Game Face Read online

  Game Face

  A Small Town Bachelor Romance

  Abby Knox

  Copyright © 2017 by Abby Knox

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Edited by Aquila Editing

  Cover Designer: Mayhem Cover Creations

  Dedicated to the memory of my beat-up three-speed bike that took me to Little League practice in the blistering heat every day so I could stand in the outfield and look for butterflies.

  Contents

  Game Face

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  an excerpt from Abby’s next book…

  Also by Abby Knox

  An excerpt from Take Me Home

  Game Face

  Book Two in A Small Town Bachelor Romance series

  Coach Troy has about had it with the curve balls being thrown at him by the beautiful but overbearing baseball mom, Remy. He would love nothing more than to tell her to grab the bench and stop the chatter, but first he will have to stop putting his lips all over her.

  Baseball mom Remy is so over this new, cocky coach who keeps sidelining her input. She will definitely be ready to tell him he’s outta there, just as soon as she’s able to keep her hands off him and her eyes on the prize.

  1

  Remy

  Well, that was rude.

  Remy Dawson studied the email again to make sure it was meant for her.

  “Your son will pitch when I say he pitches.

  “We have a full roster this season, so we will be working extra hard to make sure everyone gets a chance to play all positions. Your son, Elliot, may have only pitched in past seasons, but I don’t believe in laser focus at such a young age. That is not my method, so you should get used to it if you want Elliot to play ball at all.”

  Yep, there was Elliot’s name. Twice. This email was indeed meant for Remy’s eyes and was not an accidental slip of the finger on somebody’s smartphone.

  How dare this new guy talk to her like that? No way the old coach would have ever blown off her requests.

  Remy slapped her laptop closed. They would have to sort this out at the team’s first practice tonight.

  “Elliot, honey? Let me see your homework!” she called from the dining room.

  Elliot’s feet bounded down the stairs. It was a sound that she was eternally grateful to have around, but the single mom was painfully aware that those feet were no longer in the pitter patter phase of life. Her one and only child, now 13, was growing up way too fast.

  Elliot galloped goofily over to Remy at the dining room table. She laughed at him. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, just banging two ends of a coconut together.”

  “Honey Elliot, you’re not holding any coconuts.”

  “Come on, Mom. Holy Grail?”

  “Uhh, Monty Python?”

  The teenage boy rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you only watched it like a million times.”

  “No, you watched it while I worked and brought you microwave nachos.”

  Elliot sidled up to Remy and scratched his back against her arm as if he was a bear and she was a tree. “Maybe it’ll rub off eventually,” he joked.

  She laughed and slapped him away. “Not likely. That’s a you-and-Dad thing. Let me see your math.”

  Elliot handed over his work. Remy examined it. “This isn’t right, you need to show your work.”

  “But I know it in my head. That old battle-ax knows I know it.”

  “Elliot! Ms. Cole is not old, and that is rude.”

  “She is old—you had her in school and so did Dad.”

  Something like sadness or high school regret suddenly bubbled up in her and made her raise her voice at her son. “She’s not that much older than your dad and me, and words do hurt people. Remember that when you and your dad start bonding over his so-called glory days, OK? There’s a reason why Ryan Dawson never got a college recommendation. Being a clown isn’t getting you a degree. Don’t follow in his footsteps, whatever you do!”

  “Wow,” he replied.

  “What?”

  Elliot smirked at her. “That escalated quickly.”

  She stared at him, bewildered. “Sometimes I don’t understand your sense of humor.”

  “Try, like, ever.”

  “Fix it.” She handed his work back to him.

  Elliot grunted and plopped down at the table and scribbled while she opened her laptop back up and looked at her bookkeeping spreadsheet. There would be just enough coming in this month from her online work training medical transcriptionists. Enough to get a couple of name brand junk foods for Elliot.

  She then opened a new tab on the screen and typed out a grocery list to send to her phone later.

  Strawberry-frosted Pop Tarts

  Wrapped cheese slices (orange)

  Chocolate milk

  Pirate Booty puffs

  The rest of the list went on like that. Mostly junk. She worked hard to get a vegetable into his body about once a week, but it was so exhausting, she gave up feeling the mom-guilt over his eating habits. Besides, he worked and played so hard she didn’t feel she could deny him his “kid food.”

  It was truly unfair that eating garbage had no effect on Elliot’s slim, gangly body. Remy’s body type, on the other hand—yikes. She looked down at her “mom pooch” and sighed. She also worked hard, but no amount of sit ups or squats at the gym ever made her pants feel looser. She added a few things for herself on the list.

  Broccoli

  Kale

  Blueberries

  Plain yogurt

  So not fair.

  Elliot handed her his work and she rechecked it.

  “Good! Was that so hard?”

  “Yes, especially when I’m trying to get out of here to go see Brandt’s new skateboard. He’s gonna let me try it out.”

  Remy shut that down. “Nope. You have practice tonight.”

  “Not until seven!” Elliot protested.

  “I’m sorry, I meant pitching lessons at five o’clock first.”

  “Aww, man, come on, I’ve been doing pitching lessons since last season! Do I really have to keep doing it during regular season?! Rod sucks so hard.”

  She smiled at her boy. “Try to think of a more creative way to say you don’t like someone besides ‘sucks.’ And also,
Rod is the best private coach around here, and you’ll thank me when you go pro.”

  “But he’s such a douche, Mom.”

  “My own mom would have had a fit over me using that language. You should feel lucky you get to express yourself.”

  “Hardly.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, young man?”

  “Nothing. All right, I’ll suck it up if it will help you.”

  She cocked her head. “Help me what?”

  “Help you get the cob out of your ass.” Elliot playfully pulled her ponytail and ran off to get ready.

  “You better run, you little shit!” she called after him, smiling.

  Remy sighed as she watched her baby bounce off to the bench in the small kitchen to put his shoes on. She tried so hard not to live vicariously through that amazing boy. But he was only 13 and already a better person than she felt she was.

  As a single mom, she wished she had planned better and given him a sibling. They would have had so much fun together. Heaven knows she wasn’t the most fun mom on the block. He deserved to have more fun than she could give him.

  Just then her phone made a plinky-plonk sound. It was Ryan texting her. Elliot must have secretly been changing her ring tones and text tones again.

  “Hey, I know it’s not my weekend, but I got tickets to Weird Al in Des Moines this Saturday and I’d like to take Elliot.”

  The fun parent strikes again.

  She typed: “Sure, come to the scrimmage that morning and you can take him after that.”

  Ryan replied, “I can get a ticket for you if you want to come, too.”

  She laughed out loud picturing herself at a Weird Al concert. Or any concert. When was the last time? She couldn’t remember. Wait, yes she could. It was Usher, at the arena in Des Moines, that one arena that’s named after some blood-sucking bank now. That was the night she and Ryan skipped prom, because, well, Usher seemed more fun at the time. That was also the night Elliot was conceived, if she was not mistaken.

  Remy wrote back, “Hard pass, but thanks.”

  Again, Ryan was typing. Doesn’t he have work to do? Remy thought as she watched the three little dots.

  “OK,” said his final text. “Just try to find something fun to do while I have Elliot. You need to chill.”

  Ryan was a little too much like a sibling. He was a good guy, but in too many ways he was still a kid. Great as a teenage boyfriend but not such a great husband. Especially not when pushed into it while barely out of high school.

  But Elliot was crazy about his dad, and Remy was grateful they could co-parent relatively free of drama.

  Ryan seemed happier single. Remy wasn’t so much happy as she was content taking care of Elliot and making ends meet.

  Biologically speaking, it wasn’t too late to give Elliot a sibling. She was only 32. But there just wasn’t a relationship in her future.

  Remy laughed out loud. You don’t need a baby, you probably just need to get laid.

  She stared again at her laptop screen and tried focusing on how to reply once again to the rude new baseball coach. Troy, was it? God, he even had an arrogant jock name.

  Putting Troy in his place was going to be all the fun she needed for today.

  2

  Troy

  “What a bitch,” muttered Troy Mattis, looking at his email for the last time that day as he parked his Silverado pickup at the ball field.

  He hated communicating over these tiny little anger boxes, as he called them. He hopped out of the truck and stuffed the phone into his back pocket of his vintage button-fly Levis, shaking his head. He was quickly finding out that around 30 percent of coaching middle school-age kids was managing a bunch of twitchy parents. Especially this one.

  What was her name?

  He reached into the pickup bed and hoisted out the bag of bats and balls. As he trudged to the dugout, he grudgingly took his phone out of his back pocket again. He looked at the name on the email. Remy Dawson. Sounds fancy. Sounds pretty stuck up.

  However, he had to take into consideration she was the mom of Elliot Dawson, whose pitching last year went all the way to the youth league’s national championships and had gotten him the attention of high school coaches. That emailing shrew must be doing one thing right, even if she had a bitchy attitude.

  She probably just needed to get laid, he mused.

  Troy plopped the bag over the fence, then returned to the truck to get batting helmets and spare mitts for anyone who might not be able to supply one for themselves.

  Remy Dawson evidently was not a fan of Troy’s first mass email, informing everyone of practice and game times, rules, and the new plan to rotate all the players around the infield. Troy did not like kids this age sticking with one job to do all season. Her first response to that plan was enough to get his blood pressure rising. She had told him in no uncertain terms that Elliot was the pitcher.

  Troy had then politely responded to explain that wasn’t his style of coaching.

  And then this Remy woman had the nerve to reply with a threat: “Elliot will be pitching whether it is for you or for someone else.”

  Troy dumped off the bag of helmets and fumed as he walked the ball diamond, reverently wiping off the bases with a small broom. He didn’t know if keeping the bases clean was a part of a coach’s job, but he made it so.

  He pondered whether that Remy woman meant she would yank Elliot off his team, or if she was implying that she could get Troy fired.

  Good luck with the latter, because there isn’t anyone else around who wants a volunteer side gig following in the footsteps of a championship coach.

  That previous coach had sold his car dealership in Middleburg and moved to Florida. So when Troy moved to town to teach English and had put out his feelers to coach baseball, the state’s youth league snapped him up. Troy had the feeling that the speed with which he was placed with a team had a little something to do with his past. But that was OK with him, as long as nobody made a big deal out of it. “It” was something he didn’t like to talk about; he just wanted to play. If he could not play, he just wanted to coach.

  As Troy watched the trail of SUVs and minivans arriving for the season’s first practice, he wished he had been prepped by that previous coach/car salesman on the ins and outs of all the players and their high-maintenance parents. He was tempted to call him up and chew him out for not warning him.

  But the truth was, any warnings about the parents would not have deterred him. Troy would be on the field, for better or for worse, every second he wasn’t busy teaching English at Middleburg High School. As a single outsider who had been recruited from a much lower-wage teaching job from out of state, there wasn’t much else for Troy to do in Iowa for fun.

  Troy would just have to overlook all the ridiculous adults and stay focused on the kids.

  Nobody, especially not some snooty mom named Remy Dawson, was going to get into his head.

  He kept his eyes focused on the kids who approached the field, introduced himself and he checked their names on the roster. He assigned each kid a fielding position as they arrived, instructing them to practice their base-throwing.

  Troy largely fended off the parents by giving them a polite nod as they each introduced themselves. He did not want parents hanging around practices, and thankfully most of them took the hint and left.

  Then the man himself, Elliot Dawson, arrived and Troy could not help but smile as the kid ran over and extended his hand. “Elliot? Coach Troy. I saw your pitching stats from year, congratulations. Today we’re going to start with fielding, so I want to start you at short stop and see how everybody does in all the positions.”

  Elliot smiled back at him and thanked him. He quickly donned his mitt and hopped over to short stop.

  Well, that was easy.

  A little too easy. Because, of course, Troy could sense a presence in the bleachers. Some parent had chosen to stay to watch practice and hover like a helicopter.

  Troy didn’t have t
o use too many brain cells to figure out it was Remy Dawson, she of the witchy emails.

  He ignored the presence on that other side of the fence and went to home plate with his favorite, broken-in Louisville Slugger. He started with a few grounders to get the kids warmed up, then moved on to flies to see how they got underneath the ball and if they called it.

  Still, there was that person in the stands, and he could feel her eyes boring into his back.

  3

  Remy

  As soon as she and Elliot piled out of her old Toyota with her cooler of orange slices and Gatorade and started heading toward the ball field, Remy had her eyes peeled for this Coach Troy.

  She watched Elliot run ahead of her to introduce himself. From a distance, it looked like Troy was indeed some random jock who didn’t know who he was going to be dealing with.

  She was about to slog over there to introduce herself, but as she got closer, she started to lose her nerve. The coach had his back to her, and … whoa.

  That blue and gray baseball shirt hugged his frame and outlined some serious muscles. The coach wore some well-worn Levis that hugged a beautiful ass. There really wasn’t another word for it. He wore an old royal-blue ball cap over a mop of straw-blond hair. She suddenly realized she had been spending way too much time interacting with teachers and parents online. Her interpersonal skills were rusty and she had no actual idea what she was going to say to put this coach in his place.