The Heart Of The Game (45 page)

Cody squinted into the sun. He had finally lost it.

Alex waved.

Zoe didn’t.

But she was real.

His heart pounded against his ribs, banging so loudly that he was sure the boys gathering around home plate could hear it.

Over his pounding heart and racing thoughts he heard one of the new boys say,
No girls allowed
.

“That’s
Cody’s
girl,” Alphonso said. “And besides, we like girls. Some of them play better than you.”

Cody felt like he was in some reality-TV show.

Alex fell back, slowing his steps. Zoe kept walking.

By the time she reached the mound, Scotty was beaming and Cody had broken into a cold sweat.

She tapped the glove against his arm. “Thought I’d try my hand at baseball.”

In front of the kids, in front of his teammates, Cody hauled her close and kissed her. He’d intended a welcome kiss, a shallow kiss with the promise of more to come, but when she let out a soft, deep moan and met his kiss with a hungry passion that matched his, he had trouble breaking it off. When he eventually did, the boys were staring, little ones and big ones alike.

“Meant to tell you, Bond,” Alex said as he reached the mound. “You’re benched for this game. As in
not
in the lineup.” He glanced at Zoe. “I understand you two have some rules to bend.”

They barely made it back to Zoe’s apartment at the house.

It took every ounce of restraint she could muster not to crawl into Cody’s lap as he drove. The kisses they’d already shared had told her what she needed to know, that he still wanted her. But her hands wanted to explore his body, her mouth wanted to taste, to devour and to make up for months of lost time.

They sneaked up the back stairs and into her apartment. The door had barely clicked shut behind her when Cody pinned her to the wall with a kiss that led to the wildest, most abandoned lovemaking of her life.

When her breath slowed and her thoughts returned, all she knew was that she wanted more—more of him, more of the world-shaking pleasure, more of the deep contentment she now knew as love. She traced a zigzagging line along the taut muscles of his abdomen and then moved her hand lower.

Yes, she wanted more. But for the moment, she’d settle for him again. And a bed this time.

He grabbed her wrist. “No, we need to talk. I can’t even think when you touch me.”

“That makes two of us.”

She pulled her hand free from his gentle restraint and placed her palm against his heart. “You’ll have to talk while I touch you. I spent too long not able to feel you. Your skin... your muscles... your—”

“You’re making this harder.”

“My intention precisely,” she said, moving her hand down his chest and to his throbbing erection.

He closed his hand around hers, again stopping her.

“Zoe.”

She grinned but didn’t resist. She lifted their twined hands and kissed his fingers. “I fell in love with your hands, you know. You can blame all of this on them.”

He pulled his hand free and slid away from her. He sat up, giving her a breath-stopping view of the full extent of his arousal. No sculptor had ever managed to capture the pulsing power of such a man. At least no work that she’d ever seen. She sat up too and reached for him again, but he held out a palm to stop her.

“Be serious.” He turned and put both hands on her shoulders. “And listen to me. When you left, I threw everything I had into trying not to love you.”

He moved his hands down her arms. His eyes weren’t smiling. Her heart thudded hard as she prepared herself for the outcome she’d dreaded, the outcome she’d barely allowed herself to consider. She’d waited too long. She shouldn’t have left. Their bodies might set off sparks, but he’d walled off his heart. She should’ve written, should’ve called, should’ve done
something
more than set up her ridiculous plan to surprise him.

He leaned in close and touched his forehead to hers. “But the truth is... I do love you. Maybe have since the first moment I saw you. But back then, I didn’t believe in such things. I do now.”

He still loved her.
She wanted to go to her knees and thank everything holy in the universe.

“But I need to know what this is now.” He gestured into the space between them. “What we are now.” He let out a long breath. “I need to believe that you really know what you want, Zoe.”

He wanted more than three simple words and she knew it. But what words would convince him that she knew what she was about, that she wasn’t flitting from whim to whim and dragging him with her? That she knew, really knew, the path she wanted to take?

“You were right about following my own dreams. But to find them, to follow them, I had to learn to see,” she said slowly.

Already she was gesturing broadly, moving her hands—trying to fill in the blanks that language didn’t fill, not like she wanted it to.

“I thought I wanted the gallery. I thought it was my dream. I was so enmeshed by my grief for my mother, I couldn’t see that I’d lost true north. If my father hadn’t swept us all up and brought us here, I wouldn’t have met you. And I wouldn’t have discovered what I want, what I truly want and need.”

She hadn’t rehearsed this speech. Now, as she struggled with the language, with the words, she figured that maybe she should have.

“Did you find what you wanted?” Cody asked into the silence.

She touched her hand to his heart. “Right here. It always was right here. I was just too stupid to see.”

“You are in no way stupid, Zoe.”

His voice was a caress. But he didn’t seem to understand that in her own way, she was saying she loved him.

“Blind, stubborn—whatever the word is—I didn’t know what was important. One night I was staring out at the stars—really seeing them, as if for the first time—and I realized that until that moment I had been looking at what was
not
there.” She took one of his hands and closed it in both of hers. “But now I’m looking at what
is
there. What is
here
.” She let out a frustrated breath. “God, I don’t know the words. When my heart gets all tangled, everything mixes and I just can’t find words.”

She leaned close, until all she could see was his beautiful eyes. Close enough that he could see into hers.

“But even without the words, the truth is here. Can you see it, Cody? Can you feel it? It’s pulsing through me. It’s reaching out to you.”

He lifted his hand to the back of her head and drew her to him. Their mouths were so close she could feel his lips stretch into a smile. Then he took her mouth in a gentle kiss.

“Okay, I believe you,” he said as he broke off the kiss. “Torture’s over.” He coaxed her head to his chest, dropped a kiss on her hair. “I used to think words were overrated. I think I’ll subscribe to that old belief again.”

She grinned and without warning, leaned back, tumbling them to the carpet, with him landing beneath her.

“Oh, no,” Cody said. “We’re using the bed this time.” He pushed her to her feet, joined her, and they raced to her bedroom.

And once they fell into her bed, even if she’d tried to form words in her mind, the sensations that swamped her senses as their bodies melded made thinking blissfully impossible.

Cody woke to see Zoe rise from the bed and light a candle on the small table beside it.

Her hair cascaded around her shoulders, framing her face in the flickering light. He’d never tire of looking at her.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

He pulled her to him. “Ravenous.”

“Be serious,” she said, tossing his own phrase from hours before back at him.

“I’m entirely serious.”

“I’m still on Roman time,” she said, motioning to her belly as she wriggled free of his grasp.

“Then let’s get you something to eat. But before we face the world downstairs, there’s something else I need to know, Zoe. What
is
it that you want?”

She turned and pointed to him.

“Besides me. No fair saying me, not this time. I need to know that you’ll be happy.”

He didn’t say happy
here
. He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
She
had to. And he had to believe it.

She furrowed her brow and bit at her bottom lip before looking up at him. “I’m privileged. I want to do something with my resources that makes a difference. And I know
people
need so much but...” She tossed her hands into the air with a resigned sigh. “But my heart is with animals. I think I was born this way.”

“Don’t. Don’t apologize for what you love. There are plenty of others who fund projects that benefit people’s needs—that’s
their
dream,” he said gently. “Animals have no voice except through those who care about them. They need champions.”

She stood and paced to a window. Stared out for a moment and then whirled back to him with a pensive look in her eyes. “When I saw you with Telemachus, when I saw how you connected, saw you enter his world, comfort him, draw him out—heal him—I knew we shared this, the love of animals and the need to care for them. But I was so caught up in my grief, in my rigid plan about going back, about starting the gallery, I didn’t,
couldn’t
, see.” She sat beside him at the edge of the bed, pulling one leg up under her. “I fought my heart, Cody.” She let out a sigh laced with frustration. “And I wasted so much time.”

“Time can’t be wasted. It’s never ours in the first place. We have only the fruits of our efforts, nothing more.” He traced his finger along the creamy skin at the inside of her elbow and smiled when she shivered under his touch. “And who’s to know what would’ve happened? At this point, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

She told him about the refuge, about Alastair’s offer of the house. The excitement in her voice built as she laid out her plans. And he knew she told the truth, that she would be happy in Sonoma, surrounded by most of her family, establishing the refuge, doing the work of her heart.

“Brilliant woman. But I thought Italians did things slowly?”

“I have discovered that love and dreams have no respect for timelines.” She smiled. “Or geography.” She lifted his hand and placed hers over it and looked up at him from under her lashes. “I love you, Cody.”

It was the declaration he’d been waiting for, three common words, one following the other. Why the specific words mattered, he wasn’t sure. But hearing them was like unearthing a secret portal that opened out to the future.

He took her face between his palms, traced his thumb along her lips and said a silent prayer when she shivered under his touch. “Then marry me. Because I will never let you go. Never again. Because nothing would be right without you.
Ti amo
.
Mi rendi felice
.”

Her eyes went wide. It wasn’t the reaction he’d expected from expressing his love in Italian. Suddenly he felt silly for using the phrase he’d practiced. Maybe he hadn’t remembered it right.

“I have it on good authority—verified by three Internet sources—that I just told you that I love you. Either that or I ordered a case of cat food.”

She laughed. It was the sound he remembered from that first day, when he rode over the polo field. The sound that opened his heart. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, the force of her body against his tumbling them back onto the bed. No kiss had ever held such power or promise.

“Well, we could always return the cat food,” he whispered against her cheek.

“
Aspetta,”
she said as she lifted onto her elbows above him. “I’m Italian. You marry me, you marry my family.”

“That was the main draw,” he said with a grin. “From the beginning.”

She punched him. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her on top of him, cupping her hips in his hands.

“But for right now,” he said, kissing her ear, “I believe we’ll leave them out of it.”

THE END

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