“You can always call first.”

“Then I know you’ll be naked. Shudder.”

“Did you seriously just say shudder out loud?”

“Trying to stay hip for when I’m a dad.”

I laugh out loud, but the distinctive creak of my bedroom floor makes me shut up and rip the shower curtain mostly closed around my tub. “Are you seriously coming in here to make sure I’m alone?” I ask, and no, I’m not talking to Grady anymore.

“Yes,” Cooper replies.

“Get ready for an eyeful. Arlo, Sven, and Ricky are in here with me.”

His face appears in the doorway, eyes mostly elevated, like he’s hoping his peripheral vision will pick up wherever anyone else might be hiding in my little bathroom. I can just see him through the crack between the curtain and the shower wall.

“I’m not trying to be a dick,” he says gruffly. “But there are things—”

“Did I say a single word when you hooked up with our night manager two winters ago?”

“I didn’t know she was the night manager.”

“But she did. And you should’ve.”

“I wasn’t a dick to her. It ended…very nicely.”

“Cooper, you might think it ended nicely, but that does not mean it wasn’t awkward as hell and not nice for everyone else.”

“You flirting with Max is—”

“If you say completely different, I fully support her climbing out of that tub and naked wrestling you into her dirty bathwater for a swirly,” Grady interrupts. I can’t see him, but he’s closer than he was before. He whistles softly. “Jesus, TJ. How long has your bedroom looked like this?”

“Quit talking about her bedroom,” Cooper snaps.

Grady ignores him. “If this Crusty Nut thing doesn’t work out, you could be an interior designer for the young and horny.”

“You are not seriously getting turned on by Tillie Jean’s bedroom.”

“Nah, man, I’m not young anymore. Horny, sure. But not young.”

“Love you, Grady,” I call. “Favorite brother. You get the trophy.”

“Hot damn. I never win trophies over Cooper. And to think—all it took was a few kind words and minding my own business.”

“Would you two knock it off?” Cooper snorts, which is both amusing and a big warning sign.

He doesn’t do mad well.

Not a lot of practice.

I peek out from behind the shower curtain, and uh-oh.

That’s the same face he wore when he got sent home early from summer baseball camp for raiding the kitchen for a late-night party to celebrate one of the kids who got his first home run ever despite not usually connecting with the ball at all.

His heart was in the right place, and he got punished for it.

“You’re going to have to spell this out for me very clearly,” I tell him. “What’s your issue with me being friends with Max?”

He grunts, which is also un-Cooper-like.

He only grunts when he can’t fix something and he knows he’s being an idiot.

At least, that’s how I see it.

“You hear about the three dozen women Max has loved and left since he got here in November?” Grady says conversationally.

I almost bolt out of the tub, except no. I haven’t.

And that’s the point.

I could wait until two in the morning to sneak over to Max’s house, climb in the window, and seduce the hell out of him, and I’d get away with it for one night.

Maybe even a full week.

But absolutely no more than that.

This is Shipwreck, and someone will catch us.

Probably.

I also know Shipwreck.

I could finagle this. I could make it work and keep it a secret.

But Max seeing someone on his own?

Nope. We’d all know.

“He’s not fucking around with anyone,” Cooper mutters.

And I believe him. We would’ve heard about it if he was.

At least, all except those three weeks he was gone.

And if he slept with someone while he was on the beach?

It’s not like we were in any kind of committed relationship. That’s his right.

Except I don’t think he did.

He didn’t come back acting like a guy who spent three weeks hooking up with women. He came back acting like a guy who’d had a lot of time for self-reflection and made a big decision.

“Huh.” I don’t have to see Grady to know he’s rubbing his chin like he’s pondering the magnitude of that statement, and also because he knows rubbing his chin like he’s pondering something will piss off Cooper. “Don’t you all fuck around basically every road trip and home series? Like you can’t play if your dick doesn’t get some action or something?”

“It’s the off-season.”

“All that free time. Playtime. Have women in from the city time with all that privacy you have up on the mountain… Or is it like, you have to be celibate in the off-season? Do you like, masturbate more to gear up for making it through sex-with-strangers season too?”

I snicker, then clap a hand over my mouth and hide behind the shower curtain when Cooper shifts a glare at me.

“No,” he snaps. “We don’t train our dicks for sex with groupies all season. Jesus. Why are we discussing this?”

“Because you’re being an overprotective wanker?” I offer.

“Wanker,” Grady says on a snort. “Nice one, TJ. Fist bump.”

“Fist bump,” I call back.

Cooper growls again. “You know what? Fine. Go fucking sleep with Max. But I swear to the baseball gods, Tillie Jean, if you fuck up his game by fucking with his head or promising him things you can’t deliver, you will be at every single fucking game sacrificing live chickens and making out with the damn meatball and doing whatever the fuck it takes to get his head back on. Got it?”

I peek out from behind the curtain one more time. “You know I wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt your team, right?”

“Sure. Right. Whatever.”

“Cooper. You’ve wanted to win a World Series with the Fireballs since before I was born. You get ten, maybe fifteen chances—”

“Twenty,” he growls.

“Fine. You get twenty chances at that, and you’re through like seven or eight of them already, and it’s only going to get harder. It’s easy to suck but it’s hard to win and now you’re the team to beat. I respect that. I’m not going to do anything to fuck up your chances. I want you to win. I want your dreams to come true. Could you maybe find a way to freaking trust me here? And maybe have some respect for your teammate at the same time?”

He stares at me.

I stare back.

I’m not compromising on this one. If he doesn’t know I support his dreams, he needs to. And if he can’t respect his teammates’ abilities to leave their private lives off the field, he needs to do that too.

Even with Max.

Especially with Max.

A guy who grew up figuring out how to get himself to baseball practice on his own before he was out of grade school—a guy who grew up to be a pitcher while getting himself to practice on his own—isn’t the kind of guy who’ll throw away winning or his career for a woman.