Love on the Line Read online

  LOVE ON THE LINE

  Book Four in the Heart of the Game Series

  Cara and Ryan

  © 2014 Pamela Aares

  [email protected]

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  Heart of the Game Series:

  Love Bats Last (Book #1, Alex and Jackie)

  Thrown By Love (Book #2, Chloe and Scotty)

  Fielder's Choice (Book #3, Alana and Matt)

  Hiding her identity was a small price to pay for freedom...

  Heiress Cara Barrington fled the opulent world of her rich and famous family to carve out an idyllic existence on the California Coast. In the sleepy town of Albion Bay, she’s embraced the simple way of living she's always craved. No one knows her identity, and she’s free from the pressures of wealth... until her sexy new neighbor threatens the unpretentious world she’s worked so hard to build.

  All-Star athlete Ryan Rea enjoys his high-profile status. He’s used to charming his way into the heart and bed of any woman he desires while keeping his own heart secure behind a steel wall. When he meets Cara, she throws him a curveball—she’s unlike any woman he’s ever met, and he has to have her.

  Cara’s growing attraction to Ryan endangers her hard-won anonymity, and when she inherits the family business, she must choose between the world she left behind and her new life in the community she’s come to cherish. But facing up to her responsibilities could destroy her freedom and cost her the greatest love she’s ever known.

  A note from Pamela:

  What a journey it has been writing about All-Star Alex Tavonesi and the emotion-packed love stories of his teammates and family! I'm so lucky to have the most wonderful readers in the world—your emails and tweets asking for more of the Tavonesi clan and their captivating friends keep my fingers flying.

  Stay tuned, as the next books in the series will bring Alex's sister Sabrina's story and the unexpected arrival of the Tavonesi clan from Italy. With their passion for wine and polo and their exuberant love of life, the wine country of California will never be the same.

  If this is your first time reading a book in the Heart of the Game series, each book can be read as a standalone--and I hope each story carries you away!

  Thanks to all of you who've written to tell me how much you love the whole series--it means so much to know that the happy-ever-afters of the Heart of the Game are as much fun to read as they are to write! Strong women determined to follow their dreams and sexy heroes fighting to open their hearts make for some sizzling romance!

  I hope you enjoy meeting Alex's off-the-charts sexy teammate Ryan Rea and getting to know the captivating woman he won't live without.

  Pamela Aares

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Other Books by Pamela

  Thank You

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  For my mother who taught me to treasure my dreams and for readers everywhere who believe in the power of love.

  Chapter One

  A high-pitched scream was once something that stopped Cara’s heart. But not anymore. After two years of driving the Albion Bay school bus, Cara found it would take blood or the report of an injury to have her take the antics of the children seriously.

  A quick glance in the side-angled mirror over her head told her that Sam Rivers was up to his usual tricks. His repertoire included dropping lizards down the backs of girls’ hoodies and the other occasional pranks of a typical twelve-year-old.

  Sam and his friends liked nothing more than to get a rise out of Cara as well. Though she was twenty-three, the older kids sometimes treated her like a buddy. She walked a careful line with her charges, happy that they liked and accepted her, while taking seriously her responsibility for their safety.

  Secretly she was glad they had the spunk and verve that they did. Some days their enthusiasm rubbed off on her, their innocent, youthful energy wrapping a snug web of delight around her heart. But today the curving coastal road to the Albion Bay middle school was littered with rocks that had slid down the cliff side during the night. Dodging obstacles and getting her charges safely to school was foremost in Cara’s mind.

  She glanced back up to make sure the boys hadn’t done any harm and was surprised to see Sam race to the driver’s side of the bus and throw open a window.

  “There! I told you I saw it!” Sam pointed to a red car parked in the driveway of a newly renovated ranch house.

  Not just any red car.

  Cara knew a Bugatti when she saw one; her brother had two, although he preferred muted colors.

  She maneuvered a curve that brought them closer to the ranch house. Whoever had bought the old Smith property had done a speedy job of putting a new face on the dilapidated old ranch.

  “It’s a Ferrari,” Timmy Brown said as he stuck his face out the window.

  “It’s not. It’s an Aston Martin,” Cara heard Sam say with definite authority.

  She smiled to herself. What did the name of a car matter? But hearing the awed voices of the boys did give her pause. Money could buy such a car, but unless the owner was part of a racing circuit, there was usually only one reason someone needed a two-million-dollar sports car in a rural coastal California town.

  Ego.

  Well, that and the desire for the flash that went along with it. All one and the same, really.

  The high-end sports car was a visual reminder of the world she’d spent three years fighting to escape.

  And only because she knew that novelty was scarce in Albion Bay did she slow the bus and give the boys a good look at the car.

  But as she drove closer, it wasn’t the car that caught her eye.

  A ridiculously handsome specimen of male was unloading a hay bale from the passenger seat of the Bugatti. He was tall, maybe six-foot-three, and handled the hay bale as if it were a sack of feathers.

  Hay?

  Now, that did make her smile. A sports car wasn’t a sensible vehicle for transporting hay bales. The guy was crazy, desperate or just lacked everyday common sense.

  Whatever his foibles, his broad-shouldered physique and rugged good looks were likely to cause a town buzz that went well beyond a group of preteen boys. The man looked up and flashed a wave toward the bus. When he followed his gesture with the most beaming smile she’d ever seen, a smile that zinged into her core, she was sure of it.

  Cara threw her keys onto the kitchen counter. It’d been a good day. No fights on the bus and a good turnout to help with the harvest in the Albion Bay community garden. Over the next two weeks they’d can the surplus and take it down to the community food bank for distribution. For some residents, the extra food from the canning sessions got them through the winter.

  She poured a glass of iced tea and glanced around the
small cabin that had become her sanctuary. For all its faults, the simplicity of the cabin suited her. She’d had to put in new pipes in the bathroom so the shower wouldn’t leak through the floor, and the kitchen had been a challenge, but two refurbished burners in the stove and an overhaul of the fridge had made it serviceable. A coat of bright paint that she’d applied herself had spiffed up the bedroom upstairs.

  The rest of the cabin she’d left mostly untouched, although before the winter rains set in she’d have to hire Adam Mitchell, the local carpenter, to shore up the roof over her bedroom and replace the worst of the sagging boards on the front and back decks.

  Her one indulgence had been a set of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that housed her most precious volumes. The books were her best company on rainy winter nights.

  There were only two doors in the cabin. The front door was a bit battered, but the two glorious rose bushes that flanked it made up for the sagging beams and peeling paint. The paned windows at the top of the back door that led out from the kitchen provided a view of her vegetable garden and the small deck where she loved to drink her coffee on lazy Saturday mornings.

  Cara walked out that back door now and set the glass of tea on the redwood stump that served as her outdoor table.

  Turning her head left and right, she pulled the elastic band from her hair and let it swing free around her shoulders. She tried to stretch out the worst of the kinks in her neck and then rubbed at her temples. The din of thirty kids crammed into the bus, bursting with energy after a long day at school, had made her head throb.

  The stem of a ragweed poked its head up out of her herb bed. She knelt at the side of the garden box and tugged the weed out, careful not to disturb the roots of the basil plant growing next to it. She’d dry the basil and send it to her family in ribbon-wrapped jars for Christmas. Though they poked fun at her homemade gifts, she liked to imagine they appreciated her efforts.

  Working in the garden after her afternoon shift of bus driving usually relaxed her, but all the talk in the community garden that afternoon had been of Albion’s newest resident, Ryan Rea.

  As she’d suspected, the boys on the bus weren’t the only ones who’d noticed the flashy Bugatti of their town’s newest resident, and Cara wasn’t the sole woman to have noticed his rugged good looks.

  Ryan Rea.

  His name made him sound like an extra from a Texas Western. And the smile he’d flashed as she’d driven past him had made her pulse leap, surprising her. She didn’t need the complication of a flashy man in her life. No indeed.

  She put both thumbs to her temples and pressed hard.

  An earsplitting ring sounded from the room that doubled as her dining room and living space—she’d forgotten to turn the ringer down. For a moment she considered not answering. No one local would be calling since she’d seen nearly everybody in town during the course of her day. And anyone calling from the world outside Albion Bay just brought trouble to her quiet slice of paradise.

  On the tenth ring she remembered she’d also forgotten to turn on the answering machine. Whoever was trying to reach her was damned persistent. She stubbed her toe on a protruding deck board as she ran to answer. She’d better call Adam and see if he could come out to work on her decks this week. They’d had a dry September, but the rains wouldn’t hold off forever, and if Adam didn’t get started before the rains did, the decks would never get done.

  “Cara?”

  Alston Patterson might be nearing eighty, yet he had the voice of a much younger man. But her attorney’s voice always meant trouble. At least it had lately.

  “No, it’s Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.”

  “Just the person I was looking for. Facing the news I have might require a bit of magic.”

  “Alston, I’m bordering on a headache and—”

  “The news will be the same whether I tell you today or tomorrow,” he said in a gentle voice.

  She’d known Alston all her life. He’d been her grandfather’s attorney, and when she needed wise counsel a few years back, she’d asked him to be hers.

  “Might as well tell me now then. After wrangling thirty hyped-up school kids, dodging the latest rock avalanche that the gods of nature have thrown upon us and harvesting the world’s most stubborn earth-hugging carrots, nothing could faze me.”

  “Your grandfather’s estate has finally been settled.”

  There was a long silence. One of those silences that made time feel unreal, one of those silences that Cara imagined was intended to prepare the listener for the news to follow but never did. She missed her grandfather; Alston knew that. That he was calling her rather than just mailing information told her that what was to follow wouldn’t be welcome news.

  “His will sets you up as president of the Barrington Foundation.” He inhaled and exhaled a heavy breath. “Its current assets are just under two billion dollars.”

  Two billion dollars.

  Cara groaned and sank into the stuffed chair, one of only two seats in her tiny living room. For three years she’d lived simply, quietly, anonymously in the little town of Albion Bay. The townspeople had accepted her as one of their own. For the first time in her life people looked at her and saw just Cara, the school bus driver and community member, not Russell Barrington’s daughter, not a woman born into one of the richest families in America.

  She’d driven the bus, quilted beside the women of the town when someone had a baby, farmed the Albion Bay community garden, gotten dirty, and laughed and cheered at the middle school baseball games.

  She’d fit in. She’d carved out a life that felt right. Felt right to her. She’d learned to live with her family’s protests and lack of understanding. She’d found meaning for her life in Albion Bay, meaning that buoyed her in her darkest moments, meaning that made it possible to face her days without fear.

  And she’d managed, with Alston’s help, to hang on to her anonymity; he understood that it was crucial to maintaining her carefully structured new life. For the past three years she’d met with him in the city and found clever ways to disburse the two-hundred-thousand-dollars interest from her personal foundation, granting the funds anonymously each year.

  And though she was tempted—she liked providing funding to projects that made a difference in people’s lives, even had a knack for it—stepping up to head a two-billion-dollar foundation would push the game into a new arena. A very public arena. Being responsible for giving away that much money in any fashion—and especially in a prudent and well-thought-out manner—would be more than complicated. It would push her back into the world she’d fled and would destroy her quiet, happy life.

  “He’s also bequeathed a matching two billion to you directly. That is, if you accept the position as president of the foundation. But you won’t be able to touch that money until you’re twenty-five.”

  Four billion dollars.

  She could do even more good with four billion dollars.

  But the thought had barely materialized when she saw Laci’s face—cold, white and surrounded by the silk blankets that Cara had tucked into her coffin. She would never forget the waxy feel of Laci’s skin and the bruises that showed through the mask-like makeup the undertaker had slathered on her friend’s face. Unlike Cara, Laci hadn’t escaped.

  “I won’t do it, Alston. I can’t. What was Grandfather thinking? What about Quinn? He can take the helm.”

  “Your brother has a bequest and a foundation of his own to run, although his is far smaller than this one. And the legal language is very clear. You have two months to decide, or the foundation will remain under the control of the present board and its current president. As will the funds of your private bequest.”

  “Who is the current president?”

  “Your father appointed Dray Bender to that position, just after your grandfather died.”

  Cara knew from Alston’s tone and what he didn’t say that he didn’t like Dray Bender. All she remembered was that the man was one of her father’s go
lf buddies. Her dad probably owed the guy a favor or something. A big one. Her heart fell at the thought. They’d probably fund golf scholarships for Ivy League preppies.

  “I see.” She suppressed her desire to curse. Alston always clucked in disapproval when she cursed. “Can’t we dump him and hire someone else? Someone”—she searched for a positive way to frame her remark—“someone who would honor my grandfather’s legacy?”

  “Only if you’re at the helm.”

  “This is worse than blackmail.”

  “Blackmail’s a harsh term, my dear. I doubt that’s what your grandfather intended.” He paused. “Think about it, Cara. There’s a lot at stake here—lives, possibilities, values. Your grandfather liked your values—he trusted you. I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted a man like Bender stewarding his legacy.”

  Her head was splitting. “Look, can I call you in a few weeks? Can you stall? There must be a way to pry Dray Bender out of there and find someone good to head up the foundation.”

  “We already have someone good for that. You.”

  “What happened to no pressure, my dear?”

  “That was before you were willed the control of two billion dollars and a private fortune to match it. Like I said, think about it. And I promise I’ll see how deeply we can bury this for the time being so you can maintain your anonymity, at least for a while. But I warn you, it may not be possible.”

  Alston had never criticized her choices. He’d even helped her get through the fingerprinting and paperwork at the county level so she’d been able to take the school bus driving job under her mother’s maiden name. The guy was a wizard with the law and with government forms. She’d known that someday there’d be bumps, tasks she’d have to handle, responsibilities that Alston couldn’t hold at bay. But not this soon. And not at this level.

  “I can keep it out of the press, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Alston added. “That’ll buy us some time.”