Calling the Curveball: a Small Town Sports Romance

Jamie Lawson should have made it to baseball’s big leagues, but a tragic accident sends him back to his hometown with his dreams shattered. Then life throws him a curveball named Kira. Will he let her walk, or will he embrace the possibility that his glory days just might be in the future?

PROLOGUE
“I’ve got news.” Jamie Lawson eased the new Audi TL—the car his wife had insisted on buying when she’d gotten the offer from Strauss & Levine—onto the county road. Truth be told, he’d rather be driving their beat-up Subaru Outback on a night like this.
A light mist was falling, turning to ice at the corners of the windshield. He wondered briefly if it would turn to snow; February weather was nothing if not unpredictable in Minnesota.
“I got an offer!” He’d meant to deliver the news in a mature way, not blurt it out like the twelve-year-old kid he felt like right now. But the dinner with Lauren’s lawyer friends had dragged on forever. “From the Kansas City seed teams! The gateway to the pros, Babe!”
He grabbed his wife’s hand across the car console. “I talked to Brady—you remember him from college, right?” he continued. “He went there out of school and he’s moving up. He said he’d hook us up with a place to live and introduce us to the city. Can you believe it?”
It had taken three years and buckets of sweat, but he’d done it.
She pulled her hand away from his. “I can’t move to Kansas City,” she said.
Jamie’s breath caught in his lungs. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t even ask me.” She frowned. “You just assume I want to pick up and leave.”
“But you knew.” Jamie used one hand to tug at the tie she’d wanted him to wear to dinner. “You knew going pro ball player was my goal. My dream. You knew it when we met, and you certainly knew it when we married.” He sounded accusatory, but he couldn’t seem to curb it. “You knew it would mean moving.”
“What about everything I’ve worked for?” she said. “What about my career? I could make junior partner in as little as two years. I can’t just pick up and leave. And for what? One year?”
She doesn’t think I’ll last more than one season.
Jamie’s knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past three years, going to every tryout I could get?”
“I surely don’t know.” The distain in her tone was something he’d heard more and more often lately.
Jamie felt the slight skid of the car’s wheels on the slick pavement. He ignored it; slippery roads were part and parcel of driving in Minnesota.
“You don’t know,” he repeated flatly. When had their hopes and dreams become so divergent? “Who are you?”
What happened to the girl who used to hide under the covers with me and talk until the wee hours of the morning?
“Apparently I’m the adult in the relationship,” she said. “Everybody has to grow up sometime, Jamie. Be responsible. Get a job.”
Oh, so now she was saying his freelance work as a sports medicine consultant wasn’t a real job—even though it had helped put her through the last year of law school.
He shook off the hurt. Anger was easier. “So I can spend my life like you, kissing ass to get another rung on the corporate ladder?” he said. “No thanks, babe. That’s never been me, and you know it.”
And you used to love me the way I am.
“I’m not going,” she said flatly. “If you want to go, you go.”
And live apart for more than half of every year? What kind of marriage was that? They were supposed to be partners.
It wasn’t the prospect of a long-distance relationship that turned him cold. It was the suspicion—and yes, fear—that their marriage was already strained and wouldn’t survive a separation like that.
The back wheels skidded again.
Damn front-wheel drive.
This section of the road was curvy and heavily lined with trees. He noticed the ice had crept up the windshield.
“Slow down,” Lauren said.
He didn’t answer, although he did let off the gas a bit.
I can drive a car without instruction, thank you!
The thought was barely formed when the car took a violent lurch toward the outside of the curve.
Lauren gasped.
He took his foot off the gas and jerked the steering wheel toward the center of the road.
The car whipped ninety degrees, perpendicular to the road.
He tapped the brakes.
That made it worse.
Trees came at them as the car continued a slow rotation.
The car’s wheels slammed into the high grasses on the shoulder.
He laid on the brakes, hoping for better traction on the grass.
No effect.
“Jamie!” His mind registered the fear in Lauren’s voice. Registered the hand that gripped his bicep as he struggled with the steering wheel.
And then they were tumbling, like stones in a polisher. Right. Upside-down. Left.
Something struck his head.
An incredible, soul-shattering jolt shook the entire vehicle.
And then…
Silence.
Red-hot pain radiated up his leg, his thigh, his neck.
Lauren!
His world went black.