ryan last night. She really had followed every single rule she’d ever been told to follow. It was easier that way. No one got angry. Nothing ever went wrong.
    Her mother always said Lindsey had been the world’s easiest baby. And Beth had been the most difficult. Except, maybe, for Beth’s own baby, the one she gave birth to over spring break her junior year in high school. Even now, Lindsey could remember listening to Aidan scream with colic while Beth tried to finish her trigonometry homework, tried to master a page full of irregular French verbs.
    The day Beth flunked out of high school, she moved out of the Ormonds’ house. That hadn’t made things better, though. The midnight phone calls didn’t stop, the pleas to bail her out of yet another drunk tank, to pick her up from the street corner near some new abusive boyfriend.
    Their parents insisted that Aidan stay in the house with them, that he not be exposed to the disaster that was Beth’s life, and that led to even more screaming matches. Beth wasn’t allowed inside the house if she was drunk, if she was high. And every time she stood on the front porch, screaming that she hated everyone and everything,