Rules of the Game by Nora Roberts Page A

her heart was hammering in her throat. Ridiculous, she told herself once, then surrendered.
    â€œCome on, damn it,” she muttered, “smack one out of here.”
    He took the first pitch, a slow curve that just missed the corner. The breath that she’d been holding trembled out. The next he cut at, fouling it back hard against the window of the press box. Brooke clamped down on her bottom lip and mentally uttered a stream of curses. Parks coolly held up a hand for time, then bent to tie his shoe. The stadium echoed with his name. As if deaf to the yells, he stepped back into the box to take up his stance.
    He hit it high and deep. Brooke was certain it was a repeat of his performance in her first game, then she saw the ball begin to drop just short of the fence.
    â€œHe’s going to tag up. He’ll tag up!” she heard Lee shouting as the center fielder caught Parks’s fly at the warning track. Before Brooke could swear, the fans were shouting, not in fury but in delight. The moment the runner crossed the plate, players from the Kings’ dugout swarmed out on the field.
    â€œBut Parks is out,” Brooke said indignantly.
    â€œThe sacrifice fly scored the run,” Lee explained.
    Brooke gave him a haughty look. “I realize that—” only because she had crammed a few basic rules into her head “—but it hardly seems fair that Parks is out.”
    Chuckling, Lee patted her head. “He earned another RBI and the fleeting gratitude of a stadium full of Kings fans. He was one for three today, so his average won’t suffer much.”
    â€œBrooke doesn’t think much of rules,” Claire put in, rising.
    â€œBecause they’re usually made up by people who don’t have the least idea what they’re doing.” A little annoyed with herself for becoming so involved, she stood, swinging her canvas bag over her shoulder.
    â€œI don’t know if Parks would agree with you,” Lee told her. “He’s lived by the rules for most of his life. Gets to be a habit.”
    â€œTo each his own,” she said casually. She wondered if Lee was aware that Parks was also a man who could seduce and half undress a woman behind the fragile covering of a rock wall in the middle of a crowded, glitzy Hollywood party. It seemed to her Parks was more a man who made up his own rules.
    â€œWhy don’t we go down to the locker room and congratulate him?” Genially, he hooked his arms through Claire’s and Brooke’s, steamrolling them through the still cheering crowd.
    Lee worked his way into the stadium’s inner sanctum with a combination of panache and clout. Reporters were swarming, carrying microphones, cameras or notepads. Each one was badgering or flattering a sweaty athlete in the attempt to get a quote. In the closed-in area, Brooke considered the noise level to be every bit as high as it had been in the open stadium. Lockers slammed, shouts reverberated, laughter flowed in a kind of giddy relief. Each man knew the tension would return soon enough during the play-offs. They were going to enjoy the victory of the moment to its fullest.
    â€œYeah, if I hadn’t saved Biggs from an error in the seventh inning,” the first baseman told a reporter, deadpan, “it might have been a whole different ball game.”
    Biggs, the shortstop, retaliated by heaving a damp towel at his teammate. “Snyder can’t catch a ball unless it drops into his mitt. The rest of us make him look good.”
    â€œI’ve saved Parks from fifty-three errors this season,” Snyder went on blandly, drawing the sweaty towel from his face. “Guess his arm must be going. Thing is, some of the hitters are so good they just keep smacking the ball right into Parks’s mitt. If you watch the replay of today’s game, you’ll see what fantastic aim they have.” Someone dumped a bucket of water on his head, but Snyder continued