Flash and Fire Read Free Page B

hand, grateful for the excuse to break eye contact. She felt like a mongoose escaping a deadly cobra.
    She rubbed her damp palms against the back of her shorts. It didn’t help. Amanda could feel Pierce watching her as she stepped up to the plate.
    With a sigh of resignation, she took the bat from Jon’s hands. “Are you sorry you talked me into this yet?” God knew she was sorry he had.
    “Not yet,” he laughed. ‘We’re still leading.”
    No thanks to me.
    Amanda wound her fingers around the bat the way Paul had coached her. Another trickle of sweat slid down from her forehead and zigzagged along the hollow of her cheek. Her throat felt parched, dry. It was the only part of her that was.
    “Strike one!” the tall, reedy man behind her in the umpire’s suit announced.
    Damn, she hadn’t even moved a muscle. The ball had appeared low when it had come sailing toward her. Paul had told her to only hit the ones that looked as if they were going to smash her chest.
    Amanda rotated one stiff shoulder, trying to get comfortable. She was dirty, grimy; the bat felt as if it weighed a ton; her eyelashes were sweating. And for some unknown reason, Pierce Alexander was stalking her. It was not her definition of a good day.
    She took a swing at the next ball and missed it by a huge margin.
    “Strike two!”
    Amanda glanced at Jon, who patiently shook his head.
    For one irrational moment, she felt like feeding the bat to him. It was his fault she was in this ridiculous situ ation in the first place.
    No, Amanda, she upbraided herself the next moment, it’s your own fault. No one was responsible for what she did or didn’t do but her. That was the way it had been since she was twelve and made up her mind not to be manipulated for anyone’s benefit any longer. She had no one to blame but herself for standing here, dripping while she waved a stick impotentlv through the thick air.
    She watched the pitcher, the six o’clock anchorman on the other station, wind up. The confident, five-thousand-dollar smile he wore told her that she was as good as out. For one brief, futile moment, she wished for Jose Canseco’s eye, but there was no use fighting the inevitable.
    The pitch came. Amanda swung. And missed.
    Her side had two outs.
    When she returned to the bench, Pierce was still there. There were three other batters on the bench, but she saw only him. Only he annoyed her.
    As she approached, he shook his head. Undoubtedly, something male and decidedly chauvinistic was about to come forth, she thought. She was already tuning him out when he opened his mouth.
    “Want some advice?”
    The smile she wore for the camera’s benefit, the one without any emotion behind it, fell into place. “I’ll pass, thanks.”
    She could be cold when she wanted to be, he thought. And he’d be willing to place a large bet that she could be just the reverse if a man were to press the right buttons.
    Finding the buttons was the challenge.
    “Your form is all wrong,” Pierce told her as if she had enthusiastically accepted his offer.
    Amanda let out a short breath and raised her chin.
    “Not the obvious one,” Pierce continued, the soft burr of a southern accent evident in his voice. She knew that Pierce was from Georgia, but he usually kept his accent under control. It obviously suited his purpose to let it seep around his words now, like a fog wrapping itself around the coastline as it rolled in at dusk.
    A lazy smile curved his lips as his eyes rolled over her body. “I don’t think there’s much room for improvement there.”
    “Thank you for sharing that,” she said icily. She started to walk away.
    Pierce caught her hand. She glared at him accusingly, reluctant to cause a scene in front of so many people. But she would if she had to.
    He spoke in a soft, moderate cadence, as if they were exchanging recipes for tall, cool drinks to be shared under the shade of an old magnolia tree. “But you’re holding the bat all wrong.” There