LITMIR.BIZ

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Carerra, the baseball player?”

      The attendant pried David loose and guided him into a wheelchair. He raked back his tangled hair. When his hand pulled away, blood glistened on his fingertips.

      Brooke’s mouth was agape. He winced, knowing he was losing her. “That’s right, David Carerra. Like I told you—I’m notorious.”

      “IS IT TRUE?”

      Brooke gave her head a shake. She’d dozed off, huddled inside the injured man’s denim jacket, his helmet nestled in her lap as she sat up in one of the hard plastic chairs of the emergency room. She pulled back the sleeve to check her watch. Ninety minutes, it’d been, and still no sign of him. A nurse had told her to wait, but for how long?

      “Yo, there. Is it true?” asked the man across from her. He was grizzled with several days’ growth of a beard. The ice pack applied to his left wrist leaked onto his Patriots jersey and moth-eaten gray sweatpants.

      “Is what true?” Brooke tightened her knees, then lifted her hand to brush away the hair hanging in her face. What do you know—she had tendrils.

      “You came in with David Carerra.”

      She grimaced at the splotches of blood on the jacket cuff. “I guess so.”

      “That turncoat son of a bitch.”

      Brooke’s gut knotted. “What?”

      The man tightened the wrap on his wrist. “Weren’t no Series for the Sox this year, y’know?”

      “And you blame Mr. Carerra?” Brooke followed baseball at a once-removed distance. Her late father had gone to the games, occasionally with Joey or Katie, but he’d left Brooke out of the invitation after she’d taken along a sketchpad once too often.

      Even so, she knew David Carerra. He was the pinch hitter whose home run had won the previous season’s World Series for the Red Sox. For a time, Carerra had been the toast of the town, a shaggy-haired rebel who’d stepped off the bench and become the city’s unlikeliest of heroes. Opinion had turned against him the past season. Even though he’d been elevated to a starting position and had been performing well, he’d suddenly quit the team at a midpoint losing streak. After that, the Sox had sunk even lower in the standings, a galling comedown after the championship year. Speculation about Carerra’s defection had run rampant the columns of the city’s sportswriters. Rumors had run wild among the stunned fans.

      “He sure didn’t help,” the stranger said. “What’s with the guy, quitting like that? Steroids? Drink?” He looked her up and down. “Sexual addiction?”

      Brooke’s thigh muscles squeezed even tighter. She pulled the jacket closed over her chest and gave the man a lofty look down her nose, using an expression and tone borrowed from her Great Aunt Josephine, who could drop the temperature of a Sub-Zero with one glance. “I couldn’t possibly say.”

      “Yeah, well, you tell him he turned his back on a town that don’t forget.”

      If I ever see him again. Brooke looked away. She had his wallet, jacket, helmet and keys. She had to see him again.

      Feeling decidedly displaced from the ninety-to-ten ratio of her normal appearance, she rose up on the unstable spike heels and set her sights on the nurses’ station. Maybe Carerra had been admitted for overnight treatment and they’d forgotten to tell her.

      She arrived at the desk without turning an ankle or splitting a seam just as the attending nurse hurried off to take care of a scuffle that had broken out in the curtained examining rooms. First a drunken lout bellowed, then came a shout and a crash. A knot of white coats hustled a patient from the area.

      David Carerra. Over his shoulder, he gave the drunk a rude gesture, Southie style. Someone shoved a clipboard at him. He scrawled a signature, looked up and saw Brooke. A doctor was reeling off instructions, but Carerra brushed her off.

      He walked over and stood before Brooke, his hands riding low on his hips. “Whaddaya know? It’s my angel of mercy.” His voice was thick and slow and sweet. She wondered what kind of medication he was on. “Hey, there, beautifulll.”

      “I’m Brooke.” He’d pinned her with his eyes. They were bright green and hugely dilated. She felt her own widening. Even battered, disheveled and disgraced, David Carerra was too much man for her to take in. “Brooke Winfield.”

      He smiled with only one side of his mouth—crooked and cocky. Sticky spikes of hair had flopped over the wide bandage wrapped around his head. “I remember.” His gaze dropped. “Especially the dress.”

      She shuffled her feet together, clutched the jacket collar. “I don’t usually wear—” She stopped. He doesn’t need to know that. “This is yours.”

      “The jacket? Keep it.”

      “You’ll be cold.”

      “They gave me painkillers. I’m comfortably numb.”

      “Mr. Carerra,” the doctor interrupted. She handed him a prescription form. “You may have a headache for a few days, and you’ll need to clean your wounds properly.” She glanced at Brooke. “I’ll discharge him to your care. Our tests showed no sign of concussion, but it’s best if you keep an eye on him for the next twenty-four hours.”

      Brooke blinked. “Me?”

      David spread his hands. “Angel?”

      “I couldn’t possibly—” Brooke’s voice halted again at the shock of hearing herself sound exactly like Great Aunt Josephine, even when she hadn’t meant to. While she wasn’t sure where to take the rest of her life, she knew that emulating her prim-and-proper aunt was not the way to go. And dressed as she was, with the city’s most rebellious bad boy in tow, there was no telling where the night might lead.

      “Thank you.” She removed the prescription from the doctor’s hand. “I’ll look after him.”

      2

      CAMERA FLASHES BLINDED David the instant he stepped outside of the hospital. He winced and threw up his arm to block the photographers’ shots. Returning to Boston had been a bad idea even before the accident. Now every rag in the area would have a heyday, plastering his ravaged face on their front pages.

      “Carerra!” called one of the circling vultures. He recognized Bobby Cook, a wannabe sports writer who slummed for the Insider, a tabloid that preferred flash and trash to legit reporting. Cook had been raking through David’s past since his retirement, looking for the buried muck. Little did Cook know that he’d need more than a rake. Maybe a back hoe.

      “What happened tonight?” shouted a reporter. “Were you drunk?”

      “Where’ve you been?”

      “Why’d you come back?”

      “Who’s the chick?”

      The questions came in quick succession. David made no reaction.

      “Hey, ya lousy quittah,” shouted someone at the back of the group. Probably a photographer, hoping to provoke a response. David was much too familiar with their tactics. “Look this way, jerk-off.”

      David grabbed Brooke’s hand and shoved through the gathering of journalists. He pushed her inside the waiting cab, following so closely he almost landed in her lap. Without bothering to disentangle their limbs, he slammed the door shut, clipping a protruding lens. The photographer went reeling.

      David met the driver’s flat glare in the rearview mirror. “Floor it.” The man grunted, but the cab took off with a jerk.

      “What was that about?” Brooke was flush with outrage.

      “Read tomorrow’s paper and you’ll find out.”

      She put her hands on his chest as if to push herself away. “Will it be the truth?”

      “Who cares?”

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