Read Catching Hell: A Hot Contemporary Romance for Free Online

This was all the worst parts of being a teenager, with none of the advantages. His knees still hurt, from the long sleepless hours. His back was still tight.  
    Maybe all this thinking and crap was because he was exhausted. He glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock. Not enough time to get out to the farm, catch a nap, and still make it back to the park for the late afternoon game.  
    Well, that’s why he’d bought the condo. It was convenient, even if it never felt like home. He headed toward the hospital garage, already fumbling for his keys. A nap, a meal, and batting practice. And maybe by the time he next saw Anna Benson, he’d be ready to act his age.
    * * *
    Anna took her time reading through the stack of papers. The package had been prepared with Gregory Small’s usual thoroughness. Anyone who had just dropped into the morning meeting would assume that the general manager had taken weeks to analyze the situation, massaging data and manipulating printouts until every last detail was perfect. They’d have no idea that the entire discussion had begun after midnight the night before.
    But for the first time ever, Anna could see the tiniest hint of strain in Small’s demeanor. His scalp was shaved, and his goatee was meticulously trimmed—the man clearly kept a razor in his office. But his lips were rough, as if he’d spent the night licking them to soothe a case of nerves. And a tiny speck of blue ink stained the right cuff of his immaculately pressed dress shirt.  
    The real Gregory Small, the man who hadn’t been awake for more than thirty hours straight, would never have tolerated such sloppiness.
    “All right,” Anna said, tapping the pages into a single neat pile. “Let me make sure we’re all on the same page here.” She looked around the table. Small sat at the opposite end of the table. Between them sat Jimmy Conway, the Rockets’ long-time manager. He’d brought along his hitting coach and a pair of his most-trusted scouts. Opposite Jimmy sat Boyd Larson, the Vice President of Finance. He’d brought a nervous kid whose primary function seemed to be swapping out pencils so that Larson was never without a deadly-sharp graphite tip.
    Each of the seven men looked like he was braced for a battle. The table was already littered with coffee cups, and a tray of breakfast pastries had been reduced to crumbs. Jimmy was fiddling with a cigarette, turning it end over end, and Anna could only imagine how much smoke would have filled the room back in the Good Old Days.
    But these weren’t the Good Old Days. This was now. And this meeting wasn’t moving forward unless Anna took the reins.
    She cleared her throat and began by stating the obvious. “Cody Tucker is…” She hesitated. No, she’d continue to use the present tense. The man was injured, not dead. She rattled off his batting average, on-base percentage, and his slugging average.  
    She took comfort in the numbers. She understood the numbers. The entire time she was growing up, Gramps had tossed statistics across the dinner table like potato chips. Every morning for as long as she could remember, she’d started her day reading box scores from the previous night’s game, turning the tangle of abbreviations and numbers into a story as rich as anything taught in American Literature 101.
    Bottom line, of course, was the fact that Cody Tucker was good. Most Valuable Player of the year good. A dream at the plate. But that wasn’t all. The man’s defense was above reproach as well. “He has no errors on the year,” Anna continued. “And only three in all of last year. He would have won the Gold Glove, if Jackson hadn’t been a sentimental favorite. Am I missing anything?”
    She took her time, looking around the table, capturing the gaze of each man in succession. She’d learned at her grandfather’s knee. Gramps might be the team owner, but he was only as good as the men he’d hired. He paid all of them a fine salary so that he could take