Night Watch. Suzanne Brockmann

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СКАЧАТЬ hallway outside the locker rooms wasn’t filled to capacity as it usually was after a game, with girlfriends and dorm-mates of the players crowded together. Today, only a very few bedraggled diehards were there. Brittany looked, but Andy’s girlfriend, Danielle, wasn’t among them. Which was just as well, since Andy had told her Dani hadn’t been feeling well today. If she were coming down with something, standing in the rain would only make her worse.

      “My track record with sisters isn’t that good,” Wes continued. “I tend to piss them off, after which they run off and marry my best friend.”

      “I heard about that.” Britt stopped outside the home team’s locker room door. It was slightly ajar. “Mel told me that Bobby Taylor just married your sister…Colleen, wasn’t it?”

      Wes leaned against the wall. “She tell you about the shouting that went down first?”

      She glanced at him.

      He swore softly. “Of course she did. I’m surprised the Associated Press didn’t pick up the story.”

      “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as she—”

      “No,” he said. “It was. I was a jerk. I can’t believe you agreed to meet me.”

      “Whatever you did, it wasn’t a capital offense. My sister apparently forgives you.”

      Wes snorted. “Yeah, Melody, right. She’s really harsh and unforgiving. She forgave me before Colleen did.”

      “It must be nice to know you have such good friends.”

      He nodded. “Yeah, you know, it really is.”

      He met her gaze, and there it was again. That darkness or sadness or whatever it was, lurking back there in his eyes. And Brittany knew. The outwardly upbeat Irishman would be fun to hang around with and was even adorable in his own loudly funny way. But it was this hidden part of him, this edge, that would, if she let it, make him irresistible.

      He was, without a doubt, her type. But she wasn’t his, thank you, God.

      Eddie Sunamura, the third baseman, popped his head out of the locker room. His wife—June—was one of the soaking wet diehards. She lit up when she saw him, and he grinned back at her. They were only two years older than Andy, a thought that never failed to give Britt a jolt.

      “Give me ten more minutes, Mrs. S.,” he called to June, and Brittany couldn’t keep from groaning.

      “Eddie, you’re unbelievably hokey,” she said.

      “Hey, Britt.”

      “Have you seen Andy?” she asked him.

      He pointed down the hall before he vanished back into the locker room.

      And there was Andy. At the end of the hallway. In the middle of what looked to be a very intense discussion with the team’s star pitcher, Dustin Melero.

      Andy was tall, but Dustin had an inch on him.

      “Man, he grew,” Wes said as he looked at Andy. “I met him about four years ago, and he was only…” He held his hand up to about his shoulder.

      It was then, as they were gazing down the hallway at the two young men, that Andy dropped his mitt and shoved Dustin with a resounding crash against the wall of lockers.

      Brittany had already taken three steps toward them, when Wes caught her arm. “Don’t,” he said. “Let me. If you can, just turn around and don’t look.”

      Yeah, like hell…

      Still, she managed not to follow as Wes hustled down the hall to where Andy and Dustin were nose to nose, ready to break both the school rules and each others’ faces.

      As she watched, Wes put himself directly between them. They were too far away for her to hear his words, but she could imagine them. “What’s up, guys?” The two younger men towered over him, but Wes somehow seemed bigger.

      Andy was glowering—the expression on his face a direct flashback to the street-smart thirteen-year-old he’d once been.

      He just kept shaking his head as Wes talked. Finally, Dustin—who was laughing—spoke. Wes turned and gave the taller boy his full attention.

      And then, all of a sudden, Wes had Dustin up against the lockers, and was talking to him with a great deal of intensity.

      The new expression on Andy’s face would have been humorous if Brittany hadn’t been quite so worried at the amount of damage a full-grown Navy SEAL could inflict on a twenty-year-old idiot.

      Dustin’s sly smile had vanished, replaced with a drained-of-blood look of near panic.

      Finally, unable to stand it another second, Brittany started toward them.

      “…so much as look at her funny, I will come and find you, do you understand?” Wes was saying as she approached.

      Dustin looked at her. Andy looked at her. But Wes didn’t look away from Dustin. All that intensity aimed in one direction was alarming.

      She wasn’t sure what to do, what to say. “Everything okay?” she said brightly.

      “Do you understand?” Wes said again, to Dustin.

      “Yes,” he managed to squeak out.

      “Good,” Wes said and stepped back.

      And Dustin was out of there.

      “So,” Brittany said to Andy. “This is Wes Skelly.”

      “Yeah,” Andy said. “I think we’re kind of past the introduction stage.”

      Chapter 2

      Remarkably, Brittany Evans didn’t jump down his throat.

      Remarkably, she didn’t immediately demand to know what on earth would possess him to physically threaten a kid more than a dozen years his junior. Forget about the fact that he did it in front of her impressionable teenaged son.

      In fact, she didn’t say anything about it at all.

      Wes took that as a strong hint that he’d surely hear about it later.

      But she’d merely talked about her sister’s current pregnancy and friends they had in common as they drove to a Santa Monica café, not too far from the house Brittany shared with her kid.

      The questions didn’t come until they’d sat down to dinner, until they’d ordered and had started to eat.

      “You surprised me back at the fieldhouse,” Brittany introduced the topic. The table was lit by candlelight, and it made her seem warmly, lushly exotic in a way that her little sister would never look. Not in a million years.

      Wes used to think that Melody was the prettier of the Evans sisters, and maybe according to conventional standards she was. Britt’s face was slightly angular, her chin too pointed, СКАЧАТЬ