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pitching, for one.” He fiddled with the glass. “What brings you up to the city today?” He’d changed the subject, and she was glad. She was in no mood to discuss baseball. “I’d have thought classes were in session.” A glint of mischief flashed in his eyes. “And now I’m the one being nosy.”
She couldn’t tell him. One didn’t go about announcing the health status of baseball owners, even if they were family. In fact, just sitting there with Scotty was rather out of bounds. Would’ve been even if the man hadn’t sent her senses spinning. But he did send them spinning, and that made being there even more forbidden. There weren’t many taboos in baseball, but fraternizing with players was one of them. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t directly involved with the game—her dad was an owner. That was enough.
“I had business to attend to,” she answered in the coolest tone she could muster.
     

     
Scotty could take a hint. There were topics they couldn’t discuss. Shouldn’t discuss. Of all the beautiful women in the Bay Area, this was one he shouldn’t be spending time with.
Baseball had its hidden rules as well as the ones that umpires and players and fans understood, unwritten rules and boundaries that weren’t to be ignored or crossed. He’d already learned the hard way that some were picked up in only one classroom: the school of hard knocks. Unwittingly cross a line, and someone would let you know about it, sometimes gleefully celebrating your gaffe, sometimes kindly clueing you in on the sly. The unwritten rules were eventually absorbed by every player, part of the code, part of the moral fabric of the game. Some were tradition and some were plain common sense. Scotty had a few favorites: no stealing bases with a big lead, no standing on the dirt near home plate while a pitcher is warming up, no swinging at the first pitch after back-to-back home runs. And no admiration of long home runs from the batter’s box. That was a rule he probably wouldn’t have to worry about.
Hell, the rule about not dating an owner’s daughter was probably written in stone somewhere in mile-high letters. It just hadn’t come up yet.
But the slight tremble in Chloe’s hands as she crumbled an edge off her cookie and lifted it to her lips told him that she felt the energy between them as well as he did.
When he’d kissed her the night of the gala, he’d felt something new. He hadn’t even had words for it, but his body recognized it. Yet once he’d gone home, once he’d thought of all the problems that simply seeing her would cause, he’d sworn not to pursue her or the feeling and resisted his urge to track down her number and ask for a date. But he hadn’t done very well at keeping her out of his dreams.
When he’d first spied her in the aisle of the bookstore, he could’ve walked the other direction, probably should have. But he hadn’t wanted to. The feeling she’d ignited had ripped him open. He’d thought he’d known women, thought he understood them. Thought he knew himself. But meeting Chloe made him realize there was uncharted ground he wanted to explore, aspects of life he craved to know, and she was the key to the kingdom.
“Are today’s students any more focused than when we were in school?” He tried for a neutral tone and saw the lines around her eyes relax. Evidently he’d found safer territory.
“I suppose it helps that I’m teaching elective courses and devoted graduate students—students are there because they choose to be.”
She sipped from her coffee, and he smiled inwardly; the tremble was still there.
She set her coffee on the table and stared at it. She had beautiful eyes, dusky blue like the early evening sky of Nebraska in spring
“I love my students,” she went on, “but I hate the academic stiffness. There’s no sense of community like there is in baseball, no sense of teamwork.”
The light in her eyes dimmed, as though a curtain of caution had closed in the