The Rookie's Sin

Sweat and pine-scented cleaner. That is what hits him first, coming through the tunnel into the clubhouse before dawn. Jack Callaghan is early. The kind of early that screams desperate rookie to anyone who notices. He leans against his locker, number 47, nameplate still fresh, and breathes three counts in and four out until the nausea passes, the way a coach taught him back in Single-A when he thought the hardest thing in baseball was a cutter that did not hang. He checks his phone. Nothing. The bookie has been quiet for two weeks, which means he is either forgiven or about to get his legs broken. Jack was not quite fifteen the night he sat in the basement of the Pony Express with his hands flat on the green felt, playing his father's fourth seat and winning six hands straight, and heard the tavern owner explain to the table that the family farm had been gone for years. He walked four miles home in the cold that night and made himself three promises: no drinking, no gambling, no lying to the people he loved. His father signed a promissory note. Interest compounded monthly. By the time Jack was drafted, the debt had grown, and a man named Bennett Webb had bought the paper out from under it, and Webb did not call it in until Jack finally had something worth taking. Now there are two weeks until Opening Day, and Webb expects one game thrown. Lena Hartley appears in the clubhouse doorway with a medical bag over her shoulder and a braid that swings when she moves. She is the head athletic trainer for the Hawks, which puts her on the wrong side of every line Jack would have to cross to tell anyone the truth. Her brother Marcus is a private investigator who has been building a file for months: financial records, wire transfers, names, and a shell company whose paperwork reads Bennett Webb Holdings. What helping Jack could cost Lena is her certification. What not helping him costs is something else. A contemporary baseball romance about a rookie who inherited a debt, a trainer who knows exactly what it will cost her to believe him, and a man who bought an I.O.U. and calls it ownership. The romance is closed-door.