“It gets worse?”
“Hannah Vinch knows too.”
Fuck. Hannah is one of the ownership group’s chief representatives from the board. She generally stays out of our business and lets Stew run the day-to-day operations, but when she does make her presence known, it’s either really good or really, really bad.
This definitely qualifies as really bad.
“Yeah, and they’repissed. She’s holding them off for a bit because I promised her that we have a plan, with or without Quicke, but she wants to hear it from you, since I’m technically on leave.”
“You’re nottechnicallyon leave, Stew. You need to be resting. Go back to bed. I got this. I’ll grab the next flight I can and I’ll stop by to see you tomorrow morning before I go into the office.”
“Good, and Frankie?”
“Yeah?”
“How’d the kids look?”
“How did you know we’re in Arizona?”
“I have eyes everywhere, kiddo. So, how’d they look?”
“They look great and it seems like they’ve already imprinted on Charlie, so it should make for an interesting spring training.”
“He’s Charlie now?”
“That’s his name, isn’t it?”
“Sure is,” he agrees, “just not used to you calling him that.” Then he’s laughing, and the laugh turns into a cough and then a muffled curse. “Okay, I gotta go. Rita’s found me, and if you could see her face right now, you’d be running for the hills.”
“Go, get some rest,” I insist, and with a quick goodbye, the line goes dead. As soon as I hang up, I pull the shirt back over my head. Only to immediately realize it’s on backwards and I have to pull my arms in and twist it around.
When I brush my hair out of my face, Charlie is already on his phone. “There’s a flight back at nine tomorrow morning. Or I could call up my charter company and get you out of here tonight . . .” he trails off.
And leaves it up to me.
Take the flight tomorrow morning and we can pick up right where we left off, finally give in to thisthingbetween us.
Or I could call an Uber right now, be on a plane back to New York, grab a shower and a fresh outfit, and be back in the office tomorrow morning to deal with the crap headed our way.
It’s not even a hard decision. I wish it was, though.
“I’m gonna call an Uber,” I say, and to his credit, his expression doesn’t change at all. In fact, other than the ungodly mess that I made of his hair, you’d never know that he just had me laid out on his kitchen counter top practically begging him to fuck me.
All he does is start dialing a number and lifts the phone to his ear when it connects.
Chapter 12
CHARLIE
I focus on the phone call. That’s all I can do. That’s safe and simple and very unsexy.
“Express Charters, this is Bernice. How can I help you?”
Her accent is thick and southern and her voice high-pitched and very much the opposite of Frankie’s.
It helps.
“Hi, this is Charlie Avery.”
