Be My Baby Tonight by Kasey Michaels

right, he and Suze. They
would probably do better as time went on.
    But he’d have to remember that temper....

Chapter Five
    Players like rules. If they didn’t have any
rules,
    they wouldn’t have anything to break.
     
    — Lee Walls, coach
     
     
    Sam Kizer had the most interesting vein on
the side of his rather large, bulbous nose. The redder his nose
got, the bluer the vein got. And when he began yelling, it
throbbed.
    Fascinating, Suzanna thought, watching the
vein do its thing.
    Intrigued as she was by his nose, there was a
lot of Sam Kizer to look at. The Phillies’ skipper was short, with
a generous belly that overhung the belt on his home uniform that
fit him like a second skin. He had a mop of white hair that bore
the imprint of the cap he’d hurled across the office a few minutes
ago, and if there was ever a set of legs that didn’t look good in
red stirrups socks, Sam owned them.
    “Sam,” Tim was saying. “Sam, Sam, Sammy. I’m
here, aren’t I? I said I’d be here, and I’m here. So what’s the
problem?”
    “What’s the problem? What’s the—” Sam put out
both hands, as if pushing his temper away. “No. I’m not going to go
nuts. Lesson seven, Tim. When faced with idiots, do not say
anything. Just walk away. Lesson seven, Tim. I’m on f-ing lesson
seven, and you aren’t going to make me blow it.”
    “Oh, I don’t know, Sam. I think you oughta
blow,” Tim said as Suzanna stepped in back of him, because if the
guy was going to explode, she wanted to have already ducked for
cover.
    “Tim. He said he didn’t want to get angry,”
she whispered, hoping he’d hear.
    “I know, Suze,” Tim said back to her as Sam
Kizer walked back behind the desk in his jumbled office and sat
down. “But if he doesn’t blow at me, he’s going to blow at an
umpire, and the owners aren’t going to like that. He’s been warned.
He can be thrown out three times this year, and that’s it. I
wouldn’t want him to waste one of them on me.”
    Tim raised his voice slightly. “Isn’t that
right, Sam? You don’t want to get thrown out of tonight’s game
because you really want to yell at me? Come on, Sam, you know you
have to do it. Give it to me, both barrels. You know you want
to.”
    Sam looked up at Tim. He raised his hands
from the desktop, slowly curled his fingers into claws. His eyes
grew wide and showed white all around the irises. “I don’t want to
yell at you, Trehan. That’s too f-ing easy. I want you boiled in
oil. Tarred and feathered. Hung up on the flagpole. I want,” he
said, slowly rising from his chair, “I want to—”
    “Wait outside,” Tim said with a grin, at the
same time Suzanna mumbled, “I think I’ll go wait outside.”
    She closed the door just as Sam’s almost
polite “f-ing,” that had probably been cleaned up for her benefit,
was discarded for a more definitive term. She walked down the lime
green painted cinder block hallway, as far as she could safely go
without getting lost and yet still far enough away not to hear
every word Sam Kizer said.
    Tim hadn’t been kidding. The man had a
definite temper. And, in Suzanna’s considered opinion, a really
good reason to go ballistic on Tim.
    She and Tim had met at the stadium in
Pittsburgh Sunday night. Monday, they had jetted off to Vegas. In
the very early hours of Tuesday morning, they had flown back to
Pennsylvania. Who would have thought the world would miss Tim
Trehan so much if he disappeared for a little over twenty-four
hours?
    They had driven down to the stadium in Tim’s
sports car, after he’d stopped in the driveway to transfer her bags
into his trunk.
    An hour. That was all it took to get from
Whitehall to the stadium. There were players who lived in New
Jersey, Tim had told her, right over the Walt Whitman or Ben
Franklin bridges. There were players who lived in other
Philadelphia suburbs. Sometimes it took players who lived closer longer to get to the ball park.
    But not Tim. Because there was