Page 20 of Wild Hit (Wild Baseball Romance #3)

MIGUEL

S omehow my house has become a zoo.

“All right, folks. Here’s the plan,” Lucky Rivera says as he motions at the TV in the living room, where he has casted a note from his iPad.

Chicken scratches adorn the screen in different colors, code for who is doing what.

All of them are connected by red lines that look suspiciously like a certain meme.

He explains, “We need to make this as believable as possible, which means scattering witnesses everywhere and posting proof on social media. For that we have our expert here.”

He motions at Rosalina who raises her hand in a salute. “Aye, captain.”

“I’m the captain,” her boyfriend mumbles before taking a sip of lemon La Croix. My face twitches with a flash of amusement.

“You’re the general of my heart, how about that?” She bats her eyes at him.

“Focus, people,” Lucky says, as though he wasn’t the most easily distracted person in this entire committee. “So as we have discussed, the first step is for the ladies to go shopping for wedding stuff—rings, dresses, and something blue.”

My daughter pauses from munching on literal popcorn. “Who’s bringing something borrowed?”

I take a deep breath and remain unmovable.

I sit in the middle of my couch, Marty on my left and Audrey on my right, facing the screen.

Cade and Hope sit on the armchair together, as in, she’s on his lap.

Inwardly I thank them for keeping it PG rated.

Meanwhile, Logan—our captain, aye—and Rose sit on the carpet by the coffee table.

No matter how many times I offered to bring them chairs, they refused.

Clearly this is a comfortable setup for them.

It also allows them prime access to the boxes of pizza on the coffee table that came straight from Cade’s favorite joint.

The locksmith has come and gone, so in theory we don’t have to be cramped in my modest living room, but this has become headquarters for the Marriage of Convenience Operation—name provided by a team captain who surprisingly reads romance books—and somehow Lucky has become the project lead.

Dude has a glint in his eye that is almost scary, as if he’d waited his entire life for this very moment.

He gesticulates like an overhyped scientist as he continues speaking. “Listen, I can lend socks to the whole wedding party if I must.”

“No,” Logan fires back right away.

Cade shudders. “Hard pass, bruh.”

Clearly there’s some history here.

“I made friendship bracelets yesterday, how about those?” Marty offers from her generous, and also deeply amused heart.

“Way better options,” Hope agrees.

Beside me, Audrey is as still as a statue. For the billionth time tonight, I check with a quick glance that she’s still, in fact, breathing. Her eyes are so wide that the lamps brighten them a shade or two. Pretty sure she’s scared of all these shenanigans, yet she’s not putting a stop to them.

“You okay?” I whisper to her.

She turns slightly toward me. “Unsure.”

“Should we stop?” Not just this strange pajama party, I mean, but everything. The whole plan. Call off the wedding, per se.

She just shakes her head as an answer.

“Now, the next crucial step is that we have to do Vegas rules.” Lucky circles the air around the messy Welcome to Las Vegas sign he drew in a corner.

I reach over to my daughter and cover her ears. “Keep it child friendly, my guy.”

“Of course.” He nods theatrically and folds his arms. “All I’m proposing is group clubbing and some paparazzi type pics that we can accidentally leak.”

Rose reaches for her phone on the carpet next to her. “Roger that. Creating a burner account as we speak.”

“Dad?” Marty asks, “Can I hear the rest now?”

I don’t remove my hands from her ears quite yet and ask Lucky, “Do we have specific situations that we want to, uh, capture on camera?”

I will yeet him into outer space if he proposes something I wouldn’t let my kid see.

The smirk on his face tells me he can read my mind. “That’s gonna be up to you two.”

Audrey and I exchange a silent glance. She blinks a lot. I do my best for my eyes to not pop out of their damn sockets. A private conversation is definitely needed. I finally release my kid from the protective hold.

“Then,” Lucky emphasizes, “We get drunk.”

“Absolutely not,” our physical therapist snaps, folding her arms tight enough to show muscle. “Not mid-season and certainly not on my watch.”

“Boo, hiss,” Lucky says, clearly enunciating the words. “Then how do we justify stumbling into a chapel for these two to get married?”

“We justify it by saying they’re in love and couldn’t wait any longer,” she fires back.

Lucky turns to us on the couch. “Does that sound reasonable enough?”

No.

I nearly snort. None of this makes sense.

I’ve never been part of anything more absurd in my life.

Yet, I know that not so deep down it’s not gonna be super hard to fake interest on the woman beside me.

She’s really freaking beautiful anyway, with those freckles over her nose and the pink lips.

I’m not immune to her generous, very distracting curves either. And those gams…

Oof.

I squirm. What can I say? I didn’t make a whole kid by osmosis.

Then Audrey finally speaks for the first time in at least an hour. “I can get drunk, at least.” I turn to her like a whip and she asks, “What?”

“I’m not gonna marry a woman who is drunk and with impaired judgement.”

“That’s admirable and all,” she returns, dripping in sarcasm. “But we’re agreeing to the marriage days in advance already, and I’ll need all the liquid courage I can get to make this happen.”

Cade runs his hands up and down his girlfriend’s arms. “Are you sure that at least Machado can’t get drunk?”

She tosses a glare over her shoulder. “Miguel is in the lineup for the Vegas game, so no.”

“What if he gets explosive diarrhea?” Lucky asks, calm as a cucumber even though he didn’t just stun the entire room to silence. “Don’t look at me like that, cabrones, I’m not saying I’ll cause it. What I mean is that a lil temporary inactive list never hurt nobody.”

“And what if we lose the series because of that?” the Orlando Wild’s first captain in franchise history asks in something like a growl.

Silence.

“I’ll just pretend I’m drunk,” I offer.

“Okay great. That’s a solid idea.”

“Whew, thought I was gonna die tonight.”

“No more out of the box ideas, yeah?”

“Out of the box or out of the butt? Get it? Get it? ”

I would laugh if I wasn’t in the middle of this.

This is when I notice my hand fiddling with the crucifix at my neck, my knee bouncing, my palms sweating, my pulse hammering like I’m running home and a baseman is trying to tag me before I get there.

Last time I tried to get married the whole thing was dead on arrival.

I’m not exactly prime husband material with being a single dad and on the road much of the year.

But Marty’s getting someone to role play Mom and daughter with at school, and Audrey’s getting spared from an arranged marriage like this is still the 1800s.

All I have to do is… go along for the ride. My overthinking isn’t welcome. This isn’t real, no matter how much I look forward to the prospect of kissing this woman after we lie through our teeth with I do’s.

I force both hands to hold my knees down.

“Anyway,” the cowboy says, motioning with his hand so that his bruh continues outlining the plan.

“Then, once they get married we take pictures and move on to the hotel.”

I smack my things. “All right, that’s it. Marty, off to bed you go.”

“But—”

“No buts. Let’s get you upstairs.”

“Talk about party poopers,” she grouches, setting the popcorn bowl on top of an empty pizza box.

The others yap about this and that as I shepherd my wild daughter upstairs. She puts some resistance, dragging her feet at turns or stomping at others, but I manage to get her in her room.

She whirls on me and folds her arms, rising to her full 4 foot 11 height. “Dad, I know about the bees and the flowers.”

I freeze.

“You don’t have to treat me like I’m a baby.”

I swear I’m quaking in my chanclas. My mouth flaps open and closed. Part of me doesn’t want to ask, but the other part needs to understand if we’re on the same page.

“Uhh, what do you mean?” My voice comes out like a squeak at the end.

Marty rolls her eyes. “I know I wasn’t brought by the stork, so if you want to poke Audrey’s flower?—”

“Yeah, that’s enough. Go wash your?—”

“I don’t mind because?—”

“Marty, I beg you not to finish that sentence.”

“Then she might stick around.”

Once more, I lose all mobility function other than what it takes for my mouth to flap like a fish.

It really takes me a hot damn minute for my brain to form fully coherent sentences.

“Marty, there will be no flower poking because none of this is for real. Where did you even learn that? Did you bypass the parental controls somehow?”

Her eyes open really wide. “No, the teacher explained this when someone asked where babies come from. She said a bee pokes a flower and that’s how babies start to grow.” Now she huffs. “What I’m saying is that I wouldn’t mind if I got a little sister or a brother. But I’d prefer a sister.”

My shoulders deflate, but I’m not that much calmer than a second ago.

“Marty, Audrey and I aren’t getting married for real, so we can’t give you a sibling. This is all just temporary.”

“So you say.” She shrugs, and as she heads to her bathroom to wash up, she casually says, “But we’ll see about that.”

I can confidently say my beloved child has never scared me before—until this moment. A shiver rises up my spine and once I head back downstairs, I can’t meet anyone’s eyes for the rest of the night.