Center Stage: A Hot Baseball Romance (Diamond Brides Book 8) Read Free

the edge of a dream. The one that wakes you up in the middle of the night, reminding you about phone calls and text messages and changes of plan that you never connected at the time, that you never realized had one thing in common. I knew the truth about Doug. I knew it even before I could say it out loud.”
    Zach looked miserable. She understood how much that first disastrous wedding had cost him, and she wasn’t talking about money. The oldest of the Ormond siblings, Zach wanted to protect her. He wanted her life to be perfect, as perfect as he could make it, now that Momma and Daddy were both gone.
    Zach was there for her. He might be twelve years older than she was. He might have resisted stepping into the strange role of not-quite-parent, all those years back. But for all of Lindsey’s life, she’d been certain Zach could pick up the pieces.
    He was the one who’d found her hiding in the snack bar at the public pool when she was seven years old, crying because she was afraid to jump off the high board—and he’d taught her how to make the jump, and how to dive as well. He was the one who’d taught her how to drive stick when she was fifteen, letting her grate the gears on his old truck until she’d finally mastered the clutch. He was the one who’d told her she should look to her career instead of marriage when Doug proposed to her, and he was the one who’d walked into the hotel ballroom that horrible night and told all the guests that the wedding was off.
    For all those reasons, and a thousand more, she turned to her oldest brother now and said, “It’s the same thing with Will.” But even as she said the words she shook her head, vehemently enough that her careful up-do started to tumble loose. “No,” she corrected herself. “It’s not the same . Will’s not screwing around with other women.”
    “You’re not making sense, Lindsey.”
    She bit her lip and forced herself to speak the truth. “Will’s not ready for this, not ready to be married. He thought he was. I thought he was. But he doesn’t want to be tied down. He doesn’t want to give up fishing trips with the guys and golf on Sundays. He doesn’t want to pass up the chance that there’s someone else out there, someone better. Someone who can cook,” she added ruefully.
    “You can cook.”
    She shook her head. “If you’re going to lie about that, then I can’t ever trust you on anything else again.” She sighed. “Macaroni and cheese out of a box isn’t cooking. Neither is raiding the salad bar at the local grocery store. Stop changing the subject. Will’s not ready. I forced him into this.”
    Zach’s voice was rough. “If that’s true, then the asshole should have told you he had cold feet. He never should have let things get this far.”
    Lindsey sighed. “It’s not all his fault. After last time, I wanted to do what’s right—keep the wedding small, keep it simple—but everything moved too fast. I was trying to be a good girl.”
    “You are a good girl. You’re always a good girl.”
    The vehemence in her brother’s voice sparked tears in her eyes. Before she could answer, there was a sharp buzz by her elbow. She recognized the text alert even as she reached for her phone. And there was the message—the one she’d feared to see, the one she’d known she would find. It had just been a matter of time.
    I’m sorry.
    The words were there in black and white, like thousands of other texts she’d gotten from Will. She could picture him typing the nine characters, lean fingers flashing over the face of his phone. She knew him well enough to imagine the other messages he’d typed, the longer ones, the explanations, and she could picture the way he’d deleted all but the basics.
    The two words stole her breath, collapsing every atom of oxygen in her lungs into a solid, aching lump. For one blinding moment, she thought someone had actually, physically hit her. She couldn’t think of what to say, couldn’t