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  “My … cousin?” A pit began to form and slowly hollowed its way through her stomach.

  “Yes, Quinnell. He was regaling me with tales of Scotland.” She leaned in conspiratorially, twirling her diamond pendant around her slender fingers. “I’ve always been a sucker for Scottish accents. What a nice addition to our little soirée. He’s full of charm.”

  Cat forced her grimace into a smile. “He’s definitely full of something, I don’t know if I’d say it’s charm, though. I better make sure he’s not pulling anybody’s legs. Would you excuse me, Mrs. Aiken?” She was less concerned about their legs and more worried he was pulling their credit card numbers.

  She charged the bar, where Quinn was surrounded by a gaggle of player wives. He was holding a hand, and as Cat drew near, she realized it belonged to the brunette from earlier.

  “Do I miss auld Caledonia? Aye. But I dare say there are no lassies like you in Edinburgh,” he said.

  The women tittered at his every word.

  One of the girls piped up, “Say something in Scottish.”

  “Hmm …” Quinn flashed the women his ornery smile, “An toir thu dhomh pòg?”

  It had been many years since Cat had heard any Gaelic. But pòg … she’d heard that one before for sure.

  “What does that mean?” Foley’s buxom girlfriend asked, her hand still nestled in Quinn’s.

  “If I tell you, you have to do it.”

  “Okay.”

  Kiss! What a creep, Cat thought.

  She began to work her way up to the front of the group. Since Quinn probably didn’t have any health insurance, she didn’t want to be stuck with the bill to rewire his jaw when Todd Foley caught him pòg-ing his girlfriend.

  “An toir thu dhomh pòg means… will you give me a kiss?”

  The ladies giggled.

  “What’s so funny, Quinn … ell?” Cat glared at him.

  When he saw Cat, Quinn released the girl’s hand. “Catriona, hey.”

  “Hey. Perchance may we have a blether?”

  Grams had been born in Glasgow, but her family had immigrated to America when she was just a baby. Nevertheless, the Scottish brogue would come through whenever she was angry, which is probably the reason Quinn had learned to mimic her so skillfully. Cat figured he was just a couple of conjugations away from being fluent in Gaelic.

  He rolled his eyes at the ladies as he grudgingly slid off the bar stool. Taking him by the sleeve, Cat marched him to the back corner of the bar area.

  Quinn jerked his arm out of her grip. “Keep the heid, why doncha!”

  “Knock it off, Braveheart. I can’t believe you’re using that bad Scottish accent to tell everyone you’re my cousin.”

  “Bad? Fooled them.”

  “You’re making a fool out of yourself and taking me down with you.”

  He threw his head back. “Oh ye’re a right scunner.”

  “Quinn!”

  Cat immediately looked around to see if anyone had heard her shout. Everyone in the restaurant looked to be having a good time, drinks in hand, smiling as they listened to stories or told their own. Everyone, that is, but her.

  “Fine, fine. Excuse me for trying to liven this snorefest up a little. Benji said this was going to be a party.”

  “We are leaving as soon as I make my rounds. Until then, sit your American arse at the bar, sip your ….” She eyed his scotch glass.

  He lifted it up and toasted the air. “Old Pulteney, of course.”

  She rolled her eyes and adopted a fake Scottish accent of her own. “And shut yer geggie.”

  Cat hurried back over to Benji. It appeared he had managed to dodge the intern and was now listening to Spencer recap the highlights of the season for an entire group. She leaned in close to his ear. “Care to mingle with me for a few minutes?”

  He nodded gratefully. Benji hadn’t been a fan of Spencer since the moment the newspaper reporter had befriended her at the beginning of the season. It was a shame, because outside of baseball, Spencer and Benji had a lot of common interests. Spencer had even started off as a biology major before he’d one-eighty’d to journalism. Nevertheless, it was their shared interest in her that put Benji on the offensive. He’d gotten in his head that Spencer had a crush on her and would not be dissuaded. She pulled him over to Roger Aiken, taking advantage of one of the rare moments the general manager wasn’t surrounded by fledglings.

  “Mr. Aiken, you remember my boyfr— uh, fiancé, Benji.” She smiled sheepishly. “Still getting used to saying that.”

  She felt Benji’s pointed stare but refused to acknowledge it. They’d been engaged for eleven months now and she still hadn’t picked a dress, flowers or a date for the nuptials.

  Roger extended his hand. “Of course. How’s the science game?”

  Benji smiled charmingly. “Ever evolving.”

  Roger chuckled and Cat beamed, relieved they’d skirted past her engagement faux pas and proud to have Benji at her side. From his charcoal suit to his matching dimples, he really was the perfect cocktail guest. As the two began to delve into shared acquaintances from Van Buren University, her eyes wandered toward the bar. Quinn’s barstool was unoccupied.

  “He’s on the loose,” she murmured and scanned the room for trouble.

  Benji and Roger both turned to her, their interest piqued.

  She shook off their curious stares. “Would you guys excuse me for a second?”

  “Is everything all right?”

  She nodded and hurried out of the dining room and into the bar area. As she neared the players’ cliques, she found it wasn’t as easy to pick out Quinn’s tall disheveled head amid other tall disheveled heads. Everyone in the room was in need of a shave and a haircut. Her brother’s finely honed image of lazy chic was a clear knockoff of professional athlete panache, but she doubted the athletes would be able to pull it off as well with only Quinn’s bank account to work with.

  She made her way around the bar and into the game room. As she scanned the room, the pool table in the back caught her eye and she beelined for it.

  Sure enough, there he was, leaned over the green felt, lining up his angles on a sure shot. He might’ve had the athletes’ stature and style, but his pale skin stuck out like a beacon here. Quinn spent his days in bars and pool halls, while the players baked in the sun. In post-shower interviews, when players would wrap towels around their waists, their drastic tan lines made it appear as though they were wearing t-shirts. She entered the room and cleared her throat.

  “Quinn. It’s time to go.”

  All the players looked up. A groan came from a guy with a bleached-blond mohawk. It was the Soldiers’ lights-out closer, Adam Alvarez. He’d been sporting this ridiculous hairstyle since the All-Star Break and it made her nostalgic for his former shaggy locks. His mouth hung open, displaying a row of crooked teeth. “Aw, come on. Tell your girlfriend she’s gotta at least give us a chance to get our money back.”

  Quinn smirked at Cat. “You heard the man.”

  Cat glared at Quinn and turned to Adam. “I’m not his girlfriend, I’m his half-sister, and also, the team reporter.”

  “Oh. Nice to meet you.”

  “We’ve met several times over the season.”

  Adam’s gray eyes narrowed into slits. She wasn’t sure if he was teasing her or genuinely didn’t place her as the woman who conducted interviews after every game. “Oh yeah. Sorry. Didn’t recognize you without your little pen and pad of paper.”

  Not teasing.

  Cat didn’t use a pen and pad of paper and for that matter, neither did Spencer or any of the other regular reporters. Adam had either mixed her up with the elderly man from WBFL who did the farm reports and sport scores, or didn’t even have the media personnel on his radar. She hoped it was the latter.

  “Can’t you let your little brother finish the game?”

  Cat stiffened.

  “He’s my older brother—half-brother. Half, older brother.” She glared at Adam again. N
o wonder he thought she was the older sibling; all this glaring she was doing was probably giving her crow’s feet.

  Adam made a poor attempt at disguising a smile. “Oops.”

  “Quinn? Let’s go.”

  “Aw, come on. This game’s double or nothing.” Quinn winked at her.

  “No.”

  Quinn handed his pool cue to Adam. “Just give me two seconds.”

  It was his turn to pull Cat out of earshot. Once they had reached a small banquet room that was currently serving as a coat check closet, he said, “What are you doing to me?”

  Cat yanked her arm out of his clutches. “To you? Why do you wink at me like I’m your shill or something? Do these guys know that you’re a professional pool hustler?”

  “Shh.” Quinn’s head darted back into the room. “They will if you keep yammering. Now come on, just let us finish this game. I’ve got money on it.”

  “George! Get back here.”

  Cat’s response was stuck in her throat as the team owner and his wife came storming in from the other door across the room. Both Quinn and Cat looked over but their presence had not yet been detected.

  George Hudson lowered his voice, but not so much that Cat and Quinn couldn’t hear every hiss. “Do not make a scene here, Kiki.”

  Quinn hunched over to whisper in Cat’s ear. “Who is that?”

  “George Hudson. He owns the team.”

  “Not him, the cougar with the sili-cans.”

  Cat rolled her eyes. “His newest wife, Kiki.”

  Kiki’s slender arms folded across her large chest, and she flipped her silky platinum hair over her shoulder. “You don’t let me have anything! I am not your wife, I am your little puppy dog.”

  “I give you everything!”

  “I want that yacht. Don’t you find it insulting that one of your employees has something you don’t?”

  “It’s my money and we’re not spending it on a boat we can only use three months out of the year.”

  “Your money? I thought marriage was supposed to be about sharing.”

  “Not when you sign a pre-nup, baby.”

  Her response was a resounding slap across his face. Cat and Quinn widened their eyes at each other.

  Quinn leaned over again and whispered, “Marriage. See what you have to look forward to?”

  George didn’t reply and turned on his heel, walking right past them. Cat quickly lowered her eyes.

  Kiki stalked out next, huffing as she went by them. “Whatever you do, little girl, do not marry a man for his money.”

  Quinn smirked. “That won’t be a problem. I rode here with Benji, is he joking with that toy car?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Benji is very eco-conscious. His car happens to be electric.”

  “So’s a Tesla Roadster.”

  “Well, going zero to sixty in three-point-seven is just a skosh out of the price range of his teaching salary.”

  “That’s my point. Maybe you should do what the Plastic Princess did. There’s a lot of change in this room.” He peeked into the pool room. “Mohawk in there seemed to take to you.”

  “Adam Alvarez? He didn’t even know who I was and he thought I was older than you.”

  Not to mention that he had the gap-toothed overbite of a Simpsons’ character. When it came to looks versus personality, Adam had neither. Fortunately for him, he made up for both on the pitching mound.

  Quinn grinned. “That’s just because I look so young.”

  “Anyway, I thought you liked Benji.”

  “I do. I just want to make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “No, you just want to make sure you’re taken care of, which brings me to my original point: I’m not going to help you cheat my players.”

  “What do you care?” Quinn stood up straight. “That jerk in there makes millions of dollars a year. I think he can afford to lose a couple thousand to me in a game of pool.”

  Cat’s eyes bulged. “A couple thou— Quinn, you’re killing me.”

  “I’m killing you? I rode in here on my last tank of gas. The sooner I can make a little change, the sooner I can get out of your hair. That is, unless you have money to loan me?”

  Cat squeezed her eyes shut but couldn’t block out his smarmy smile. “It’s not a loan if you don’t pay it back.”

  “Then let me earn it.” He pointed toward the pool table.

  Cat sighed. She’d lost this argument before it had even started. “Fine. You’re an adult, they’re adults. Please make this the last game though.”

  He reached out to ruffle her hair but she ducked out of the way before he could mess up her curls.

  “This is great. I never could’ve got him to go double or nothing if you hadn’t came in and pressed. You still make a great little sidekick, just like the old days.”

  He managed to pinch her cheek before she swatted his hand away.

  “Cat? Everything okay?” Spencer stepped into the room and sized up Quinn. It was an empty threat. Quinn had nearly a foot on the pint-sized reporter and could easily hang him from the coat rack if he so desired.

  “It’s fine, Spencer.”

  The menacing glower on Quinn’s face melted into amusement. “This is Spencer, huh?”

  “This is my half-brother, Quinn.”

  “Brother?” Spencer’s face lit up as he thrust out his fist for a bump. “Nice to meet you.”

  Quinn eyed the waiting fist with a raised eyebrow and finally relented by bumping it with his own. “Believe me, the pleasure is all mine.”

  He turned on his heel and strolled back into the game room, immediately placing a wad of money on the pool table. Cat wondered if their yearbook pictures were still up at the Joliet Pool Hall. The sandbagging siblings had used their skills to pay for matinees and Sno Cones all summer long, until the owner decided their game was hurting his bar tabs and issued a photographic warning to all their drunken pigeons, blackballing them from any further schemes.

  “I didn’t know you had a brother—uh, half-brother.”

  She smiled at his self-correction. “Half-brother, full bother. He’s swindling Soldiers as we speak. I’d go in there but I’m afraid that would just make it worse. He promised it’d only be one game.”

  “You want me to keep an eye on him? I can text you when the game’s over.”

  “You’d do that?”

  Spencer smiled proudly. “Hey, you got me in here. I figure I owe you one, right?”

  “Consider us even.”

  She followed him out the door but stopped when a rack of coats on the other side of the room fell to the floor. She peeked back into the makeshift coat room and saw Kiki slammed against the opposite door, moaning with pleasure, her long, bare leg wrapped around a man’s waist.

  Guess they made up.

  With another grunt, the twosome switched places and Kiki slid to her knees. As the man’s head fell back, his eyes met hers. Cat’s hand flew to her lips to cover the gasp that escaped.

  That isn’t George Hudson.

  She stumbled backwards, fleeing the doorway before either of them had a chance to say anything to her.

  As she hurried across the barroom floor, the diamond on her ring finger caught her eye. She was shocked by Kiki’s philandering, of course, but it made sense, statistically at least. Her job centered on statistics. How many home runs a guy hits, how many strikes a pitcher throws, how many errors a fielder commits—she was constantly consulting these numbers to form her opinions. How could she not do the same with marriage statistics? The chance of divorce for the newly married like Kiki and soon-to-be married—herself—ranged from forty to fifty percent. Heck, a hitter was considered a sure threat if his batting average was around thirty percent. With those odds, neither she nor the naughty Mrs. Hudson stood a chance at the plate.

  She shuddered at lumping herself in with the gold-digging silicone queen, but her nagging conscience reminded her that she and Kiki weren’t as different as she’d like to think. During the last of
fseason Cat herself had been tempted by Junior DeLeon. The beefy pitching coach had tested every ounce of her willpower; she’d barely been able to resist his charms. Hunky dreamboats like Junior DeLeon were rife in this industry, along with late nights at the office and long trips across the country.

  Once she and Benji married, could she count on her willpower to go the distance?

  Chapter 4

  “One hundred bucks into four thousand dollars.” Benji’s wide blue eyes met Quinn’s cynical green ones in his rearview mirror. “Can you believe that?” he said to Cat in the passenger seat.

  Cat cast a look of disdain at Quinn, stretched across the backseat and leaning against the door of Benji’s Focus, counting his money with a pleased smirk.

  “It’s great. I’ll probably never get another quote from Adam Alvarez, but at least you made a quick buck.”

  Quinn stopped counting and gave her a hard, flat scowl. “Sis, get over it. He made nine million this year and is due ten million next year. Quit acting like I stole his grocery money and his kids are going to starve.”

  “How do you know he makes nine million a year?”

  He wagged his cellphone at her. “Mobile ESPN lists player salaries. Always know your mark, first rule of hustling.” He smacked the back of Benji’s seat as the car slowed to a stop for a traffic light. “She used to know these things, Teach.”

  “She did?” Benji tossed a curious gaze her way before the light turned green. “How about that? Yesterday I find out you have a brother. Today I learn you’re a con artist. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for tomorrow.”

  Cat cringed. She’d chosen to hold back certain unsavory pieces of her life—her con-man father, her wastrel half-brother, some of the details of her own hard-scrabble childhood—from Benji but now the jigsaw was nearly complete.

  “Quinn worked a couple of summers flipping burgers at a pool hall and Grams didn’t want me staying home alone so I had to go in with him. If business was slow, we’d play a couple games, sometimes for money.”