He met her challenging gaze. She was nothing like any women he’d ever met, which was to say the kind of women one wouldn’t bring home to their mother.

But he didn’t have a mother and wouldn’t have brought a woman home to her if he did.

Yeah, Holly was different. She was pretty damn perceptive, for one thing.

And pretty damn . . . pretty.

It was useless to deny it. She had those light brown eyes, round and soft and big enough to drown in, but she wasn’t vulnerable. Not one little bit, not with her sharp tongue and sharper wit.

She had a small spattering of freckles on her nose, making him wonder where else she had freckles, and then there was her mouth. It was a little too big, and right now it happened to be curved in a smirking, smug smile. He’d had some interesting dreams about that mouth, and all the things he’d like her to do with it.

Yeah. Lots of dreams.

Honestly, he had no idea why she got to him. Or, hell, maybe he did. Maybe it was the combination of that sharp good humor and unmistakable dare in her eyes. Maybe it was the way she stood there in his world, so damn sure of herself when even he wasn’t, when he hadn’t been since his shoulder had made him realize exactly how damn tenuous his life really was. And she wanted his pants.

“What’s the matter?” Henry asked. “Shy?”

“Shut up.” Pace unbuttoned and jerked down his pants to the tune of the laughs of his supposed friends.

Holly kept her eyes on his as he handed over the pants. Then she sat on the bench, her head bent as she worked, her hair slipping in a soft, silky looking curtain around her face, her fingers moving nimbly and ably while he stood there in his compression shorts.

Feeling . . . exposed.

And not just physically. Annoyed at himself, at his ridiculously juvenile teammates, at everyone including the smooth, unruffled, and unknowingly sexy Holly Hutchins, he took his pants-less self off for a moment alone.

Holly fixed the zipper, then went looking for Pace, trying to avoid the area where guys tended to be naked and scratching things that she didn’t need to see scratched or otherwise.

The visitors’ clubhouse was much smaller than the one at the Heat’s complex. In Santa Barbara, they had a huge facility, where anything the players could possibly want was readily available—flat screen TVs, a state of the art sound system, a refrigerator full of goodies, a whirlpool, video games, leather chairs all over the place.

A baseball player’s self-contained biosphere.

But here, on the road, there was little of that. Just the guys and their gear. And most interesting, the overwhelming levels of testosterone, male camaraderie, and genuine sense of affection and good humor.