Diamond in the Rough. Marie Ferrarella

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       “Miranda Shaw, are you telling me you’re just using me for your own purposes?”

      “No, I –” She saw Mike’s broad grin when he couldn’t keep a straight face. “Do you enjoy flustering me?”

      The grin only widened. “I didn’t know women still blushed.”

      “I’m not blushing,” Miranda insisted. “I’m allergic to hotshot sportswriters. I can’t come within fifty feet of one.”

      “Too late for that,” he told her. “Looks like you’ve entered the ‘danger zone.’”

      She was going to ask what he meant by that, but she didn’t get the chance. The very next thing she knew, Mike was leaning over, moving his upper torso to invade her space.

      And then his lips touched hers.

       And all hell broke loose.

      Marie Ferrarella, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA^® Award-winning author, has written more than one hundred and fifty books, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide.

       Diamond in the Rough

       Marie Ferrarella

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To Nik, who really did teach himself to read at four

      because I wasn’t getting to the baseball scores

      fast enough. And to Mark, who is my

      walking encyclopaedia in all things sports.

      Chapter One

      “Why that sanctimonious, pompous, low-life bastard…”

      Born equal parts of surprise and outrage, the less-than-flattering character description leaped out of Miranda Shaw’s mouth before she could stop it. The heated pronouncement contrasted with the soothing strains of whisper-soft classical music that was being piped into the pharmaceutical laboratory where she worked.

      Her cheeks heated and her breathing became shallow. This was worlds apart from her condition minutes ago when she finally declared herself at lunch ninety minutes after the traditional time and picked up the sports section of the L.A. Times. She’d been reading the sports section since she was four years old. Too impatient to wait for her mother to read the all-important baseball scores to her, Miranda had doggedly taught herself how to read by sounding out the opposing teams’ names.

      Her rabid interest in baseball had come into being because she adored her father. Steven Orin Shaw, known as “SOS” to his one-time legion of fans, had once been regarded as one of the greatest pitchers to ever grace the mound—until a scandal had brought an abrupt end to his career.

      But not to Miranda’s allegiance. Only death—hers— would have terminated the steadfast loyalty that beat in her twenty-four-year-old heart.

      She felt that loyalty flare—along with her temper— as she read words by a man who had been her favorite sportswriter, Mike Marlowe. Oh, she differed with his opinions now and again, but never violently. And, up until this point, she’d admired both his broad range of sports knowledge and his ability to make his topic come alive.

      But at this moment, she wanted to skewer him. Slowly.

      It was that time of year again, when people around the country packed away their Christmas decorations and frowned over their impetuously written New Year’s resolutions, a large number of which had already been broken. And this time of year, the Baseball Writers Association of America turned their attention to the all important question of who, if anyone, was going to be inducted into the baseball hall of fame in Cooperstown.

      However, long before the actual voting came the lists. She had already made her peace with the fact that her father would never be on these lists.

      But this idiot, this supreme jerk who had so colossally disappointed her, had the unmitigated gall to touch on the fact that her father had been banned from baseball for all eternity. And he devoted most of his column to the lament that the once-pure game was assaulted now by numerous scandals. Marlowe had belabored reasons why SOS could never be considered for placement in the esteemed hall.

      It was bad enough to know this without having someone painstakingly elaborate, in rapier-sharp rhetoric, all the reasons that SOS had disappointed his fans and shamed the great game of baseball.

      So he’d had a moment of weakness and gambled, so what? Lots of people gambled and her father had never bet against his team. In the larger scheme of things, it wasn’t such an unpardonable offense. Not enough to merit being permanently ostracized.

      Except that it had.

      After reading Marlowe’s column, all she could think of was that her father would see it. He didn’t need this now, not now. First the scandal and then the awful accident six months later. Those incidents had all but turned him into a hermit. It had taken her years, but she had finally gotten him to come around, to venture out of his shell and start interacting with people again.

      This could ruin everything.

      The moment her angry words ricocheted around the almost empty lab, Tilda Levy looked up from the computer screen. She rubbed the area just above her eyes before turning in Miranda’s direction.

      “Did you get your paycheck early?” she asked dryly. It was a given that most of the research chemists employed by Promise Pharmaceuticals felt vastly underpaid, especially considering the demands placed on them and their time.

      “What?” Completely focused on the article, Miranda needed several moments to make sense of Tilda’s wry question. “No. It’s this article.”

      Getting up from her chair, she pitched the paper into the wastepaper basket by her desk. The basket fell over. Muttering under her breath, Miranda picked up the basket and put it back.

      Tilda leaned over, craning her neck to observe her friend. They’d been friends since they’d paired up in chem lab their junior year in high school and Tilda was well aware of Miranda’s taste in reading material even though they definitely didn’t share it.

      Pausing to save her work, Tilda nodded toward the banished newspaper.

      “What’s the matter, doesn’t your favorite sportswriter think the Angels will win the pennant this year?” she asked, referring to Miranda’s favorite baseball team—the team her father had played on the last seven years of his career.

      Miranda didn’t answer right away. Instead, she just scowled and she glared down at the offending paper.

      “It’s about your dad, isn’t it?” Tilda asked.

      Miranda shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her lab coat. She wanted to pace, but the lab wasn’t made for releasing bottled-up energy of the human variety. It was designed to maximize experimentation.

      Blowing out a breath, she bit off one word. “Yes.”

      With a shrug, Tilda went back to what she was doing. “Don’t pay any attention to it. Tomorrow that article will be lining some bird’s cage—or sitting in a bin, waiting to be recycled.”

      But today it was being read by who knew how many people? And, most likely, her father. And that was all that counted.

      Miranda squared her shoulders. Bottling this up wasn’t going to help. She needed to excise this somehow.

      “He said that—” Miranda pulled the paper out of the trash again, holding it the way a person might hold a dead rat they’d been forced to retrieve. It took her a second to find the right page. “‘Steve Orin Shaw, SOS to his friends and the players that feared him, sadly embodies everything that is bad and corrupt about the game…’” She stopped,