The Lucky Charm (The Portland Pioneers) by Beth Bolden

closest thing she had to a friend since transferring and once she told him she couldn’t date him, he’d never talk to her again. “I can’t go on a date with you,” she said coolly. “It would be totally inappropriate. Fraternization with players isn’t allowed.” That wasn’t entirely true; at least she’d never seen a formally written rule, but she could only imagine Toby’s reaction to this scene.
    “Who said anything about a date?” The wrinkles around his eyes crinkled with his smile, and she wished he would take a step back. She was a terrible liar under ideal circumstances, and his nearness kept making her brain short circuit. “You like me. I like you,” he continued, scooting closer, until his jean-clad knee was almost brushing the bare skin of hers. The temperature inside the trailer rose with nearly every shallow breath she took. “But it would just be as friends.”
    “It doesn’t matter what it actually is, it’s what it would look like. And I can’t be seen with you socially. Period,” she insisted as icily as she could. What had ever possessed her to flirt with him? She’d led him on and this whole awkward, uncomfortable conversation was her own damn fault.
    “Don’t you ever want to break the rules?” He sounded a hell of a lot more confident than she felt. But then all she was feeling was the heat racing along her skin, the electricity in the air raising goose bumps along her arms.
    Sanity. Izzy grasped it and stood shakily, determined to move away from the hypnotic stare that was trying to lure her past the point of no return.
    “No. The rules are there for a reason,” she said as firmly as she could, turning away from him and busying her hands in a half-packed box.
    “You know as well as I do that the rules are stupid,” he argued so earnestly, the suave confidence giving way to a jumbled yearning, so similar to the butterflies in her own stomach, that she nearly turned back and relented, but something stopped her.
    No, not something, someone . Her dad, whose favorite saying had been, “Follow the rules only until you know them.” Izzy could see her dad’s face the last time she’d ever seen him, about eight weeks from graduation, when he’d told her how proud he was. He’d just watched her senior project—a documentary on a club of special-needs athletes—and he hadn’t even had to say the words. The pride was plain in his eyes, his smile. The certainty of his love had almost made up for the fact that she’d never be the one to cure cancer.
    The truth was she didn’t have any grasp on the new tangent of her career, never mind any kind of knowledge of the rules. And while she’d resented the hell out of her father’s wisdom when she’d been a teenager, after experiencing something of the world, Izzy was pretty certain he’d been right.
    “The rules aren’t stupid,” she corrected in a frosty voice and for the first time in their brief acquaintance, she could hear the ring of truth in her own voice. She sounded like she actually believed her own crap. Finally . “I can’t go to dinner with you. I’m sorry.”
    Jack’s expression was full of regret. “I’m sorry, too.”
    She wanted to tell him she liked him, too, but she’d already seen his persistence in action. If he got one whiff of her uncertainty, he’d wear her down until she forgot everything she’d worked for.
    When she didn’t say anything, he threw his hands up in frustration. “Fine, fine. Go all icy on me, if it helps. But I’m not one of those idiots who can’t see underneath the frost. Just remember that.”
    She turned away, this time completely, and the screen door slammed again, a different kind of punctuation. Her eyes shot open to find herself alone again, the smell of Jack’s soap and her shaky knees the only evidence that he’d even been there.
    CHAPTER SIX
    O pening Day was pretty much the greatest day of the entire season, Jack thought, as he took the dugout steps and gazed