Free Playing the Field: A Diamonds and Dugouts Novel by Jennifer Seasons Page B

baby, were staring at him. Though he’d been in the big leagues for a while now, that kind of reaction still surprised him. In his mind he was just Jason Patrick Trudeau: Iowa-born farm kid from the sticks who was good at playing ball and had a thing for pretty ladies.
    Right now he was looking at one very pretty lady. Standing barefoot in the grass, her creamy legs went clear to her chin in those khaki shorts and her figure was outlined mighty fine in her dark pink tank top. She’d pulled her hair back at the nape of her neck and loose strands of red-gold waffled in the breeze. The long line of her neck was elegant and graceful, and he wanted his lips on it bad.
    Mostly he just wanted her bad. Period.
    Yesterday after the game, he and the guys had grabbed a few beers at a club in LoDo that Mark owned. While the talk had revolved mostly around the game, there’d come a point when the conversation had turned to women. More specifically, Sonny. The guys had been full of suggestions on how to win her over. Most of them he’d ruled out as plain dumb, but there’d been one that he’d taken to heart.
    It’d come from Mark’s sister, Leslie. She ran the club and had taken a break, sitting at the long table with the players. Although she was dating fielder John Crispin, JP had started to suspect that she had an interest somewhere else. It was hard not to notice how often she stole glances at Peter when she was sitting directly across from him. That’s probably the only reason he noticed though, because Leslie was a cool one. Not much showed on her surface.
    But she had a razor-sharp intelligence that he respected. So when she’d told him that Sonny was most likely feeling overwhelmed and needed time to get used to him being around, he’d listened. Women like Sonny, who’d been burned and left with a bagful of responsibility, were cautious and needed to be coaxed gently. They needed time to trust and see that it wasn’t misplaced.
    He figured he could do that. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to push through her resistance. And it sure didn’t mean he wasn’t going to be kissing her again. It simply meant that he’d have to let her think it was her idea.
    Which shouldn’t be too hard, considering the way she’d gone boneless on him yesterday. It’d taken no coaxing at all to get her to kiss him back, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get her to do it first.
    And there was no time like the present to get the ball rolling.
    As he strode across the grass toward her, he saw her friend elbow her in the side and whisper, making him smile. The little girl on her hip hadn’t stopped staring at him since he’d arrived. Since he had a bunch of nieces and nephews and was used to it, her open curiosity didn’t bug him. Besides, he liked kids. They had an honesty about them that was refreshing.
    He liked Sonny too. Not just in a sexual way, either. But in a friendship, enjoyed-talking-to-her-and-making-her-laugh sort of way. His parents were still the best of friends, so he figured maybe he was on the right track to finding what they had by the way he was feeling.
    Before Sonny, there hadn’t been many women that he’d really clicked with. And that had led him to be picky, which wasn’t a bad thing. It did mean, though, that he dated less than people thought he did. He’d rather be alone than waste time in a relationship that didn’t satisfy on all the levels.
    Sonny now, she satisfied.
    As he approached, an image of his parents flashed across his brain. In the warm months they spent the evenings together on the front porch, sipping tea and talking through the day’s events as the sun went down. There was such an easy intimacy between them. Some day he wanted that for himself—and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it.
    JP was probably the only twenty-six-year-old guy on earth who didn’t just think with the junk in his pants.
    But he thought of his parents, his siblings and their partners, and he understood that