The Boyfriend League

  The Boyfriend League

  RACHEL HAWTHORNE

  For Alan,

  my source for all things baseball.

  Thanks, Big Guy.

  On my personal roster, you’re a 10.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  For anyone not familiar with Ragland, Texas, the front-page headline…

  Chapter 2

  “This would be the perfect place for a baseball player…

  Chapter 3

  His name was Jason Davis, and he took my breath…

  Chapter 4

  During dinner, I did little more than eat and sneak…

  Chapter 5

  “Is Brandon Bentley totally hot or what?” Bird asked, referring…

  Chapter 6

  “So, Bird said you need a ride home,” Jason said.

  Chapter 7

  Staring into his earnest eyes, I almost told him the…

  Chapter 8

  Tuesday afternoon I was at my desk, working on my…

  Chapter 9

  “I so cannot believe we missed the opening pitch of…

  Chapter 10

  Needless to say, I missed the real fireworks.

  Chapter 11

  Late the next morning I woke up with a thundering…

  Chapter 12

  No surprise. I was the only one at Dave and…

  Chapter 13

  The next morning I went into the kitchen for an…

  Chapter 14

  “I knew Mac was interested in you,” Bird said late…

  Chapter 15

  Saturday night, against the Plano Blue Sox, I finally, finally…

  Chapter 16

  The way he was delivering that kiss—slowly, so amazingly…

  Chapter 17

  I was stunned.

  Chapter 18

  It was official. I had a boyfriend.

  Chapter 19

  “What are they talking about?” Bird asked. “I’ve never seen…

  Chapter 20

  Jason and Mac. Mac and Jason. I couldn’t sleep. Instead,…

  Chapter 21

  “Omigod! I need help!”

  Chapter 22

  We kissed pretty much the entire bus ride home. Jason…

  Chapter 23

  The next morning, I was lying in bed, staring at…

  Chapter 24

  “Telling the guy I’ve come to think of as a…

  Chapter 25

  The Fourth of July game against the Denton Outlaws was…

  Other Books by Rachel Hawthorne

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Ragland Rattlers Team Roster

  Chapter 1

  Families Needed to Provide Homes for Rattlers

  For anyone not familiar with Ragland, Texas, the front-page headline in that morning’s Ragland Tribune may have seemed odd. But I’d lived in Ragland since the day I was born. I couldn’t think of anything more exciting than living with a Rattler.

  It was Thursday morning, and I’d grabbed the newspaper to check out my weekly column, “Runyon’s Sideline Review,” because it was always a rush to see my byline. But as I sat at the breakfast table, before I’d turned to the sports section where my column usually appeared, the headline had snagged my attention and the possibilities bombarded me.

  I absolutely couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. Having a Rattler in the house would be awesome!

  Okay, I don’t mean the slithering-along-the-ground-tail-rattling-in-ominous-warning rattler. I mean the sexy, hot, to-die-for players on our town’s collegiate baseball team. As part of the Lonestar League, the Ragland Rattlers was one of nine city teams in the north Texas area made up of college players who wanted to play baseball during the summer. Local families hosted the team players.

  Apparently this year, they were a few families short. And what better family than mine?

  I heard a car honk and knew it was my ride to the softball field. My best friend and I both played on the high school softball team, but during the summer we just played whenever we had time to arrange a game with friends, which wasn’t very often. Between attending the major-and minor-league games played in the area, plus being almost-groupies to the collegiate league, we didn’t have a lot of time to commit to organized sports of our own.

  I mean, if the choice was playing on a field with girls or watching a field of guys, Bird and I were going to choose the guys every time.

  Her real name is Barbara Sawyer, but when she was a baby, her dad had thought she looked like a tiny bird, always chirping for food, and so he started calling her Birdie, which, over time, became Bird. Sometimes you gotta wonder what parents are thinking when they name or nickname their kids.

  My own dad, I knew exactly what he’d been thinking when I was born. He wanted a boy. Instead he got me. Definitely a girl.

  A year before I came along, my mom had given him another daughter, Tiffany, and Mom figured two kids were more than enough, especially since she wasn’t a stay-at-home mom. We were a two-income family with a two-income lifestyle. Mom worked as a legal secretary in a prestigious Dallas law firm about thirty miles south of Ragland.

  Anyway, Dad decided if he wasn’t going to have a son, he could at least have a son-sounding name in the family. Hence, my parents named me Danielle, which of course got shortened to Dani.

  But it all worked out. I love my dad, and we’re really close. He always took me fishing, taught me to play baseball, and gave me loads of his time. He’s a sports fanatic. Whenever he says, “Let’s go out to eat,” we know we’ll be going to a sports bar to watch NASCAR, baseball, football, basketball, and golf simultaneously on the plasma TVs hanging throughout the place.

  Connecting with my dad has always meant connecting with sports. Over time, I’ve gained an appreciation for all sports. In fact, I plan to major in journalism when I go off to college in another year. I want to be a sports announcer.

  Bird, however, insists that my desire for a career in sports reporting has nothing to do with my love of sports. “It’s your other love: guys. You want to know what really goes on in the locker room, and you want to get up close and personal with those towel-wrapped hotties.”

  Her theory is a lot closer to the truth than I like to admit, because it makes me seem less than noble in my pursuit of a higher education.

  My sister has no love of sports, but she tolerates the sports bars because most have a nice salad selection, and she watches what she eats the way I watch Lost, searching for all the hidden clues, only she’s searching for hidden calories.

  Mom dotes on Tiffany, beautiful Tiffany, who’s been named Miss Teen Ragland three years in a row and spends way too much time polishing her tiara.

  Not that I’m jealous of Tiffany or anything, but sometimes, when so many guys are hanging around her and ignoring me, it’s hard not to feel like the ugly duckling.

  Bird honked again. She has her own car. I share one with Tiffany, but she’d already called it for the day. Actually, she’d called it pretty much for the entire summer, and since she had “obligations,” I was used to her getting what she wanted. Especially guys. I basically carry a mop to clean up their drool whenever she’s around.

  Did I mention my sister is gorgeous? Gaggingly so.

  I picked up my softball cap from the table, settled it on my head, and pulled my reddish-brown shoulder-length hair, which I was presently wearing in a ponytail, through the opening in the back. Tiffany has thick, lustrous, amazing hair that’s more red than brown, but not red enough that anyone would call her Red. It’s glorious.

  While mine tends to just…hang. Which is the reason I usually wear it pulled back.

  I grabbed my glove off the counter an
d headed out the door. It was the first official week of summer, the first week of no homework, no classes, no schedules, no bells. I was in heaven.

  There are only two things I like as much as I like summer: baseball and boys.

  Not necessarily in that order. But baseball has always been an important part of my life. Boys not nearly as much. I’ve never had a boyfriend, and I’m really starting to get bummed out by that fact. After all, next year I’ll be a senior. As far as I’m concerned, it’s long past time I had a boyfriend.

  Oh, I’ve had a date now and then, but nothing long-term, nothing serious, nothing that’s had my heart doing cartwheels inside my chest. Nothing that even hinted at any permanence.

  I spotted the familiar white Grand Am waiting at the curb, idling, and sounding like it was shaking something loose beneath the hood. It’s way older than I am, but I wasn’t complaining. I was just grateful Bird could provide a ride.

  I opened the car door, slid inside, and buckled up. “Did you see this morning’s Tribune?”

  Bird glanced in the rearview mirror before pulling out into the street. “Are you kidding? Mom took it for the Wed and Dead sections.”

  Bird’s mom sells real estate. Newly married couples need places to live, newly dead people…well, their houses need to be sold, usually to the newly wed.

  “Why? Did I miss something interesting?” Bird asked.

  “They need extra families to host the Rattlers.”

  “And this concerns us because?”

  “What is the one thing you want more than anything else?”

  “You mean other than your autographed Babe Ruth baseball?”

  In his youth, my granddad had watched Ruth play, and had gotten his autograph on a baseball. He’d given it to me the first time I hit a home run.

  “Yeah, other than that,” I said.

  “A boyfriend.”

  I twisted around in my seat so I could look at her directly and accurately judge her reaction to what I was about to suggest. She so didn’t look like a bird. Well, maybe she did a little. A ruffled bird. Her blond hair was cut really short with different layers, so even when she styled it, it didn’t look styled. It sorta poked out here and there, which she said made it easy to care for, because no one knew if she’d taken the time to fix it or not. Which in her case was usually not.

  That’s one of the things I love about Bird. She’s completely the opposite of my sister. If not for Bird, I would have grown up believing that spending three hours minimum in the bathroom in the morning was a common practice.

  Unlike Tiffany, Bird and I aren’t really into spending a lot of time working to be beautiful, which might be one reason neither of us has a boyfriend.

  Or, as it had occurred to me when I saw that morning’s headline, it could all boil down to opportunity.

  “How do you get a boyfriend?” I asked.

  “If I knew that, I’d have one,” Bird said.

  “Hanging around guys. And where are there lots of guys during the summer?”

  Bird pulled into the parking lot near the softball/baseball fields. She turned to me and arched a brow in question. She’s one of the few people I know who actually have that whole Spock thing going and can make one eyebrow shoot way up. “Are you going somewhere with this?”

  “There are lots of guys playing for the Ragland Rattlers,” I explained. “It’s a team of potential boyfriends.”

  “Not so far. Do we not traditionally hang out at the ball field during every practice and every game?”

  “But we’ve always been no-name spectators. This year we could move into the realm of something more important. Let’s talk our parents into letting us sponsor players for the summer. Then we’ll hang out with them, and they’ll hang out with the team. We’ll have an in that we’ve never had. We’ll be like ambassadors to Ragland, making them feel welcome, showing them around. Before we know it, instant summer boyfriend!”

  “Don’t the families usually have sons that the baseball players can be comfortable around?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe because girls-only families never offered. Besides, the article said the team needs families, so we’d have a good chance of being selected even if we don’t have brothers.”

  Like me, Bird has an older sister. Stephanie’s a sophomore at a nearby university, with her own “stud-muffin” as she refers to him. She’s always telling Bird not to worry about not having a boyfriend, because boyfriends aren’t really worth having until you get to college, anyway. Until then, they’re too immature. So, a college baseball player for the summer sounded like an ideal compromise. We could get a head start on the whole older, mature guy thing.

  “I can’t see my mom letting a guy live with us. She won’t even let Steph’s boyfriend stay over when he comes to town to visit,” Bird said.

  “We’d promise not to date them.”

  “I thought dating them was the whole point.”

  “No, the point is getting them to introduce us around.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  “Because we’ll know all the happening stuff.”

  “Have you forgotten we live in Ragland? There is nothing ‘happening.’”

  “There’s lots going on. You just have to know where to search for it, and that’s where we come in. We can serve as the chamber of commerce to the collegiate team. We could even arrange some outings.”

  “Like they have time for outings.”

  It was a pretty intense schedule, with four or five games a week, almost always at night.

  “We’ll figure something out. The first hurdle is getting the guys into our houses.”

  “And you don’t think they’ll be the one?”

  “No way. With those guys, we’ll be wearing blinders. I can’t think of anything worse than my parents knowing about me and a boy. It would be too weird.”

  “What if our guys are hot?”

  “Bird, these are college students. Do you really want to date the boy who sees you before you’ve applied your mascara?”

  “Good point. Plus, I hang my bras in the bathroom to dry. Are you sure we want to do this? Having a guy living in the house has the potential to be embarrassing. What if he reveals our darkest secrets to the team?”

  “We don’t have dark secrets.” Bird and I are pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get girls. Maybe we need to be more mysterious. I filed that thought away for later. “He’s our connection to the team, and eventually to a boyfriend. That’s all. He’s not going to be the boyfriend.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot.”

  “You might want to curb your enthusiasm.”

  “Sorry. I just see the potential for disaster. We’ve never lived with guys before.”

  “Our dads.”

  “Like they count.”

  “We could set up a hotline. Your sister knows a lot about boys.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  We knocked our knuckles together.

  She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “You might even get to have a look into the locker room without becoming a sports reporter.”

  I grinned. “With any luck…”

  Now all we had to do was convince our parents.

  Chapter 2

  “This would be the perfect place for a baseball player to live,” I said during dinner that evening.

  Mom had picked up Chinese food on her way home. Tiffany was the only one eating with chopsticks. She thought it was important to respect the customs of all nations, just in case she ever decided to enter the Miss Universe pageant.

  My dad had been listening intently as I explained how the team was in need of host families. He always paid close attention to anything I said, because I was the one in the family most likely to talk sports.

  He’d recently taken to shaving his head, because his hair had started thinning on top. One day Tiffany had said, “Dad, what are you holding on to? Go for the Bruce Willis look.”

  Since Tiffany i
s the fashion expert, he’d taken her advice. Unfortunately Dad more closely resembles Lex Luthor than Bruce Willis, and I’m still missing what little hair he’d had on his head before he took a razor to it.

  “He’ll be here more than three days,” Dad said.

  Ah, Dad’s three-day rule. Any relatives worth having as company know to limit their stay to three days. After that, they all get on his nerves.

  “Well, yeah, but we’re not related to him. I thought your rule only applied to family,” I said.

  “Honestly, I think he just applies it to your grandparents,” Mom said from the other end of the table.

  “I guess we have plenty of space,” he said.

  We have four bedrooms upstairs: mine, Tiffany’s, the junk room, and the official guest bedroom. Mom and Dad’s bedroom is on the first floor, near the back of the house.

  “Plus we have a great backyard,” I reminded him. “Sports-guy heaven.”

  Our backyard has a home plate and pitcher’s mound properly measured off, a basketball goal with a half court, and a six-hole miniature golf course—all designed and built by my dad, the owner of Backyard Mania, a company that makes big-time sports equipment in miniature for people who want more than a swimming pool in their backyard.

  Before I hit my teen years, I’d spent many summer days riding around with my dad, serving as his “assistant,” carrying his clipboard, giving my approval to the many projects he’d been hired to build. He even had a motto: “Every project comes with Dani’s seal of approval.”

  The past few years, though, I’d outgrown wanting to be his assistant. And he was okay with that. He may have even been relieved. He probably gets a lot more work done, because he doesn’t have to make numerous DQ stops to satisfy my ice-cream addiction.