Read Second Thoughts: A Hot Baseball Romance for Free Online Page B

something come up, so I came to get you. You’re coming to work with me, okay?”
    Olivia was already letting herself into the back of the car, settling into her booster seat. Jamie passed her a juice box and a snack of string cheese and apple slices before she eased the car into traffic. “So?” she asked, once she was clear of the school. “What did you learn today?”
    Olivia spouted off a dozen answers. Her favorite class was math, because she was going to grow up to be a scientist, and scientists needed to be very good at math. But reading was fun, too, especially when she got to read out loud, like she had that morning.
    Jamie laughed at her daughter’s enthusiasm, and they chattered all the way across town. Olivia was such an easy-going girl, so different from Jamie’s own rebellious self at that age. Olivia took whatever was thrown at her. No babysitter today? Fine. Not going home right away? No problem. Pulling into a dark parking garage and standing next to the car while Mommy collected two huge bags of equipment? Okay!
    Jamie followed the signs to the executive offices, only to be greeted by a perky intern who told them everyone was waiting down on the field. Olivia was enchanted by the baseball-shaped pin the intern gave her, and then all three of them hurried down to the photo shoot.
    As Jamie emerged from the corridor into the playing area, she could see that Robert was in his element. Her assistant stood on the top step of a short flight of concrete stairs, leaning against a blue-painted railing like he’d spent the better part of his life in the dugout.
    He was talking to a ballplayer, a slim-hipped wonder with short blond hair and piercing blue eyes. She’d never seen Robert look so happy. “So,” he was saying. “In that perfect game—” But he cut himself off as soon as he saw Jamie. “There you are!” he called out.
    There were introductions all around. Robert gave Olivia a bear hug and walked her over to the furthest corner of the dugout, far from the tangle of lights and reflectors and other photographic equipment. He helped her unzip her backpack and made sure she had an adequate supply of fresh, unbroken crayons to create a series of masterpieces.
    DJ Thomas was nice enough. Jamie realized, chatting with him, that she’d actually heard something about the ballplayer. The man was engaged to a former beauty queen, to a woman who’d started an after-school music program at Olivia’s school.
    It was easy to talk to him as she guided him through the shoot. He was familiar with publicity photographs; he’d probably been subjected to hundreds of them in his career. He paid attention when she told him to lower his chin; he kept “right” straight from “left”—a feat that proved surprisingly difficult for the vast majority of her subjects—and he moved easily from pose to pose.
    As Jamie worked, she felt the old spell settle over her. Holding her camera, she was able to relax. She could see the world around her in a different way from her normal, everyday vision. She wasn’t tied up with what was ; she could create what might be .
    That was the thing she loved about photography. People thought she was merely recording reality. But she was shaping that reality, framing it, setting it in a specific window. She could change the entire world by adjusting a single angle. She could shape her subject, and doing that, she could shape herself.
    Time fell away while she worked. She forgot about whether Olivia had enough paper, about what she, Jamie, was going to cook for dinner. She didn’t worry about whether she had clean underwear in her dresser at home, or whether she needed to do laundry before she could fall into bed. She wasn’t distracted by the rough fingernail she’d meant to file or by the stack of bills leaning against the African violet on her kitchen counter.
    She just was —herself, and the camera, and the ballplayer in front of her, the abstract of a human man that she