Read From Left Field: A Hot Baseball Romance (Diamond Brides Book 7) for Free Online Page B

and Adam could bring a civil suit. Government agencies would follow up—the Internal Revenue Service had gotten Al Capone, and they’d track down Reiter if he didn’t pay every single penny he owed under the tax code.
    But all of that would take years .
    The money would be meaningless by then. The Foundation needed regular cash infusions. By the time Adam’s lawyers and the FBI and Interpol and the IRS had their way, the Foundation would be stone cold dead.
    Sure, Adam could keep it going for another year, maybe two. The salary he’d get under the last year of his contract would do that much. But with the Foundation’s principal gone, it could never be secure. No large-scale donor would ever step forward to support an underfunded hobby from a has-been ballplayer. BUNT would end up the punchline of a bad joke, if anyone remembered it at all. It would just be one more thing those kids had loved and lost.
    A huge chunk of cash, that’s what Adam needed…
    The idea came to him like a two-seam fastball, cutting in like liquid fire. He could buy the Reeves farm. He could underwrite luxury townhouses on the land—maybe a dozen to start. He could sell the first round and fund more, end up building a hundred or more. There was plenty of land there, plenty of opportunity.
    He could secure the Foundation forever.
    He reached the end of the deck before he realized he’d started pacing. His fingers closed over the pressure-treated wood, and he leaned forward into the night. This time, he ignored the explosion in his obliques.
    The entire idea was crazy. He’d need a loan against next year’s salary just to buy the farm. Real estate deals were notoriously risky. He’d have to hire the best lawyers in town to draw up the contracts—the best lawyers he wasn’t already keeping busy full time, trying to sue the shit out of Reiter. Adam would need iron-clad contracts with the developers, massive penalties if they missed a single deadline, because he wouldn’t have a day to lose.
    But those were all details. He could get the loan. He could pay lawyers. He could hire project managers. It wouldn’t be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever was.
    The most important thing was convincing Reeves to sell the farm to him. But what had the guy said that morning? He and his wife were retired. They needed every penny they could get.
    An icy April breeze picked up from nowhere, slicing across the lawn and raising goosebumps on Adam’s arms. Don’t be an asshole , something whispered deep inside his brain. Haley wants the farm.
    Yeah. He was being an asshole. He only knew the farm was for sale because Haley had let him sleep over the night before.
    But Reiter had backed him into a corner. Adam had to protect his business. Buying the farm would be the difference between life and death for the Foundation, for the thousands of kids who relied on BUNT.
    Haley might have thought about buying the farm first, but all projects weren’t created equal. Paws would continue to exist, even if Haley couldn’t move her shelter out to the farm. If Adam didn’t act now, didn’t buy Reeves’ place, the Foundation would be dead, dead, dead. And even Haley had to admit that kids were more important than animals.
    It was too late to make an offer tonight. Reeves would laugh him off the farmhouse’s front porch if he showed up ranting about the Foundation, about BUNT. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough. It had to be.
    He forced himself to step back from the deck railing. For the first time in his whole miserable, exhausting day, he could begin to see a path out of hell.
    Yawning deep enough to set his side throbbing again, he headed into the house. First things first. He’d get a good night’s sleep in his own bed, without the distraction of another person, of Haley , sleeping down the hall. And then, in the morning, he’d set the wheels in motion to save BUNT and the Foundation.
    ~~~
    As Haley glanced at her phone, she shivered on the top step of