Ruthless but beautiful.
I refocus on the field ahead of me, shifting back to the conversation at hand. “They’re a good match for one another.”
The click of Reese’s heels begins again, and out of my periphery, I can see her moving closer. My attention snags on the sharp angle of her hair just below her jaw, which could not have been a better choice of cut for her, before it trails to the elegant slope of her shoulder and down her arm. Which is when I remember to pull my eyes away again.
The soft notes of amber and vanilla from the perfume she wears invades my senses as soon as she gets close enough. And I know the scent is coming from her because it’s all I could focus on during the flight here. Reese sits directly behind me on the team plane, and it was a nice reprieve from the guy-stench that typically fills our aircraft.
“We have a press conference scheduled after the game tonight.”
“We?” I ask, skeptically. “As in, you and me? Why?”
Reese leans on the dugout railing next to me, mirroring my position, but she makes the move look a whole lot more graceful than the way my bulky frame is hunched over.
“Some of the bigger networks want to talk about our new relationship.”
I turn in her direction, lifting my brow. “Our what?”
“Our relationship,” she repeats. “Ourworkingrelationship. You know, the one where you’re the long-standing field manager and I’m the new President of Baseball Ops.”
“Well, I guess it’s going to be an awfully short press conference seeing as we don’t have much of a working relationship.”
Other than the flight, I’ve hardly seen Reese on this road trip. I think it’s obvious to both of us that we’ve been avoiding one another.
“We can fake one,” she says simply.
“It’d be better if we actually had one.” Standing, I turn to give her my full attention. “I want you to succeed here, Reese. You might not believe that, but it’s true. And this season would run a whole lot smoother if we could communicate with one another. You run the back end of baseball ops. I run the games. We have to work together. I just... it’d be nice if we could try to get along. I get that we may never be friends, but I respect you.”
“Do you?” Her question is almost testing in the way she asks it.
“Of course I do.”
“Then why haven’t you let one of your video coaches go the way I asked you to? It’s the end of the week, Emmett.”
Not this again.
I slightly roll my eyes. “Because I’m not fucking doing that.”
“And so much for respecting me.”
“I do respect you, Reese. But I wouldn’t respectmyselfif I fired a soon-to-be father after I just gave him a promotion that he needed. That hisfamilyneeded.”
There’s this heavy tension living in the silence between us, and if she’s going to learn one thing about me, I hope it’s this. That I’m not going to do something that goes against my beliefs, even if it risks my job or gets me shit from my boss.
Reese straightens her spine and lifts her chin as she looks up at me. “That’s fine. I already took care of it for you.”
The chill in my veins is instant. “What?”
“Nate. I let him go. He was the newest hire of the three. I gave you until the end of the week and you didn’t do it, so I did it for you.”
“What the hell, Reese?”
She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have an ounce of remorse anywhere to be found in her expression.
It has me starting to rethink some things.
Yeah, sure, Reese is a boss. Arthur was too checked out, while she gets things done. But at what cost?
“Do you understand what this means for his family?” I ask, the desperation clear in my tone. “Exactly how heartless are you? Because I’m realizing it’s more than I assumed.”
