Read Pitch Perfect: Boys of Summer, Book 1 for Free Online

the arm. The girl squealed with delight, and Emmy wrapped her in a hug.
    Any intention she’d had of coming their way was thwarted. Tucker couldn’t tell if he was relieved or bitter. He drank more of his beer and tried to pretend he didn’t care.

Chapter Six
    Emmy hadn’t seen Alice Darling in a year, not since her last foray out to spring training with the White Sox the previous spring. Alice was a Lakeland townie, well-known among the players and not for the reasons most townie girls were.
    Sure, Alice loved ballplayers. But she steadfastly refused to date any of them because of her job. Alice was a minor league umpire, and during training season she was the only female umpire who called spring training games.
    If romance was ill-advised for Emmy, it would have been career suicide for Alice. No one would be able to take her calls seriously if there was even the slightest whiff of a scandal. So Alice took the high and lonesome road and made it a rule never to date baseball players.
    Emmy had the same rule. Or at least she’d decided that day she had the same rule.
    There was also the Simon issue.
    Simon Howell, Emmy’s long-term, long-distance boyfriend. They’d met when she was working for the Sox. At a press conference following the injury of the White Sox’s star shortstop, the whole medical team had been grilled about what treatments they were planning and what the expected turnaround would be. As the assistant athletic therapist she’d mostly just sat beside her boss, but once or twice she fielded a question about the player’s pregame routines.
    One of those questions had been from Simon. He was a well-respected columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times , and though his bread-and-butter was reporting on hockey, he “slummed it” with baseball in the off-season. Chicagoans loved baseball, something Simon—who came from Canada where there was only one MLB team—didn’t quite grasp.
    She’d tried to make him appreciate baseball with her family’s season tickets to the Cubs and the occasional staff passes to Sox games, but he never got interested. “Too much standing around,” he’d claimed, which always astonished Emmy. Baseball was all about moving. Running, diving, leaping and throws. She viewed baseball as a sport that never stopped moving and couldn’t figure out why anyone else would see it differently.
    Likewise, Simon had tried to convince her hockey was the greatest sport known to man. Emmy could appreciate aspects of it—any athleticism on ice was naturally going to be impressive—but it was too violent for her tastes. Like the bastard offspring of figure skating and ultimate fighting.
    They agreed to disagree when it came to sports, something that was a bit of a farce considering they both made their living from sports-related enterprises.
    When Emmy had applied for the job in San Francisco, she and Simon had a long discussion about their future. She loved him, but it wasn’t the kind of devoted love that was going to make her stay in Chicago when a better job opportunity was available in California.
    Simon, too, seemed more invested in his job than the possibility of looking for a writing position in California, so they’d agreed to see how things went. As luck would have it, the Felons would have their first away games of the year in Chicago against the Sox, so she’d be able to see Simon then. Likewise, he’d spend as much of the season traveling to games as she would, so it wasn’t like they’d be seeing that much less of each other anyway.
    It would work out if it was meant to work out, she told herself.
    When she spotted Tucker across the room, she gave a little sigh. You have a boyfriend, she reminded herself. And you can’t date a player on your own team.
    There wasn’t actually anything in her contract against it, probably because her contract had been drafted for a male therapist and the idea of dating between players and trainers hadn’t ever come up before. She didn’t