LITMIR.BIZ

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insists that I stay another day. Which is irrelevant as far as you’re concerned. The Jacks aren’t going to let you leave.”

      “I want to take you home.” He shifted on his feet, squared his shoulders and got a stubborn look on his face. “I mean, I’m going to take you home. They—the Jacks—do want to keep me in here, but I’m leaving when you do, so don’t go without me. As ticked off as you are, I wouldn’t put it past you to check out early.”

      “What’re you going to do to stop me? Camp out in the parking lot?” She sighed, too tired for sarcasm. “Besides, you can’t drive with that knee. You’re in pain. I know the signs whether you admit it or not.” She could tell by the strain pulling at his mouth and the fact that he was sweating. “If you’ve really got a concussion, I don’t think it’s smart for you to be driving. If you don’t worry about your own safety, then I care about mine. Marcie will come for me if I call her.”

      “I’ll hire a limo and driver. We’ll go home together. Then we’ll talk.”

      “A limousine?” He blinked at the sudden fury on her face. “Do. Not. Hire. A limousine. I repeat, Buck, do not do it. I hate the publicity this has already stirred up. All I need is to get discharged and find a forty-foot limo with a driver waiting to take me away in style. I’m leaving to escape that kind of smothering publicity.”

      He frowned as if he hadn’t heard her correctly. “What do you mean, you’re leaving?”

      She closed her eyes and looked away again, unwilling to get into it with him now about her plans. “I’m tired, Buck. I don’t have the energy to talk about this anymore. You can go home with me tomorrow morning…if you’re able to leave. Otherwise, I will ask Marcie.”

      “Is that a promise?” he asked.

      She turned to look at him. “I don’t want more gossip, so that’s the way it has to be.”

      “Then I’ll be here,” he said, speaking with a clamped jaw. “Come hell or high water, I’ll be here.”

      She waved a hand weakly. “Whatever, Buck.”

      “I’m sorry, Anne.” When the words came out huskily, he cleared his throat. “I swear to God I’ll make it up to you.”

      She turned back to the window without speaking and after a minute, she heard him leave.

      Buck was in mortal pain when he got back to his room. In order to get his doctors—and the Jacks on-staff sports medicine physician—to allow him a visit to his wife, he’d finally agreed to being pushed in a wheelchair by an orderly. Turned out, the guy was a Jacks fan and Buck bribed him with prime seat tickets to park him outside the door and wait. Somehow, in spite of his throbbing knee, he had managed to limp to Anne’s bedside. He had been determined not to be in a wheelchair when they talked.

      But he was glad to be wheeled back to his room. The effort had taken a toll and he was shaken by Anne’s reaction. She might never forgive him for this. He didn’t know how he’d manage to drive her home tomorrow, but he was determined to do it. No way was he going to let her check herself out of the hospital and him not be there. Judging from her mood today, he wasn’t sure she wouldn’t go to a hotel to keep from looking at him. With his knee throbbing now, he was on the point of buzzing for a nurse when a huge black man strolled into the room.

      “Time for your meds, Mr. Whitaker.”

      Buck made an attempt to look less than half-dead. “Call me Buck. Mr. Whitaker is my big brother.”

      “And you can call me Eddie.” He looked more like a wrestler than a nurse, but he moved with the grace of a dancer. He held out the tiny paper cup. “I brought you something that’ll take you to paradise…temporarily. Considering how you look, it should be welcome.” He watched Buck toss it back and offered water from a decanter on the bedside table to swallow it down.

      “How long do these things last?” Buck asked, shuddering.

      Eddie tossed the paper cup. “The concussion, the banged-up knee, the bruised ribs, the narcotics or your rotten mood?”

      Buck rubbed a hand over his face wearily and grunted an obscenity.

      “I guess you mean the dope,” Eddie opined. “With that concussion, a couple hours. It wears off, you can call me and there’s more where that came from.”

      “I don’t want to sleep through checkout time tomorrow morning.”

      “Why, you got a ball game?”

      Everybody’s a comedian, Buck thought, staring at his knee, now elevated on some kind of foam wedge-thing and wrapped securely. It was worse than he’d thought at first. He’d seen athletes with similar injuries and he was worried that it could be a long time before he played ball again. “I can veg at home just as well as here,” he told Eddie. “I don’t want to sleep past six-thirty.”

      “No problem there,” Eddie said cheerfully as he adjusted the wedge. “You know that old saying, doncha? A hospital is no place to get any rest. There’ll be folks in and out of here starting around daybreak. Sleep through all that and you’re closer to dead than alive.”

      With that bit of macabre humor, he stripped off his disposable gloves and tossed them into a receptacle near the door. “You take my advice, you’ll do what your orthopedic man recommends with that knee. I can’t see him liking it that you want to leave here while it’s puffed up like that. You mistreat your knee now, you’ll pay for it later.” At the door, he added, “Whatever your reason for wanting to leave, you might ask yourself if it’s worth your career. ’Cause if you don’t treat it right, that knee can ground you for good.” He flashed a grin as he pulled the door open. “Just my take on it, buddy.”

      Buck closed his eyes and prayed for the drug to kick in. He didn’t need homespun advice from anybody to know what to do to be back on his feet the soonest. The concussion was nothing new. He’d had more than a few. In a day or so he wouldn’t even have a headache. But the knee was serious. It could give him grief long enough to knock him out for the season. He worried whether or not he had the time. The Jacks had a major investment in him and would pull out all the stops to give him the treatment necessary to put him on his feet again. He wouldn’t have a choice about it. But Anne was the wild card here. She wasn’t thinking about his career. Hell, she wasn’t even thinking about him as he’d just discovered.

      Jesus, he’d really screwed up this time.

      Ten minutes later, he had a nice buzz on from the narcotic Eddie had given him. He turned drowsily at a cursory tap on his door as the coach of the St. Louis Jacks let himself in the room. Buck instantly came alive.

      Gus Schrader was a squat, red-faced man with attitude. While most of the team he coached was bulked-up athletes who towered over him, Schrader, at about five foot nine, took no guff from anybody. His word was law and Buck respected him more than any coach he’d ever had. Last year, with Buck as starting pitcher, Schrader had shepherded the Jacks into a wild card status and it was his mission in life to actually win the league championship this year and wind up in the Series. He would not be happy that his star pitcher was laid up with a bum knee, especially when he heard how it happened.

      “How’s it going, Buck?”

      Buck struggled to clear a narcotic haze from his brain and stuck out his hand to greet Schrader. “I’m okay. Ears ringing a little from cracking my head on the windshield,” he said, tossing a grin and hoping not to show how he dreaded whatever the next few minutes would bring. “Otherwise, nothing’s broken.”

      Schrader looked at the knee. “Think you’ll be able to walk on that anytime soon?”

      “A couple weeks, give or take.” Buck used the remote to raise the head of his bed.

      “That so?” Arms crossed, Schrader eyed him skeptically.

      “What were you thinking, Coach?”

      “I’m thinking your guestimate is a

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