Second Thoughts: A Hot Baseball Romance Read Free Page B

page. Not that much! Chin up. Eyes down. There you go!”
    The camera clicked away, storing dozens of digital photographs. This was the magic that had led to her becoming a professional photographer. This was the trick that had saved her in those horrible months after graduation, when she’d visited and revisited her final conversation with Nick.
    How had she missed his signals? How had she been caught so unprepared? Night after night, she’d stayed awake, replaying his last words in her mind. It’s not you, it’s me. He’d actually said that. It’s not fair to make you wait. I’ll be up and down from the minor leagues. I could get traded. We had four great years, Twelve. Let’s just end things here. Graduate tomorrow and have a great life.
    She hadn’t known she was on the clock. She’d had no idea her time was up, until it was too late. She’d stumbled through graduation like a princess snared in a magical sleeping spell. She’d stopped eating for weeks, unable to keep food down even when she managed a few bites. She’d been exhausted, so emotionally stripped that she couldn’t drag herself out of bed most mornings. She’d been completely on edge emotionally, bursting into tears at commercials on television.
    If Nick hadn’t broken up with her, she would have realized a lot sooner that she was pregnant.
    But by the time she knew Olivia was on the way, Jamie had finally gotten over the worst of the break-up. She’d stopped reaching for her phone whenever she thought of something that would make Nick laugh. She no longer started typing witty texts, hoping to catch him off-guard, trying to surprise a deep laugh out of his broad chest. She didn’t start each day asking what he was doing, end each night wondering if she should fly to LA and beg him to change his mind.
    She couldn’t let a baby change all that. She couldn’t let a baby take away all her hard-won gains.
    And so she never told Nick about Olivia. She never asked for a penny in child support. She never hinted to Olivia that her father was a rich and famous baseball player. And she wasn’t about to upset that precious balance now.
    “All right,” she said to Nick, returning to the photo shoot at hand. “Let’s try a few with you sitting on the desk. Hips toward me. Chest toward the door. Head forward, chin down.”
    She shut down the jabbering voices at the back of her mind and concentrated on getting the best shots of her life.

CHAPTER 2

    “Shoot me now,” Jamie moaned.
    “I assume you’re using that as a term of art,” Ashley said.
    “You’re my best friend. You’re supposed to show me sympathy and affection.”
    “I’m cooking for you. Extra avocado?”
    “Yes, please,” Jamie said, only a little abashed. She watched hungrily as Ashley added a handful of green cubes to the crisp bacon and bright red tomatoes that already spotted the omelet. “Seriously, though. I wanted an earthquake to happen. I wanted the stadium to rip in two and a hole to open up to the center of the earth, so I could just slip inside and die.”
    “Feeling a bit melodramatic this morning, are we?”
    Utilizing her skills as a trained chef, Ashley slipped the omelet onto a plate, automatically turning it to the perfect angle as she set it in front of Jamie. She topped off their orange juice glasses before taking her own seat at the high center island that passed as a kitchen table in her apartment.
    Jamie smothered her sour reply in a rich, eggy bite. “Mmm,” she said. “You should consider cooking for a living.”
    “Yeah, smartass,” Ashley said. “And maybe you should take a snapshot or two, with the camera in your phone.”
    They laughed together. “Seriously,” Ashley said, after Jamie had taken another bite. “You knew he worked here when you decided to move back to Raleigh. And you’re the one who took the job at Rockets Field.”
    “But I only took the job because it was for the front office. I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the